The Thinking, Walking Biped, part four. Famous Nature Walks: Petrarch and the Great Mt. Ventoux hoax

I first heard about the Italian poet Petrarch’s famous ascent of Mt. Ventoux in southern France (April 26, 1336) during a high school humanities class. Petrarch supposedly presaged the Renaissance by making this artistic, as opposed to religious, pilgrimage. Some people have called him the first mountain climber because he made his ascent for no reason other than to see the view. An earlier monk (Jean Buridan) had ascended it on his way to see the Pope at Avignon, to make meteorological observations. And other people had probably climbed this mountain for strategic or economic reasons. Petrarch said he met a shepherd on the lower slopes of the mountain who claimed to have been the only person to have climbed the mountain, and he said it was just a bunch of rocks and not worth the effort.

How different it is today. Thousands of people hike, bike, or drive on this mountain. Its steep incline is a famous point on the Tour de France.

Many scholars have concluded that Petrarch did not climb this mountain at all. It was all a hoax.

Here are some reasons for believing the ascent of Ventoux to be a hoax. Petrarch mentions precisely nothing about the natural wonders that he would have seen all around him. Foremost among these is the wind. Ventoux means “windy.” The mistral winds average 90 kilometers an hour for 240 days a year. Mt. Ventoux sticks up into a mass of cold air that moves from the north to the Mediterranean. No mention of it. Also, Mt. Ventoux is famous for its white limestone cap visible from a great distance. No mention of this either. A lot of the bare limestone has resulted from deforestation, which might not have been as extensive in the fourteenth century as today. But most mountains in France have been deforested, and yet few have such visible summits. Certainly there would have been something that Petrarch might have noticed, had he actually been there.

Perhaps most of all, Petrarch made his entire ascent and descent in one day, then went back to the inn and wrote about it before supper. Might we suspect Petrarch, not noted for physical prowess, to have exaggerated his vigor a little bit? Conveniently, he had no eyewitnesses other than his little brother.

Instead of Petrarch being an early Thoreau or Muir, he was actually writing in the tradition of pilgrimage fiction, a tradition that began before Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and has continued long after C. S. Lewis’s Pilgrim’s Regress. Petrarch wrote about how he kept taking descending trails, hoping to find an easier path, only to have to climb back up and do it the hard way. This, he said, is a symbol of how, when we choose the easier path in life toward spiritual salvation, we have to keep starting over and over again. Bunyan could have done no better.

So if Petrarch is to be remembered today, and taught about in humanities classes, let it least be for something he actually did or wrote, and not for the Mount Ventoux hoax.

Religion Allows No Gray Areas of Uncertainty (for Abortion)

Nearly everything on Earth (and probably every place else in the universe) has areas of uncertainty between opposites. For example, there are plants, and there are animals, but there are some protists that could be considered neither one nor the other.

But religion is in the business of creating absolute distinctions. You are either going to Heaven, or to Hell; something is either sinful, or it is not; there are the sheep, and the goats.

One recent example of the difference between science and fundamentalist religion involves abortion. I have written very little about abortion, since I know little about it, and my opinions have little validity. I will let other people get angry on one side or the other. I am more interested in the light band of grayness between the two sides. Here are two relevant stories.

A Texas couple looked forward to having a child and were overjoyed with preparation for its arrival. Then, mid-pregnancy, an unthinkable tragedy occurred. The woman’s water broke, and all the amniotic fluid was lost. The fetus was thus doomed to death. But Texas has a heartbeat law. Abortion is murder if a heartbeat is detectable. In this case, the fetus still has a heartbeat, and under Texas law a doctor cannot abort the fetus. The woman has to carry the fetus, which has no hope of survival (unless God performs a miracle), perhaps risking her own health, until the heartbeat stops, something that could take a long time. What kind of law would insist that a woman carry a fetus until it inevitably dies? Only a law that attempts an absolute definition of pregnancy and allows of no exceptions, that’s what.

In Ohio, a nine-year-old girl was raped, and became pregnant. But Ohio law forbids abortions once a fetal heartbeat can be detected. She had an abortion in Indiana. What kind of law would force a now ten-year-old girl to carry through a pregnancy from a rape? This assumes that her body would even be capable of handling this. Only a law that attempts an absolute definition of pregnancy and allows of no exceptions, that’s what.

I am not saying whether or not a state should or should not have an anti-abortion law. But it is clear to me that individual exceptions must be allowed. But individual exceptions are something that fundamentalist religions will not allow.

The only thing I am absolutely sure about is that we can trust the women. A mother’s love is a force of nature. Mothers are not looking for a chance to kill their fetuses unless an old white man points a gun and tells them not to. Abortion is an act of desperation, as the above examples and thousands of other news items illustrate.

Among other things, life is about gray areas of uncertainty. An absolute light/dark distinction is a characteristic of death. Science fiction writer Clive Staples (C.S.) Lewis made this distinction in his Perelandra novels. In these novels, the forces of evil wanted to make everything black and white, as on the Moon; but on Earth, there is a lot of penumbra. Many religious fundamentalists today would side with Lewis’s forces of evil. But Lewis was a Christian and used to be, at least when I was younger, a very popular Christian writer. Times, apparently, have changed, or at least Christianity has.

Christianity Used to be an Intellectual Challenge

I have recently been looking through my scribbled notes from Bible studies back in the 1970s. Pages and pages of them, now barely decipherable. They were based on a close reading and analysis of many scriptural passages (avoiding, of course, the strange ones such as the fifth chapter of Numbers). We thought about, and discussed, everything, and analyzed our own lives in great detail. We had Friday night Bible studies and weekend conferences and retreats. These Bible studies were sponsored by Turnpike Road Church of Christ near Santa Barbara, a church that still exists. The youth ministers put a lot of thinking into the study sessions. Even though I now consider many of their assertions to have been incorrect, I remain amazed at the careful thought they put into it.

Those days are gone at most evangelical churches in America. Today, for many if not most white evangelical Christians, Christianity is very simple: Just worship Donald Trump. Even after Trump lost the election, evangelical support is still strong for Him. If you are a Republican—and very few centrist Republicans questions a single word from Trump—then everything is fine. You don’t have to worry about your materialism or your sexual morals, since God has given Trump and presumably His worshipers a blanket forgiveness for everything. You do not need to develop anything remotely resembling what we used to call a Christian character or an attitude of holiness. No longer do you have to wonder what sort of response you should have to immigrants; just kick them all out. No longer do you have to think about how a Christian should be a steward of God’s creation; the environment is nothing more than a source of raw materials for rich people to exploit. No longer do you have to consider that someone who disagrees with you might be partly correct; just assume that they are totally evil and treat them that way.

Perhaps the difference between then and now is best illustrated by what evangelical Christians are supposed to pay attention to. Back then, we read and discussed C. S. Lewis. Now, many evangelical Christians subsist on a fare of pure Fox News.