Spring Break
The Road to Freedom
An Essay
Giuseppe Mazzotta, Yale University
Issue date: 6/1/08 Section: Spring 2008
In Avignon, Petrarch at first received these philosophical and political theories in existential terms, but later developed their political and conceptual implications. No doubt, both in Avignon and elsewhere later in his life, he played a subservient role to patrons and made peace with tyrants, but he never failed to grasp the sense of freedom both as an individual experience and as a way of life. Nor did he stop reflecting on its necessity and the ways of making it the condition for and the fundament of his larger, ambitious intellectual project, which in point of fact became a new paradigm of culture. The birth of a modern idea of intellectual freedom was slow and even painful, and Petrarch must be credited with developing it by following several routes.
In the perception of freedom as the trait and mark of the unique self, Petrarch owes a great debt to the doctrines of his intellectual forbearers (mainly St. Augustine, as we have seen) and he fused his thought to their teachings. I have shed light in the previous chapter on the challenges he mounts against Augustine exactly on the point of freedom and transcendence. Let me add that Augustine's separation of freedom from politics (and the consequent notion that freedom exists in the individual regardless of one's social status or bonds) entails the further conviction that freedom concerns man's own inner self, the interior moral space where slavery to vices and passions can be subdued and shattered. In this religious view, freedom is properly used when we act virtuously and avoid the tyranny of vices: "The will is truly free when it is not the slave of vices and sins." St. Augustine's sense of moral freedom from sin parallels his view of freedom from politics, and both hinge on the skeptical argument that the moribund, corrupt Roman state could no longer offer security: "what do I care who governs me," he memorably writes in the City of God, "provided they do not make me sin?"
What awakened Petrarch to the subject and to a dramatic understanding of freedom are not just the philosophical writings musing abstractly about life's ethical order. Predictably, for a radically subjective, self-centered thinker such as he was, the concrete circumstances of his life, the awareness of a general crisis directly involving him forced him to re-orient his thinking. These circumstances did not really amount to one single traumatic crisis. They were cumulative and in time they grew on him. At any rate, we can pinpoint them between the years 1346 and 1348. In 1341, as we have seen, he had obtained the poetic laurel in Rome. In 1346, however, what must have been the creative excitement triggered by that occasion (and his heightened involvement in the secular history of Rome) gave way to the consciousness of an imaginative impasse.
In the perception of freedom as the trait and mark of the unique self, Petrarch owes a great debt to the doctrines of his intellectual forbearers (mainly St. Augustine, as we have seen) and he fused his thought to their teachings. I have shed light in the previous chapter on the challenges he mounts against Augustine exactly on the point of freedom and transcendence. Let me add that Augustine's separation of freedom from politics (and the consequent notion that freedom exists in the individual regardless of one's social status or bonds) entails the further conviction that freedom concerns man's own inner self, the interior moral space where slavery to vices and passions can be subdued and shattered. In this religious view, freedom is properly used when we act virtuously and avoid the tyranny of vices: "The will is truly free when it is not the slave of vices and sins." St. Augustine's sense of moral freedom from sin parallels his view of freedom from politics, and both hinge on the skeptical argument that the moribund, corrupt Roman state could no longer offer security: "what do I care who governs me," he memorably writes in the City of God, "provided they do not make me sin?"
What awakened Petrarch to the subject and to a dramatic understanding of freedom are not just the philosophical writings musing abstractly about life's ethical order. Predictably, for a radically subjective, self-centered thinker such as he was, the concrete circumstances of his life, the awareness of a general crisis directly involving him forced him to re-orient his thinking. These circumstances did not really amount to one single traumatic crisis. They were cumulative and in time they grew on him. At any rate, we can pinpoint them between the years 1346 and 1348. In 1341, as we have seen, he had obtained the poetic laurel in Rome. In 1346, however, what must have been the creative excitement triggered by that occasion (and his heightened involvement in the secular history of Rome) gave way to the consciousness of an imaginative impasse.
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