The Augustinian Epic, Petrarch to Milton

Introduction: Petrarch’s Culpa and Augustine’s Counsel

Introduction Petrarch’s Culpa and Augustine’s Counsel =< starting with petrarch In the beginning, there was the tormented soul of Francis Petrarch. This book offers a history of Renaissance epic poetry that starts at the beginning. It therefore starts with Petrarch’s tormented soul, which—if we accept the most brazen of his self-publicity—was a soul so exquisitely tormented that it fueled the energies that wrought the achievements that marked the dawn of the Renaissance after ages of darkness. Also, this history begins with Petrarch’s Africa, which has a genuine claim to being the ‹rst Renaissance epic, however skeptical we might be of its author’s other pretensions. That these two de‹nitions of the beginning are related is the premise behind this book’s central argument, which is that three of Petrarch’s works—his Canzoniere (or Rime sparse), his epistle to Frederigo Aretino on the veiled meaning of Vergil’s Aeneid, and his imagined dialogue with St. Augustine in the Secretum—together supply a guide to reading the Africa as autobiographical spiritual allegory and that our attention to this allegorical dimension of the poem enables new insights into the history and interpretation of Renaissance Christian epic through John Milton ’s Paradise Lost. By “Petrarch’s culpa” in this chapter’s title, I refer to the familiar pair of ignoble loves that Petrarch so often con›ates, that he confesses are the source of his torment, and that, in the Secretum, he has Augustine condemn in him: his passion for Laura, which Augustine dismisses as merely the burning of carnal desire, and his passion for the laurel, a burning to achieve literary fame. The Africa, so I argue, represents Petrarch’s ‹nal reply to Augustine’s charges, and it is the reverberation of this reply through subsequent epics of the Renaissance that in part leads me to call them “Augustinian .” I also do so because Renaissance epic tradition is rooted—even more deeply than has been realized—in the precedent of Augustine’s Confessions as a work of the literary and religious imagination. Not only does the Confessions chronicle its author’s own struggle against the temptations of the ›esh and the seductions of poetry (which a wayward Petrarch could imitate and ask his readers to measure him by). It also supplies aspiring epic poets with a plotline, a symbol system for allegory, and a Christian motive. By framing the narrative of his personal conversion in the terms of a Vergilian epic journey, Augustine conversely furnished the terms for writing Vergilian epic as a personal conversion narrative and, like the Confessions , a ministering instrument.1 Thus I call these epics Augustinian not for their theology but for their two linked agendas: to induce a version of Augustine’s spiritual journey in the experience of their readers and to claim by that motive a justi‹cation for the poet’s vocation. This history of Augustinian epic is presented in two parts, according to its two basic types, each represented by works famous and obscure. The ‹rst, the allegorical epic, works demonstratively, presenting an allegory of the good man’s journey from a life of earthly pleasures to a life of heavenly contemplation, from being lost in sin to ‹nding peace in faith and God’s grace. This type is represented by Petrarch’s Africa when it is read according to the prompts that Petrarch gives us in his other writings; by Vergil’s Aeneid when it is read according to the explications of medieval and Renaissance allegorical commentaries; and by Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata when it is read in light of the commentary editions of Vergil that were published while Tasso was at work on his epic and according to the exegesis Tasso supplies in his own “Allegory of the Poem.” The second type, the biblical epic, works rhetorically, meaning seductively and suasively, to prompt emotional and intellectual responses that will facilitate in readers their escape from the life of earthly pleasure to a life of heavenly contemplation , from being lost in sin to ‹nding peace in faith and God’s grace. This type is represented by the Christiads of Marco Girolamo Vida and Alexander Ross and by the epic that is written both in and against the the augustinian epic, petrarch to milton 2 < Augustinian epic tradition, Milton’s Paradise Lost. What is most new about this schematization of allegorical and biblical epics is the revelation that both types share patterns of organization and ‹guration that serve like ends, that they exploit an allusive poetics that is mutually informing, and that they have a common source of inspiration in the tormented soul of Francis Petrarch. So there we must start, with this tormented soul that Petrarch subjects to severest examination in the Secretum, or My Secret. The poet claims in his preface to recount a dream in which he has been visited by Lady Truth and a specially selected mentor, St. Augustine, who together intend to lead Petrarch back to the path toward salvation. Petrarch is confronted in this dream dialogue with his most grievous sins: “On the left and on the right,” Augustine charges against him, “you are bound by chains as hard as steel that do not allow you to meditate on death or on life.”2 The “chains” are of course Petrarch’s two passions, his love for Laura and his love for the glory that he wins through his literary achievements. Augustine urges Petrarch to free his soul from these earthly bonds, to devote himself wholly to God, but Petrarch cannot do so without struggling through stages of denial. He says, in defense of his love for Laura, Do you not know about this woman whom you mention, that her mind knows nothing of earthly concerns and burns only with a desire for heavenly ones? that in her face, if there is any truth at all, a sign of divine grace shines? that her character is an exemplum of perfect honor? that her voice, and the life-spark in her eyes, and her movements betray no trace of being merely human?3 Laura’s virtues being what they are, Petrarch de‹antly claims, “Love of her undoubtedly con‹rms my love of God.”4 But Augustine scoffs at the suggestion that Laura might serve as the poet’s mediatrix. Petrarch is attempting to associate Laura with Beatrice, Dante’s intervening angel in the Divine Comedy, but Augustine sees through the gambit because he recognizes that his spiritual patient, in praising his beloved, has echoed Vergil’s description of the goddess of love (Aeneid 1.327–28). The allusion betrays to Augustine that Petrarch is sickened by an ignoble and idolatrous passion—not “love of God,” but what Dante had called “the poison of Venus” (di Venere . . . il tòsco [Purgatorio 25.132]).5 Augustine scolds in the Secretum: “[Laura] has removed your mind from the love of heaven and inclined it away from the Creator to desire for a created thing. . . . And that perverts the order.”6 Introduction 3 = The same distracting idolatry characterizes Petrarch’s pursuit of immortal literary fame. “You would rather abandon yourself than your little books,”7 Augustine complains, and he attacks speci‹cally two of Petrarch’s works in progress: the Africa, an epic poem on the victory of Scipio Africanus over Hannibal in the Second Punic War, and his massive prose tribute to “illustrious men” of antiquity, De viris illustribus, in which the life of Scipio is treated at more length than the lives of most other Roman nobles by a factor of ten.8 It was on the promise of the un‹nished Africa that the city fathers of Rome, reviving the ancient ceremony, crowned Petrarch with the poet’s laurel,9 but Augustine is hardly impressed by such tokens of earthly triumph. He tells Petrarch: Cast off the great burden of the histories: the deeds of the Romans are made known well enough by their own fame and the talents of others. Abandon Africa, and leave it to its owners; you will not increase your own glory nor that of your Scipio. . . . Put these things aside, restore yourself at last back to yourself, and to return to the issue from whence we strayed, begin to meditate on your death, which comes upon you slowly when you are unaware. Fasten your eyes on it, once you have torn away the veil and scattered the darkness .10 The wayward pilgrim of the Secretum resists this advice just as he does Augustine’s earlier admonishment to abandon Laura, but eventually there are two very different outcomes to his instruction. As for his ‹rst sin, Petrarch admits at last that from the day he ‹rst caught sight of Laura, his soul has been turned away from God, and he agrees henceforth to avoid her presence and to think no more of her. “I accept [your advice], and thank you,” he says, “for I think that the remedy is suited to my illness; I now intend my escape.”11 Apparently he is true to his word. Petrarch does not mention Laura again in the Secretum, and there are no hints that his promise to expel her from his thoughts was insincere.12 He has, we must conclude, successfully navigated that leg of his spiritual journey, which allows Augustine, for the remainder of the dialogue, to concentrate on the remaining chain that binds Petrarch’s soul—his passion for literary projects . In contrast to his earlier progress, however, by the end of the Secretum , Petrarch yet clings to this sinful desire. Even as he concedes that it would be best to follow Augustine’s counsel, still he makes excuses and delays. In fact, he is anxious to conclude their meeting so that he can “hasten to other matters” (meaning, get back to his books), and he offers the augustinian epic, petrarch to milton 4 < Augustine only the very weak promise that he does so the more “studiously ” in order that he may sooner be done with them and “return to these affairs” (meaning, his soul’s salvation). Petrarch says ‹nally, “I am not ignorant that, as you were just saying, it would be much safer for me to attend to this one care and, shunning the byways, commit to the straight road to salvation. But I cannot curb my desire.”13 Augustine is dismayed by such prevarication in the face of his warnings, but he agrees to conclude the debate: “We are slipping back into the old quarrel, where you say the will is powerless. But let it pass, since it cannot be otherwise, and I shall pray to God that he will go with you in your travels and lead your wandering steps to safety.”14 By telling Augustine in the Secretum that he intends to “escape” from Laura, Petrarch is promising to abandon an idolatrous love that he had already renounced, more famously, in the two framing poems of the Canzoniere . But as many critics have stressed (and as the second section of this introduction revisits, though in different terms), that ‹rst renunciation is equivocal and unconvincing. The 364 intervening verses of the Canzoniere revel in the lost lover’s idolatry with more vigor and delight than the framing poems can persuasively repudiate. Indeed, at times they dare even suggest that Laura might prove the poet’s saving mediatrix, though all the while they anatomize her destructive power over his soul. The Africa, in contrast, unequivocally renounces this love that Petrarch admits is ignoble —explicitly (as in the Secretum) and through its allegory. But as for Petrarch’s second sin, we shall see that the Africa, like the Secretum, equivocates in a way that corresponds to the Canzoniere’s problematical renunciation of the poet’s love for Laura. On the one hand, the Africa’s un‹nished state seems to imply that Petrarch has at last accepted Augustine ’s counsel, by abandoning work on the poem and renouncing the literary fame it promised. On the other hand, the Africa’s spiritual allegory signals Petrarch’s resolve to show that he can celebrate “the deeds of the Romans” for Christian purposes and with felicitous results for reader and poet alike, af‹rming thereby that God attends his “wandering steps” along the path of literary achievement even to salvation. In this way, the Africa represents Petrarch’s bid to compose the epic plot of a life journey that is at once Vergilian and Augustinian. From my explication of the Africa in chapter 1, I follow the path of Petrarch’s epic exemplar through late Renaissance commentaries on the Aeneid to Gerusalemme liberata and through the two Neo-Latin Christiads to Paradise Lost. My study thus takes a unique, alternative via to the analyses of the famous vernacular epics. Ordinarily, Gerusalemme liberata and Introduction 5 = Paradise Lost are approached either directly from discussions of their models in classical tradition (Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Vergil’s Aeneid) or from their counterparts in epic romance literature (Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Spenser’s Faerie Queene). My alternative route recovers strategies of reading the Neo-Latin epics that have been unrecognized by modern scholarship, and these strategies are shown in turn to be productive for interpreting the vernacular epics’ aims, methods, and meanings. In that sense, this new approach to the epic promises a story that is yet untold, a segment of literary history that ‹lls a gap in Renaissance studies and deepens our understanding of Tasso, Milton, and—in an afterword re›ecting on this study’s implications to our understanding of romance epic— Spenser. In many instances, this trek through the byways of the Neo-Latin tradition to Gerusalemme liberata and Paradise Lost will illuminate features that have been little remarked in these epics. In others, it will lead to new readings of passages whose meanings remain much debated in contemporary scholarship. And in still others, it reinforces and elaborates interpretations that have been previously formulated by way of traditional approaches to the history of epic poetry.15 My aim throughout will be to recover intended meanings in the poems and to describe the supposed experiences of those readers who responded according to the poets’ designs. Thus I “alternate between the approach of the intentionalist and that of the reader-response critic” (as Carol Kaske describes her practice in Spenser and Biblical Poetics [1999, 3]), and I would emphasize that the process by which past readers could have interpreted Augustinian epics in the manner that I describe is neither complicated nor preciously subtle. My explications of the allegorical epics, for example, do not depend on our adoption of any novel or even very precise understanding of the nature and modes of allegory. The rudimentary, classical de‹nition of the trope—such as we ‹nd in the anonymous handbook Ad Herennium: “Allegory is a manner of speech denoting one thing in words, another in meaning”16—was the one invariably repeated in the medieval and early modern periods, and it conveys adequately enough what poets conceived of the technique and how readers understood what allegorical interpretation required of them. I would only go farther than this basic de‹nition to note two major features that the interpretation of allegorical epic shared with medieval scriptural exegesis, in order to underscore just how familiar, if not routine, this manner of reading would have been to many among the epics’ original audiences. These features are de‹ned and abundantly illustrated in Henri de the augustinian epic, petrarch to milton 6 < Lubac’s classic study of the medieval Christian search for scripture’s “four senses.” In fact, it is largely on their basis that Lubac argues, “Christian and pagan allegory, if they use a certain number of analogous procedures, are nonetheless two functionally heterogeneous things” (1959, 2:396; 2000, 19).17 Christian—speci‹cally Pauline—allegory, to begin with, assumes that it discovers “another meaning” not just in myths or ‹ctions but in historical events. Citing Augustine’s teaching that “the very history of the Exodus was an allegory of the people to come” (De utilitate credendi 3.8, commenting on 1 Corinthians 10:1–11) and that “where the Apostle calls something ‘allegory,’ he ‹nds it not in the words but in the fact” (De Trinitate 15.9.1), Lubac asserts that “it is always . . . the allegory ‘in the fact’ or the ‘allegory of the fact’ which is speci‹cally Christian allegory” (1959, 2:381; 2000, 7–8). Consider thus Petrarch’s epic on the Second Punic War and Tasso’s on the First Crusade. Rather than judging that these poems’ bases in history oppose them to allegorical literature, as is frequently done, we might perceive that it was exactly this feature that alerted readers to the possibility of their Christian allegory. Indeed, we may even most properly understand Petrarch’s and Tasso’s poetic embellishments on their historical sources as being none other than their elaborated clues to the “allegory in the fact” that they presumed to reside in the history itself. The other feature that is shared by allegorical epics and medieval biblical exegesis is their ultimate goal in “anagogy,” the last stage of scripture’s “four senses” and journey’s end for the epics’ heroes and readers. To illustrate this trajectory, Lubac cites one of many pithy formulae de‹ning the four senses: “The letter teaches events, allegory what you should believe, / Morality teaches what you should do, anagogy what mark you should be aiming for” (Littera gest docet, quid credas allegoria, / Moralis quis agas, quo tendas anagogia [1959, 1:23; 1998, 1]). (This distich is often attributed to Nicholas of Lyra but is traced by Lubac to Augustine of Dacia.) Like anagogical interpretation, the allegorical epic yearns toward God, representing the spiritual pilgrim’s progress from a desire for earthly things to the contemplation of heaven while striving to inspire the same progress in its readers . “The anagogical sense is that which leads the thought of the exegete ‘upwards,’” Lubac explains; “it leads the mind’s consideration ‘from things visible to those invisible,’ or from things below ‘to the things above.’” Just as we recognize Tasso’s aim in celebrating the Christian army’s liberation of the Lord’s sepulcher, anagogy (Lubac continues) is “the sense that lets one see in the realities of the earthly Jerusalem those of the heavenly Jerusalem”: it is a vision of, but also a prompt toward, that “which is to be Introduction 7 = desired, namely, the eternal felicity of the blessed” (1959, 2:622–23; 2000, 180–81, my emphasis). If a studied alertness to such prompts was one aspect of an interpretive practice that was habitual for many readers of the Bible, then in this respect, too, the transition from seeking multiple meanings in scripture to extracting the allegory of Augustinian epic would have been a natural and easy one. Lubac marks the decline of allegorical interpretations of scripture at the start of the Reformation, when Luther’s denunciations of the method put its practitioners on the defensive (1959, 1:34–36; 1998, 9–11). It is probably no coincidence, therefore, that the ‹rst major biblical epic—Vida’s Christiad —appeared in 1535. In obvious ways, biblical epic elicits a different range of responses than does allegory, but to sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury readers the process was surely no less accessible or customary. One of its main features, we shall see, is the recurring challenge of Vergilian allusions that would seem, in the contexts in which they occur, to elicit inappropriate , “earthly” responses based on the implications of their original contexts (“original” meaning perhaps Vergil’s Aeneid, perhaps the allegorized Aeneids of the commentators); or at least, the responses to these allusions would be inappropriate but for one’s effort to “read against” those implications and discern the “heavenly” meaning lent by their new context. Again, this should not strike us as a specialized operation: inherent in every allusion is some level of contextual disjunction requiring a corresponding degree of imaginative agility from readers. Nevertheless, my explications of this process must eventually draw me into one of the most heated of longstanding critical controversies, for it will evoke among Miltonists the thesis that Stanley Fish argues in Surprised by Sin: that Paradise Lost invites inappropriate responses from its readers in order to correct the errors and so assist them in their efforts to recognize and surmount the defects of their fallen condition. In fact, it is one of my claims that Milton could have developed such a way of working, as Fish describes it, by attending to how Vida and Ross work in their Christiads. But that is an argument I defer to the ‹nal chapter. This study’s participation in current discourse on the historical representations of women, in contrast, merits noting here at the outset, for a central focus of all my chapters is a recurring image of woman whose appearance and function in other contexts has been well documented by scholars. Designed as a rhetorical device to be an instrument of spiritual aid for men, this is an image that Petrarch (in the voice of Augustine) scolds himself for trying to exploit but exploits anyway, and the image subsethe augustinian epic, petrarch to milton 8 < quently appears throughout the Neo-Latin and vernacular epic tradition— to wit, the alluring woman who is the potential object of sinful desire in the male pilgrim (the epic hero or the epic reader, perhaps both) but who in some way facilitates his journey to salvation. Consequently, my analyses of these epics as “Augustinian” presume a male readership, not because men were their only intended readers (although that could well be so in the case of the Latin poems), but because only men would have been invited to read them in the way that my analyses suggest. As Jorunn Buckley has shown, the idea that heaven may be “accessible” to these devout males “through paradox or a negative via” pervades Christian discourse on the nature of woman as early as Gnostic texts of late antiquity (1986, xi–xii), and in some respects, my study traces the continued utility of this idea through the span of the Renaissance.18 In the Canzoniere , as we shall see later in this introduction, Petrarch manipulates the ambiguity of the phoenix image to support the claim that his love for Laura, idolatrous as it was, could nevertheless testify to the strength of his subsequent love for Mary and his devotion to God. In the Secretum, as we have just seen, Augustine succeeds in getting Petrarch to reject that claim to a negative via through Laura and to accept instead a pair of mutually exclusive categories: there is either the idolatrous love of Laura or there is love of God, an opposition corresponding to the clichéd dichotomous images of woman herself as, on the one hand, “the Devil’s Gateway” (in Tertullian’s infamous formulation) and, on the other hand, the Virgin Mary, Queen of Heaven (or the Church as bride of Christ).19 Such categories are essentially maintained in the Africa (Rome and Carthage are personi‹ed as chaste maiden and crafty hag), but the tactic of asserting the possibility of salvation through a negative via is transferred to the goal of justifying Petrarch’s other love, “desire for study” and pursuit of literary fame, which he could not relinquish, just yet, in the Secretum.20 Thus we encounter the paradoxical assertion that the study of classical pagan texts and the composition of new texts modeled on the classics imperil the soul but might contribute to one’s salvation after all, or as Petrarch will dare to suggest (capitalizing on the paradox that he had put into Augustine’s ‹nal prayer), his steps though “wandering” might lead him to heaven because God attends them. What makes this paradox so fruitful for the epic poets is their coupling of the former negative via with the new one. Similar to the oft-made observation on the Canzoniere that Petrarch’s two “chains” are really one (his pursuit of Laura is entirely a literary one; it is his pursuit of the laurel),21 we discover that it is in those epic details that represent (in the epic hero) or Introduction 9 = invite (in the male reader) feelings of sexual attraction to a woman, modeled primarily on Vergil’s account of Aeneas’s liaison with Dido, that the negative via is invoked to assert the epic’s ‹tness for doing Christian work.22 Only in part does this mean the obvious: that the epics’ monitory tales of controlling the passions and avoiding dangerous women justify their composition and reading by Christians. Yes, in the Africa, Petrarch recalls his too-tardy “departure” from Laura, and he delivers an explicit lesson on restoring the self to virtue by retelling, in the story of Massinissa’s renunciation of Sophonisba, Aeneas’s “escape” from Dido. Tasso delivers the same lesson in Rinaldo’s ›ight from Armida. But far more interestingly, Petrarch and later epic poets will devise ways to suggest that the process of writing and reading these epics can be saving rather than damning— despite their being modeled on pagan classics and despite Augustine’s charge that such literary pursuits are a “byway,” a negative via rather than the straight path to salvation—by linking this process and this paradox by way of analogy with the activity of differentiating opposing images of dangerous woman and female divinity: Laura versus Beatrice or Mary; the “vulgar” versus the “heavenly” Venus; Eve versus the “second Eve” who redeems the sins of the ‹rst. Behind these contrasting pairs is of course the analogous master trope of male versus female, Adam versus Eve, which itself proved useful in the medieval period for justifying the study and imitation of classical literature by Christians. As R. Howard Bloch comments, medieval poets generally followed the tradition of biblical exegesis that conceived of “the relation between Adam and Eve” as “the relation of the proper to the ‹gural, which implies a derivation, de›ection, denaturing, a tropological turning away” (1991, 38),23 but it was precisely “the metaphorical status of women” that made available the “possibility of interpretation that enables the Christian recuperation of the pagan past” (215 n. 6). Bloch cites for illustration Augustine’s commentary on Genesis 1:28—God’s decree that humankind will “increase and multiply.” In the Confessions, Augustine interprets this verse ‹guratively, by drawing an analogy between the procreative power of men and women and the mind’s power to state one meaning in different ways or to comprehend multiple meanings in one statement. “By this blessing ” to “increase and multiply,” Augustine explains, “I understand that [God has] granted us the faculty and the power not only to express in several ways that which we understand in one sense but to understand in several senses that which we read obscurely stated in one way.”24 The power to give birth to children ‹gures the power to discover multiple routes of expression and interpretation toward one destination: it is Adam and Eve’s, the augustinian epic, petrarch to milton 10 < more particularly Eve’s, biological/“tropological” faculty that sanctions the quest for God in unlikely, unpromising places. The God-granted “faculty” and “power” of ‹guration will authorize Petrarch, for one, to test the byways of Vergilian epic for alternative paths to heaven. In his other (early) writings, Augustine would seem to allow for such expeditions as Petrarch intends, and he himself famously invokes the image of the good-faith wanderer who may yet reach Truth by a circuitous and unpromising route.25 In a frequently cited passage from De doctrina Christiana describing one whose “interpretation of the scriptures . . . differs from that of the writer,” Augustine is not hasty to pronounce such a man lost, for if “he is misled by an idea of the kind that builds up love, which is the end of the commandment, he is misled in the same way as a walker who leaves his path by mistake but reaches the destination to which the path leads by going through a ‹eld.”26 In this respect, too, therefore, Augustine informs the Africa’s spiritual allegory and enables its rejoinder against the Augustine who is Petrarch’s accuser in the Secretum. Though a number of the Africa’s explicators have suggested that the poem contains some such allegory and a few have ventured to describe it in brief and general terms, chapter 1 of this study aims to demonstrate its centrality to the purpose and within the structure of the poem, showing that the great battle between Hannibal and Scipio, Carthage and Rome, is also the battle within the soul to break loose of the earthly city’s chains and to enter the City of God.27 We know that on one level, this particular Punic war represents the ful‹llment of Dido’s curse in book 4 of the Aeneid—that Hannibal is the “unknown avenger” who rises from her ashes “to chase with ‹re and sword the Dardan settlers” of Rome.28 I will argue that on another level, the reiteration of Aeneas’s abandonment of Dido symbolizes Augustine’s and Petrarch’s victories over the Carthaginian culpa in themselves—their personal victories over the Carthage of the heart. Petrarch’s poem on Scipio’s defeat of Hannibal , in other words, replays Augustine’s quelling of his own youthful passions , his own escape from the ‹res of Carthage, and it claims the same achievement for Petrarch. The Africa, as such, is Petrarch’s other Secretum, his Confessions by way of allegorical epic.29 the frying pan and the phoenix: the poetics of the canzoniere and the promise of the africa If, as I claim, the history of Augustinian epic starts with the Africa’s exchange of one sin’s justi‹cation—that ventured in the Canzoniere—for Introduction 11 = another, then a revaluation of the Canzoniere’s poetics is in order so as to de‹ne the ‹gural “justi‹cation by equivocation” that Petrarch invented there and afterward reprised in his epic. I say “revaluation” because, for nearly three decades, critics of the Canzoniere have generally shared a different understanding of its method, based on John Freccero’s landmark essay “The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch’s Poetics” (1975), whose thesis was soon extended in essays by Guiseppe Mazzotta (1978) and Thomas Greene (1982a, 81–146). Mazzotta best characterizes the interpretive crux of Petrarch’s rime as a discrepancy between the framing poems’ declarations of spiritual reformation and the rest of the sequence’s too-ardent revelry in “giovenile errore.” Although, “on the face of it,” the poet “speaks with a voice of moral authority, the voice of a public self who ‹nally confesses his past errors and disavows them,” Mazzotta explains, critics, “with few exceptions,” have perceived that the “extended ironies” of the sequence “disrupt the notion that the Canzoniere is the poetic narrative of a conversion ” (1978, 272). The framing poems try to claim that the poet has “reached the vantage point from which a structure of intelligibility can be imposed on the temporal fragmentation of the self” (ibid.), but that structure has not seemed convincing to most readers, who have looked instead to the “labyrinth” of poems within the frame in attempting to characterize the Canzoniere’s poetics.30 Toward that end, John Freccero opposes the contrasting tropic functions of the ‹g tree in Augustine’s Confessions and the laurel in Petrarch’s Canzoniere, as Augustine himself recommends in the Secretum.31 Freccero notes that the ‹g tree “was already a scriptural emblem of conversion before Augustine used [it] to represent the manifestation of the pattern of universal history in his own life” (1975, 34). Thus, Freccero maintains, it is an allegorical sign, “just as it is in the Gospels when Christ says to his disciples that they must look to the ‹g tree if they would read the signs of the Apocalyptic time,” and it operates on two levels: it precipitates, on the one hand, Augustine’s conversion, “the revelation of God’s Word at a particular time and place, recapitulating the Christ event in an individual soul” (36); on the other hand, it “stands for a tradition of textual anteriority that extends backward in time to the Logos and forward to the same Logos at time’s ending” (37), thereby inviting Augustine’s readers to apply to their own lives the “trajectory” of God’s Word. In contrast, the laurel in Petrarch’s Canzoniere “has no such moral dimension of meaning”: it is, says Freccero, “the emblem both of the lover’s enthrallment and of the poet’s triumph,” because “it stands for a poetry whose real subject matter is the augustinian epic, petrarch to milton 12 < its own act and whose creation is its own author” (34). Freccero determines that unlike Christian allegory, in which “all signs point ultimately to God,” the laurel “cannot mean anything: its referentiality must be neutralized if it is to remain the property of the creator”; accordingly, the laurel is “the emblem of the mirror relationship Laura-Lauro, which is to say, the poetic lady created by the poet, who in turn creates him.”32 Through this “poetic strategy” of circular, “self-contained dynamism,” Freccero concludes, the Petrarchan lover stakes his claim to autonomy (37). In this account of Laura, however, Freccero’s powerful reading of the Canzoniere depends upon a contradiction of its own. He claims that the “narcissistic lover ‹nds spiritual death” in Laura’s eyes—indeed, that she is an “Anti-Christ” (39)—while he states, in another place, that “many of the later poems suggest that the love for Laura was ennobling, at least in a literary or humanistic sense” (40). As other scholars have rightly emphasized, Petrarch’s moral universe was wholly, traditionally Christian—such that we always ‹nd him compelled to de‹ne anything that is ennobling in a literary or humanistic sense to be likewise ennobling in a religious sense.33 This is why it is necessary to our understanding of “Petrarch’s poetics” that we observe one premise of the Canzoniere that is implied throughout but eventually made explicit in the concluding poem of penitential prayer: that the poet’s love for Laura, though sinful, functions positively by testifying to the strength of his future devotion to the Blessed Virgin. He puts this claim in a rhetorical question to her: se poca mortal terra caduca amar con sì mirabil fede soglio, che devrò far di te, cosa gentile?34 [If I am accustomed to love a little mortal, ›eeting dust with such marvelous faith, how then will I love you, a noble thing?] These lines do not imply that Laura is a mediatrix in the way that Beatrice is for Dante (in the same poem [line 52], as Freccero reminds us [1975, 40], the “Queen of Heaven” is said to be the only “vera beatrice”). But if the strength or “marvelous faith” of Petrarch’s idolatry vouches for the strength of his subsequent love for the Blessed Virgin, then the sinful desire represented throughout the previous rime proves valuable, even justi‹ed, as a comparative measure and anticipation of the holy love for which it will be rejected. To see how Petrarch advances this idea in the intermediate Introduction 13 = poems of the sequence, I would propose an alternative image to the laurel (and the labyrinth that Mazzotta prefers [1978, 295]) as an emblem best be‹tting the poetics of the Canzoniere: the phoenix, the immortal bird that rises anew each year from its own ashes. There are obvious ways in which the phoenix is suited for symbolizing Petrarch’s poetic strategy. As Mazzotta points out, the sequence of the Canzoniere “is governed by recurrent motifs, such as the phoenix, the sun, the cycle of seasons, metamorphoses, and the like,” which emblemize the manner in which “each poem attempts to begin anew” while “inevitably repeat[ing] what has already been tried before” (295). The phoenix represents particularly well the poet-lover’s oxymora and paradoxical self-evaluations , as in his admission “I am consumed by the ‹re from this living stone, upon which I rest” (m’à concio ’l foco / di questa viva petra, ov’io m’appoggio [no. 50, lines 77–78]), through which he quizzically asserts that what destroys him springs from what supports him. On occasion, he speci‹cally invokes the phoenix to make this lament, as in no. 135. Così sol si ritrova lo mio voler, et così in su la cima de’ suoi alti pensieri al sol si volve, et così si risolve, et così torna al suo stato di prima: arde, et more, et riprende i nervi suoi, et vive poi con la fenice a prova. (lines 9–15) [Thus is my desire unique, and thus at the height of its lofty thoughts it turns toward the sun, and thus does it dissolve, thus does it return to its original state; it burns, and dies, and renews its courage and lives again, vying with the phoenix.] Similarly, in no. 207, the sight of Laura at once nourishes and burns him: così dal suo bel volto l’involo or uno et or un altro sguardo; et di ciò inseme mi nutrico et ardo. (lines 37–39) [Thus from her beautiful visage I steal now one and now another glance; and by these I am at once nourished and set a‹re.] the augustinian epic, petrarch to milton 14 < In these last lines, the origin of the ›ames is ambiguous. Is he saying they are set by Laura or by his desire? In no. 165, he is precise: Laura “sparks” the ‹re on which he lives and burns, and it is this ‹re that makes him phoenix-like. Amor, che solo i cor’ leggiadri invesca né degna di provar sua forza altrove, da’ begli occhi un piacer sì caldo piove chi’i’ non curo altro ben né bramo altr’ésca. Et co l’andar et col soave sguardo s’accordan le dolcissime parole, et l’atto mansüeto, humile et tardo. Di tai quattro faville, et non già sole, nasce ’l gran foco, di ch’io vivo et ardo, che son fatto un augel notturno al sole. (lines 5–14) [Love, who entraps only gracious hearts and does not deign to prove his power elsewhere, makes her lovely eyes rain with such warm delight that I care for no other good nor long for different bait. And with her walk and with her gentle glance her words most sweet accord, as well do her gestures—mild, humble, and demure. From those four sparks, and not from them alone, is born the great ›ame on which I live and burn, for I am become a night-bird in the sun.] The difference between the two potential sources of the ›ame may appear slight, a quibbling distinction between the poet saying that he burns with desire for Laura and that Laura sets him burning with desire. But the distinction is functional. If lover and beloved share one ›ame that has its source in the beloved, the ‹gural justi‹cation for Laura’s quasi-mediatrix effect on the poet is established. So it proves, for in passing from the in vita to the in morte portion of the Canzoniere, we discover (in no. 321) that the phoenix symbolizes both the burning desire that Laura instills in the poet and her “›ight to heaven.” The phoenix has become Petrarch’s symbolic link between Laura’s ascension to God and the poet’s repentance and spiritual renewal. E’ questo ’l nido in che la mia fenice mise l’aurate et le purpuree penne, Introduction 15 = che sotto le sue ali il mio cor tenne, et parole et sospiri anco n’elice? O del dolce mio mal prima radice, ov’è il bel viso onde quel lume venne che vivo et lieto ardendo mi mantenne? Sol’ eri in terra; or se’ nel ciel felice. Et m’ài lasciato qui misero et solo, talché pien di duol sempre al loco torno che per te consecrato honoro et còlo; veggendo a’ colli oscura notte intorno onde prendesti al ciel l’ultimo volo, et dove li occhi tuoi solean far giorno. [Is this the nest in which my phoenix donned gold and purple feathers, where she kept my heart beneath her wings, and still extracts my words and sighs? O ‹rst root of my sweet illness, where is the beautiful visage whence came the light that sustained me in life and happy burning? A sun on earth; now you are happy in heaven. And you have left me here miserable and alone, so that full of grief I always return to this place that, consecrated to you, I honor and revere; I am gazing at the dark night round the hills whence you took your last ›ight to heaven and where your eyes once brought the day.] In the ‹rst stanza of the preceding sonnet, the poet ostensibly remembers Laura as a phoenix in her nest, enclosing his heart within her gold and purple feathers—a nurturing image but for the statement that she also “extracts” from it his “words and sighs,” referring of course to the words and sighs of the Canzoniere, which are nurtured by this love for Laura. In the following stanza, the phoenix image is then transferred from her, now “happy in heaven,” to him, who is being sustained in “happy burning.” The transference is underscored by the repetition of “Sol” and “solo” in the lines bridging the octave and sestet: the ‹rst is applied to her, the second to him, implying—we surely are meant to suppose—that her phoenix-like rebirth in heaven shall afterward be followed by the poet’s own phoenixlike conversion. But for now, as the poet admits in the stanzas that conclude this poem, he is stuck in circularity, always returning in his narrative to this place of grief and adoration, returning yet again to the same eyes that brought the same light that were already the subject of the second stanza and of too the augustinian epic, petrarch to milton 16 < many poems before. This phoenix is arrested, “sustained” in a prolonged burning midway between its former and future self: “On this side of the pass still closed to me,” he cries, “I half remain, alas, and half cross over” (di qua dal passo anchor che mi si serra / mezzo rimango, lasso, et mezzo il varco [no. 36, lines 7–8]). The Canzoniere captures the poet’s extended transformation in progress, a metamorphosis whose articulation in oxymora evokes the phoenix caught at mid-con›agration, roiling around in apparent self-contained circularity. We get the impression that the poet is “petri‹ed” (Freccero 1975, 34), trapped in a “labyrinth,” or “locked in a cosmos of his own creation” (Mazzotta 1978, 295–96), because for so long his consuming defers consummation.35 But Petrarch expects us to remember that the phoenix’s eventual rebirth is destined. As Augustine objects in the Secretum, by contrast, such self-indulgence in the phoenix’s ›ames only postpones the discovery that spiritual death, not new life in heaven, awaits the poet. Augustine’s allowance in De doctrina Christiana for the possibility of negative viae hardly admits the notion that narcissism and idolatry could testify to the strength of a subsequent conversion, let alone enable one, and such suspension as the Canzoniere’s is conceivable neither as a moral condition nor as a stage in his own literary self-representation. From the opening of book 3 of the Confessions, where Augustine, before Petrarch, renders the experience of burning with wrongful love as a circling around in paradoxical self-analysis, the frying pan (sartago), just as well as the ‹g tree, presents itself as an appropriate emblem to contrast with Petrarch’s phoenix. I came to Carthage, and a frying pan of shameful loves roared round me on every side. I was not yet in love and yet I longed to love, and having a more hidden want I hated myself for wanting less. I sought what I might love, loving to love, and I hated peace of mind and the road without pitfalls because the hunger within me was for an inner food, You Yourself, my God, and yet I was not hungering in my want, but was without the desire for incorruptible nourishment , not because I was ‹lled with it, but because the more empty I was of it the more loathsome it was to me. And so my soul was sickly and ulcerous, and miserably it thrust forth, desiring to be scratched by the touch of sensual things. But if these had no soul, they were not to be loved. To love and to be loved was to me more sweet, and the more so if I might enjoy the body of the one I loved. Therefore I de‹led the spring of friendship with the ‹lth of concupiscence and Introduction 17 = beclouded its luster with the hellishness of lust, and yet, though so foul, in my over›owing vanity I sought to be elegant and re‹ned. I then rushed headlong into love, because I desired to be so taken. My God, my Mercy, out of goodness to me you sprinkled the enjoyment with bitterness, because I was loved and reached secretly for the bond of pleasure, and I was tied fast, happy in my bitter servitude, so that I was scourged with the burning iron rods of jealousy and suspicions and fears and angers and quarrels.36 Augustine remains long suspended in the sinful state described here, and it is this experience in particular that quali‹es him to counsel Petrarch in the Secretum. Lady Truth there reminds Augustine of this, telling him: “When you were locked up in the prison of the body, you suffered much the same as he does. That being so makes you the best physician to cure these passions that you have experienced.”37 Even after renouncing all the other pleasures of “secular life,” Augustine says in the Confessions, “still I was bound tightly for the sake of a woman.”38 To be suspended in this state, for Augustine, is always, strictly, to be in error. Whether hanging on the lips of Aristotle (4.16.28) or burning with lust in a ‹gurative frying pan, he was only prolonging his time in spiritual darkness. This suspension carries no such guarantee of conversion as the phoenix can pledge; on the contrary, says Augustine, “by being suspended I was the worse killed.”39 Accordingly, for him, conversion is sudden. It comes under the ‹g tree “statim,” quickly and steadfastly, so that Augustine is, in the moment, wholly God’s: “For you converted me to You, so that I sought neither a wife nor any hope of this age.”40 In the Secretum, Petrarch likewise emphasizes the suddenness of Augustine’s rebirth, having his spiritual guide recall to him, “After I was fully willing, then was I able, and with amazing and blessed speed I was transformed into another Augustine.”41 The contrast between the phoenix and the frying pan underscores just how far the Canzoniere is from achieving decisively the same breakthrough to enlightenment, the same irrevocable rejection of his love for Laura, as is claimed by the spiritual pilgrim of the Secretum. For Petrarch to advertise such a breakthrough in verse, it remains for the Africa to demonstrate unequivocally his rejection of loving basely. There at last, Petrarch renounces his sinful lust as Augustine of the Secretum had requested and as Augustine himself had modeled in the Confessions. But in so doing, Petrarch plays for other stakes. Whereas the Canzoniere audaciously cites the poet’s idolatrous love for Laura as testimony to the strength of his subthe augustinian epic, petrarch to milton 18 < sequent love for heaven, the Africa abandons that claim in order to make another much like it—an equally audacious suggestion that such devotion as Petrarch’s to the byways of pagan literature and the acquisition of literary fame can provide real testimony to his devotion to God. In the allegory that advances this idea, and in the drama of sexual temptation and renunciation that conveys the allegory, we experience the self- and reader-justifying poetics of Petrarch’s Augustinian epic. Introduction 19 = ...