Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

by Sarah Bakewell

“It’s a philosophy that rejects supernaturalism, regards man as a natural object and asserts the essential dignity and worth of man and his capacity to achieve self-realisation through the use of reason and the scientific method.”

am a humanist,” he said, “which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishments after I’m dead.”

In each case, the individual is kept at the top of the list of concerns, not subordinated to some grander concept or ideal.

Many have shared the ethical interests of the other kinds of humanists, believing that learning and teaching the human studies enables a more virtuous and civilized life. Humanities teachers still often think this, in a modernized form. By introducing students to literary and cultural experiences, and to the tools of critical analysis, they hope to help them to acquire extra sensitivity to the perspectives of others, a subtler grasp of how political and historical events unfold, and a more judicious and thoughtful approach to life generally. They hope to cultivate humanitas, which in Latin means being human, but with added overtones of being refined, knowledgeable, articulate, generous, and well mannered.

Amid such anticlerical fun, other stories risk a more serious critique of the authority of Christianity: in one, a great lord summons his three sons in turn and gives each a ring, as if to say he has chosen that one as heir. In fact, he has made two identical copies of the original ring, so no one can tell which of the three is real. It makes a good parable for the competing truth claims of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, all thinking they have the one true religion, whereas in reality the matter is undecidable.

Ignorance is not the path to virtue. Petrarch was devout enough, but he had no time for the idea that a Christian life must be one of unworldly contemplation, reading sacred works only, or no works at all. He was on the side of knowledge, of learning, of a healthy abundance in words and ideas.

Petrarch, too, wrote that non-Christian teachings—so long as they did not actually contradict the Gospel—added “a considerable measure to the enjoyment of the mind and the cultivation of life.”

People made efforts to remain calm and optimistic, believing that fear would make them more vulnerable—and what a psychological hall of mirrors that must have been to navigate! Meanwhile, thoughts often turned to God, who seemed to be in one of his punitive moods and in need of human penitential display.

Medicine, that great improver of the human condition, could do almost nothing. The civilized arts of government and administration did not keep the plague at bay, either.

The disease challenged both the Christian vision of God’s order and the classical vision of a society of gifted, capable people benefiting from their sciences and arts.

Total collapse, like total war, makes a compelling story, but when it looms, people will also do their utmost to ward it off or mitigate the damage. Thus, in the midst of the emergency, individuals did sometimes stick at their posts and make heroic efforts to hold things together.

That human dimension was always important. Rhetorical skill was useless, or even damaging, if it did not go with virtue and moral purpose: all must be done in the service of good. Cicero drew a distinction between virtuous eloquence and the mayhem created by demagogues.

After all, language is “the gift that distinguishes us from other living things,” and Nature would hardly have given humans such a gift if it served only to “lend arms to crime.”

Thus, to use language well is about more than adding decorative twiddles; it is about moving other people to emotion and recognition. It is a moral activity, because being able to communicate well is at the heart of humanitas—of being human in the fullest way.

Petrarch’s book takes the form of two contrasting conversations, in which the personified figure of Reason responds to those of Sorrow and of Joy, in turn. Reason’s task is to cheer Sorrow with happy thoughts, and to dampen Joy with reminders not to get carried away.

Not all sources of misery are overt ones, and inner sufferings are harder to manage: despite the rudder of our reason, we lose our way in turbulent seas. But if our suffering is deep, so too is the pleasure offered by the best parts of life. Reason reminds Sorrow of the many gifts God has bestowed on us, from the natural beauties of the world (those burbling streams and twittering songbirds) to our own excellent achievements.

As a whole, it is a work not so much of positivity as of balance, weighing each side against the other, and reminding us that the human story is neither all good nor all bad, but that we can use each side to temper the other.

He and Petrarch set themselves to retrieve what they could of that past, and to rework it, reimagine it, use it to strengthen themselves and their friends against grief—and to pass it on to future generations, in the hope that they, too, would use it for a rebirth.

In a long-ago time, he believes, the ancients lit up their world with their eloquence and wisdom. In some new period of time to come, future generations may illuminate their world afresh. The hope is to bridge this gap, by preserving what can be found or copied, by creating new variations on the old forms, and by keeping it all in precarious existence, long enough for the lamps to be relit.

The humanists dismissed the more elaborate style as “Gothic,” an insult implying “barbarian”—as in the hordes of Goths and Vandals who had brought Rome to its earlier downfall. Their own rival style said everything about how they saw themselves: reviving old simplicity, sweeping away clutter, and ushering knowledge into the light.

Learning to speak and write well, and to understand historical examples and moral philosophy, formed the perfect foundation for a life dedicated to public speaking, writing, politics, and wise judgments. But that was the problem. Few parents would ever dream of their girls having a life of that sort.

They would never give addresses or write elegant letters; they had no need of Latin, and there was no point in studying the art of making wise choices, because they were unlikely to be able to make many choices at all. Lacking such training, they were excluded from most of what counted as humanitas. Instead, they had the virtues of chastity and modesty to look forward to, and for those one did not need much education. Some of the most vibrant humanist cities, notably Florence, were also the ones where the most pressure was put on women to be invisible.

That was in 1556, and by that time the idea of a scholarly female perhaps seemed very slightly less bizarre than before, and women had a very slightly better chance of getting an education.

Of course, just because the boys had a finer and fuller moral education does not mean that they always came out as paragons of virtue and wisdom. 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.

Still, the ideal was certainly an admirable one, directly absorbed from such revered models as Cicero and Quintilian: to govern well, one should be able to speak well, reason well, practice moderation and balance, and be suffused with “humanity” in all its senses—including knowing something of how real human stories had played out in the past.

economics, by which public and domestic affairs are regulated.” These three humanistic pillars—moral philosophy, historical understanding, and good communication—were all best practiced in the world, even if that world was the rarefied one of a royal entourage. Vives thanked God for freeing him from pedantry, and for allowing him thus to discover “the true disciplines that are worthy of man, and for that reason often called the humanities.”

Above all, they agree that he should be brave, well educated, and eloquent, and should behave with sprezzatura. This meant a relaxed, dismissive nonchalance: doing difficult things as if by nature, making no visible effort. The word, to me, brings to mind someone carelessly flinging a cloak around the shoulders in such a way that it is left hanging perfectly, without needing to be pinned in place or rearranged. Sprezzatura was also the ideal in literary activity.

Printing, both with and without movable type, had been pioneered long before in China and Korea: it was useful for the Buddhist practice of reproducing prayers in large quantities to gain merit. When the technology arrived in Europe, it would quickly be put to a similar use churning out papal indulgences—that is, tickets reducing the amount of punishment to be expected in the afterlife. Up to ten thousand such indulgences were printed by Johannes Gutenberg, who would be better remembered for producing the first major European printed book: his great 1455 Bible.

That was how other humanists imagined themselves, too: bringing fresh air and flowers into the scholarly world while bringing the scholarly world out into real life. They also continued to enjoy their other favorite metaphors for what they were doing: raising wrecks, lighting up the darkness, saving prisoners.

But if you spend so much time working out the signs that texts have gone wrong or become garbled, or if you identify some of them as downright fakes, or if you just seem to be enjoying yourself too much while doing all this, then you risk upsetting some powerful people. Rather than seeming a harmless literary potterer, you might start looking like a dangerous heretic, or a provocative “pagan.” And that would make you one of the subjects of the next chapter: scholarly humanists, still in Italy, still from much the same period, but driven by more rebellious purposes.

Then an Epicurean puts the opposite case. Life is full of pleasurable and beautiful experiences, he says, such as listening to the voice of a woman speaking sweetly or tasting good wine. (I myself, he digresses, have cellars filled with the best vintages.) There are deeper pleasures, too, such as those that come from having a family, holding public office, and lovemaking. (He has a lot to say about this last one.) Even better is the self-satisfied glow that comes from knowing how virtuous one is: that is just another kind of pleasure.

A third speaker argues for the Christian view: pleasure is nice, but it is better to seek heavenly pleasures instead of worldly ones. The Christian is allowed to keep the last word and win the case, but it is hard not to notice the sympathetic treatment the Epicurean receives along the way, especially at one moment when the character of Lorenzo (that is, the author) is shown whispering to him, “My soul inclines silently in your direction.”

All these people loved their classics, but this long series of Ciceronian quarrels shows a rift appearing between two types of humanists: those who adored and imitated certain long-lost authors unquestioningly, and those who considered nothing beyond question, not even Cicero (or, indeed, the pope).

This word pagan, originally meaning “peasant” or “country bumpkin,” was used by Christians to describe all pre-Christian religion, but especially that attached to the old Roman gods. Relations between the two traditions had always been strained, hence the eagerness of early Christians to literally stamp the Roman temples and statues out of the landscape. The relationship mellowed with time, however. It became clear that pagan traditions were so interwoven with Christian ones in European culture that they could not be fully untangled again. The very stones of Rome were pagan in origin, and Roman and Greek mythology was so full of good stories that artists, in particular, could never resist it—especially when it featured love goddesses emerging from seashells wearing floaty, translucent clothes. Perhaps, rather than trying to wipe out the pagan tradition, it was better to try to assimilate and Christianize it.

That process necessitated some mental athletics. Petrarch reassured himself that Cicero, if only he had had the chance, would have been a good Christian. Others tried to reinterpret classical works as prophecies of the coming religion.

The Tuscan humanists were more likely to work either in purely private posts as tutors and secretaries or to have civic, diplomatic, or political appointments in the great Tuscan cities. These cities tended to present themselves as beacons of freedom, openness, and harmony.

Far from being harmonious, Athens experienced public disorder, plague, and uprisings, and it eventually lost that war with the Spartans. Florence, too, was a welter of dynastic conflicts, plots, regime changes, and general insecurity. Yet in both cases the humanistic ideal was central to their identities—and there is no question that Florence did become an energetic, artistic, intellectually active place through the fifteenth century, filled with larger-than-life characters and generally friendly to the activities of humanists.

Alberti was thus the very model of the splendid, accomplished, free human being in the full sunlight of his days. True, he was exceptionally able. But what is being conjured up here is more than that; it is an ideal figure of the human in general. All the qualities highlighted are those of humanitas: intellectual and artistic excellence, moral virtue and fortitude, sociability, good speaking, sprezzatura, being courteously “pleasing to all.” Along with this comes his excellent physical condition: the mental abilities were reflected in his physical proportions. Reading his description, one pictures another figure of the time: that of “Vitruvian Man.”

The message here is that real human beings, even those who match the dominant template of muscular masculinity, are characterized by something less than perfect harmony. They are subtly off-center. An ideal, harmonious human cannot be found any more than an ideal, harmonious city can (or even a harmonious chameleon). Immanuel Kant was surely closer to the truth when he wrote, three centuries later: “Out of such crooked wood as the human being is made, nothing entirely straight can be fabricated.”

Out of such experiences, as well as other challenges to Europeans’ understanding of life—notably their encounter with a “new” world across the Atlantic and an explosion in the amount of printed information available—sixteenth-century humanists would become ever less naively adoring of the past and ever more interested in social complexity, human fallibility, and the effects of large-scale events on individual lives. The spirit of questioning, pioneered by Valla and other humanistic scholars who refused to limit themselves to approved sources, gained further ground. The interest in the changeable human chameleon shown by a Pico or Ficino remained but became less theological and more pragmatic. For example, the historians Niccolò Machiavelli and Francesco Guicciardini developed a tough, investigative attitude; they reflected on the causes of historical changes and on the reasons why people behave as they do. A similar interest in human complexity brought a revival of another human-centered genre: biography, with its questioning of causes and consequences in individual lives.

The actions of humans, the difficulty of making good judgments, the uncertainty of all things—these themes would continue to fascinate sixteenth-century writers. They would have to face the religious split in western Europe, and the revelation that the world was much bigger and more diverse than the ancients had expected. This would bring some of them to a subtle understanding of uncertainty and complexity. A few would also realize that nothing was more complex or self-divided than an individual human being.

Mitigating the suffering of one’s fellows is a humanistic goal in the broadest sense, and in general the practice of medicine straddles the worlds of science and of humanistic study. It uses quantifiable research (far more so now than in Fracastoro’s day) but also patients’ personal accounts of what they feel; a working doctor must know how to listen and talk well with those patients. Medicine deals in observable and experienced phenomena. But it also relies on books: knowledge is passed from practitioner to practitioner through education and the sharing of professional experience. Like other sciences, it explicitly deploys the humanities, especially history, so as to reflect on its own past and to refine its approach. Far more than other sciences, it draws on contemporary prevailing ideas of who and what we are as humans, and generally as living beings. In return, medicine helps to change what we are, as we become (hopefully) more knowledgeable about our own systems and ultimately able to meddle a little with our own basic chemistry and processes.

They almost certainly never chose to end up on the page like this: right through to the nineteenth century, many people resisted the prospect of being dissected. One reason was that they believed in physical resurrection in the afterlife; no one wants to rise into heaven as an empty torso or a flapping curtain of shredded nerves and muscles. The prospect of helping anatomical students to learn—far from being something to “delight” in, as the Padua motto had it—was considered a powerful deterrent to crime, almost more so than execution itself.

Along the path between these events, all is in flux. The mind certainly is. For all our exalted sense of ourselves as spiritual beings, our conscious selves are prone to being befuddled by alcohol or enfeebled by disease. Even the wisest sage can lose her reason in a flash if a stone falls on her head. Lucretius and his ultimate source, Democritus, observed how mind and body alike are affected by the senses and events throughout life; they reminded us that, one day, each of us will come to an end in the gentle, silent dissolution of our atoms. Writers through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries continued to reflect on these thoughts; a new sensibility was formed around them. Ultimately, as it turns out, neither books nor bodies are completely reliable.

A lack of civilized living conditions formed another aspect of the attitude of “contempt for the world” that Erasmus was now rejecting. Instead, he felt that education should train a person to be at home in the world, in tune with fellow humans, able to make friends, act wisely, and share the light of knowledge while treating all people with courtesy. That is, it should encourage the development of humanitas.

The aim is something like Castiglione’s ideal of casual poise, but it is not done mainly with the intention of showing off one’s own cool. The aim is, rather, to make life nicer for others. It is a method for not separating oneself from the world, like those awkward Sorbonne teachers or bad-tempered monks. It means knowing how to put companions at ease and to take your place in a generally pleasant society, living with humanity in every sense. It even makes you human. “Manners maketh man,” as the motto of Winchester College and New College, Oxford, still maintains—a line dating from a couple of centuries earlier, in fact.

Erasmus also taught the habits needed for a fulfilling intellectual life, and here the key thing is to have a richly stocked mind with as large a frame of reference as possible. This will bring better judgment and an ability to express yourself with understanding as well as elegance. He recommends reading good books and following a popular technique of the time: keeping notes grouped by subject, so you can remember what you read and combine it with other ideas in useful ways. If no paper is to hand, you can paint notes on a wall, or even scratch them into window glass. The important thing is to build up a treasure house—the literal meaning of “thesaurus”—in your mind, so it is always there as a resource.

On the other hand, he also became repelled by the aggression of Luther, who was a born contrarian and fighter. Erasmus was not of that type, and he thought that it would make more sense “to mitigate through courteous treatment an issue sharp by its very nature than to add ill will to ill will.” Courtesy, of course, was everything to him: more than just a social veneer, it was the very basis for all mutual respect and concord. He and Luther had theological disagreements, too, notably on the question of human free will. (Erasmus, remaining consistent with the church’s position, believed that humans could freely choose their own path, for good or ill; Luther thought we had no such freedom and that our only route to salvation lay through God’s grace.)

He made no secret of the fact that he preferred tranquility. “When popes and emperors make the right decisions I follow, which is godly; if they decide wrongly I tolerate them, which is safe.” Erasmus did have courage, but it was of a different sort: he preferred to be discreet but to advance arguments for peace quietly and persistently.

Erasmus takes us on a tour of the body and mind, pointing out each of the features that obviously suit us better to a life of mutual assistance and kindness, rather than one of fighting. A bull has horns and a crocodile has armor, but we have soft skin, embracing arms, and “friendly eyes, revealing the soul.” We laugh and cry, revealing our sensitivity. We have speech and reason, with which to communicate. We even have a natural attraction to the love of learning, which “has the greatest power of knitting up friendships.”