Note 302 — Chapter IX · CHRISTENDOM IN THE MIDDLE AGES

Side by side with Boccaccio, his friend Petrarch (1304–1374), who with him completes the great literary trio of the late Middle Ages, belongs to freethought in that he too, with less aggressiveness but also without recoil, stood for independent culture and a rational habit of mind as against the dogmatics and tyrannies of the Church.302 He was in the main a practical humanist, not in accord with the verbalizing scholastic philosophy of his time, and disposed to find his intellectual guide in the skeptical yet conservative Cicero. The scholastics had become as fanatical for Aristotle or Averroës as the churchmen were for their dogmas;303 and Petrarch made for mental freedom by resisting all dogmatisms alike.304 The general liberality of his attitude has earned him the titles of “the first modern man”305 and “the founder of modern criticism”306—both somewhat high-pitched.307 He represented in reality the sobering and clarifying influence of the revived classic culture on the fanaticisms developed in the Middle Ages; and when he argued for the rule of reason in all things308 it was not that he was a deeply searching rationalist, but that he was spontaneously averse to all the extremes of thought around him, and was concerned to discredit them. For himself, having little speculative power, he was disposed to fall back on a simple and tolerant Christianity. Thus he is quite unsympathetic in his references to those scholars of his day who privately indicated their unbelief. Knowing nothing of the teaching of Averroës, he speaks of him, on the strength of Christian fictions, as “that mad dog who, moved by an execrable rage, barks against his Lord Christ and the Catholic faith.”309 Apart from such conventional odium theologicum, his judgment, like his literary art, was clear and restrained; opening no new vistas, but bringing a steady and placid light to bear on its chosen sphere.