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Dante and Petrarch
The Passage
The experience of these two great Tuscan poets is the turning point of an era. Two viatores traveling different roads in the human mind: one arrives at the certainty of faith, the other at a sense of something missing. The great Italian Literature espert, Ezio Raimondi, measures himself against Fr Giussani’s talk to the Memores Domini published in last month’s issue of Traces (“Upon the Ruin”).

edited by Davide Rondoni

Recently, Fr Giussani returned to the figures of Dante, Beatrice, and also Petrarch (“Upon the Ruin,” Traces, Vol. 6, No. 1, 2004, p. 1). Already in a book of his written some years ago, The Religious Consciousness in Modern Man, he maintained that Petrarch represents a first departure from the typical medieval man, where the idea of human fulfillment possible in the life touched by the Christian event is replaced by the idea of Fortune, of fame as an ideal, on one hand, and on the other a sort of nostalgia for a fulfillment that is impossible. Christ begins to be perceived as something that at the most forgives, but it is as though the human being could never be fulfilled. Petrarch is indeed a Christian man, totally Christian. But it is as though the feeling of Christianity were like a dream and the content of faith the promise of something that will manage, if anything, to recover a human condition that has been irreparably wounded, but does not fulfill it any more, no longer fulfills the human here in the present. Christ can fulfill life, but all this is something to which one aspires, maybe for the next life. Professor Raimondi…
The problem is very complex. We have to see if the relationship between Dante and Petrarch is a relationship of opposition or, on the contrary, as I believe, if it is also a sort of great dialogue between two profoundly different spiritual moments, between the late 13th and the middle of the 14th centuries, where we have the idea of a Rome abandoned and alone, in light of the transfer of the Papal See to Avignon…
In the meantime, we should engage again in a total reading of Petrarch and establish whether to read the Canzoniere with the Latin works, reconstituting a great dimension. Undeniably, there is a category in Petrarch that in Dante has another meaning, which is the category of waiting. Waiting bears within it the moment of hope, but this also contains what we could call anxiety and the deep sense of temporality.
In Petrarch, there is a sense of temporality profoundly different from Dante’s, which has to do also with the way he puts a phrase together. It is not peremptory; it is done with a kind of trembling. In any case, we have to be attentive to the fact that there is a sort of paradox in Petrarch. The word tends to be clear, distinct, without residue, and then there is an inner tension that we must not ignore. This tension lies precisely within the making of the word, which in the end seems the most elegant word possible. Otherwise, we would not understand why Petrarch is the amazing reader that he is, not only of Seneca but also and above all of Augustine. Without this, the end of the Canzoniere would not have the meaning it has. And it is evident that also in this case we are outside of Dante: at a certain point the allusion to the true Beatrice, who is the Virgin Mary and no other, is a sort of reply.
The problem is to establish if this Christian sense, in which the lack of something goes beyond the moment of fullness, is a loss or a possibility. I read in Traces Fr Giussani’s recent words: “We are still in a world that is, in a broad sense, medieval, but at the same time we have moved away from certainty and the strength of Christ seems to be weakening.” I would say that in Petrarch the sense of guilt is stronger, also on a daily level. Not guilt as something extraordinary, but moving through the day, living in the current times with the failings that the conscience–the Augustinian conscience–vigilantly watched out for and harshly accused. I wonder: in the Christian way of feeling, are trembling and trepidation part of feeling oneself to be in time and projected out of time, or not?
Many years ago, when I had just received my degree, Professor Calcaterra gave me the task of translating the Secretum. I do not remember very well what I wrote in the preface. I only remember that I dwelled on the image of the homo viator. Dante and Petrarch are two different viatores.

The connection between the vacancy of the Papal See, as a great sign of uncertainty concerning the Presence, and this change of the Christian sensibility in Petrarch in the direction of a sense of something missing, redeemed in part by a heightening of the sense of expectation, seems very important to me… However, I would like to go back for a minute to the question of the sense of straying, of guilt. In Dante, too, there are moments of trepidation and trembling caused by the sense of having strayed… Indeed, the entire Divine Comedy arises as the story of a situation of being lost, the “forest”…
But in Dante this trembling lasts only a few minutes. It does not become the permanent characteristic of what we could call the breath of the soul.

Thus we notice a different emphasis concerning the theme of the victory of Christianity as the full possibility of human life. You say that in Petrarch, this feeling of something missing never goes away.
Certainly, in this case, too, the penitential dimension of Petrarch is profoundly different from Dante. What I am wondering is if there is only one model or if there are different possibilities among which I can choose. Certainly, from this point of view, the medieval nature of Petrarch is more “modern” than that of Dante, because it gives up certain great constructs. In Petrarch, even if his relationship with the Biblical texts is intense and profound, we do not find what we could call the prophetic dimension. It is a profoundly human dimension, with the idea of a presence that is at the same time, however, a separateness. We should go back and look again at the De vita solitaria or the De otio religioso, and especially a book that was extraordinarily widespread but of which we do not yet have a modern text, the De remediis utriusque fortunae.
We find in it the public role that Petrarch felt he was playing as a poet. Here, too, there is certainly an element of differentiation from Dante. In Dante, the consciousness of exile is a crucial element that is deeply intertwined with his prophetic role. In Petrarch, whose familiarity with the sacred texts is extraordinarily intense, this is not determined in the same way. Their way of understanding the relationship between the individual and history is different. We see, not in the Canzoniere but in the Trionfi, an operation by which the history of the “I” is at the same time the history of mankind, but Dante manages it in a completely different way. In Dante, there is–I would define it like this–a legislative will that is missing in Petrarch in this case, but that does not immediately mean the conversion to an idea of spiritual weakness. Petrarch insists on this dimension of deficient humanity. It is the dimension of acedia, apathy, i.e., a sort of spiritual sin. Faith discovers also the possibility of being diminished, of becoming less than it is. It is another way of understanding what we could call the idea of the miles cristianus, the Christian soldier. To be sure, it is true that this relationship between the “I” and the community, present or perceived spiritually in Dante, has a different tension in Petrarch: he no longer has certain given sureties, but the aspirations remain, the tension remains, to come out of time or to perceive time not as a destroyer, but as a moment of peace. I read Fr Giussani’s beautiful lines on Dante’s prayer to the Virgin and Petrarch’s prayer to the Virgin. An extraordinary sixteenth century reader, Castelvetro, who was, however, by then part of an evangelical tradition that was not Catholic and was anti-Rome, reading this song said disdainfully at a certain point, “There is something pagan about it.” In reality, things are once again more complex. If we read the poem, there is an element in Petrarch’s prayer that is certainly alive and Christian, and it is what I would call its intimacy: this way of addressing maternal womanhood by invoking the filial relationship as the possibility of listening even to one who knows he is a sinner. This intimacy is another way of understanding the saving power of womanhood compared to Dante’s. There is a sort of lofty and affectionate motherhood.

In Dante, too, the reference to the warmth in which Mary’s loving womb was “rekindled” indicates the force of this affection. The intensity of affections is similar…
Certainly, a purely humanistic reading of Petrarch diminishes, removes, this extraordinary intensity, this sort of inner strength. A reduction solely to humanism would mean hearing Petrarch as a Platonic voice and not, on the contrary, as an Augustinian voice. There is no doubt that Seneca is assimilated to Augustine, not Augustine to Seneca. Let’s think of how some of these possibilities flow again, albeit indirectly, in Erasmus, and then listen to Erasmus in dialogue with the sixteenth century world, with Luther. These are the different voices of Christian spirituality, from this point of view. Here there is an element that leads towards the modern, if we understand the modern not only as hope, but also as the sensation of its possible loss and its opposition.

On this point, I think that one of the risks lies in understanding the modern as more animated by the debate between having hope and the possibility of not having it, compared to the Middle Ages. I believe, conversely, that in reality this possibility was very much present in Dante’s Middle Ages. The Divine Comedy is born out of this. Its source was precisely the possibility of losing Beatrice, losing hope: Dante experiences this loss and thus begins his journey. I believe that the difference lies, more than in the business of hope and its possible opposite or loss, in something very interesting that you were saying earlier, which is the greater emphasis on the sense of one’s own limitations compared to the accent on Christ’s victory, on Christ’s victoriousness.
There is no doubt that the sense of finitude has a new dimension in Petrarch, which makes him open to the future adventures of modern subjectivity. But within Petrarch, if we read him thoroughly, the moment of faith and hope is just as alive; however, it has what I would call a sort of trembling. We do not have the moment of joy, the moment of coinciding with the fullness of the divine word. Let’s not forget that Dante coincides with the divine vision, in the end, even if later he will forget it, whereas Petrarch remains here on this side–he lowers his head rather than raising it, if I can put it like this; he does not feel he is on the same level.

But couldn’t this be a form of pride? The pride of insisting on one’s own limitation instead of on the strength of another, of Christ?
When, quite rightly, we remember these lines and say, “The day is drawing near and cannot be long,/ so fast does time run and fly,” it does not seem to me that there is the prelude to pride here. Also because the line “sì corre il tempo et vola,” “so fast does time run and fly,” is all wrinkled up, this line that seems so flowing and is in reality bent. Petrarch’s art is to create oppositions and then muffle them. In the Italian tradition, only Manzoni, at another junction, is capable of doing similar things. It is what Campo called the extraordinary, explosive oxymorons that are said under one’s breath. It does not seem to me that there is pride here… Look at “Raccomandami al tuo Figliuol, verace/ omo et verace Dio,” “Commend me to your Son, true/ man and true God,” with that very strong “verace,” still so intensely Latin, where he talks of this dual nature and underlines “verace,” true. And … “ch’accolga ’l mïo spirto ultimo in pace,” “may He take to Himself my last spirit in peace,” where spirit is also the last breath.

Clearly, here we have the entrusting of one’s own weakness, but not the glad sense of a victory already present in it.
It depends somewhat on our reading and on what I would call–it seems like a paradox but it is not–the Petrarchization of Petrarch. Our own predisposition can decide or not.
On the other hand–I would not like to make a basely historical argument–we must not forget the passage from Dante to Petrarch within the great events already cited: the papal exile in Avignon. Dante knew only its earliest moments, but Petrarch lived it fully at mid-century (think of St Catherine, who also lived through these events; think of the dream, the illusion of Cola di Rienzo, with this different hypothesis of a prophetism that is no longer Dantean and is lived as an ideal of “Romanization”). Let’s not forget that we are witnessing the waning of the great Scholastic philosophy and the birth of the new voices of the Augustinian voluntarism, of full fideism, of faith that is even tied to the absurd… Petrarch is a contemporary of this new reason. We are in front of a gap with regard to divinity: the distance increases, and other reasons are given for abolishing and overcoming the distance. If we do not keep all this in mind, we do not understand why in the fate of the European spirit, broadly speaking, Petrarch counts more than Dante.
A problem remains, which is the problem of redemption. Redemption lies in this certainty that there will be a hand held out to me, but that it is already given here, since in the very moment when I think it will be there, it is already there. The theme of faith not as reason but as absurdity is part of the Christian tradition. It is thus a different thrust towards what we could call the idea of completion. Many years ago, when during the war I saved a German sergeant who was a seminarian at the time and then went on to become a priest, he gave me a book by a German thinker, entitled Uncertainty and Risk. The risk it talks about is the moment when I could get lost while still on the road.

That’s it; the real question hinges on what “risk” is. The risk of faith in experience…
I can translate it for you into more modern terms of “adventure,” but keep in mind that aventure in the medieval world means “calling ourselves into question,” thus “the forest,” “the knight,” the concept that Dante then proposed in his own way with those figures.

What is the element of certainty that makes someone run the risk? What is the force that makes one go through risk in order to verify the promise of fulfillment?
Well, risk is a trial. After all, the story of Isaac and Abraham is the story of a trial.

In fact, Abraham was not immobilized by risk, but went forward. The act of faith is this relationship with something present because of which you find the strength, the reasonableness to go ahead. It’s a gamble on the present. Otherwise, you do not risk.
Certainly. Thus, the way of understanding the “pact,” the way one sees himself inside all of this, is at stake. There is no doubt that, between Dante and Petrarch, a passage takes place.