Petrarch's "philosophical education" bore the stamp of Augustine's writngs, having been introduced to the North African saint at an early age. When he reached maturity, he read the Confessions. "From the moment he devoured Augustine's spiritual autobiography he was under the Father's guidance and became as much of an Augustinian as was possible for a man of the fourteenth century. Augustine appears as his severe but helpful confessor when he writes his Dialogues on the Contempt of the World, in which he tells the great Saint all his inmost feelings and sorrows. His Augustinian thinking and his almost perfect imitation of Augustine's style are also manifest in his letter to the Augustinian hermit, Dionigi da Borgo San Sepolcro."
--Hans Nachod, The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, 27.
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