Theological Origins of Modernity

3 Humanism and the Apotheosis of Man
petrarch and the origins of humanism
It is diffi cult today to appreciate the impact Petrarch had on his contemporaries
in part because we fi nd it so diffi cult to appreciate his impact on us.
Petrarch is scarcely remembered in our time. Th ere are very few humanists
or academics who can name even one of his works; and none of his Latin
works makes it on to a list of great books. And yet, without Petrarch, there
would be no humanists or academics, no great books, no book culture at
all, no humanism, no Renaissance, and no modern world as we have come
to understand it. Why then have we forgotten him? Several factors contribute
to his oblivion: the neglect of Latin literature as literary scholars have
increasingly focused on national literatures, changing scholarly tastes and
fashions, and the fact that many of his works fall outside familiar genres.
But the real cause lies deeper. Petrarch seldom tells us anything that we
don’t already know, and as a result he seems superfl uous to us. But this is
the measure of his importance, for what he achieved is now so universally
taken for granted that we fi nd it diffi cult to imagine things could have been
otherwise.
At the time of his death, Petrarch was the most famous private man in
Europe, and during the next 150 years his fame and infl uence continued
to grow and spread. 1 In part this was certainly the result of his masterful
command of language and his ability to move the human heart, but this
cannot be the whole story. Dante had written vernacular poetry a generation
before that was widely admired, but he did not inspire generations of
imitators. Petrarch’s impact was more the result of the fact that he off ered
a new vision of how to live to a Christian world caught in the tremendous
spiritual crisis brought about by the nominalist revolution and the
cataclysmic events of the fourteenth century, a Christian world turned inward
by the failure of the Crusades and the looming threat of a rejuvenated