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The World Is Too Much With Us by William Wordsworth : The Poetry Foundation

Heroes of Humanism: Seneca (d. 65 CE)

Of all men they alone are at leisure who take time for wisdom, they alone are alive. For they are not content to be good guardians of their own lifetime only. They annex every age to their own; all the years that have gone before them are an addition to their store. Unless we are most ungrateful, all those men, glorious fashioners of holy thoughts, were born for us; for us they have prepared a way of life. By other men's labors we are led to the sight of things most beautiful that have been wrested from darkness and brought into light; from no age are we shut out, we have access to all ages, and if it is our wish, by greatness of mind, to pass beyond the narrow limits of human weakness, there is a great stretch of time through which we may roam. We may argue with Socrates, we may doubt with Carneades, find peace with Epicurus, overcome human nature with the Stoics, exceed it with the Cynics. Since nature allows us to enter into fellowship with every age, why should we not turn from this paltry and fleeting span of time and surrender ourselves with all our soul to the past, which is boundless, which is eternal, which we share with our betters?

--Seneca, "On the Shortness of Life," tr. John W. Basore (slightly altered).

Heroes of Humanism: Khosro I Anushirvan (531-579 CE)

Famous for his justice, Shah Khosro I was a strong supporter of Mazdean Zoroastrianism and cultivated the study of literature and philosophy at his court. He suppressed the followers of the apocalyptic preacher Mazdak and introduced a variety of reforms to the bureaucracy of the Sasanid state. He had literature translated from Greek, Syriac, and Sanskrit into Middle Persian, kept up with the latest astronomical observations, and entertained at his court philosophers exiled from Athens. In 561, he negotiated a fifty year peace with his rivals in Byzantium, though the treaty was broken in 571 during an Armenian revolt.

The Peculiar Case of Boethius [6th Century C.E.]

The assumptions upon which Boethius' philosophical position rests, and the detailed arguments by which his position is expressed are, for the most part, not original [but]...derived from the classic works of Greek and Roman philosophy, most notably from Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, and from the Neo-Platonists, and adapted during the Patristic period to the theology of Christian revelation. What is new in The Consolation, and the reason for its lasting influence and importance in the history of medieval philosophy, is the expert synthesis of these traditional ethical doctrines by an author who consciously limits his consideration to the powers of natural reason without direct recourse [to], or even mention of, Christian revelation.

--from R. Green's "Introduction" to his translation of the Consolatio (xv). Emphasis added.

Wilhelm Dilthey

Whoever studies history and society is everywhere confronted by abstract entities such as art, science, state, society, and religion. These are fog-banks that obstruct our view of reality, yet cannot themselves be grasped. Just as substantial forms, mystical forces, and essences once stood between the eye of the scientist and the laws governing atoms and molecules, so these entities veil the reality of socio-historical life, the interaction of psychophysical life-units as regulated by the conditions of nature and the natural genealogical articulation of human life. I would like to demonstrate how to see this reality--an art of seeing which needs to be practiced for a long time, like the art of perceiving spatial forms--and to drive away these fog-banks and phantoms.

Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Works, Vol. 1, ed. Makreel and Rodi, Princeton: Princeton University Press (1989), 93.

Montaigne's "Jewishness"

We live in strange times. Too often, scholarship becomes the battle ground of our "culture wars" and identity politics. Even our dear Michel de Montaigne--who managed to safely navigate the cultural conflicts and civil strife of 16th century France--is, through insinuation, not argument, retrospectively recruited to score points on behalf of Catholic identity, or atheism, or Jewish identity. It is a sad state of affairs.

The facts are well known. Montaigne's mother was descended from Spanish Jews and a convert to Protestantism; Michel himself was raised as a Roman Catholic. His "scriptures," however, if by that term we mean the texts upon which he meditated constantly and that informed his thinking about the world, were composed by pagan intellectuals from classical Greece and Rome. Montaigne was an early modern humanist. He expressed personal loyalty to the faith of his baptism (Catholicism) but regarded his Catholic identity an accident of birth. He never felt moved to change his accidental confessional affiliation because, to put it bluntly, his broadly skeptical epistemology made him, for the most part, religiously apathetic. Besides, in his own time, confessional changes were political statements. To change one's confessional identity from Catholic to Protestant was revolutionary; to convert from Catholicism to Judaism would have been reckless; to declare oneself an atheist was just as dangerous as conversion to Judaism (if not moreso); converting to Islam would have been bizarre, and possibly suicidal; conversion to Hinduism, Buddhism or even Eastern Orthodoxy, simply unthinkable. His religious choices were really quite limited and, as far as he was concerned, the differences among the choices realistically available to him (Protestant or Catholic) were not differences worth losing one's life over.

The fact that he had "Jewish blood" as it has been termed by some commentators did not make him a humanist or a skeptic. It is reasonable to infer that the persecution his mother's family had faced made him sensitive to the problem of religious persecution more generally, but he lived in an age when religious persecution was pandemic--he did not require exposure to anti-semitism to be sensitive to the depth or scale of the problem.

"Jewish blood" (which is no different than any other type of human blood) did not determine Montaigne's thinking and, frankly, those who would make such a suggestion out of sympathy or bigotry have abandoned scholarship for the low road of cultural politics, if not racism.

Auerbach In Istanbul

Finding humanism's haven in Istanbul Israel News | Haaretz