Humanism began as a school syllabus before it became a worldview
Long before it meant a life without gods, humanism meant a reading list. Renaissance teachers used it for grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and moral philosophy. A Bavarian theologian probably coined the German form for a school curriculum, and only in the twentieth century did the word settle into its naturalistic, human-centred sense.
The root is the Latin humanitas, which Cicero and his contemporaries used for the values of a liberal education. That same root gives universities their humanities. By the end of the 14th century, Italian scholars spoke of studia humanitatis for the subjects they taught, and the Italian label umanista followed. English picked up the word in 1589.
Its meaning wandered. Samuel Johnson's 1755 dictionary treated a humanist as a philologer or grammarian. In the 1780s Thomas Howes, arguing against Joseph Priestley in the Unitarian disputes, applied it to people who held that Christ was merely human, a theological usage now considered obsolete. Early in the 19th century Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer likely invented the German humanismus for a classical secondary-school course, and Jacob Burckhardt and Georg Voigt soon took it up.
Petrarch, raised in Avignon and often called the father of the movement, hunted down ancient manuscripts such as Cicero's Pro Archia. His most lasting gift was a list of four core disciplines, heavily indebted to Cicero, that became the backbone of humanistic study. Florence was a key centre, and Italians met Aristotle partly through Arabic translations arriving from Africa and Spain. Earlier roots run to Protagoras around 440 BCE, who confessed he could not know whether the gods exist, and to Epicurus, who built a philosophy around friendship, moderation and living well.
Today no single definition commands agreement. Sidney Hook in 1974 described humanists as opposed to dictatorship and to violence as a tool of reform; Jeaneane Fowler in 1999 stressed rejecting divinity. Andrew Copson's 2015 account calls it naturalistic, moral and practical. Most organised groups are secular and gather under Humanists International, though the Humanist Society endorses chaplains. The labels Christian humanism and secular humanism are themselves contested, carrying polemical baggage from later arguments.
Source: Humanism
