Theological Origins of Modernity

70 chapter three
Islam in both the east and the west. Th is Petrarchian project rested on the
assertion of the ontic priority of individual human beings and the assertion
that the search for a meaningful human life began with an examination of
human individuality. Petrarch was able to make this vision concrete and
attractive by displaying to the public his own inner life as well as those
of an astonishing array of ancient personalities quite diff erent from the
saints and martyrs who guarded all of the entryways into the cathedral of
Gothic Christianity. In this way Petrarch set his contemporaries on a twofold
journey. Th e fi rst phase of this journey led inward to the unexplored
territory of a self fi lled with passions and desires that were no longer something
mundane and unspiritual that had to be extirpated or constrained
but that were instead a refl ection of each person’s individuality and that
consequently deserved to be expressed, cultivated, and enjoyed. Th e second
phase of the journey led backwards to an ancient but now suddenly
relevant past fi lled with courageous and high-minded individuals who had
won fame and a kind of immortality by cultivating their own individuality.
Moreover, these two journeys were connected, for it was through the
exploration and appreciation of the biographies of the great men of antiquity
that one could begin to understand how to give shape to one’s own
individuality and thereby lead not merely a pious but a noble life, a life
worthy of being remembered. He showed that immortality did not merely
belong to the saints and martyrs but also to all those who emulated men
like Scipio, Cicero, Homer, Virgil, Socrates, and Plato, the warriors, statesmen,
artists, and philosophers who had created and sustained the Greek
and Roman worlds. What lies concealed behind these fabulous examples
is the idea that individual human beings and their goals matter, that they
have an inherent dignity and worth. Th is assertion was revolutionary and
stood in stark opposition to the regnant doctrine of original sin and the
Fall, which denied that individuals had either an intrinsic value or a capacity
for self-perfection. It was this Petrarchian notion of the ontic priority
and value of the individual human being that became the guiding light
of the humanist project and that made the Renaissance and the modern
world possible.
Th e humanist project was prefi gured in Petrarch’s aspiration to combine
Christian piety with Roman virtue under the rubric of Platonism.
While Petrarch himself was never able to achieve this goal, those who followed
in his wake redoubled their eff orts to bring it to completion. As we
will see, however, synthesizing such disparate elements was a diffi cult task
and required humanists to rethink not merely what it meant to be moral
but also what it meant to be Christian. Italian humanists focused more on