In antiquity and throughout the middle ages, going into the mountains was in itself a remarkable feat and a sure sign of virtus, whether military as in the case of Hannibal or religious as in that of St. Benedict. In late antique popular culture and in the lives of the saints, the mountains were the abodes of demons and centaurs, places the average person avoided at all cost and where a holy hero, such as St. Antony, might test his mettle against the forces of darkness. In Petrarch’s de Ascensu Montis Ventosi, we see something new: the mountain stands almost as a challenge, always looking down on the insignificant humanity that inhabits its base. The most discussed portion of the letter is this first passage:

Altissimum regionis huius montem, quem non immerito Ventosum vocant, hodierno die sola videndi insignem loci altitudinem cupiditate ductus ascendi. Multis iter hoc annis in animo fuerat; ab infantia enim his in locis, ut nosti, fato res hominum versante, versatus sum; mons autem hic late undique conspectus fere semper in oculis est.¹

Petrarch’s claim that he completed his ascent sola videndi insignem loci altitudinem cupiditate has inspired generations of mountain climbers, scholars, and the literary public at large. Outside of the context of the rest of the letter, Petrarch’s long-held desire to climb the mountain seems a prototype of the modern conquest of nature and exultation in the indomitable human spirit, a posture seemingly far removed from the soul enslaved by concupiscence of the Middle Ages.

Based on this reading, later generations have fashioned Francesco Petrarch’s de Ascensu Montis Ventosi into a foundational document of the Renaissance, the secular afterglow of which sent forth the first rays of enlightenment into a world still shrouded in the darkness that followed the fall of Rome.² Petrarch himself has become the locus classicus of this new spirit,³ while this letter acts as the screen for the projections of later ages, a text wherein diverse varieties of modernists situate the birth of their intellectual tradition.⁴ The letter, decontextualized, has been made to serve as the canonical expression of everything new and wonderful in Petrarch. ⁵ While Petrarch was certainly an author of genius, he was for all that a man, and a man of his times.⁶ A fresh reading of de Ascensu Montis Ventosi is necessary to bring into focus the work and its author, an individual situated in a particular time and tradition, novel but also an organic continuation of the culture in which he lived. Only then can a picture of Petrarch that is realistic and representative rather than idealized and anachronistic be drawn. Reading de Ascensu anew within the fourteenth-century context in which it was composed rather than through the preoccupations of nineteenth-century cultural historians and their successors allows the emergence of a new, older Petrarch. It makes possible the expression of an important continuity with the Christian culture of the middle ages, a culture that so many have seen as the great antagonist of Petrarch the Modern, who proclaims a new, secular way of life in a world dominated by monasticism and circumscribed by Scripture, Tradition, and the Fathers.

As mentioned above, many commentators have focused their attention on the opening passages of de Ascensu Montis Ventosi, taking Petrarch’s praise of nature’s beauty and the pleasure of a vigorous mountain climb as indicative of a new attitude, but they largely ignore the second half of the letter, which makes explicit the implicit Christian allegory of the ascent as Christian life.⁷ Taken together, the two halves of the letter form a unity that brings the beauty of God’s creation together with a powerful meditation on the nature of sin and conversion. Far from being an unwelcome medievalism, the second part of de Ascensu sets forth a program for a new way of living in active contemplation. Petrarch’s letter ought to be read anew, neither as the first spark of the Enlightenment nor as a source of Romantic Medievalism, but rather as the founding document of a humanism that has more in common with the mendicants, Beguines, and adherents of Devotio Moderna than with Rousseau and Voltaire. When read as the fourteenth-century document that it is, Sts. Antony and Augustine emerge as the equals of or superiors to Livy, Ovid, and Vergil, and Petrarch points the way forward not to secular enlightenment but to Christian humanism. There is undoubtedly something novel in de Ascensu, but it is not the awakening of a secular consciousness that banishes religion, but rather a new charism of Christian life, the rebirth of a Christian humanism that supplements but does not replace Scripture with the Classics. Nor is Petrarch a liminal figure, a Christian intoxicated by the possibilities of the secular but too committed to the old world to pass through the portal and enjoy the light of the newly dawning day. Rather, Petrarch blazes the trail taken by Erasmus and More, living a life of contemplation in the world, a life dedicated to the pursuit of truth and wisdom in harmony with traditional Christian devotion, studying Cicero and Vergil alongside Scripture and the Fathers.

Like so many other personalities who play a part in the history of the renaissance, Petrarch suffers from being made to act in plays written by others.⁸ It is certain that Petrarch wanted to be remembered, but it is equally certain that he is today celebrated as something far different from anything he could have imagined. This article will begin by mentioning two versions of Petrarch remembered by literary historians: the founder of (secular) humanism so dear to English-speaking historians on the one hand, and the writer of vernacular lyrics, who is a supporting character in the story of the foundation of Italian literature on the other. Next, a reading of Petrarch’s most famous letter will provide the basis for arguing that Petrarch was rather first and foremost a Latin writer, concerned to develop the best parts of his tradition rather than to make a decisive break from it.

How did Petrarch become the founder of humanism? Burckhardt’s epoch-making interpretation along with the anglophone work of Symonds cast the Renaissance as a profound break from the medieval world, with Petrarch as a central figure in the forging of a new consciousness.⁹ While these earlier historians had studied the Renaissance as a political phenomenon that led to the formation of the modern nation-state, scholars working in the early twentieth century attempted to demonstrate the primacy of literature in the creation of the new cultural landscape of the early modern period.¹⁰ If anything, this new focus pushed Petrarch into an even more central position in explaining the origins of the modern mentalité. This interpretation was especially widespread in the English-speaking world. By 1914, Petrarch was eulogized as “the first modern scholar and man of letters” in an extensive biography by James Harvey Robinson.¹¹ Robinson’ assessment that “no complete edition of [Petrarch’s] works has ever been published”¹² remains valid despite several attempts over the last century to fill the void, perhaps confirmation that Petrarch is an historical personage more discussed than read. Robinson’s project was to recover Petrarch as an individual, to stress the centrality of the author’s Latin works to his own conception of his mission and legacy, and to balance the romantic legend of Petrarch as the “father” of the sonnet and of European vernacular lyric poetry with an account of his scholarly achievements and the status as the founder of modern Latin letters.¹³ In dismantling the old myth of Petrarch, Robinson recast him as a culture hero of a different sort: the father of philology and literary studies, the first gentleman and man of leisure, the herald of a new, secular otium - of a life of contemplation lived beyond the walls of the cloister.

While Robinson’s work was indicative of a largely successful movement to recover Petrarch the scholar, it, like so many well-intentioned scholarly enterprises, went too far in disenchanting the old myth while constructing an account that was no less mythical but far less enchanting. For a variety of cultural and political reasons concomitant with the great upheavals of the century, Petrarch’s reputation in the English-speaking world, either as the exponent of vernacular poetry and literary father of Shakespeare and Goethe or as the prototype of the man of letters ensconced in the ivory tower, slipped further and further into oblivion, except as a convenient name used to explain complex cultural developments in textbooks on the history of Western Civilization. In Italy, Petrarch, considered the last and least important of the “founders” of the national language, maintained his reputation as a lyric poet but could not compete with Dante, nor did his Latin works emerge from the obscurity in which they had languished for centuries.

In the midst of the last great war, some of the greatest authorities on humanism and the renaissance came together to discuss to what extent the movement begun by Petrarch was indebted to the past.¹⁴ In a broad-ranging discussion that encompassed science, medicine, philosophy, and literature and anticipated many of the anxieties and hopes about the dawn of a post-modern age, these scholars were eager to demonstrate significant continuities between the middle ages and the renaissance and to stress that the art and letters of the period we now call “early modern” were in fact a rebirth of classical antiquity rather than something altogether new and original. Thorndike in particular sought to deflate not only Burckhardt’s renaissance but also Petrarch’s reputation as anything more than an expert rhetorician.¹⁵ Towards the end of the twentieth century, Stephen Minta summarized Petrarch’s influence on later literary tradition thus:

The bulk of his literary output was in Latin, but it is for his two works in Italian that he is now remembered...I doubt if he is much read today, but over the past four hundred years or so his reputation as one of the very finest European lyric poets has never been successfully challenged...it is difficult to explain why Petrarch’s work should have exercised so powerful an influence...Petrarch was not the earliest important love poet in Italy...He gave to the European tradition no new lyric forms. He was not even responsible for the invention of the ‘Petrarchan’ conceits which abound in literary histories. But for all that he remains, in the view of many, the first modern European love poet, indeed for some the first modern European man.¹⁶

Minta’s evaluation is non-committal. Although he admitted that Petrarch had few readers in the later twentieth century, Minta believed that the Petrarch myth was still in need of deconstruction. With all of these qualifications, it seems that there is little reason for the generalist to read Petrarch in the here and now, except insofar as some knowledge of him and his work is necessary for appreciation of the English renaissance poetry that students must study in order to fulfill the requirements of their degrees, or for students in Italy, who must take an unfortunate detour from the more interesting works of Dante and Boccaccio to appreciate the role of this proverbial “third wheel” in driving the establishment of Italian literature.

Around the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Italian scholar Amadeo Quondam wrote a study entitled Petrarca, l’italiano dimenticato,¹⁷ in which he discusses Petrarch’s contemporary place alongside Dante and Boccaccio, with whom he forms the tre corone fiorentine.¹⁸ In this study, Quondam proposes a gioco degli spiccioli (game of pocket change) as an index of national identity.¹⁹ Italians, on emptying their pockets, are likely to find depictions of Roman and Italian renaissance art but will only find one person: Dante, on the obverse of the €2 piece, the highest denomination. In Italian education and culture, Dante has so eclipsed his two rivals as to be almost the self-sufficient incarnation of Italian literature. Boccaccio remains familiar due to the charm of his Decameron and its importance as an example of literary excellence in prose, but at a time when Petrarch’s readership has reached its nadir worldwide, even in his homeland few have read his works or could name them if asked.²⁰ Petrarch, it seems, is too classical, too French, too lyrical. In an age when an education no longer consists of deep training in multiple languages and their associated literatures and historical consciousness is becoming ever more abbreviated, what appeal can Petrarch have? Lyric poetry has never been less popular, and the reclusive academic is no more an appealing figure in the third decade of the twenty-first century than he was one hundred years earlier when Robinson discovered Petrarch’s invention of the professorial life.

The remainder of this discussion will attempt to excavate a different Petrarch, neither the vernacular Romantic nor the Latin philologist but the originator of a truly novel way of life nonetheless: the renaissance Christian humanist. By reading Petrarch’s de Ascensu Montis Ventosi anew but with a view towards his innovation within a framework of substantial continuity, a new Petrarch emerges, every bit as enchanting as the old Petrarch but truer to his time and his own understanding of himself and his works, one who is able to merge the disparate strands of secular and sacred, Romance and Latin.

Stepping away from both versions of Petrarch, we return now to Petrarch’s own words, where he tells of the catalyst that finally resolved him on climbing the mountain:

Cepit impetus tandem aliquando facere quod quotidie faciebam, praecipue postquam relegenti pridie res Romanas apud Livium forte ille mihi locus occurrerat, ubi Philippus Macedonum rex - is qui cum populo Romano bellum gessit - Haemum montem Thessalicum conscendit, e cuius vertice duo maria videri, Adriaticum et Euxinum, famae crediderat, vere ne an falso satis comperti nichil habeo, quod et mons a nostro orbe semotus et scriptorum dissensio dubiam rem facit. Ne enim cunctos evolvam, Pomponius Mela cosmographus sic esse nichil hesitans refert; Titus Livius falsam famam opinatur; michi si tam prompta montis illius experientia esset quam huius fuit, diu dubium esse non sinerem.²¹

Petrarch’s love of the classics does not elevate them to authorities. He wishes to contend with them in aemulatio, to test through experience what others have been so long content to believe by reading ancient books. Fama, so often falsa, will give way to experientia. Petrarch, the rational actor, has it within his reach to determine the truth or falsity of the claims of the ancients and intends to do so. And since he is the ruler of his mind, endowed with the power of judgement, he will not allow issues that can be so easily tested to remain doubtful. So far, it is not difficult to see why some readers of Petrarch have been so eager to imagine this letter as heralding a new spirit of rational enquiry and empirical examination.

Throughout the first half of the letter, Petrarch adopts an easy, flowing, conversational tone in close imitation of Cicero’s epistolary style. His chattiness, though, is studied, and his apparently unselfconscious narration is interrupted by frequent citations from classical authors. Petrarch’s letter is not a chance survival of a genius’ pile of ephemera; it is a conscious literary product with a definite moral, one might even say ascetic, end. After the prologue discussed above, Petrarch narrates his arrival at the foot of Mt. Ventoux:

Statuta die digressi domo, Malausanam venimus ad vesperam; locus est in radicibus montis, versus in boream. Illic unum diem morati, hodie tandem cum singulis famulis montem ascendimus non sine multa difficultate: est enim prerupta et pene inaccessibilis saxose telluris moles; sed bene a poeta dictum est: labor omnia vincit improbus.²²

Petrarch’s attitude toward the mountain seems changed now that he has seen it up close. Looming from the north, the mountain appears as a prerupta et pene inaccessibilis saxose telluris moles. No longer a target for easy conquest by man’s will and ingenuity, it is once again a threatening force of Nature, the mistress that rules all and reminds man that he is but the cleverest animal and subject to her no less than the beasts. Petrarch almost despairs of his project, seeing no clear path upwards, but literature comes to his aid. The Poet (Vergil) reminds him of the positive value of hard work. In a pattern that will repeat many times in the remainder of the letter, a pagan sage heartens Petrarch at the critical moment, just when he seems ready to abandon his ascent.

Although Petrarch has been succored for the moment, he gives the first indication that his ascent will be something more than a pleasurable constitutional. Man will conquer Nature, but she will not be mastered easily. Having prevented the irruption of the indomitable other, that which is greater than man and not subject to the ordering principle of his reason, Petrarch returns to calm confidence that he will be successful: dies longa, blandus aer, animorum vigor, corporum robur ac dexteritas et siqua sunt eiusmodi, euntibus aderant; sola nobis obstabat natura loci.²³ Petrarch seems to possess all things necessary for his ascent, yet he tellingly says that only nature stands in his way. Even if he can trust his character, his firm resolve, and his body, the force of nature lingers as imminent threat. What seemed at the beginning of the letter an innocent fancy has become a hard-fought battle against an unmoving and impassive menace.

Before his journey can begin in earnest, Petrarch is greeted by a familiar helper, the shepherd:

Pastorem exacte etatis inter convexa montis invenimus, qui nos ab ascensu retrahere multis verbis enisus est, dicens se ante annos quinquaginta eodem iuvenilis ardoris impetu supremum in verticem ascendisse, nichilque inde retulisse preter penitentiam et laborem, corpusque et amictum lacerum saxis ac vepribus, nec umquam aut ante illud tempus aut postea auditum apud eos quemquam ausum esse similia.²⁴

The appearance of so archetypical a figure at this crucial moment seems too perfect to be accidental. Whether historical fact or literary invention, the shepherd plays an important role in Petrarch’s ascent and further enhances the journey’s significance as something more than the mere satisfaction of curiosity. A good shepherd would provide Petrarch with the guidance and protection he needs to reach his destination, but instead, this pastor malus tries to dissuade Petrarch from his purpose and convince him that he is driven by no noble impulse but rather iuvenilis ardoris impetu. The shepherd urges complacency, the comfort of the known against the promise of something better. With this shepherd, Petrarch has signaled to his reader that there is something supernatural about his ascent. By using the familiar trope of the shepherd and casting him as a tempter, Petrarch connects his journey with the medieval pilgrimage and the monastic withdrawal into the desert. Petrarch’s quest to enjoy the secular pleasure of a mountaintop view has been invaded by the demonic forces that inhabit the desert places in the lives of the saints. The shepherd attempts to force Petrarch to abandon his purpose and to descend to consideration of things corporeal: scratched legs and torn clothes. The only things the shepherd says Petrarch is likely to find at the top of the mountain are penitentiam et laborem.

Petrarch is greatly struck by what the false shepherd says. From this point onwards, the letter takes a decisive turn towards the religious. What began sola videndi insignem loci altitudinem cupiditate becomes explicitly the struggle to ascend not the summit of Mt. Ventoux but rather the ladder that leads to the blessed life. With difficulty, he shakes off the shepherd’s false enticements:

Sic sepe delusus quadam in valle consedi. Illic a corporeis ad incorporea volucri cogitatione transiliens, his aut talibus me ipsum compellabam verbis: -Quod totiens hodie in ascensu montis huius expertus es, id scito et tibi accidere et multis accedentibus ad beatam vitam, sed idcirco tam facile ab hominibus non perpendi, quod corporis motus in aperto sunt, animorum vero invisibiles et occulti.²⁵

Petrarch’s breezy style has been suddenly replaced by the severe tone of inner criticism. The studied spontaneity of Cicero’s epistles fades as Petrarch becomes introspective. All this is a sign that Petrarch, in a state of inner turmoil, volucri cogitatione transiliens, is trying to redirect his thoughts, to force himself to consider the spiritual rather than material benefits of his climb. Petrarch has been building towards this transition slowly, telegraphing his intention from his arrival at the base of the mountain. As he continues, Petrarch’s language becomes more and more Christian. His quotations from classical authors recede further into the background as Scripture, the Fathers, and the lives of the saints come to the fore.

At the climax of the first half of the letter, Petrarch interprets his journey to the foot of the mountain as a moral struggle:

Equidem vita, quam beatam dicimus, celso loco sita est; arcta, ut aiunt, ad illam ducit via.²⁶ Multi quoque colles intereminent et de virtute in virtutem preclaris gradibus ambulandum est; in summo finis est omnium et vie terminus ad quem peregrinatio nostra disponitur. Eo pervenire volunt omnes, sed, ut ait Naso,²⁷ velle parum est; cupias, ut re potiaris oportet.²⁸

The hills and valleys that Petrarch encountered as he approached the mountain have become symbols of the small acts of virtue that he must constantly employ as he makes his way through life. They are the necessary preparatory exercises for the great exertion, the great test that will come at some point in the life of every person. The two-fold nature of Petrarch’s allegory becomes clear, and the distinction between the ascent of the mountain and the ascent to heaven is blurred. Although he has adopted the gnomic voice of the moral theologian, Petrarch curiously retains Ovid as a secondary adviser. In this particular passage, Petrarch makes his first definite scriptural citation and follows it nearly immediately with an Ovidian gloss. Petrarch uses Ovid to bring the lofty sublimity of Scripture down to the mundane. Petrarch makes the spiritual Scripture real by uniting it to the most corporeal of Roman poets. The two halves of Petrarch are brought into harmony through this clever glossing. He has found a spiritual use for his carnal pleasure. This may seem novel, but it is in fact an ancient, or more properly, an early medieval practice. Ovid was a favorite author of the Carolingians and the School of Chartres, whose accessus without fail counted him among the moral philosophers and teachers of ethics.²⁹ What many have thought to be a modern feature of de Ascensu - citing the classics - proves to be rather a sure sign that Petrarch is a medieval. The relationship of the Church Fathers to classical literature was notoriously strained. One thinks of St. Augustine condemning his own sorrow at Dido’s suicide or St. Jerome’s Somnium Ciceronis. It is only in the middle ages that Biblical commentators, monks, feel comfortable with the dead paganism of the ancients, which was still a vital if waning force in late antiquity, and make what use they can of it to understand the mysteries of Scripture. Petrarch uses Ovid to make an incisive psychological and spiritual point: the difference between will and desire. This distinction will form the axis of discussion for the second half of the letter as Petrarch attempts to discover his motives and goals.

Having made his transition from the material to the spiritual, Petrarch’s language becomes more and more colored by biblical idiom and the language of the fathers. Throughout this section, the abstract language of necessity and volition is married to the hard reality of the hills and valleys at the foot of the mountain:

Tu certe - nisi, ut in multis, in hoc quoque te fallis - non solum vis sed etiam cupis. Quid ergo te retinet? nimirum nichil aliud, nisi per terrenas et infimas voluptates planior et, ut prima fronte videtur, expeditior via; verumtamen, ubi multum erraveris, aut sub pondere male dilati laboris ad ipsius te beate vite culmen oportet ascendere aut in convallibus peccatorum tuorum segnem procumbere; et si - quod ominari horreo - ibi te “tenebre et umbra mortis”³⁰ invenerint, eternam noctem in perpetuis cruciatibus agere.³¹

Petrarch uses this language of verticality to organize his thinking. He contrasts the culmen beatae vitae with the convallibus peccatorum tuorum, ascendere with procumbere. Petrarch’s goal in scaling Mt. Ventoux is not bodily exercise or aesthetic pleasure, but a mortal struggle against terrenas et infimas voluptates. The Psalmist serves as Petrarch’s authority here. He no longer needs Livy, Vergil, or Ovid to mediate and guide him toward scripture. Having taken time to consider prayerfully what is most important and what he truly desires, Petrarch finds his answer in the Bible, not in the classics.

But his resolve is short-lived. Petrarch’s inner struggle continues, and he follows a new authority, St. Augustine, in examining the power and utility of memory:

Tempus forsan veniet, quando eodem quo gesta sunt ordine universa percurram, prefatus illud Augustini tui:³² “Recordari volo transactas feditates meas et carnales corruptiones anime mee, non quod eas amem, sed ut amem te, Deus meus”.³³

Petrarch imagines himself at the end of his life, running through the catalogue of his sins. The memento mori plays an important part in much of Petrarch’s writing, whether in the Secretum or his letter to posterity.³⁴ The pleasures of this world are good, but their goodness pales in comparison to that of the life of the world to come. Following St. Augustine, the act of memory shows that God uses even sin to fulfill his purposes. Indeed, knowledge of sin is the indispensable first step in conversion. Petrarch’s preoccupation with death and the account that he must render at the end of time run counter to modern expectations of what Petrarch, the first humanist, ought to have been concerned about, but it fits both his historical context and the themes of his wider body of writing. Of all his modes, and Petrarch was certainly a diverse and diffuse writer, it is the penitential, the Augustinian, that is most effective. Once the fire of his passion for Laura dimmed and his hopes for a new Scipio who would restore Rome faltered, Petrarch still had St. Augustine, always in his breast pocket, urging him to daily conversion, withdrawal from worldly concerns, and contemplation.

Now Petrarch lets his spirit run free. The inner turmoil of his struggle to control his passion bubbles up to the surface. Here Petrarch seethes with an emotion his will can only just contain:

Michi quidem multum adhuc ambigui molestique negotii superest. Quod amare solebam, iam non amo; mentior: amo, sed parcius; iterum ecce mentitus sum: amo, sed verecundius, sed tristius; iamtandem verum dixi. sic est enim; amo, sed quod non amare amem, quod odisse cupiam; amo tamen, sed invitus, sed coactus, sed mestus et lugens. Et in me ipso versiculi illius famosissimi sententiam miser experior:³⁵ Odero, si potero; si non, invitus amabo.³⁶

While this soliloquy may seem a prototype for nineteenth-century Romanticism, its language is Augustinian. The breathless alternation between extremes, the self-criticism, and the investigation of motive are reminiscent of the prologue to the Confessiones. One almost expects Petrarch to end this diatribe with sero te amavi,³⁷ but instead Petrarch makes Ovid speak for him. In context, this shift back to Ovid is not abrupt. The quotation seems apt, and unlike his previous use of Ovid, Petrarch here quotes him without attribution. Petrarch is in control, masterfully leading the reader to expect an Augustinian climax in this emotive crescendo but subtly leading his discourse back to Ovid. Such use of style and citation to create a harmony of seemingly disparate materials is Petrarch’s genius. The following and closing sections of the letter are the most clearly theological, and this last nod toward Ovid, using him to make an Augustinian point, seems intended to slip past the reader but on reflection, show once again Petrarch’s deft ability to blend the two halves of his inner world.

Petrarch now directly associates his climb with monastic life. He uses St. Antony, the first monk, as an example for imitation:

Quod iam ante Antonio acciderat, quando audito Evangelio ubi scriptum est: “Si vis perfectus esse, vade et vende omnia tua quecumque habes et da pauperibus, et veni et sequere me et habebis thesaurum in celis”,³⁸ “veluti propter se hec esset scriptura recitata” ut scriptor rerum eius Athanasius ait,³⁹ “ad se dominicum traxit imperium”.⁴⁰

Antony, converted not by argument but by hearing the words of scripture, experiences a moment of perfect clarity and creates a new form of religious life. St. Antony finds the words of scripture to be tailored especially for him, and he is led into the Lord’s imperium. In such an important place in the letter, the climax of the second section and of the epistle as a whole, Petrarch uses the word imperium, an unusual synonym for the usual regnum. This cannot be unintentional. Petrarch is, just as Antony and Augustine before him, recognizing that Caesar’s imperium is bound by time. Although Petrarch would never abandon his project of restoring Rome’s temporal power, he seems already to have decided in de Ascensu that his true home is in the Kingdom of Heaven. While Petrarch’s secular political ambitions cannot be denied, this passage is evidence that he thought long and hard about the relationship between the two swords of his world’s polity and sought his citizenship in the City of God.

Petrarch goes on to unite St. Antony and St. Augustine in a progression that leads ultimately to himself: et sicut Antonius, his auditis, aliud non quesivit, et sicut Augustinus, his lectis, ulterius non processit, sic et michi in paucis verbis que premisi, totius lectionis terminus fuit...⁴¹ Petrarch’s conversion is not just ascent from consideration of the material to the spiritual, or the judging of the City of God to be superior to the City of Man, but it is finally a conversion from letters to revelation, from reading to hearing. Petrarch here reveals his intimate devotional life, the way he could converse with God without the mediation of auctores or patres. The inadequacy of literature to satisfy but his abiding love for it is a central theme of Petrarch’s writings. He struggles to balance the various impulses in his life - the poetic, the Roman, and the religious - but the religious always triumphs in the end. Petrarch sees that a life lived in contemplation is closest to the vita beata celso loco sita, but he strives to find a way to live that life within the world and to maintain his participation in the republic of letters and the political world of Rome abandoned by both emperor and pope. This, rather than secularism or pure aestheticism, is the real novelty in Petrarch’s meditative ascent. As if in answer to one who should mistake de Ascensu Montis Ventosi for a hymn to nature, Petrarch ends his reflection thus: o quanto studio laborandum esset, non ut altiorem terram, sed ut elatos terrenis impulsibus appetitus sub pedibus haberemus!⁴²