Petrarch. What will you say next! Do you counsel me to court Poverty? I have no longing for it, but I will bear it with courage if Fortune, who delights to overturn human affairs, reduces me to it.
S. Augustine. My opinion is that in every condition man should aim at the golden mean. I would not then restrict you to the rules of those who say, "All that is needed for man's life is bread and water; with these none is poor; whosoever desires no more than these will rival in felicity the Father of the Gods."[19] No, I do not tie man's life down to dry bread and water; such maxims are as extreme as they are troublesome and odious to listen to. Also, in regard to your infirmity, what I enjoin is not to over-indulge natural appetite, but to control it. What you already have would be sufficient for your wants if you had known how to be sufficient to yourself. But as it is you are yourself the cause of your own poverty. To heap up riches is to heap up cares and anxieties. This truth has been proved so continually that there is no need to bring more arguments. What a strange delusion, what a melancholy blindness of the soul of man, whose nature is so noble, whose birth is from above, that it will neglect all that is lofty and debase itself to care for the metals of the earth. Every time you have been drawn by these hooks of cupidity you come down from your high meditations to these grovelling thoughts, and do you not feel each time as if hurled from heaven to earth, from the bosom of the stars to a bottomless pit of blackness?
Petrarch. Yes; in truth, I feel it, and one knows not how to express what I have suffered in my fall.
S. Augustine. Why, then, are you not afraid of a danger you have so often experienced? And when you were raised up to the higher life, why did you not attach yourself to it more firmly?
Petrarch. I make all the efforts I can to do so; but inasmuch as the various exigencies of our human lot shake and unsettle me, I am torn away in spite of myself. It is not without reason, I imagine, that the poets of antiquity dedicated the double peaks of Parnassus to two different divinities. They desired to beg from Apollo, whom they called the god of Genius, the interior resources of the mind, and from Bacchus a plentiful supply of external goods, way of regarding it is suggested to me not only by the teaching of experience, but by the frequent testimony of wise men whom I need not quote to you. Moreover, although the plurality of deities may be ridiculous, this opinion of the Poets is not devoid of common sense. And in referring a like twofold supplication to the one God from whom all good comes down, I do not think I can be called unreasonable, unless indeed you hold otherwise.
S. Augustine. I deny not you are right in your view, but the poor way you divide your time stirs my indignation. You had already devoted your whole life to honourable work; if anything compelled you to spend any of your time on other occupations, you regarded it as lost. But I now you only concede to what is Good and Beautiful the moments you can spare from avarice.
Any man in the world would desire to reach old age on such terms as that; but what limit or check would be to such a state of mind? Choose for yourself some defined goal, and when you have attained it, then stay there and breathe awhile. Doubtless you know that the saying I am about to quote is from lips of man, but has all the force of a divine oracle—
"The miser's voice for ever cries, Give, give;
Then curb your lusts if you would wisely live."[20]
Petrarch. Neither to want nor to abound, neither to command others or obey them—there you have my heart's wish.
S. Augustine. Then you must drop your humanity and become God, if you would want nothing. Can you be ignorant that of all the creatures Man is the one that has most wants?