Grade 10 Western Civilization Lesson 155

In this lesson I did a review. I also had to write essays answer two of the following topics.

1. Discuss some of the key ideas of the Renaissance.
2. In what ways does Petrarch embody the spirit of the Renaissance?
3. According to Pico della Miranola, what makes human beings unique? What is his attitude toward knowledge derived from sources other than the Bible and the Church? Why does he find the liberal arts valuable?

I chose to answer the first and second topics.

The Renaissance is known for its paintings, sculptures, and art in general. However I learned in the past week that it also very much housed new ideas. In this essay I’ll be describing these key ideas, and showing their effects.

An idea that showed great growth in the Renaissance was individualism. Individualism was the belief that the individual could, on his own, do great things. As you can imagine this led to individuals taking credit for said great things. Artists wrote their names on their works, which believe or not, was not a common practice before the Renaissance. There was also an increase in portraits as a result. People who weren’t artists also wanted in on the fame, not only wanting their names known but also their faces. People were less and less content with eternal life in heaven and more wanted eternal life on earth, or fame.

Another idea that grew in the Renaissance was that secularism was not illegitimate. For those who hate double negatives, people believed more and more that secularism was worthy of observation and focus. This is not to say that the church was ignored. On the contrary, people saw secularism as a way to promote faith and used it as a more persuasive way of spreading what they believed. Secularism was simply recognized as legitimate and grew alongside religion without taking from it. It must be acknowledged though, that there was a significant emphasis on this world and the beings within it.

The final idea I’ll be discussing today is that of the emphasis on natural man. Natural is referring to the natural and the supernatural, of mortals and deities. From that we can gather that people were more focused on what man could do without God. Now this paragraph is focused more on the belief that man has infinite possibilities. This belief can be specifically found in Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486). Now Mirandola was a Catholic, but he had a tremendous optimism for man, calling to mind his heroic nature.

Some ideas of the Renaissance include individualism, secularism, and the emphasis on natural man. While we don’t often hear about them, they impacted the majority and even some of the most famous artists, writers, and thinkers.

Now for the second essay.

Petrarch was born in 1304, and though his father forced him to study law, he wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to be a part of the Renaissance. His life embodied the spirit of the renaissance and he would even promote one of its main ideas.

Once free from his father’s control, Petrarch abandoned his study of law to pursue his real love, poetry. He enjoyed reading the classics and sought them out, helping recover many lost works that we know today. Petrarch loved secular works, however he was pious, carrying Augustine’s Confessions on himself at all time. Rather than ignoring his faith to read secular works, he found that reading the secular works could help him spread his faith. In this way he promoted secularism, one of the key ideas of the Renaissance. He was turned off by Aristotle’s logical reasoning because he thought that the common man would be bored by them too. Instead he thought that the works of Virgil, Cicero, and Plato could be used to persuade people of religion in an interesting manner.

Petrarch would however not be content with eternal life in heaven. Later in life after becoming the poet laureate of Rome in 1340, he would write his own poetry. What every historian notes about his poetry is that there is an undeniable focus on himself. Petrarch wanted fame, he wanted his name to be known on earth in a sort of earthly immortality, and this essay is a testament to his success. In this way embodied the spirit of the Renaissance that eternal life was not enough, emphasizing himself even in his love poems.

Petrarch promoted secularism, the belief that secular works should be legitimately observed, as well as earthly fame, the pursuit of immortality on earth. This is why Petrarch embodied the spirit of the Renaissance.