Having thus conceived of literature, Petrarch obtained a standard for estimating the barren culture of his century. He taxed the disputations of the doctors with lifeless repetition unmeaning verbiage. Schoolman after schoolman had been occupied with formal trifles. The erudition of the jurist and the theologian revealed nothing fruitful for the heart or intellect; and everything was valueless that did not come straight from a man's soul, speaking to the soul of one who heard him. At the same time he read the Fathers and the Scriptures in a new light. Augustine, some few of whose sentences had been used as links in the catena of dogmatic orthodoxy, seemed to Petrarch no longer a mere master of theology, but a man conversing with him across the chasm of eight centuries. In the 'Confessions,' 'running over with a fount of tears,' the poet of Vaucluse divined a kindred nature; one who used exalted eloquence for the expression of vital thoughts and passionate emotions; one, moreover, who had reached the height of human happiness in union with God.[29] Not less real was the grasp he laid upon the prophets and apostles of the Bible. All words that bore a message to his heart were words of authority and power. The _ipse dixit_ of an Aristotle or a Seraphic doctor had for him no weight, unless it came home to him as a man.[30] Even Cicero and Seneca, the saints of philosophical antiquity, he dared to criticise for practising less wisdom than they preached.[31] [Footnote 29: The references to Augustine as a 'divine genius,' equal to Cicero in eloquence, superior to the classics in his knowledge of Christ, are too frequent for citation. See, however, _Fam. Epist._ lib. ii. 9, p. 601; the letter to Boccaccio, _Variarum_, 22, p. 1001; and _Fam. Epist._ lib. iv. 9, p. 635. The phrase describing the _Confessions_, quoted in my text, is from Petrarch's letter to his brother Gerard, _Epist. Var._ 27, p. 1012, 'Scatentes lachrymis Confessionum libros.'] [Footnote 30: 'Sum sectarum negligens, veri appetens.' _Epist. Rer. Sen._ lib. i. 5, p. 745. 'Nam apud Horatium Flaccum, nullius jurare in verba magistri, puer valde didiceram.' _Epist. Fam._ lib. iv. 10, p. 637.] [Footnote 31: See the letters addressed to Cicero and Seneca, pp. 705, 706.]