ru Your Name FictionBook Editor Release 2.6 22 October 2010 44DFDFF1-8474-47BB-8BD0-987B2834F1C2 1.0

The Ancient Rhetorical Ideal and the Culture of the Renaissance

In the famous anti-Averroist pamphlet of 1367, "On the Ignorance of His Own and Many Others," Petrarch discusses the question of the extent to which a Christian is allowed to be a "Ciceronian." The word "Ciceronianus" was overshadowed by the reproachful words of Christ, heard in a dream by Blessed Jerome almost a millennium earlier: "Ciceronianus es, priest Christianas."

"Of course," Petrarch declares, "I am neither a Ciceronian nor a Platonist, but a Christian, for I have no doubt that Cicero himself would have become a Christian if he had been able to see Christ or to know Christ's teaching."

The conventional mode of unreal assumption (if only the pagan classic could know Christ's teaching, he would become a Christian) prompts us to recall the words of the late medieval Mantuan sequence about the Apostle Paul: "Being led to the tomb of Maron, he poured out the dew of compassionate tears over it: 'What,' he said, 'what would I make you if I found you alive, O greatest of poets.'" In general, the need to baptize ancient authors posthumously, as it were, is characteristically medieval4. The Byzantine poet of the middle of the eleventh century, John Mauropodus, Metropolitan of Euchaita, formally prayed in verse for the repose of the souls of Plato and Plutarch: "If You, my Christ, were pleased to remove any pagans from Your condemnation," reads his epigram in literal translation, "remove Plato and Plutarch at my request! For both of them, both in word and in disposition, came closest to Thy laws."5 The example was set back in the patristic era. In Jerome's time, Virgil was often called "a Christian without Christ" for his fourth eclogue, which, however, Jerome himself disapproved.6 In one of his epistles, Augustine pondered over whose souls, in addition to the Old Testament righteous, were led out of hell by Christ - were not the souls of the ancient pagans, especially those "who

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I know and love for their literary works, whom we honor because of their eloquence and wisdom"; it is true that he nevertheless considered it rash to answer this question (from a theological point of view much bolder than the modus irrealis of Petrarch and the Mantuan sequence). And another parallel to Petrarch's "if" is the words of Lactantius about Seneca the Younger: "He could have become a true worshipper of God if someone had shown him the way."8 "Seneca is often ours," said Tertullian,9 and the need to transform the unreal conditional period of Lactantius into a report of fact gave rise to, as is well known, the fictitious correspondence between the Roman Stoic and the Apostle Paul,10 already known to Jerome,11 and popular in the Middle Ages.

What is new in Petrarch's words? Perhaps it is worth paying attention not to the statement itself, but to whom this statement refers?

In fact, Plato and Plutarch, for whom Mavropod prayed, are philosophers, and philosophers who are strictly idealistic, with a strong mystical pathos. Plato taught the contemplation of spiritual reality and, as it were, anticipated many features of medieval sacred authoritarianism, beginning with the utopia of the theocratic rule of "philosophers" who resemble either Western doctors or Orthodox "elders" to whom they were likened by A. F. Losev.12 Plutarch developed a mystical ontology in the dialogue "O ? in Delphi" and demonology, which greatly influenced medieval ideas, in the dialogue "On the Demon of Socrates", and in his moral doctrine13 he really "approached the laws of Christ". Seneca, of whom Tertullian and Lactantius spoke, is a moralist, like Plutarch; restless and divided in himself, he was clearly looking for some new foundations of morality. Finally, Virgil, who proclaimed in the Fourth Eclogue the birth of a universal Saviour and the beginning of a new cycle of time, is the most mystical of the Roman poets. But Petrarch did not speak of a philosopher, not of a moralist, not of a poet, but of an orator, a politician, a lawyer - a lawyer above all ("ortimus omnium patronus", "the most excellent universal lawyer" - this is how Cicero was called by his contemporary Catullus). In comparison with Plato and Plutarch, Seneca and Virgil, Cicero appears as a man completely "of this world", without mystical depths, which can evoke the greatest

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Theft, but not reverence - ???? and there is no reverence in him.

This is how he was judged in quite different times. "As for Cicero," remarks Montaigne,14 "I am of the opinion that, apart from learning, his spirit was not distinguished by his loftiness." And Lactantius, who owed much to Cicero in literary terms and himself earned the nickname of "Christian Cicero" among humanists, wrote:

"In his work on duties, Cicero says that you should not harm anyone, unless you yourself are offended... Just as he himself practiced the dog's biting eloquence, so he demanded that man imitate dogs and snap back in response to offense."15