[8] The pope had asked Petrarch to suggest someone for a papal secretaryship. He had offered the place to Boccaccio, who however refused it.
The following letter is one of Petrarch's most unreserved confessions of confidence in Christian asceticism.
On a Religious Life.
To his Brother Gherardo, a Carthusian Monk.[1]
Your double gift,—the boxwood box, which you yourself in your leisure moments had polished so carefully on the lathe, and the very edifying letter, built up and strengthened by a vast number of quotations from the Fathers, and testifying a truly religious spirit,—reached me yesterday evening. I was delighted to receive them both, but as I read the letter I was, I must confess, affected by strangely conflicting emotions, now warmed by generous impulses, now paralysed by chilling fear. Your admirable example aroused in me the longing to lead a better life, and supplied the incentive; it loosed the hold which the present exercised over me, enabling me to see more clearly where I really stood. You showed me the road which I must follow, and the distance which still separates me, miserable sinner that I am, from our other home, the New Jerusalem, for which we must always sigh, unless this dark and noisome dungeon of exile has destroyed all recollection of our true selves.
Well, I congratulate both of us,—you, that you have such a soul, myself, that I have such a brother. Yet, in spite of this, one thing fills me with pain and regret,—that while we had the same parents we should not have been born under the same star. We are sprung from the same womb; but how unlike, how unequal! This serves to show us that our natures are the gift, not of our earthly parents, but of our Eternal Father. We were begotten in carnal depravity by our father; to our mother we owe this vile body; but from God we receive our soul, our life, our intellect, our desire for good, our free will. All that is holy, religious, devout, or excellent in human nature comes directly from him.
So your letter at once comforted and distressed me. I rejoiced in you and blushed for myself. I can only say in reply to it that what you write is all very good and helpful, though it would have been quite as true even if you had not supported it so abundantly by high authorities. Take, for example, the opinion, which you call in St. Augustine to defend, that our endeavours, as well as our desires, are often at variance with one another.—I should like, however, if you will permit me, to express my own views upon this matter before coming to Augustine's. By so doing I shall gratify myself without, perhaps, annoying you.
The aims of mankind as a whole, and even those of the individual, are conflicting. This must be admitted; I know others and myself all too well to deny it. I have looked at the race as a whole, and have examined individuals in detail. What can, in truth, be said that will apply to all; or who can possibly enumerate the infinite diversities which distinguish mortals from one another, so that men do not seem to belong to the same species or even to the same genus?...[2] This, I confess, surprises me, but it is much more astonishing that the wishes of one and the same man should so ill agree. Who of us, indeed, desires the same thing when he is old that he craved as a youth? Or, what is still stranger, who wants in the winter what he wished in the summer? Nay, who of us would have to-day what we longed for yesterday, or this evening what we sought only this morning? As for that, we can see the vacillation from hour to hour, from minute to minute. Yes, there are more desires in man than minutes to realise them. This is a constant source of wonder to me, and I marvel that everyone should not find it so. But I am losing myself, and must return to you and your Augustine.
That the same individual may at the same moment be in disagreement with himself in regard to the same object—a truth which you call St. Augustine to witness, although you do not express yourself in exactly his words—is a source of the most profound astonishment to me. How common, nevertheless, is this species of madness,—to desire to continue our journey but without reaching the end, to wish to go and stay at the same time, to live and yet never die! Yet it is written in the Psalms, "What man is he that liveth and shall not see death?" Still, we harbour these contradictory desires. In our blindness and incredible perversity we yearn for life, and execrate its outcome, death. These wishes are, however, thoroughly at variance with each other, and mutually exclusive. Not only does death necessarily follow life, but, as Cicero says,—in whose opinion on this point I have, for some reason, almost more confidence than in that of Catholic writers,—" What we call our life is in reality death." So it falls out that we both hate and love death above all things, and are fitly described in the words of the comic poet,—Volo nolo, nolo volo.