Petrarch's Augustinian View from Mont Ventoux
On April 26, 1336, Petrarch climbed Mont Ventoux just for the pleasure of doing so. While this is sometimes seen as a mark of the transition to modernity, Petrarch himself spoke of the experience in Augustinian terms. Upon reaching the summit, he reports reading a passage from Confessions, reproaching himself for marveling at the nature without rather than the truly wondrous nature within. Petrarch's discovery of the interior man speaks to us today and to our fear that there is no logos behind the flux of experience, that we are as divided from ourselves and from one another as one mountain climber is from another. Petrarch responds to this fear by pointing, not forward to the post-modern, but back to the medieval.
The idea of traveling simply for pleasure could be seen as distinctly modern, as a precursor to modern tourism. When we think of travelers in ancient and medieval times, we generally find something purposive about their wanderings: Odysseus trying to return home, Herodotus recording great deeds for posterity, Aeneas re-founding a city, Augustine searching for God, Dante entering the eternal, and Chaucer going on pilgrimage. By contrast, the modern tourist follows his fancy wherever it takes him: he wants to gawk at things, to eat new foods, to bring home some trinkets. In the classical world, even as de-sacralized by Christianity, peoples and places were imbued with meaning; in the modern world, they are objects to be consumed. Once one rejects the existence of final causes, the world is no longer a sacrament from which one hopes to receive self-knowledge, but an oyster from which one takes treasures for self-creation. The ancient traveler goes to Delphi only to be told that the answer, “know thyself,” was already in his soul; the modern traveler goes to New York to be told to assert his will on the world (Rockefeller’s personal creed), or to Amsterdam only to be told to laugh at the possibility of finding wisdom there (“Homo sapiens non urinat in ventum”).
Petrarch himself may have intended his journey up the mountain as a meaningless event, as an assertion that the good life comes to those who create their own narratives. As he puts it, “My only motive was the wish to see what so great an elevation had to offer.” This speaks to the modern celebration of curiosity and whimsicality rather than the classical concern with wonder and prudence. Even when we celebrate intellectual life today, we place the emphasis on personal interests, desires, and making (“choose your path”) rather than on finding one’s place within the whole (“discover your calling”).
More generally, we could say that mountain climbing as a sport is a modern invention precisely due to the rejection of nature as something purposive. Once nature is reduced to raw materials and a series of efficient causes, it becomes either a puzzle to be solved, an instrument for the betterment of human comfort, or merely an obstacle to be overcome. Mountain climbers speak of “peak bagging,” an image reminiscent of Machiavelli’s comparison of fortune to a lady who is conquered by force. Think, for example, of Sir Edmund Hillary’s ascent of Everest: after an earlier failed attempt, he is supposed to have given her a bold warning: “I will come again and conquer you.” Upon fulfilling this promise, the newspapers exuberantly proclaimed to the world that Everest had indeed been conquered.
The classical view sees nature as a source of meaning, and even as sacramental. On such a view, Hillary did not conquer Everest, but embrace her. In this lies the significance of Petrarch’s summit: his proto-modern journey turns out to be a re-assertion of the classical view rather than the creation of a new one. Our first clue to this effect is in the inspiration Petrarch takes from reading Livy’s History of Rome. Petrarch sees himself as returning to, and modelling himself on, the lives of those who came before. As he says in another letter regarding Rome, the problem is not that the Romans of his time failed to be forward-looking, but that they were “ignorant of the Roman story” and thus unable to “rise again.” He does not call for new virtues, but a return to the old: “I bewail not ignorance alone . . . but the flight and exile of many virtues.” The study of history, then, is simultaneously a return to the given and transcendent, to living in accordance with the cardinal virtues of our eternal-seeking nature.
Our second clue comes in the ascent itself, at the climax of which Petrarch blames himself for the vice of laziness. Rather than lament his lack of high-tech gear or curse the mountain for its stubbornness, Petrarch sees her as a teacher and authority. Halfway through the journey, he finds himself constantly “looking for an easy way, [thereby] land[ing] in much difficulty. Thus I kept putting off the trouble of climbing; but man’s wit can’t alter the nature of things, and there is no way for anyone to reach the heights by going downward.” Petrarch’s ascent of Mont Ventoux does not represent an attempt to conquer nature, but to submit to her, to learn about nature’s greatness and man’s frailty. Further still, it is an attempt to let grace build upon nature.
Third and finally, then, we come to the Augustinian view itself. Nearing the top of Mont Ventoux, Petrarch’s mind turns from the corporeal to the spiritual: as he rests in a valley, he curses himself for following a path in life “leading through low and worldly pleasures.” Upon reaching the peak, the dizzying view spurs an inward turn and confession of his past sins. With a pocket edition of Confessions as his guide, Petrarch undergoes an inward (and then upward) conversion that would carry him back down the mountain:
I thought in silence of the lack of good counsel in us mortals, who neglect what is noblest in ourselves, scatter our energies in all directions, and waste ourselves in a vain show, because we look about us for what is to be found only within. I wondered at the natural nobility of our soul, save when it debases itself of its own free will, and deserts its original estate, turning what God has given it for its honour into dishonour. How many times, think you, did I turn back that day, to glance at the summit of the mountain which seemed scarcely a cubit high compared with the range of human contemplation,—when it is not immersed in the foul mire of earth? With every downward step I asked myself this: If we are ready to endure so much sweat and labour in order that we may bring our bodies a little nearer heaven, how can a soul struggling toward God, up the steps of human pride and human destiny, fear any cross or prison or sting of fortune?
Petrarch is a "Renaissance man” perhaps because he does not see his modernity in conflict with the classical. In other words, by celebrating the greatness of the pagans he does not thereby disdain the humility of the Christians. As he puts it midway through his life’s journey, “Let us call ‘ancient’ whatever preceded the celebration and veneration of Christ’s name in Rome, ‘modern’ everything from then to our own time.” Man is neither a passive recipient of meaning nor a creator-god. Rather, man is a co-creator, a free—though subordinate—participant in God’s “yes-saying.” We can view Petrarch as the founder of an alternative modernity, one that emphasizes the compatibility between the ancients and medievals by adhering to the traditional prioritizing of the contemplative over the active, and which would later pass from Montaigne to Pascal and on to Tocqueville and to Maritain.
The relevance of all this for us I take to be as follows: every time we look to the stars, or to texts from other times and places, we open ourselves up to the possibility of a Mont Ventoux experience. For Petrarch over 680 years ago, and for us today, the words of St. Augustine reach across the ages and to the eternal: “And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of the rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not.” Professors in the contemporary university can and ought to encourage students to look to the great minds scattered through time and space in the hopes of finding their place among them, of joining them—at least occasionally—on the lofty peaks from which they can look outward, inward and upward.
Michael Krom, Ph.D. is Chair of Philosophy and Director of Benedictine Leadership Studies at Saint Vincent College (Latrobe, PA). He recently authored a second book, ‘Justice and Charity: An Introduction to Aquinas's Moral, Economic, and Political Thought’ (Baker Academic Press), and currently works on the history and nature of Benedictine education.