Post date: Mar 18, 2017 5:56:43 PM
First of all, if you knew the reference for my title then give yourself a pat on the back. The title is a rip off of one of Jeff Dunham's standup routines of the same name from 11 years ago. Funny thing about Jeff though is that he is a ventriloquist and literally makes a living by arguing with himself on stage. In Petrarch's My Secret, he basically does the same thing but instead argues the points of the long dead Augustine. Reading this, I kept forgetting that this entire work was written by Petrarch and it made me smile sometimes. He has Augustine call him "Fool" or completely questions his arguments even though Petrarch would know the root of his argument...or does he?
From all the reading we have done in Shinner's class coupled with the few remaining dates I have leftover in my head from his midterm, the 14th century scares me. You got your Black Death, Hundred Years War, the Great Famine, and the Avignon Papacy. With all of these traumatic events going on, I wouldn't know what to think or believe. Religion was basically turned on its head with the Avignon Papacy and there was battle and people dying everywhere in Europe. So what does a person believe or hold onto? I enjoyed Petrarch's search for Truth and saw him drawing on some of the deductive reasoning skills prized in the scholastic method. Petrarch (Franciscus in the dialogue) continually tries to validate his feelings of depression or some other feeling while Augustinus is giving him reasons that this cannot be true. He tells Franciscus that no misery can make someone feel miserable.
My overall impression of this work is just a huge sense of logotherapy. It seems that Petrarch is using these two characters to argue out some of his points and see what eventually makes sense to him. I also had to put something out there about what I think the secret is in My Secret. I think I'll go with the totally cliche answer is that the secret is there is not secret. Everyone is uncertain and no one actually knows what they're doing so we all just keep bull shitting our way by.