Adam and Eve by Albrecht Dürer, 1504

ACROSS the world today, there are 80 countries where stating you are a humanist can have very bad consequences.

A shining light against the darkness of superstition and blind faith, humanism uses rational thought to consider what our roles are in life – and has always come up against dogmas with interests to protect.

“Many modern humanists are people who prefer to live without religious beliefs and to make their moral choices based on empathy, reason and a sense of responsibility to other living creatures,” author of a new history of humanist thought, Sarah Bakewell, writes as way of a potted description.

Yet the question, what is humanism? is not easily answered, and there are many correct responses.

What Sarah has done brilliantly is bring together a family tree of free thinkers ranging across seven centuries, shown what they had in common and what their differences were, and how they were shaped by the times they lived through.

Sarah, a former archivist at the Wellcome Collection in Euston, previously wrote a biography of Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, the nobleman who lived in France in the 1500s. In How to Live: A Life of Montaigne, she showed how this question – how to live – obsessed the Renaissance nobleman. He poured his quest for answers into essays that had an approach no man of letters had previously thought of. Musings on everything from his supper to why his dog’s ears twitched while he was sleeping, nothing was out of bounds for the ever-curious Montaigne.

Montaigne has been variously described as a Stoic – interested in the ancient Greek way of life as proposed by the likes of Zeno, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius – and a humanist. It was the links between a man of the 15th century to those who came before him – and those who followed – that piqued Sarah’s interest.

“Montaigne was a humanist in a literary sense as well as a personal sense,” she says.

“I was interested to see where he fitted in a humanist tradition.”

Portrait of Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

Sarah looks at disparate figures. The Italian Petrarch, who in the 1300s sought out ancient scripts to learn from, is linked to John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham five centuries later. The Enlightenment is well represented, with Tom Paine’s ideology explained: he summed up his humanism as “I believe in the equality of man, and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavouring to make our fellow creatures happy.”

“All those included share themes that can be considered as humanist. I wanted to explore those connections,” she adds.

A patron of Humanists UK, Sarah’s work leads to age-old questions that humanism has considered.
Starting in the 14th century and ending in the present, Sarah knits together thinking from different times.

“Some are far apart,” she says. “But the unifying principle for them is this: they put the human realm – cultural, behaviour, literary, morality, ethics at the centre of their interests, even if they were religious.

“They pushed theology to one side. It just wasn’t central to their concerns. For example, Montaigne said ‘I write about human things. I subscribe to the church’ – a wise move, considering the powers of the Pope – but I am interested in writing about humanity.”

Sarah shows how each one of the humanists have both rational critiques of the natural world around them and a code of behaviour a rational creature should understand it is in their interests to follow.

Sarah describes it as “a morality based on civic and social values.

“A lot of them write about the fellow feeling that comes naturally to us – our empathy, making that the foundation of human connection, and with the rest of the living world.”

Sarah starts the story in the 14th century – a time of intellectual rediscoveries.

“Petrarch, and those who came after, saw themselves as bringing a light in to the world,” she says.

“Petrarch spoke of the ‘dark ages’ – it’s not how historians talk about the period today, but it was their self-definition.”

Scholars had begun to scour abbeys and libraries, finding deep in the archives writings by ancient Greeks and Romans. They copied the works and began to spread new ways of thinking about the meaning of life.

“They were going back to classical works, reading Cicero, Seneca and Virgil, and it was used as a basis of a new moral sense and a new way of thinking,” Sarah states.

“They by-passed a lot of Christian sources, but they were passionate about the classical texts. That is what makes it interesting. It was a rebirth – the Renaissance.”

At the heart of humanism is the idea that our natural rationality means we can see the difference between right and wrong, and try to act with that in mind. But as Sarah’s book reveals, for all our scientific advances, we live in an age of deeply ingrained theocracies that hold sway over millions of people’s daily lives.

Sarah Bakewell

“There is not a progressive journey to some place of Utopian enlightenment,” says Sarah. “And it is fair to ask who could have an optimistic world view today?

“I am writing about a historical background and telling the European story of humanism, but I was conscious of the fact that today, in 80 countries, being a humanist or an atheist has very bad consequences, ranging from legal problems to the potential death penalty in 14 countries for blasphemy. Humanism is, and always will be, a work in progress. We have not reached the sunlit uplands and never will – and accepting this is part of being a humanist.”

But there is also great comfort to be found in humanism, and an acceptance and enjoyment of what it means to be a human being. Key facets of those Sarah quotes – from Paine to Voltaire, Descartes to Erasmus, is to find beauty in the natural world, to take stock using our reason, and appreciate the wonder of what it means to be alive.

Humanism is an unavoidable thought process that every generation reconsiders, she adds.

“It has a long history and will always go on,” she says. “We will never stop wondering about ourselves, asking ourselves ethical questions, wondering what life is about, what we should do, how we should live, considering who we are and how we can be. These questions hinge on us asking ourselves what it means to be human.”

• Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Enquiry and Hope. By Sarah Bakewell. Chatto & Windus, £22