Petrarch on Mont Ventoux and Augustine’s Confessions: Was It the Same Experience? Anonymous College

Petrarch had his Augustinian conversion experience on Mont Ventoux on April 26, 1336 and described it in enormous detail in a letter written to Dionigi da Bo San Sepolcro, an Augustinian monk and Petrarch's confessor. The letter tells of a mountain climbing experience with his brother Gherardo in which a rather unexpected turn was the enlightenment experience at the mountains’ summit. In what he obviously experiences as divine communication, opens Augustine’s Confessions and enjoys a powerful transcendental activity of conversion much like Augustine had at the climax of his path to God as described in a dialogue with God that structures the work, and more specifically an experience in Milan reading St, Paul. At issue in this essay is whether that experience which the Renaissance humanist and the Christian saint experienced are of the same order, and if not to establish what was different about them. Despite obvious similarities between where Petrarch and Augustine were coming from in their subjective experience to which we have no access, there are crucial differences in the place that God has in Augustine’s Confessions compared to a fascination with the “self’ in its uniqueness and distinction.

Unn Falkeid (2009) had agreed...