Humanitas - Humanitas During The French Enlightenment

Humanitas During The French Enlightenment

According to historian Peter Gay, the eighteenth-century French philosophes of the Enlightenment found Cicero's eclectic, Stoic-tinged paganism congenial:

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 summo 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.