Secular Humanism

Renaissance Humanism

Renaissance humanism originated in the late 14th century as an intellectual movement that developed as European scholars rediscovered ancient Latin and Greek texts. Originally, a humanist was a teacher of Latin literature, but by the mid-15th century, Renaissance humanism promoted the study of the ancient world, specifically Greece and Rome, because it was seen as the pinnacle of human achievement and should be taken as a model by contemporary Europeans.

Renaissance humanism offered to the European world emerging from the so-called dark ages the necessary intellectual and philological tools for textual analysis, including textual criticism of Biblical texts, creating a controversy with the church. This crisis came to a head with the trial of the scientist Galileo Galilei (1633), which pitted the authority of a belief in one's own observations [Page 809]against the authority of religious teaching. The trial made the contradictions visibly apparent, and humanism was branded a “dangerous doctrine” by the church authorities. It became, therefore, very difficult and somewhat dangerous to openly espouse a belief in humanism.

To avoid conflicts between humanist beliefs and the church, intellectuals made great attempts to meld the works of Antiquity with Christian values in a type of Christian humanism. This allowed ethics to be taught independently of theology. Through this bending of tradition, the authority of the church was tacitly transferred to the reasoning logic of the educated individual. Nevertheless, humanists were still constantly in danger of being labeled as heretics by the church. Interestingly, it was the Renaissance humanist emphasis on returning to the original sources that contributed greatly to the Protestant Reformation. One of the key points of the Reformation was the belief in a more accurate translation of Biblical texts. Early religious humanists included Desiderius Erasmus, a Dutch Catholic priest, and Sir Thomas More, a devout Catholic from London.

Modern Humanism

Organizations espousing humanism began to appear in the United States in the 1920s. The First Humanist Society of New York was organized in 1929, and the American Humanist Association was organized in 1941. There have been three documents published under the title Humanist Manifesto (1933, 1973, and 2003) that outline the tenets of modern humanism. Each new version updates and replaces the previous edition.

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