Exil und Heimatferne in der Literatur des Humanismus von Petrarca bis zum Anfang des 16. Jahrhunderts
frequently praises to the skies,” soon thereafter also mentioning Chrysoloras’ Greek classes (1, 160).
The third occasion is when having listed famous people from antiquity who left their homeland to become successful elsewhere, Filelfo mentions as an initial contemporary example “Jacob Bucellus, a Florentine citizen of noble family, who could have lived most honorably in his homeland, the maternal uncle of our friend Francesco Filelfo, [but who] chose Tolentino as his homeland” (1, 210):
Et ne invidere nostrae tempestatis hominibus putemur: Iacobus Bucellus, et civis Florentinus et nobili familia natus, qui honestissime in patria esse posset, nostri huius Francisci Philelfi maternus avus, Tholentinum sibi patriam delegit, fuitque apud Rhodulfum illum seniorem – quo et ipsi fortunatissimo imperatore et Picentes iustissimo principe usi sunt – omnium primus.
The exemplum is not fortuitous: Filelfo’s claiming of noble Florentine ancestors is all the more relevant when we know that in his satires he liked to dwell upon the non-Florentine origin of the Medici.22 In the Commentationes too Filelfo refers three times to the Mugello background of the Medici. In book 3, for example, when Bruni points out that one would prefer to be noble rather than wealthy, Rinaldo degli Albizzi replies: “You are joking with us, Leonardo, as if you were not aware that Cosimo and Lorenzo de’ Medici have no qualms putting wealth not only before nobility but also before virtue” (3, 33). Bruni, however, begs to differ, stating that Rinaldo must be the joker, as he is talking about “freeborn men and Florentines, not natives of the Mugello and tame beasts (de Mucellensibus et servilibus beluis) who, since they were born, reared, and educated in obscurity never know how to act in broad daylight.”
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In all this mirroring of historical reality and fictional narration, of frame story and related anecdotes, in this mise-en-abyme of allusions, cross-references and striking similarities, something should be said about the enigmatic question at the heart of our passage: “Why, Palla, are we not like ourselves (Cur non nostri similes sumus)?”
The phrase similis sui in classical Latin usually describes something that possesses an inherent resemblance to itself. This apparent tautology – how can something not resemble itself? – can be illustrated with a passage in which Cicero describes human degeneration from natural law (De legibus 1, 29). He remarks that, were it not for moral depravity, “no one would be so like himself, as all people would be like one another (sui nemo ipse tam similis esset quam omnes sunt omnium).” Universal self-similarity, in other words, coincides with the deeply moral state of humans as endowed by nature. So the issue is that we are not like ourselves, that some of us do not live in concordance with our true human nature.
The staging of Chrysoloras is indeed the justification of Palla’s explanation about appetency. He argues, with Chrysoloras, the vir omni humanitate humanior, that action and reason are proper to man, while “we have appetency in common with beasts (communis cum beluis), who, being devoid of mind, relate everything to the senses.”
It will be clear from various quotes above that the use of the word belua is hardly to be taken neutrally here, and that this is another example, albeit implicit this time, of the dehumanizing of Filelfo’s opponents, who are not capable of mastering their appetites and passions.
True human nature is another universe, the one of Boccaccio, where “Umana cosa è aver compassione degli afflitti,” to quote the opening words of the Decameron. In Boccaccio’s world, the plague cannot be controlled by any human act, nor can human love be governed by will. Both pestilence and desire overpower human ingegno. Boccaccio has the plague overcome every umano provedimento: the intellect is powerless, human ingenuity is unavailing. The tension between eros and thanatos, between pestilence and passion as it can be seen in the Decameron, has mutated in Filelfo’s Commentationes to an opposition between belua and ratio, between the plague of passion and the mental liberation assured by reason, by the wisdom of Greek philosophy – a wisdom of which Filelfo is the herald, as a familiaris of Chrysoloras, the founding father of Greek studies and thereby of Humanism.
At the end of the Decameron, Boccaccio’s brigata returns to Florence. For Filelfo’s exiled aristocrats, there was no such happy end in sight; perhaps that is one of the reasons why the Commentationes was due to remain an unfinished symphony. When after the Battle of Anghiari in 1440 it had become clear that they would not reconquer Florence, Filelfo even went as far as blaming the aristocrats themselves for having failed in their attempts to return to Florence. And he did so in a letter Rinaldo degli Albizzi, his former hero.23
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The theme of exile is notably absent from Filelfo’s later writings – a silence that may be considered telling, since there are clear indications that he did indeed consider himself exiled from Florence, where as a young scholar he had been able to take up such a prominent position. The only exception is letter PhE·30.01, sent on 31 January 1469 to Federico da Montefeltro, where Filelfo cites the exemplum of Marcus Marcellus, who quite happily lived his exile in Mytilene because his newly won otium allowed him to dedicate his time to philosophy and the study of the virtues, freed as he was of all passions of the soul (cunctis animi perturbationibus vacuus se totum philosophiae contemplandisque virtutibus dedidisset).
Filelfo’s waning interest for the exile theme is also reflected by the fact that his Commentationes remain almost unmentioned after 1462. In March of that year Filelfo asks Cardinal Jean Jouffroy of Arras to deliver a copy of the work to Prospero Colonna (PhE·18.07 and 18.09) and in June of the same year, in the long letter PhE·18.25 consoling Onofrio and Gianfrancesco Strozzi on the passing away of their father, Palla Strozzi, he refers to the Commentationes for his description of how an extraordinary philosopher Palla showed himself in the disputes that Filelfo tried to record as much as his memory allowed.24 The only mention beyond that year is a letter from 7 October 1471 to Gasparino Ardizio, whom he asks to return a copy of the Commentationes.
The reason Filelfo seems to have grown rather reticent about the work might have been his ongoing negotiations with the Medici about a return to Florence. In fact, Filelfo maintained good contacts with Piero de’ Medici, and after courting Lorenzo il Magnifico for many years, he was finally invited back to teach at the Studio – while the protagonists in the Commentationes in real life had not been able to return and were forced to settle for the consolation of Greek philosophy. How ironically full became the circle then, when Filelfo himself in the end, after those protracted negotiations with the Medici – and at the same time having ‘negotiated’ the fall-out of his provocative, Medici-bashing satirical and consolatory writings – in the summer of 1481 finally was allowed to return to Florence, only to meet his own sudden death. And so it happened that Filelfo’s severely-suffered and ever-deplored exile from the — pestiferous — cradle of humanism, which he had been writing off for the better part of his career, came to an end at the same time as his exile in this worldly prison. To quote Albert Camus’ La peste one more time: “Si c’était l’exil, dans la majorité des cas c’était l’exil chez soi.”
Bibliography
Baldassarri, Stefano Ugo (ed.): Leonardo Bruni. Dialogi ad Petrum Paulum Histrum, Firenze 1994.
Blanchard, W. Scott: Patrician Sages and the Humanist Cynic. Francesco Filelfo and the Ethics of World Citizenship, Renaissance Quarterly 60, 2007, 1107–1169.
Bosisio, Matteo: “Difficile e pericolosa pugna”: la lectura Dantis di Francesco Filelfo, in: Rencontres de l’Archet, Morgex 2017, 121–128.
Calderini, Aristide: Ricerche intorno alla biblioteca e alla cultura greca di Francesco Filelfo, Studi italiani di filologia classica 20, 1913, 204–424.
Cao, Gian Mario: Tra politica fiorentina e filosofia ellenistica; il dibattito sulla ricchezza nelle Commentationes di Francesco Filelfo, Archivio Storico Italiano 45, 1997, 99–126.
Cao, Gian Mario: The Prehistory of Modern Scepticism: Sextus Empiricus in Fifteenth-Century