In Our Time - Humanism

Episode Date: February 8, 2001

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Humanism. On the 3rd January 106 BC Marcus Tullius Cicero, lawyer, politician, Roman philosopher and the founding father of Humanism was born. His academy, the Studia Humanitas taught ‘the art of living well and blessedly through learning and instruction in the fine arts’, his version of ‘humanitas’ put man not God at the centre of the world.Centuries later, Cicero’s teachings had been metamorphosed into ‘Classical Humanism’, a faith in the soft arts of the Greek world. But how did Cicero’s ideas become Renaissance ideals? How did a small Greek curriculum later become a world philosophy? The human centred creed is credited with giving us human rights and democracy but has also been blamed for the most unspeakable horrors of the modern age. Have his ideas been distorted through the centuries for political ends? And why do some contemporary thinkers think the Humanist tradition is responsible for Elitism, Sexism and even Nazism? With Tony Davies, Professor and Head of the Department of English, University of Birmingham and author of Humanism; Lisa Jardine, Professor of Renaissance Studies, Queen Mary College, University of London and Honorary Fellow of Kings College Cambridge; Simon Goldhill, Reader in Greek Literature and Culture at Kings College Cambridge.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, Marcus Tullius Cicero, was born in 106 BC. He was a lawyer, a politician, a Roman philosopher, and the founding father of humanism. His academy, the Studia Humanitas, taught the art of living well and blessedly through learning and instruction in the fine arts. Centures later, Cicero's teaching had been metamorphosed into a classical humanism, a faith in what could be called the soft arts of the Greek world. But how did Cicero's ideas become Renaissance ideals,

and how did a small Greek curriculum later become a world philosophy? And why does some contemporary thinkers think that the humanist tradition is responsible for elitism, sexism, and even Nazism? Win me to discuss humanism as a professor of literature, an intellectual historian and a classicist. Tony Davis is head of the Department of English at the University of Birmingham.

He's a Jardinist Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary University of London, and the classicist Simon Goldhill is reader in Greek literature and culture at King's College, Cambridge. Tony Davis, Cicero's Academy of the Studio Humanitas, called out for a complete system of education focusing heavily on personal development. Now, what were the Roman values that Cicero was reacting against? Two things, I think, one can say he was reacting against. One was a tradition of Roman philistinism and pragmatism. Although Cicero's adaptation of Greek ideas is in part a translation of them into a more pragmatic and Roman register

than they had in their Greek originals. So that's the first thing. And the second thing he's reacting against is what he regarded as a superstitious tradition of popular religion. Olympian deities worshipped in small shrines and local cults and that kind of thing. He wants to replace that with something more philosophically rigorous and coherent. Simon Goldhill, can you spell it out? What was the curriculum at this academy, as you might call it? Well, Cicero appears at a remarkable cusp in Roman history.

And he's reacting against the values of macho-Romaness by absorbing really Greek material. And the curriculum would be an idea of learning poetry as a starting point, even gymnastics and physical training. But above all, it was a curriculum that ended up in philosophy. The most important thing was that you learnt to train yourself, to care for yourself. And that meant a rigorous programme of looking inwards at yourself and through philosophy studying how to be a better person to be happy with yourself.

What's remarkable about that was that it was in Latin. For 200 years, we'd had this in Greek, and Cicero, of course, went to Athens in order to study philosophy. And he was the first really to come back and try and turn it into something else, turn it into something that these pragmatic Romans could use. And that's what makes it so remarkable that it was successful is even more remarkable that an elite culture became, in the views of the traditional Romans,

corrupted by Greek, in views of the new Romans, civilised by Greek values. When we're talking elite, we are talking very much elite. We're not only talking about Greeks, and Romans, we're not talking even about any other neighbouring nations. It's very, very small. When we're talking about teaching, though, are we talking about the teaching that we could understand today,

a master and pupils, or mistress and pupils, and that sort of thing? Well, no, master and pupil, let's stick to it, yeah. Mainly master and pupils, it's very much gender-based. It was much harder for any females ever in Western world to get education than for men. But it was the case that Cicero was what they called a new man, so he wasn't from the upper elite, but nonetheless he was right at the centre of Roman power.

He became a consul. He was central to the political processes of the state. But every single elite Roman was expected to get some sort of education. And so you would have schooling in the normal sense that we could recognize. You could learn poetry in the way that we would learn poetry all the way through in the modern world. But the very elite went to philosophy school, and that's only a few people indeed. So we're talking about a man going to Athens, coming back with the philosophy, obviously they knew a great deal about Greeks, but he specifically is going back,

and changing the way that the Roman... intelligentsia, leadership, or both thought about themselves, which? Both. There's really, he was part of the leadership and he was part of the intelligentsia. So we're talking about ideas through one man changing away one of the great empires of the world thought about itself. Absolutely. And it works not only through the great speeches that he makes or the philosophical tracts,

but also the fact that he published a whole series of letters very soon after they were written in a way that gave. people the sense they had access to the inner circle. And that becomes a terribly important idea that we can, through reading, become part of this clique, part of this insider group. Lisa Jardin, would you

like to take up what Simon and Tony have been talking about? Well, what I think we should first of all focus on is that this does all begin with education. You change the world by educating people beyond the small circle. It's the trickle-down effect. So that indeed, Cicero

provides what end up or very swiftly become teaching texts for a whole generation, that generation then disseminates it into what became the great empire, as Tony said. This is about the thrust of an imperial education system so that by the time we get into the early decades of the Christian era, St Augustine in Hippo is getting a full and rounded Ciceroonian classical education. But let's stick with Cicero first. Before we move on, and there's a great deal to talk about, let's get this platform.

What Hellenistic ideas is he bringing in that we can briefly enumerate now so that people have got a grip on them? I think that the one that will help us as we go on is this one of a philosophical spiritualism. That is that instead of absorbing your religion as dogma in terms of precepts, texts which you're given a definitive interpretation of by priests and religious leaders, which is part of the Olympian, part of the old Roman approach.

What you get is, remember, Cicero is teaching philosophy through language. So this is about texts that teach the use, the study of language, the richness of eloquence. What that gives the individual is the capacity to respond to ideas in his, and it would be mostly his own terms. Now, you immediately have the possibility of philosophy. This is no longer dogma. The individual interacts with his teacher, and together, through the use of eloquence,

they develop their own spiritual ideals. But as I understand it, highly as Cicero regarded philosophy, he regarded politics even more highly, Tony Davis. And so he was putting this to the service of politics, and as Simon has observed, he was a political player in a big way.

He was a player to such an extent he got himself murdered, which you can't be a bigger player than that in that particular thing. So can you, I'm intrigued to know how these ideas that come in, of course they come in trickling, we know it wasn't Cicero, did it alone. But nevertheless, he brought them in, infatting, how they affected the thinking of what was going on and how they changed the way the Republic was thinking about itself. One of the things that Cicero had to do was actually, literally, to translate Greek texts into an idiom which was understandable and interesting to his Roman contemporaries.

and to do that he had to invent or reinvent certain terms and one of those of course is the very word humanitarian itself Roman philologists later quite a well-known amateur philologist called Aldous Gellius pointed out that the word humanitas was capable of all sorts of popular misunderstandings and he wanted to insist that it had a narrowly curricular application it just meant the study of what we still call the humanities instead of that wider sense of fellow feeling

what the Greeks called philanthropia. Now, there is no Greek word to correspond to Humanitas. There wasn't an ancient Greek, and there isn't in modern Greek. In fact, when modern Greeks talk about humanism, they use the word, humanismos. They have to actually use the Latin word. So one of the first things that Cicero did was actually to, as it were, coin or define a key term for this curriculum and educational enterprise. The second thing that he did was taking a philosophical tradition

which had large elements, if not of mysticism, at least of a kind of transcendent. Centralism, particularly Platonic philosophy, and to translate it into an ethical and political philosophy. I suppose all Cicero's text circulated widely through the imperial period and later, but the one that probably had the most lasting influence is a work of ethical and political philosophy called Deofficies, which means concerning public responsibilities,

concerning your responsibilities as a human being and a citizen. Can you give us some example, then Simon Golding, what is saying in that particular paper? What's particularly important is that he develops this philosophy of stoicism. And it's a way not only of public duty, but of dealing with power in the public sphere. We start from this small group of intellectuals in a private circle learning philosophy, and then it gets taken into the public world. And particularly once we have an emperor, once we have this supreme power in the empire,

you have to learn how to deal with that. And stoicism developed through this sense of public duty was the model for doing it. The image that everybody has of the noble Roman falling on his sword is explicitly an idea that comes out of sturicism, that when your life is unbearable, you should take your life. And you have to learn to deal with this idea of supreme power now through a philosophically trained inwardness. And that's the way in which seems to me

that the philosophical learning comes into the political system. Lisa Jarlane, how comfortably did Cicero, as what's coming from what Tony Davis and Simon are saying, more human-centered, ethical nature, idea of the nature of man. How did that sit with the religion at the time? It's the inwardness that is at odds with the exterior ceremonies. Basically, rituals are replaced by introspection. And I think that that would be, for me, that would be the move,

which is then going to be paralleled in the 15th century. So there's a move whereby the external ceremonies of religion, the power relation between the clergy and the laity is replaced by this introspective one and the stoic element in that where you actually have to come to terms within yourself rather than pleasing some external master. Before we go 1,400 years on to the Renaissance

in this race through humanism, can we just pause for a second with you, on Augustine? You mentioned Augustine earlier. and the way Augustine took on the classical humanism in his youth, young manhood as an education, and then was, as it were, overturned by St. Paul's anti-humanism. And that's the beginning of one of the great conflicts, isn't it? So could we develop that a bit?

It is the beginning. I mean, you will find, although we're so genial around this table, we will have differences of opinion. And I think that Augustine is trained in this Ciceronian tradition. He is fully educated within this stoic, rich and actually Latin lyrical tradition, the way Augustine writes. Horace and Virgil are part of the way in which he writes. He does issue that, he does reject that and turn to Christianity. That's the great moment in his life.

Now, he does, however, produce a Christianity that is modulated very, very strongly by that tradition. And when you get to the Renaissance, that will become absolutely critical. that Lusa, in fact, and Erasmus, recognize, they're both Augustinians, they're both trained in that tradition. So although there will be those of us around the table who want to say that there's a tension, there may be a tension,

but I definitely see that it's a productive and enriching tension. And to be brutally frank, Anglican Christianity has the richness that it has alongside some other Christianity's, precisely because it never rejected that rich Ciceronian tradition. Do you like a comment on that, Tammy? I would only add one thing to that,

that there are three big cheeses in the early church. Augustine is certainly one. His contemporary Jerome is another. And Jerome, I think, expresses the dilemma in a rather starker form. Augustine produces an extraordinarily productive and rich fusion of Ciceronian and Pauline ideas. Jerome, listeners may know, had a famous dream, or he said to have had a famous dream in which he was hauled in front of the throne of the Almighty.

Wipped to the gates of the God. Yes, that's right, and asked whether he was a Ciceronian or a Christian. That expresses the dilemma in the clear as possible. They had drooge in those days. That puts it pretty starkly. And, of course, on the answer to that question swings the even more awful question, are you saved or are you damned? The third big cheese, by the way, is who I'd like to put in a plug for here,

and it's about time he was reinstated, is Pelagius. not just plugging him because he was Welsh or possibly Irish. His real name was Morgan. But because Pelagius actually developed a different relationship to Roman ideas, which did not involve the ascetic repudiation of human pleasure and of the materiality of the body of the sort that you find in the writings of Jerome. We could stick with Erasmus for that. You want to put a postscript of this, then I'm going to move on, Simon.

Certainly it's about Jerome and the tension. It's very important to remember that Jerome is again working when Christianity is in charge of the empire. and a very good image for that is not just his dream of being whipped, but also when he goes to the desert. You're meant to go to the desert, if you're Christian. You're meant to be an ascetic. You're meant to suffer.

The Antenite tradition. The Antenai tradition. When Jerome goes to the desert, he takes his library and some secretors with him. It's more like an academic on a sabbatical. That's kind of a wonderful. This isn't so much the asceticism of the flesh anymore. And he becomes a great model of how to be an academician. Christian picking up on the classical tradition

going straight into Erasmus. He was Erasmus's main man. We can't hold the Renaissance back any longer. Otherwise, Lisa is going to blow up. Now, in what sense could you say that humanism was at the centre of the Renaissance, talking broadly, and we are talking broadly, in the 14th century? Humanism was, in effect, the motor of the Renaissance. In what sense was it and who were its drivers?

Well, the beauty for this discussion is that what happens in the 14th and 15th century is a repeat performance of what happened in antiquity, that you have a very strongly authoritarian church, you have a church that's descended into rituals and the power of the priesthood, you have an embargo on interpreting scripture, you have the sacred texts very much in the sense of that they are given, that you have to simply take on trust. And then a group of teachers, a group of educators in Italy, designate themselves as the teachers of the Studia Humanitatis, they make the claim that the education based on Ciceronian texts

on Virgil and Horace out of the Greek tradition will make a more civilized man, and by this time a few women, and they then market that to the elite. They market it to the princes, and they say not only will this produce richly thoughtful individuals, but there'll be fantastic secretaries, they'll be terrific orators, they'll promote your politics worldwide,

and they'll be awfully obedient because this is an education which makes people collaborate and work in friendship together. My own professional interest in this is of course in the circulation of those ideas in England, in the British Isles. And there again you can see, I think,

something not unlike the process of translation that happens when Cicero first takes over Greek ideas because the Italian humanism, which has a civic dimension to it, but also increasingly a mystical and allegorical dimension to it, a more speculatively philosophical and platonic register, when it moves into northern Europe and into the low countries and into England

and to some extent also into Scotland, then it takes on something of a more role. Roman character. And I think there you do see the development of an active civic humanism, that education of princes, which will then disseminate itself more widely, to a literate population, and will produce a sense of belonging to a common, not only to a common humanity, but very importantly, of course, in Northern Europe, to a common nationhood. Can I come to your sound gulf? Because one of the fascinating things preparing for this programme, I went back to my own note, so from university and stuff, but

when Erasmus translated the Bible, Jerome said in the beginning was that, you You might think there's a small thing. If it is, forget it, don't answer it, answer something else. But Jerome said, in the beginning was the word, and Erasmus said, in the beginning was the conversation. I'd forgotten that. That's astonishing. It was a moment that absolutely revolutionized Europe. For hundreds and hundreds of years, we'd read the so-called Jerome authentic version, or authorized version, which begins in particular era at Werbum. Now, the Greek is Logos for that, and it certainly doesn't mean word. I mean, nobody who knows any Greek would ever translate that as a word. So why did it in the first place?

Why did, why was it translating a verbal? It was a way of giving a particular spirituality and trying to give a particular thrust to that term. When Erasmus went back to the Greek, he thought this is a bad translation, and so he did translate it. In the beginning was the conversation. And all hell broke this.

There were riots against it, there were people speaking against him in public sermons, and the threat was that this was going to bring down the church. because you could know an innocent I simply did I mean the Pope called in Erasmus didn't he after Luther and said you set him off you'd go and sort him out He said it in a different way probably in Latin

And what's most remarkable is that the Council of Trent The Catholic Church actually declared the Jerome version to be authentic Not a good translation, not a valid translation, but authentic As if we had to keep with the old mistake Rather than allow the new voice But and we do have to remember That you're still reading this text in Latin

you had to have been given the tools to read that first sentence. And really that is the point. I mean, it's not that you're given an alternative text. You've been given by the humanist education the tools to actually approach that text yourself and to engage in conversation with Erasmus on the text, as it were. And you know, Erasmus never went back on that. So that although Erasmus and more remained within the Catholic Church, and although by the middle of the 16th century the Catholic Church had, as Simon said, repudiated that trache.

translation. We have to see that, which is, after all, an erudite, humanistic tradition in language and eloquence, driving the Reformation through and driving us through to where we are now. Can I move on to Borkhart with the civilization of a renaissance in Italy? Sorry about that, never mind. And the emphasis, as I understand it, he put on humanism at the center of the Renaissance. What was the effect of that history on our appreciation of humanism in the Renaissance? and I appreciate for humanism since. Can you place that time? We constantly need to reinvent tradition.

And the German imagination became obsessed with Hellenism, obsessed with Greekness. And Burkart was a central figure in inventing what became the idealism that led from the 19th century into the 20th century, where I know Lisa and Tony want to go at this point. And it was a way for the... German people as they were constructing a narrative of their own nation to invent an idealism of the past and discovering it in Greek. What was extraordinary was that the Germans were prepared to call themselves the new Dorians,

finding their own origins in a Greek race of thousands of years previously, and to start to construct their education along Greek lines, and to put Greek as the centre of their own educational system. Hitler said Greeks were Germans, didn't he? He certainly wanted to. He did, yes. A worrying thought. He's about Burkhart. Simon's been looking from Burkhardt to this century.

Of course he was writing about the Renaissance. So can you just touch on his view of the Renaissance first? Every historian writes about their own day as well as the past, but they do also write about the past. Well, we do actually see the Renaissance through Berkart, so it is important to recognise that. In the third quarter of the 19th century when Burkhart was writing, he looked back to the Renaissance,

and instead of seeing the Renaissance as a reinvention of antiquity, he thought of it as the beginning of modernity, and he thought of, therefore, he looked to that Hellenistic, the idealistic, the richness of aesthetic culture, the quintessential Europeanness of it, as he saw, as being the founding set of ideas for our own modernity. And we all still do that. We all look at Florentine paintings,

and we see our own faces in them. That's Burckhardt going back to the Roman tradition, whereas I think the Florentines saw themselves as emulating the art of antiquity and saw themselves as finding their inner selves in an aesthetic domain that came out of antiquity. Burckhart saw it as giving the late 19th century its sense of itself. Tony Davis, in your book you quote,

the modern anti-humanist Hume, who said to an audience in 1914, quote, world. After Copernicus, he was. You get a change from a certain profundity and intensity to that flat and insipid optimism. Can you comment briefly on that, please? Why was he so opposed to the humanist project? Hume had his own agenda, and we don't have time to go into that. It's a kind of quasi-religious or perhaps not so quasi-religious agenda. But that turn against humanism is very characteristic of that moment of the first 10, 15 years of the 20th century. One finds it not only in Hume, but in better-known figures and friends of Hume like T.S. Eliot.

and Elliot's friend Pound, it's in part a kind of spasmodic revulsion against what they thought humanism had become in the later 19th century, which was a particularly complacent kind of bourgeois self-satisfaction, along with a new narrative of modernity, as it were, a narrative of modernity which, appropriating Borkhart's notion of the Renaissance as the cradle of the modern, sees humanity really meaning of course largely northern European middle-class male humanity striding purposefully towards the present from this decisive moment

when as Burkhart put it the individual was invented. Much of this centres on the notion of the sovereignty of an individual human being. For all sorts of complicated reasons, some historical, some personal, some aesthetic and so on, there is a turn against that in the early years of the 20th century. I turn against the notion of the individual personality, a turn against forms of writing in which that personality is represented, in realist fiction, for example, and a turn against the whole increasingly complacent,

but also incoherent public culture which derives from those ideas. Simon Goldhill, do you see this anti-humanism as significant or a blip? Well, it's certainly significant, and the move against the idea of the human as something that's self-evident that we can just talk about the individual man, always man, at the centre. But what's fascinating about Elliot is he still says, you must learn Greek and Latin if you want England to be a Christian country. And he's still obsessed with the tradition that goes all the way back.

And he, after all, is the great reader of the earlier texts of Greek and Latin and wants to bring those into modernity too. So while it's both a blip and a continuity. Finally, Simon Goldh, as I understand it, the postmodern critique of humanism, accuses it of being the intellectual roots of elitism. Some even say Nazism. Is that too big a leap?

Well, it's a very grand story, but it's undoubtedly the case that the German Nazism emerged out of a culture that made an obsession of Greek and an obsession of the teaching of those ideas. So how did he get there from... We started with Cicero, you said poetry and philosophy was the center of it,

and then we make the leap to Nazism. Can you give us a clue? It's to do with the idea of race and nation, the idea that when you discover your past to be in an ideal place, which is this fantasy of Greece, how do you then get rid of all the things that threaten the fantasy? If you're going to have a pure Teutonic race, then which is going to be derived from a pure Greek race, you have to exclude. And who do you exclude? Well, you exclude what they call the mixed race. And that's how we find we move from what appears to be a, appears to be a,

lovely ideal of humanism of the chaps together into a violent exclusionary aggression towards the other. Nizu, would you like to come in? And where the barbarian is explicitly the Semitic peoples. I'm afraid that's where you come to from this whole tradition. Tony? I just want to add one thing to that, and I'd agree with everything that's just been said, and share the general discomfort that we all ought to feel, if we do acknowledge that to be the case. If we continue to believe that the idea has some value, then we have to live with and confront

and take a certain responsibility for what it has produced, particularly in the 20th century, the forms of unprecedented atrocity and appalling kinds of intellectual error and violence. But it still remains the case, in my view, that if we want to get beyond that, if we want to get beyond the parochialism, beyond the racism, beyond the narrowness of traditional humanisms, we don't have anything else to stand on

in order to look over those walls than some form of humanism. itself. But just to come back to a basic thing that interested me and is interested me all the time in these discussions, Lisa. Are you absolutely convinced that it is the ideas that move people to do these things?

Or it's just that the ideas are convenient for people in a power process anyway to link onto? No, it's the ideas. And it is that. I'm absolutely convinced. Why else would I be in teaching? Well, there's all sorts of reasons. I mean, one challenging your person.

It's an interesting... The idea is dry. Sometimes it seems so elasticated humanism, even in this fairly brief discussion, you think, well, do you ever think about that? I think it is the ideas, but it's the way the ideas become embodied. It's the fact that ideas are what make you a person or a human.

That's what humanism must be. That's why it's crucial, and why it has to be political and self-critical. And if you want the final moment, one must always remember what Marx's PhD was on. on Greek philosophy. Sir, well, we've gone from Cicero. Cicero to Marx by way of Burkharty, it doesn't...

I don't know, there you go. I enjoyed it. Thank you very much, Mr. Tony Davis, Lisa Jadin and Simon Goldhill. And next week, what we're going to talk about next week? The Restoration. Thanks for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy

at BBC.com.com.com. Thank you.