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Western Culture
Global Presents
The Top
100 Heroes of Western Culture
These individuals have most contributed to replacing
ignorance with knowledge, savagery with civilization,
disease with health, tyranny with liberty, poverty
with abundance, and despair with happiness.
#22: Petrarch / Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374)
Petrarch / Francesco Petrarca was an Italian scholar and writer
and is considered the father of Italian Renaissance humanism
because he did more than any other person to foster its development.
(Humanism meaning a focus on man and his affairs as opposed to God
and his.)
He was the first to characterize the Middle Ages as a period
of darkness because of its general rejection of Greco-Roman
ideas and values. He also condemned the anti-scientific scholastic
method of the Middle Ages, and, similar to the ancient Greeks, he
insisted that philosophy should be “the art of virtuous living,”
not a discipline divorced from life as many of his contemporaries
viewed it.
Petrarch is reported to have climbed a mountain to simply enjoy
the view. While this may seem today to be unimportant, doing such
a thing during the religion-dominated Middle Ages was unheard of.
To religion, especially Christianity, this world is often viewed
as low and depraved, a prison to endure until one dies and goes
to a better place. In other words, to seek enjoyment in this life
is generally considered by religion to be ultimately futile, sinful
and against God.
Petrarch’s climbing a mountain for the sheer joy of it was
a grandly symbolic declaration that the Middle Ages and its values
had ended and a new era based on a more secular, worldly, pro-happiness
foundation had begun -- an era which still continues at least
to some degree today in the more advanced, Western-like parts of
the world.
Go to #23: Albertus Magnus
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