Humanitas

Humanitas is a Latin noun meaning human nature, civilization, and kindness.Haec studia adolescentiam alunt, senectutem oblectant, secundas res ornant, adversis perfugium ac solacium praebent, delectant domi, non impediunt foris, pernoctant nobiscum, peregrinantur, rusticantur. (Translation: 'These studies sustain youth and entertain old age, they enhance prosperity, and offer a refuge and solace in adversity; they delight us when we are at home without hindering us in the wider world, and are with us at night, when we travel and when we visit the countryside').The ideal of humanitas was first brought to Rome by the philosophic circle around Scipio and further developed by Cicero. For Cicero, humanitas was a style of thought, not a formal doctrine. It asserted man’s importance as a cultivated being, in control of his moral universe. The man who practiced humanitas was confident of his worth, courteous to others, decent in his social conduct, and active in his political role. He was a man, moreover, who faced life with courageous skepticism: he knows that the consolations of popular religion are for more credulous beings than himself, that life is uncertain, and that sturdy pessimism is superior to self-deceptive optimism. Man becomes man as he refines himself; he even becomes godlike: “Deus est mortali iuvare mortalem,” wrote Pliny, translating a Greek Stoic, “To help man is man’s true God.” Finally, the man who practiced humanitas cultivated his aesthetic sensibilities as he listened to his reason: 'Cum musis,” wrote Cicero, “id est, cum humanitate et doctrina habere commercium'. Virtue, Cicero insisted, is nothing but nature perfected and developed to its highest point, and there is therefore a resemblance between man and God: 'Est autem virtus nihil aliud quam in se perfecta et ad summum perducta natura; est igitur homini cum deo similitudio'.Cicero’s humanitas . . . reappeared in the first century in Seneca’s claim – made in the midst of a lament over Roman bestiality – that man is a sacred thing to man: “homo res sacra homini”; and reappeared once more in the eighteenth century in Kant’s call for human autonomy and in Voltaire’s stern injunction: “Remember your dignity as a man.” In the beginning of his Meditations, the Emperor Marcus Aurelius elaborated a veritable catalog of qualities which, all together, made up the virtues which Cicero had called humanitas and which the philosophes hoped they possessed in good measure: modesty, self-control, manliness, beneficence, practicality, generosity, rationality, tolerance, and obedience to the dictates of nature.Herder's Humanität is a broad concept he defines variously as the gradual fulfillment of best human potential, the achievement of reason and fairness in all classes and in all affairs of men, and the joint product of the creative actions of legislators, poets, artists, philosophers, inventors, and educators through the ages.each age and every people embody ideals and capacities peculiar to themselves, thus allowing a fuller and more complete expression of the multiform potentialities of humankind than could otherwise occur. Herder expressly denied that one people or civilization was better than another. They were just different, in the same way that the German language was different from the French....l’essenza della humanitas romana sta propriamente nell’essere l’altra faccia di un insieme ordinato di valori molto precisi e severi, che facevano parte del codice di comportamento del cittadino romano fin dalle origini, e sono pressoché intraducibili in greco: la pietas (che è qualcosa di diverso dalla eusébeia), mores (che non coincidono esattamente con l’ethos), e poi la dignitas, la gravitas, l’integritas, e così via. L’idea di humanitas riassumeva in sé tuttiquesti valori . . . ma nello stesso tempo li sfumava, li rendeva meno rigidi e più universali. ...the essence of Roman humanitas is that it constitutes one of the aspects of an orderly complex of very distinct and severe values that had been part of the code of conduct of a Roman citizen from the outset and are virtually untranslatable in Greek: pietas (which is different from eusébeia), mores (which do not coincide exactly with ethos), and dignitas, gravitas, integritas, and so on. The idea of humanitas subsumed all these values ... simultaneously blurring their outlines, rendering them less rigid and more universal.Early Italian humanism, which in many respects continued the grammatical and rhetorical traditions of the Middle Ages, not merely provided the old Trivium with a new and more ambitious name (Studia humanitatis), but also increased its actual scope, content, and significance in the curriculum of the schools and universities and in its own extensive literary production. The studia humanitatis excluded logic, but they added to the traditional grammar and rhetoric not only history, Greek, and moral philosophy, but also made poetry, once a sequel of grammar and rhetoric, the most important member of the whole group. —Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought II: Papers on Humanism and the Arts (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965), p. 178.If it is true that Italian humanists had no expression closer to ‘classical scholarship’ than studia humanitatis, the Pro Archia provided classical scholarship in the Renaissance with its charter of foundation. In Petrarch’s attention to Pro Archia eight elements can be distinguished:See Michael D. Reeve, 'Classical Scholarship' in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, Jill Kraye, editor (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 21–22.Call Archimedes from his buried tombUpon the plain of vanished Syracuse,And feelingly the Sage shall make reportHow insecure, how baseless in itself,Is the Philosophy, whose sway dependsOn mere material instruments;—how weakThose arts, and high inventions, if unproppedBy virtue.—He, sighing with pensive grief,Amid his calm abstractions, would admitThat not the slender privilege is theirsTo save themselves from blank forgetfulness! —William Wordsworth (1770-1850), The Excursion (Book Eighth: 'The Parsonage', lines 220-230) Humanitas is a Latin noun meaning human nature, civilization, and kindness. The Latin word humanitas corresponded to the Greek concepts of philanthrôpía (loving what makes us human) and paideia (education) which were amalgamated with a series of qualities that made up the traditional unwritten Roman code of conduct (mos maiorum). Cicero (106–43 BC) used humanitas in describing the formation of an ideal speaker (orator) who he believed should be educated to possess a collection of virtues of character suitable both for an active life of public service and a decent and fulfilling private life; these would include a fund of learning acquired from the study of bonae litterae ('good letters', i.e., classical literature, especially poetry), which would also be a source of continuing cultivation and pleasure in leisure and retirement, youth and old age, and good and bad fortune. Insofar as humanitas corresponded to philanthrôpía and paideia, it was particularly applicable to guiding the proper exercise of power over others. Hence Cicero's advice to his brother that 'if fate had given you authority over Africans or Spaniards or Gauls, wild and barbarous nations, you would still owe it to your humanitas to be concerned about their comforts, their needs, and their safety.' Echoing Cicero over a century later, Pliny the Younger (61-112 A.D.) defined humanitas as the capacity to win the affections of lesser folk without impinging on greater (Ep. IX, 5). The concept was of great importance during the re-discovery of Classical Antiquity during the age of the Renaissance by the Italian umanisti, beginning with the illustrious Italian poet Petrarch, who revived Cicero's injunction to cultivate the humanities, understood during the Renaissance as grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy. In 1333, in Liège, Belgium, Petrarch had found and copied out in his own hand a manuscript of Cicero's speech, Pro Archia, which contained a famous passage in defense of poetry and litterae (letters): Petrarch liked this quotation and referred to it often, and where Cicero used the phrase 'litterarum lumen', 'the light of literature', Petrarch in the margin wrote lumen litterarum alongside and drew a sketch of a lamp or candle. The Liège manuscript is lost and so is Petrarch's copy, but Petrarch's copy 'can be shown to be behind all but one of the later manuscripts' and preserve Petrarch's marginal annotations. Petrarch, in many respects a Medieval man, regretted that Cicero had not been a Christian and believed that he certainly would have been one had he not died before the birth of Jesus. To Petrarch and the Renaissance umanisti who immediately followed him, Cicero's humanitas was not seen as in conflict with Christianity or a Christian education. In this they followed the fifth century Church fathers such as Jerome and Augustine, who taught that Greek and Roman learning and literature were gifts of God and models of excellence, provided, of course, they were filtered and purified in order to serve Christianity. According to historian Peter Gay, the eighteenth-century French philosophes of the Enlightenment found Cicero's eclectic, Stoic-tinged paganism congenial: During the Aufklärung (or German version of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment), the term 'Humanität' was used to designate the intellectual, physical, and moral formation of 'a better human being' (or Humanism). It was used, for example, by theologian Johann Gottfried Herder in his Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität (Letters for the Advancement of Humanity), 1792, and by Friedrich Schiller, among others.