Augustine charges Petrarch with worldliness and avarice, which will be sure to grow stronger as he gets older. He once delighted in the country and its simplicity, but the life in the city has made him sordid and grasping. Francesco admits that he dreads the thought of poverty during his declining years. His demands are modest and legitimate; his daily bread and a book or two are all he asks. Like Horace, his only object is nec turpem senectam degere, nec cythera carentem. Augustine acquits Francesco at least of any tendency to over-indulgence in food and drink, and approves of his friends, who, he has observed, are both sober and dignified in their deportment.
Purity is then spoken of. Francesco admits that he has sometimes wished himself a senseless stone. He has made a desperate struggle to free himself from the bonds of sensuality, but he has not been wholly successful.
Augustine now startles Francesco by the abrupt statement that the worst is still to come. The most serious spiritual disease has not yet been mentioned.
Augustine. You suffer from a certain dismal malady of the mind that the moderns call acedia and which the ancients termed aegritudo.
Francesco. The very name of the disease fills me with horror.
Augustine. No wonder, for you have long been grievously vexed by it.
Francesco. I admit it; and it is because there is after all a certain admixture of sweetness, however false, in almost all the other things that torment me. When I am in this sad state everything is bitter, wretched, terrible, the road to desperation opens before me and I behold all those things which may drive an unhappy soul to destruction. The attacks of my other passions, if frequent, are short and fleeting, but this plague sometimes holds me with such persistence that it binds and tortures me for days and nights together. Light and life are blotted out and I seem plunged in Tartarean gloom and the bitterness of death. But nevertheless, as the culmination of my miseries, I feast upon the very pangs and throes of my anguish with a certain confined pleasure, so that I am reluctant to be torn from them.
Augustine. You seem to know your disease well; We will now look to the cause. Say on; what is it that so saddens you—some adversity in your worldly affairs, bodily pain, or some stroke of ill fortune?
Francesco. Not any one of these. If I were engaged in single combat I should certainly hold my own. But as it is I am overwhelmed by an army.
Affliction after affliction has attacked him in rapid succession. He has finally been forced to take refuge in the stronghold of reason. There his ills lay siege to him and receiving constant reënforcements they set up their battering-rams and mine the walls. The turrets tremble and the scaling ladders are in place, and he sees the glittering swords and the threatening visages of his enemies appearing above the wall. "Who would not be filled with terror and bewail his fate, even if the enemy withdrew for the moment? Liberty is gone, the saddest of losses to the stout-hearted." Augustine finds this figurative language a little vague and confused but thinks that he understands Petrarch's case. He accuses him of mourning over misfortunes long past. "No," Francesco exclaims; "on the contrary, none of my wounds are old enough to be forgotten; those that afflict me are all recent, and lest perchance any one of them might be healed by time, Fortune takes care to strike me often in the same spot, so that the gaping wound may never cicatrise. Add to these troubles a hate and contempt for the human estate itself and I can not be otherwise than sad and dejected when oppressed by all these woes. I by no means exaggerate this acedia, or aegritudo, or whatever you choose to call it; my description exactly corresponds to the facts."
We must not allow ourselves to be misled by Petrarch's use of the word acedia, which is really quite inapplicable to his trouble. The term is a common one among mediæval writers and appears in the catalogue of the seven mortal sins. It is sometimes inadequately rendered as "sloth," but it appears to have been loosely applied to all varieties of depression and inertia, whether physical or moral. In the case of monks it might take the form of a natural reaction which followed the first enthusiasm of leaving the world and beginning a religious life. Even the most earnest, Saint Jerome says, were sometimes plunged into melancholy by the dampness of their cells, the loneliness and excessive fasts that made up their lives. For such troubles, he dryly adds, the fomentations of Hippocrates would be more in place than our admonitions. A twelfth century theologian says, "Acedia fears to undertake anything great, and soon wearies of what it once begins. Everything seems a burden and an obstacle to it, and nothing is light or easy." Dante found those guilty of acedia fixed in the slime of the sixth circle of hell, and they said to him: "Sullen were we in the sweet air that by the sun is gladdened, bearing within ourselves the sluggish fume."
But this surely was not Petrarch's trouble. No one was ever more prone to conceive new and noble enterprises, or more patient and conscientious in their execution. He was as far removed from such intellectual apathy as from the vulgar physical laziness which the monkish chroniclers sometimes comprehend under the name acedia, and which took the form of a notable reluctance to leave a warm bed for the chilly morning service. We may then assume that Petrarch uses the word in the very general sense of bodily depression, discouragement, and intellectual misgiving, without any reference to its usage among theologians and monks.[2]
The Confessor pronounces the case to be one demanding radical treatment. "What," he asks, "seems to you the worst of all these troubles?"
Francesco. What I happen first to see, hear or think of.
Augustine. There is then almost nothing which gives you any satisfaction?
Francesco. Little or nothing.
Augustine. Would that you enjoyed at least the more salutary things of life. But what displeases you most? Tell me, I beg of you.
Francesco. I've already answered you.
Augustine. This acedia then, as I call it, affects everything; everything connected with yourself disgusts you?
Francesco. And not less everything that has to do with others.