Semantic Austerity in Petrarch’s Description of Time

In his The Varieties of Religious Experience, first published in 1902, the American psychologist William James attempted a description of what he called the ‘mystical state of consciousness’ by means of four distinguishing traits – ineffability, transience, passivity and a noetic quality. While the first three describe the experience in psychological terms, the idea of a noetic quality strikes at the roots of the paradox inherent in mysticism: a state of knowledge allowing ‘direct insight into depths of truth that are unplumbed by our mere intellects’, an act of the intellect understanding its limits and voluntarily renouncing its critical praxis. Such a paradox lies at the root of Petrarch’s meditations on time: developing suggestions deriving from Augustine, Petrarch also mediates pre-Christian reflections deriving from classical writers such as Cicero and Virgil. Working obsessively on words such as tempus, hora, punctum, Petrarch attempts to find a point of convergence between dianoia and noesis, eschewing Augustine’s development of this meditation into a straightforward devotional attitude (Confessions, book 11), and rather exercising his writerly and linguistic abilities on a definition of time and its passage. Such an exercise finds its highest point in passages such as the one quoted in the title, from the last book of the Triumphi, in which eternity, the absence of time, is defined in sentences that project this concept through an absence of nouns or other semantically full words. I intend to explore passages in the Latin and Italian works, showing how the poet uses this semantic austerity to represent the very act of mystical transcendence.