Humanism is yet another word that was invented in the 19th century but it derives from a historical group of people in the Renaissance who studied the humanities.
Modern historians have piled all sorts of concepts on top of humanism and almost succeeded in turning a helpful term into a useless abstraction. Even more recently, non-believers have further muddied the waters by hijacking the word ‘humanist’ to mean a softer version of ‘atheist’.
A 15th- or 16th-century humanist was simply someone who was interested in classical Greek and Latin literature. They felt that medieval Latin was an ugly and barbaric tongue best replaced by the pure Latin of the ancients. Their paragon was the Roman orator Cicero (106-43 BC) whose language they believed to be the most cultured and stylish. In fact, by insisting on maintaining Latin in its fossilised classical form, the humanists went a long way towards killing it as a living language.
Medieval Latin was untidy precisely because it was a spoken language that could be adapted to new situations as they arose. No one had ever spoken formal Latin as Cicero wrote it. In seeking to turn back the clock, humanists thought they were at the cutting edge of innovation but they were really incorrigible reactionaries.
Humanists almost managed to destroy 300 years of progress in natural philosophy
Some humanists were so convinced that nothing good could have come out of the early Middle Ages that they mistook ninth century manuscripts in Caroline minuscule for genuine classical artifacts. These products of the reign of Charlemagne often represent the earliest extant copies of Latin literature. It never occurred to Renaissance humanists that there might have been any interest in preserving them during the so-called Dark Ages.
Renaissance humanists’ obsession with the classics led them to search out the lost works of the ancients. They scoured dusty monastic libraries for forgotten books and sent travellers to the remnants of the Byzantine Empire to bring back Greek manuscripts.
The trouble was they also cleared away the vast bulk of medieval commentaries that had expanded on the criticised Aristotle’s thought. They did not accept that medieval writers had made great advances. As far as humanists were concerned, medieval thinkers were far too recent to have produced anything worthwhile. Scholasticism was undeserving of their attention and so they dumped it. The effect was rapid and almost disastrous for natural philosophy.
In combination with printing, humanism had one other damaging effect. As printed books replaced manuscripts, the old tomes became waste paper. Combined with the changes in taste and the lack of interest in medieval writing, this meant that entire libraries could disappear.
Sometime between 1535 and 1558, Oxford University contrived to lose every single manuscript in its collection and even sold off the bookcases. Merton College, home of the Calculators, threw out three quarters of its ancient library, as many as 900 manuscripts, in the same period. These were not burned because they were made of valuable vellum. Instead, the college handed them over to bookbinders who cut them up and used them to make covers for newly-purchased printed books.
Today, it is still commonplace to find the beautiful calligraphy of a medieval manuscript glued into the covers of a 16th-century printed book.
In traditional histories, the rise of humanism is usually portrayed as “a good thing”. But the truth is that the humanists almost managed to destroy 300 years of progress in natural philosophy. By discarding the advances made by medieval scholars together with so many of the manuscripts that contained them, they could have set back the advance of science by centuries. Einstein might have had to do the work of Newton.
There was nothing that humanists enjoyed more than a good squabble. They accused each other not of heresy but of scholarly incompetence, which was much worse. Valuable patronage was at stake and if a humanist could not gain a position at court, he could at least besmirch the reputation of those who had.
One of the most fearsome debates took place between George of Trebizond (1395-1486) and Basil Bessarion (1403-1472) over the question of whether Plato or Aristotle represented the peak of Greek philosophy.
George Ebejer is a retired teacher.