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March 30 - April 4, 2023
Why fear? The stuff of my being is matter, ever changing, ever moving, but never lost; so what need of denominations and creeds to deny myself the comfort of all my fellow men? The wide belt of the universe has no need for finger-rings. I am one with the infinite and need no other assurance.
The most devastating attack on human self-esteem was written in the 1190s by the cardinal Lotario dei Segni, before he became Pope Innocent III: a treatise called On the Misery of Man.
As often happens with long-accepted ideas of history, the humanists’ vision of a joyless, lightless Dark Age invites equal responses of “Let’s face it, they’ve got a point” and “But wait, it’s not that simple.”
No wonder Poggio chose the cardinal as the dedicatee of his work On Avarice, which argued for an ancient idea: that great wealth was not sinful but virtuous, because life-enhancing things could be done with it.
An outstanding early example was the first known female professional writer, Christine de Pizan.
Humanistic tutors liked to contrast themselves with old-style medieval university professors, visualized as eccentric, pedantic, and fixated on syllogisms and pointless paradoxes such as: “Ham makes us drink; drinking quenches thirst; therefore ham quenches thirst.”
A German Benedictine abbot, Johannes Trithemius, wrote In Praise of Scribes, arguing that manuscripts were better than printed books and that scribing was too useful a spiritual exercise for monks to give up. Then, in order to reach as wide an audience as possible, he had the book printed.
His name was Lorenzo Valla, and his 1440 treatise On the Donation of Constantine is one of the great humanist achievements. It combines a precise scholarly assault with the high rhetorical techniques learned from the ancients, served up with a sauce of hot chutzpah.
He sent out his followers to gather everything that showed a love of the human body or mind, everything that was refulgent and decorative and exquisitely wrought, every game that was fun to play, every book that was delightful to read, every flirtatious trinket, every symbol of worldly joy.
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.”
Giovio would publish their discussions in a work called Notable Men and Women of Our Time.
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
history is truly the mirror of human life—not merely the dry narration of events . . . but a means of pointing out the judgments, counsels, decisions, and plans of human beings, as well as the reason for their successful or unsuccessful actions; this is the true spirit of history.”
“The question is, whether the surgeon shall be allowed to gain knowledge by operating on the bodies of the dead, or driven to obtain it by practising on the bodies of the living.”
Giacomo Berengario da Carpi,
Find out the nature of formless Chaos. . . . Find out with soaring mind the causes of individual things: investigate the blowing of the winds and the tides of the raging sea. . . . Find out why dark hollows of the earth produce sulphur and veins of fair metals, and why hot springs restore the bodies of the sick. . . . Learn something of the various peoples of the world and their different languages and customs.
For Erasmus, as for Agricola, and later for Forster, a young mind needs to be liberated from meaningless, useless systems of knowledge as taught by unenlightened masters of an outmoded stamp who themselves have no idea how to live.
Shaftesbury’s Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit, where he put forward these arguments, impressed French readers, especially Diderot, who did a translation so free and creative that it was as much his own work as Shaftesbury’s.
Aristotle, was this: “Someone is . . . a slave by nature if he is capable of becoming the property of another (and for this reason does actually become another’s property) and if he participates in reason to the extent of apprehending it in another, though destitute of it himself.”
We seek the fulfillment to be found in “the objects of nature, the achievements of art, the imaginations of poetry, the incidents of history, the ways of mankind, past and present, and their prospects in the future”—all the aspects of culture. (One thinks of Giannozzo Manetti, in his treatise On Human Worth and Excellence: “What pleasure comes from our faculties of appraisal, memory and understanding!”)
It distinguishes it, for example, from the travesty now described as “neoliberalism,” which allows the rich to pursue profit without regulation while the rest of the population is left to deal with the consequences of such ravaging of society.
The first of these, “the best,” sounds elitist, implying high things accessible only through rarefied tastes and an exclusive education.
The other phrase, “sweetness and light,” is even worse in its suggestion of fairy-like sugary fluffiness. In fact, it comes from a scene in Jonathan Swift’s “Battle of the Books,” itself drawn from sources in the Latin poetry of Horace. In
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.”
The more heavyweight of the two was German historian David Friedrich Strauss’s Life of Jesus of 1835 (translated into English by George Eliot).
In Germany, the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach suggested following a human religion in his 1841 book The Essence of Christianity (another work that would be translated into English by George Eliot).
I do believe in the nobility of human nature. I believe in love and home, kindness and humanity. I believe in good fellowship and cheerfulness, in making wife and children happy. I believe in good nature, . . . I believe in free thought, in reason, observation, and experience. I believe in self-reliance and in expressing your honest thought. I have hope for the whole human race.
Russell considered it “undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.”
Reading Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, a work savagely debunking the staid virtues of the high Victorian era, he laughed so loudly that the warder came to remind him that prison was supposed to be a place of punishment.
will become an object of the most complicated methods of artificial selection and psycho-physical training.
Trotsky
“doing one’s best to fulfil one’s humanity and treating others with an awareness that they, too, are alive with humanity.”
One of the first acts of the new government was to clear the capital, Phnom Penh, of all its citizens, sending them out to join work gangs in the countryside. From then on, there were no newspapers, no mail, no traditional music or instruments, no books, no law courts, no money, no private property, no religious ceremonies or rites of passage, no privately chosen marriages, no ordinary human relationships.
This was why the philosopher Theodor Adorno could say, in an essay of 1951, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”
which to humanist ears sounds like saying that car crashes still occur despite traffic lights, therefore the traffic lights are to blame.
It is true that the major totalitarian states of the twentieth century tended to be atheistic, thus proving again that there is no automatic connection between questioning religion and being open-minded or humanist.
The reality, however, is that history and the human world are neither stable and good on the one hand, nor hopelessly tragic on the other. They are our own work, so if we want it to proceed well, we have to exert ourselves to make it happen.
I do not share that faith myself, yet I found it impossible to walk around Chartres without feeling a (slightly nervous) faith in humanity. It is true that human beings have several times come close to knocking it down. But other human beings keep trying, even harder, to make it stay up.
I would not, by word or deed, attempt to deprive another of the consolation it affords. It is simply not for me. Somebody else may have my rapturous glance at the archangels. The springing of the yellow line of morning out of the misty deep of dawn, is glory enough for me.
