Western Civilization
The world has always progressed through those adventurous in spirit that were not afraid to brake barriers, to confront established rules and to keep seeking new territories, be it in the fields of science, religion, law, or the physical world. The period of Renaissance that started and flourished in Italy and then spread throughout the rest of the continent changed world views and challenged the traditional at every level. Although the Middle Ages are not considered as a period of complete regress compared to the Classic times in Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire, it still remains as a period when religion played the major role in the conduct of people's lives. The study of classics entered a period of hibernation until scholars revived them and thus gave a jump start to Renaissance.
Economic and political reasons contributed to the success of the first artists and scholars who found support form the wealthy Florentine bankers and other Italians that were appreciative of the new wave and eager to be declared patrons of the arts.
Reformation became the key word in Renaissance Europe and science and technology were keeping up the pace with the new refreshed spirit that came through the ages from the ancient philosophers. Humanism was the new concept that concentrated on humanity as the focal point of interest and made way for different often contradictory views to coexist. The great explorers like Magellan and Christopher Columbus embarked on journeys sponsored by kings, but led by their indestructible desire to find new ways, to bring the world the precious treasures of their own experiences in territories that were little or not know at all. Along the previous centuries the world became bigger and bigger as people moved across the land and water motivated by different reasons. The age of the great empires will make age for the age of colonialism. Columbus discovered a new vast land that is today America and although there are still controversies regarding who and what people actually first discovered this continent, it is beyond a doubt that it was Columbus who gave Europe a taste of adventure and the will to start exploring and inhabiting the vase new space of the American continent.
The development of the western civilization has relied on the bright minds who never ceased to question the obvious and the established and who kept searching for the answer to their questions even if it meant that they were to sacrifice their own lives in the process of finding the truth or a different version of it.
Thomas Moore was a man who kept pursuing the truth and always questioned himself and the way things were. His intelligence and education brought him one of the highest honors a man could have aspired to in his times: he became King Henry VIII's advisor, his ally in defending and supporting Catholicism for those like Martin Luther who were trying in their opinion to weaken the Catholic Church dividing it. In a way, the forward looking Thomas Moore was fighting a man who contradicted some of the practices of the Catholic Church that he considered opposite to the very spirit of the Christian doctrine. but, Moore was probably more concerned about the division of the Catholic Church that would bring more reasons for people to start wars than they already had. Moore was not omniscient and therefore he also made mistakes, but in the end he preferred to dye than renounce his own convictions and he did it with dignity and in a Socrates manner that rendered him the right to be valued for his thinking, political deeds and for his writings. He often doubted his own judgment, but this was in the very spirit of humanism that although placed the human being in the center, it also considered the human weaknesses of the human nature.
Moore was inspired for his book Utopia by those explorers who traveled the seas like Christopher Columbus or Magellan. Columbus could have actually have inspired More in his writing about the island of Utopia and the contact between the explorers and settlers and the indigenous population. but, even a spirit as illuminated as More's was unable to conceive how a contact between European sailors and settlers would occur with indigenous people form a far away island. The dialogues between the voice of the narrator, More and the man who recounts for him his experiences in the island of Utopia, Raphael Hythloday, reveal that Moore the author had his own doubts regarding the perfect society...
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