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August 19 - August 28, 2023
Whenever we see leaders or ideologies overruling the conscience, liberty, and reasoning of actual human beings with the promise of something higher, anti-humanism is probably in the ascendant.
Imagine what that was like: having to copy, by hand, every word of every book you add to your collection.
when monastic copyists came across Greek words within a Latin text, they tended to write, Graecum est, non legitur—“It is Greek, and cannot be read.” The phrase took on a life of its own as “It’s all Greek to me,” via Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, where Casca reports that he has heard Cicero saying something in Greek but has no idea what it was.
He kept nagging his monks: having received nice letters from monasteries offering prayers for him, he pointed out their errors of grammar and expression and arranged for the writers to have better training.
Charlemagne
Petrarch did leave an affectionate gift to Boccaccio in his will: “fifty Florentine gold florins for a winter garment to be worn by him while he is studying and working during the night hours.”
That would be a pretty pricy robe!
The bookseller and biographer Vespasiano contrasted the “great darkness” in which ignorant people live with the enlightenment or illumination that writers bring to the world. Echoing the remarks Petrarch had once made to Boccaccio, he added that ignorance is sometimes considered holy, but as a virtue it is overrated. It may even be the source of worldly evil, he suggested.
The humanistic education of the time has even been described as mainly a technique for turning out cocky, fluent public figures with no genuine intellectual curiosity or serious thought in their heads at all. There is some justice in this, and I have noticed in early twenty-first-century Britain that an ability to sling around Latin quotations while behaving like a cad can still take you a long way.
That was quite a claim: if only we had the right tools and raw materials (admittedly, a tall order in both cases), we might rival God himself as Creator.
One thinks of the way some twentieth-century Western intellectuals fell in love with totalitarian communism, never considering what such a regime would be likely to do to them.
As for his overall philosophy, Thomas Paine would sum it up centuries later when he wrote that some people seem to think it an expression of humility to call “the fertile earth a dunghill, and all the blessings of life by the thankless name of vanities.” Instead, in Paine’s opinion, it looks more like ingratitude.
Speaking of Savonarola
Dulce bellum inexpertis—three neat Latin words that come out more laboriously in English as “War is sweet to those who have not experienced it.”
Augustine had urged his readers to rise above personal feelings in order to see “the whole design, in which these small parts, which are to us so disagreeable, fit together to make a scheme of ordered beauty.” In 1710, this had been made into a formal argument by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: God could have given us a world without such things, but he didn’t, so presumably he knew that those other possible worlds would have been less good in the long run. And if this is the best world feasible, then whatever happens in it must be for the best, even if does not feel that way.
Enlightenment and humanist thinkers share a tendency to look to this world more than to the next, and to humanity more than to divinity. Both consider the use of our reason and scientific understanding, as well as improvement of our technology and politics, to be our best path toward an improved life.
To quote the nineteenth-century humanist Robert Ingersoll, “In all ages man has prayed for help, and then helped himself.”)
Voltaire took the precaution of living close to the border between France and Geneva, so he could nip from one to the other, depending on which one was persecuting him most at the time.
It is true, said Hume. “I am dying as fast as my enemies, if I have any, could wish, and as easily and cheerfully as my best friends could desire.”
This theology was confirmed in 1537, when the pope issued a bull ruling that enslaving people in the Americas was wrong.
Conservatives often took it to heart because they shared Arnold’s horror of “anarchy,” specifically the public disorder and street demonstrations that were a feature of British life at the time of publication. Privileged himself, Arnold could see no call for people to behave in such an uncouth and unharmonious way when they could be reading Horace instead.
At the heart of Culture and Anarchy are humanist ideas of an enduring vintage: that our shared humanity connects us all, and that no one has a right to condescend to others or dismiss them as unimportant.
A different kind of reader was Karl Marx, who thought he could see connections between Darwin’s ideas and his own theory of the struggle between social classes. “Although developed in the crude English fashion,” he commented to Friedrich Engels, “this is the book which in the field of natural history, provides the basis for our views.” Later, having published Das Kapital, he sent Darwin a copy, which then remained with uncut pages on the naturalist’s shelf, although he did write Marx a warm thank-you letter.
“Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules.”
Huxley's review of Origin of Species
Arnold took a more pragmatic view: in Culture and Anarchy he advised sticking with the Church of England faith because it was nicely bland, and also officially established as the national religion, so it could safely be ignored most of the time, leaving one free to think about other things.
Ingersoll advised him: “No man should kill himself as long as he can be of the least use to anybody, and if you cannot find some person that you are willing to do something for, find a good dog and take care of him. You have no idea how much better you will feel.”
Yet Russell’s own life was not guided exclusively by reason or logic, either. He suffered from depression at times. During one episode when he was young, he stood watching the sunset and thought about suicide—but he was saved, he said, by the fact that he still wanted to learn more mathematics.
The philosopher Hannah Arendt put it neatly in her postwar study of totalitarian life: “The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.”
While Warburg’s original Hamburg house has once again become an institute and center of archives, offering events and courses, the transplanted Warburg Institute in London is still a great humanistic home.
Elsewhere, microfilm photographers and archivists traveled around hastily filming as many irreplaceable documents and manuscripts as they could—a story recently told by Kathy Peiss in her 2020 book Information Hunters.
(As Bertrand Russell remarked of the British at this time, they shared with Fascists the belief that one could “only govern by putting the best people in prison.”)
Finally, as always, I am brought back to the creed of Robert G. Ingersoll: Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so.
