“Humanism begins with humanitas — Latin humanitas meant the quality of being human: education, culture, and the civilizing graces that distinguished the humane from the merely human.”
Latin humanitas derived from humanus (human, of humans), from homo (human being). Humanitas was not just human nature but the developed, cultivated human nature: the education, refinement, and social graces that Roman culture associated with the fully developed person. Cicero used humanitas extensively for the combination of learning, courtesy, and moral development that the educated Roman sought. It was, in part, what the Greek paideia was.
The Renaissance umanisti — the Italian scholars of the 14th and 15th centuries who devoted themselves to the studia humanitatis (grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy) — gave humanism its modern associations. Petrarch, Boccaccio, and their successors looked to classical Greece and Rome for models of human excellence. The humanist program was an educational reform, a reorientation toward the human world and its texts.
The Protestant Reformation absorbed and transformed Renaissance humanism. Erasmus of Rotterdam, whose Greek New Testament (1516) was a humanist philological achievement, tried to maintain a humanist Christianity. But the Reformation also produced secular directions in humanism: as European culture became less theologically unified, humanism increasingly described a orientation toward human welfare and achievement that did not require theological grounding.
Modern secular humanism — the philosophical position that human beings can lead ethical and meaningful lives without religion — developed in the 19th and 20th centuries. The Humanist Manifestos (1933, 1973, 2003) codified a non-theistic ethical philosophy centered on human dignity and reason. The Latin civilizing quality has become a philosophical position in the culture wars.
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Humanism now lives in a cultural battle it did not choose. As a Renaissance educational program it was uncontroversial; as a modern secular philosophy it is contested. Religious traditions often view secular humanism as a competitor worldview; secular humanists often see themselves as asserting human dignity against dogmatic authority.
The Latin humanitas was, at root, an educational ideal: a person more fully developed as a person through learning and culture. The argument about whether that development requires theological grounding or not was not Cicero's concern. His humanitas assumed the gods as backdrop but focused on the human foreground.
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