I THE BIRTH OF HUMANISM

“As is well known, the word humanist was applied, first in the Italy of the fifteenth century, and later in other European countries, to the type of scholar who was not only proficient in Greek and Latin, but who at the same time inclined to prefer the humanity of the great classical writers to what seemed to him the excess of divinity in the mediævals. This contrast between humanity and divinity was often conceived very superficially. However, the best of the humanists were not content with opposing a somewhat external imitation of the Ciceronian or Virgilian elegance to the scholastic carelessness of form. They actually caught a glimpse of the fine proportionateness of the ancients at their best. They were thus encouraged to aim at a harmonious development of their faculties in this world rather than at an otherworldly felicity. Each faculty, they held, should be cultivated in due measure without one-sidedness or over-emphasis, whether that of the ascetic or that of the specialist.”—Irving Babbitt in Humanism and America.

It requires an unusual effort for us to admit that there was something mysterious operating in the deeps of the Middle Ages, and again that well below the surface of the Renascence there seem to have been strange forces. We look with wonderment at the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in Europe—at that uncompleted Cathedral of the Intellect designed by St. Thomas Aquinas, at the ordering and altitude of emotion in Dante, at that philosophy of action called Chivalry; but few of us can refrain from ready interpretations. Very few can sit in the Cathedral of Chartres and sincerely arrive at the conclusion which Henry Adams reached after long saturation beneath its influences. That conclusion, highly remarkable as coming from a modern man and therefore worthy of italic print, was given by Adams all the advantages of emphatic position. It was couched in the surprising final clause of a lengthy sentence at the end of one of his chapters in Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, his elaborate homage to the splendor of mediæval times. I shall let Adams lead up to it.

“Sitting here any Sunday afternoon, while the voices of the children of the maîtrise are chanting in the choir,—your mind held in the grasp of the strong lines and shadows of the architecture; your eyes flooded with the autumn tones of the glass; your ears drowned with the purity of the voices; one sense reacting upon another until sensation reaches the limit of its range,—you, or any other lost soul, could, if you cared to look and listen, feel a sense beyond the human ready to reveal a sense divine that would make that world once more intelligible, and would bring the Virgin to life again, in all the depths of feeling which she shows here,—in lines, vaults, chapels, colours, legends, chants,—more eloquent than the prayer-book, and more beautiful than the autumn sunlight; and any one willing to try could feel it like the child, reading new thought without end into the art he has studied a hundred times; but what is still more convincing, he could, at will, in an instant, shatter the whole art by calling into it a single motive of his own.”

But, as though in obedience to some undivined law, the marvellous unity of the Middle Ages, sustained in Adams’s judgment by motives so foreign and incomprehensible to us, began to crumble. The spirit began to withdraw and the forms to change into formalism. There was less inwardness. Corruption and decline set in, and then fairly suddenly the disintegration of culture was arrested and a new growth took place to make resplendent the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Renascence was in part a great revolt against decayed scholasticism and the views of man and the world it upheld, and in part the fulfilment of fresh impulses generated by the apostles of the New Learning, the study of classical literature. This period too baffles us: we meet with so many enigmatic figures! To take a famous instance, who has ever made a plausible business of explaining the character of Francis Bacon? Enigma he was and enigma he remains, a man whose range of motivation outspans our most inspired conjectures.

But this strangeness is not all that defies our efforts at understanding. We need to suspend judgment, but the difficulties of remaining in suspended judgment are magnified in a way that has been set forth by an English amateur of philosophy, the late T. E. Hulme, whose reputation in America incidentally has never matched his deserts. Authentically, Hulme was a young intellectual giant, and his death in the Great War was a grievous casualty for contemporary philosophy. But fragmentary as his writings are, one essay in his posthumous book, Speculations, is said to have done more to clarify the mind of his generation in England than any other essay in recent years. This influential paper is called Humanism and the Religious Attitude, and some of its striking ideas are very much to our present purpose. Hulme opened by boldly declaring that the modern emancipated and instructed man shrinks from the idea of discontinuities. Such a man, he said, is wedded to the theory of evolution and the doctrine of progress, two sisters, and so he abhors the notion of a gap, a real chasm, existing in the scheme of life. In fine, the modern man takes a principle of continuity to be, not just a convenience in certain fields of thought, but an absolute fact. He therefore very frequently denies a discontinuity between Nature and Man and invariably between Man and the Absolute.

But the Middle Ages believed in a discontinuity between Man and absolute values in religion and ethics. They believed, that is to say, in Original Sin and in placing perfection far above the human plane. That is what makes those ages so hard for us to comprehend. But in the Renascence, according to Hulme, this discontinuity was denied: man was declared not radically bad, but worthy, and things perfect were brought down and mingled with things on the human plane. Where there had been the mediæval religious spirit, now appeared the modern humanistic temper—and the two were utterly different! In its later manifestations we can understand the latter, but in the Renascence, in men like Manuel Chrysoloras, Pico della Mirandola, and Leonardo da Vinci, we are haunted by the enigmatic.

What secrets they had, we cannot probe after now, even if we had fresh clues. What is incontrovertible is that we inherit that part of the Renascence which was a revolt against mediævalism. The fifteenth century founders of Humanism gave the Western World nothing less than a new weltanschauung. What that world-view is and what the Romantic world-conception is which has sprung up in the last one hundred and fifty years to challenge it, I shall try to expose in the following pages. Then in the concluding chapters, after discussing Romanticism and Humanism, I wish to return to Religion and to consider the radical difference Hulme alleged to exist between the humanistic temper and the religious spirit.

When we have a single name to cover related but highly variegated phenomena, we tend after a time to think of the phenomena as being uniform because the one name covers them all. So today when an editorial writer mentions the Humanists of the Renascence, he often sounds as if he considered all of them to have been turned out on very much the same pattern. There is some excuse then for a brief collection of data showing that such was not the case any more than a rigid uniformity characterizes the Humanists of the twentieth century. Humanism now and formerly is essentially broad and flexible, and the reader must divest himself of narrow preconceptions if he hopes to encompass the subject. For dispelling a contemporary prejudice in favor of uniformity, a mere glance at the variety of fifteenth and sixteenth century Humanism will be enough, even though we take in only the best known facts.

The earliest Humanists appeared in Italy, and principally in Florence under the patronage of Cosimo de’ Medici. Scholars like Manuel Chrysoloras and Poggio Bracciolini had delved into the treasures of ancient Greece and Rome and had risen ecstatically. In 1453 the fall of Constantinople released the old manuscripts in greater profusion: the new springs of life welled up gloriously. Men in the most powerful places like Pope Nicholas V became supporters of the new cult of literae humaniores. But as the New Learning spread, its secular spirit became more evident, and the Church found itself assaulted by some Humanists, Lorenzo Valla, for example, who stood boldly for paganism and asserted the chief good to be pleasure. Others—the most celebrated is Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494)—sought to blend Christianity with Platonism. Generally speaking, Italian Humanism had a pronounced æsthetic character, but we must not therefore think of these seminal figures in the dreamy fashion of Walter Pater. His languid essay on Pico is the least fitted thing to do justice to this man’s power of inspiring others to love the New Learning. You would never guess from Pater that Pico della Mirandola was reputed to have had such a powerful mind and memory that he retained perfectly on a single reading the entire language and meaning of any text he read. Pico was only thirty-one when he died on the day the French king, Charles the Eighth, entered Florence, but he had done the work of a giant. Enthusiasts had carried his influence throughout Europe: he had fertilized an age.

In every country where it took root, Humanism assumed national characteristics and applied itself to differing tasks. In Spain, in France, in England and in Germany each movement was sui generis—a point to remember today when we observe the classical revivals going on in France, England and the United States. The Action Française, the work of Belloc and Chesterton, American Humanism have all, in spite of many important differences, a family resemblance which will concern us later. But now glancing back at Spain in the Renascence, it is Cardinal Ximenes (1436?-1517) whom most readers will recall and his establishment of the University of Alcalá, that university from which in 1514 was to come the first Greek text of the New Testament ever printed. A little afterwards came the renowned Polyglot Bible, made under the direction of the Cardinal and published at his personal expense.

In France from the beginning Humanism was tinged with Catholic heresy. There was Jacques Lefevre of Etaples (1455–1537), whose Commentary on the Epistles of St. Paul in 1512 is regarded as a distinct enunciation of the doctrine of justification by faith alone. There was Guillaume Budé (1467–1540), whose studies were almost entirely secular; he was excelled by no one in his time for scholarship in Greek and Latin. There was finally François Rabelais (1495?-1555?), the colossal laughing incarnation of the French humanistic spirit.

In Germany and England the Humanists appear to have struck graver notes and to have been more concerned with social reform. American Humanism today bears at least this external resemblance to the Humanism of William Grocyn, Thomas Linacre and Sir Thomas More: namely, it is greatly concerned with public education. Perhaps the most typical English Humanist was John Colet (1467?-1519) who founded St. Paul’s School in London. And American Humanism has an external resemblance to the Renascence form of Humanism in Germany in that the contemporary form is likewise primarily a movement inside the universities. The famous names in Germany are Johann Reuchlin (1455–1522), Ulrich Von Hutten (1488–1523), and the artist Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528). Reuchlin, around whom, provoked by his defence of the Jews, a storm broke that swept him for trial to Rome itself, is especially noteworthy, for he indicates by his study of Hebrew and the Kabbalah (a wonderful text to Pico, too) the variety of the sources of inspiration the Humanists discovered. Ulrich Von Hutten, militant pamphleteer, sided with the Protestant Reformation, whereas as is well known many Humanists liked Calvin no better than they liked obscurantist monks.

With that fact let us close what is clearly not intended to be a comprehensive survey of Renascence Humanism or an evaluation of it, but only the presentment of enough data to recall the great complexity of the early Humanists. All that is designed is to direct attention to their heterogeneity, to remember that some were against Aristotle and others favored him, some were for paganism, others for Catholicism, and others for the Reformation, some were of singular purity, others were gay worldlings in personal morals. National traits altered the colors of Humanism, and the places of emphasis, as we have seen, shifted from country to country, here being found in the arts, there in education, and there in religious reform. It is a warning to us—this complexity in historical Humanism—not to expect a sameness, or an exceedingly close approximation to each other, in the manifestations of contemporary Humanists. Historically, the humanistic temper was broad: we shall come to see the wide latitude of a similar temper today.

And yet historians are right in applying one name to all these diverse men from Petrarch in Italy to Luis Vives in Spain, for all felt powerfully the attraction of one leading idea. That idea the modern world has agreed to call “the dignity of man,” and it is customary to go to the Oration on the Dignity of Man composed by Pico della Mirandola for the most eloquent phrasing of it. “Then the Supreme Being decreed that unto Man, on whom He could bestow nought singular, should belong in common whatsoever had been given to His other creatures. Therefore He took man, made in His own individual image, and having placed him in the center of the world, spake to him thus: ‘Neither a fixed abode, nor a form in thine own likeness, nor any gift peculiar to thyself alone, have we given thee, O Adam, in order that what abode, what likeness, what gifts thou shalt choose, may be thine to have and to possess. The nature allotted to all other creatures, within laws appointed by ourselves, restrains them. Thou, restrained by no narrow bonds, according to thy own free will, in whose power I have placed thee, shalt define thy nature for thyself. I have set thee midmost the world, that thence thou mightest the more conveniently survey whatever is in the world. Nor have we made thee, either heavenly or earthly, mortal or immortal, to the end that thou, being, as it were, thy own free maker and moulder, shouldst fashion thyself in what form may like thee best. Thou shalt have power to decline unto the lower or brute creatures. Thou shalt have power to be reborn unto the higher, or divine, according to the sentence of thy intellect.’ Thus to Man, at his birth, the Father gave seeds of all variety and germs of every form of life.”

Closely observed, this passage yields the following statements. Man is a being of extraordinary elasticity, for he subsumes the various kingdoms of nature, animal, vegetable and inorganic. Man is not given stability or a center within himself, but he may acquire them. He can do so because he has will and potentialities to develop. His dignity consists in the fact that whereas other creatures must obey their destiny, he can have an active part in forming his. His way lies between the brute and the divine: he can sink into the former or he can be reborn into the latter. To be human is to be midmost. Pico has thus written—it may be noted here—an epigraph for the New Humanism.

In passing, however, some questions should be raised. Do the New Humanists, who proclaim afresh the dignity of man, distribute the weight of their thought and emotion quite as evenly as did Pico? On the idea of rebirth, for instance, and all that it implies of revolution in personal psychology, do they not walk lightly or step carefully away from it? “The higher, or divine”—did it not tend to drop out of Renascence Humanism in its later stages, and today does it not fail to attract the best thought or the most passionate endeavors of our Humanists? Yet all, new and old, stand for man’s dignity and would agree that Pico della Mirandola has given the poetic formulation of their faith.

How would their faith be phrased intellectually? Happily, we may resort to T. E. Hulme for that. “It seems as if,” he says, “no sooner had Copernicus shown that man was not the center of the universe, than the philosophers commenced for the first time to prove that he was. You get expressed explicitly, for the first time (in Pico della Mirandola for example), this idea of the sufficiency of natural man, and it has generally been assumed by all philosophers since. It may be expressed in very different languages and with very different degrees of profundity, but even Hegel and Condorcet are one from this point of view.” The self-sufficiency of the natural man—there is a key idea we must grasp. I object to a precise equating of Hulme’s phrase with Pico’s eloquence on the dignity of man, but, leaving out the references to divine order and rebirth, the phrase is fairly close to an intellectual equivalent. Self-sufficiency is the central idea we have inherited from the Renascence, and for millions of men it has effaced the mediæval idea of the insufficiency of the natural man and the need for Grace to visit him as a basically bad creature. The dignity of man understood as the self-sufficiency of the natural man, and by natural man is meant one not reborn, is the foundation idea for all modern Humanism.

In the foregoing sketch I did not mention the man who is inevitably associated by every one with Renascence Humanism—Desiderius Erasmus. That was because I wish the reader to observe him now in a particular connection. Let us look briefly at the crisis in Christendom produced by the emotional revolt of Martin Luther. Up to 1521 when Luther shouted, “I should go to Worms were there as many devils there as tiles upon the roofs,” Erasmus had held a commanding position in Europe. Europe was then, intellectually and morally, a single community. Latin was the common language binding together all intellectual contributions and there was one Church for all the peoples. Erasmus had risen from his illegitimate birth in Rotterdam, his convent education, and his straitness of means, to be a friendly counsellor of King and Pope, a master of Latin style, an illuminated traveler throughout Europe to exchange light with its best minds. As every one knows, he addressed himself to the emancipation of the individual, expecting that from the increase of enlightened individuals would eventually issue religious as well as social reform. The evil of the time he ascribed to ignorance: he combated it with genial raillery and suave satire, making always an appeal for truth, temperate procedure, and tolerance.

Now think of the man who was described by Erasmus in a letter “as a necessary evil in the corruption of the Church; a medicine, bitter and drastic, from which sounder health would follow.” Martin Luther’s career is familiar to every one; how he was severely beaten at home and at school during his childhood, how he sang for alms at the University of Erfurt, how his friend was slain at his side by lightning and the young student’s subsequent terrified flight into an Augustine monastery, how there he was distinguished by zeal, how he was disenchanted in his pilgrimage to Rome, how afterwards he was made a professor of philosophy at the University of Wittenberg, how finally he opposed Tetzel on the latter’s mission of selling indulgences and dispensations and wrote out against such practices the famous ninety-five propositions which led eventually to excommunication; all these circumstances have been rehearsed hundreds of times in tones of admiration or detestation for the man who experienced them. Certainly in contrast to Erasmus’s, Luther’s life seems lurid. And undoubtedly the conventional Protestant account of the Reformer can stand much correction, but we need only note what unmistakably stands out in the characters of the Reformer and the great Humanist.

Carlyle had excellent reason to call Luther the Christian Odin, the right Thor: the man is impressive by his power in action, by his great and often harsh energy, by the force and sometimes violence of his feelings. He is not impressive because of his mind. Let us hear Luther himself denounce the reason which he grants is indeed of utility in practical affairs but refuses to call good beyond that realm. “Reason,” he thundered in his last sermon at Wittenberg near the close of his life, “is the devil’s greatest whore; by nature and manner of being she is a noxious whore; she is a prostitute, the devil’s appointed whore; a whore eaten by scab and leprosy who ought to be trodden under foot and destroyed, she and her wisdom.” And on another occasion he said: “Reason is directly opposed to faith, and one ought to let it be; in believers it should be killed and buried.” This clearly is not the accent of the Renascence Humanist who objected to pseudo-intellectualism but never to the idea that there is a right employment of reason in the highest matters. Nor did the Humanist throw his weight so vehemently upon the emotions and in particular upon faith as did Luther. “We can say,” remarks Jacques Maritain, one of the best Catholic philosophers today, “that Luther is the first great Romantic”—and despite Luther’s strong religious disposition, Maritain makes this remark seem plausible.

Erasmus is the antithesis to Luther. He was an active practical man, but we never think of him as an exponent of energetics; he was mature and full in his feelings, but not violent or overflowing in turbulence; he was an able reasoner but not gone mad on metaphysical refinements. What strikes us about Erasmus is not the greatness or intensity of any one of his faculties, but the fair degree of harmony in the development and operations of all of them. He is the typical Humanist because of his proportionateness. He had the supreme humanist virtue, and that is mellow commonsense.

The crisis came, and a large part of Europe followed the impassioned Luther into the Reformation. Erasmus, observing the defects of Luther, his lack of balance, his lack of reason in the best sense, could not join his forces, nor could he fight blindly and hotly on the Catholic side. Neither was the way of mellow commonsense, and he who had been the prince of the European mind retired helplessly to Basle while the struggle worked up its violence. He had his major defect too. Not a weakling in feeling, he yet had not the tremendous force of emotion required to play an effective part in the great proceedings of history. He was even able to say in a letter to Archbishop Warham: “As for me, I have no inclination to risk my life for truth. We have not all strength for martyrdom; and if trouble come, I shall imitate St. Peter. Popes and emperors must settle the creeds. If they settle them well, so much the better; if ill, I shall keep on the safe side.” But no place was safe for a champion of moderation. “Every goose,” he wrote from Basle, “now hisses at Erasmus; and it is worse than being stoned, once for all, like Stephen, or shot with arrows like Sebastian.”

Did Europe take the wrong turning when it ignored the pleas of Erasmus,—then past sixty, suffering with the stone, grieving over the execution of his friends, More and Fisher, a beclouded luminary,—and plunged recklessly into the work of breaking up its moral and intellectual unity? In retrospective wisdom Goethe thought so. Goethe regretted that Erasmus and men like him could not have retained the direction of the mind of Europe: he thought that Luther had thrown back the intellectual progress of mankind for centuries by appealing to the passions of the multitude to decide on subjects which ought to have been left to the learned. That question we do not have to debate here. Luther for worse or better is one of the makers of our modern world, and our pressing question is, what is the rôle of mellow commonsense, the great humanistic virtue, amid the confusions of our age? Should we, the heirs of those who went with Luther, now turn for light and example to Erasmus?

Fixing in our minds the several considerations dwelt on in this opening up of our subject—the absolute distinction between Religion and Humanism, the intricacy of historical Humanism, the conception of man as self-sufficient for the unifying of himself, and ripened commonsense as the prime virtue of Humanism—let us now leap to the present and examine what sort of society we belong to and how we conceive of the world and of ourselves.