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I have selected the word culture to express the idea which I wish to convey, and yet I must confess that it does not express it as happily as I should desire. Where the Greeks had their paideia, the Romans their humanitas, we have the more elastic and accommodating word culture.
While the Roman senate had first combated and then at the most had simply tolerated culture, the government of the new Italo-Hellenic empire, whose essence in fact was -humanitas-, could not but adopt measures to stimulate it after the Hellenic fashion.
It meant all that is conveyed by the Latin word humanitas; the title of "the humaner letters," by which Latin was long designated in European universities, indicated that in the great Latin writers in Cicero and Virgil preeminently a higher type of human life was to be found than existed in the literature of other countries: as though at Rome, and in the first century before Christ, the political and social environment had for the first time produced men such as men would wish to be, at all events for the ideals of Western Europe.
Now the case was altered. Just as the naive popular faith was superseded by an enlightened Stoic supernaturalism, so in education alongside of the simple popular instruction a special training, an exclusive -humanitas-, developed itself and eradicated the last remnants of the old social equality.
Those who devoted themselves to the study and imitation first of Roman, and later of Greek literature, are commonly called humanists, a name derived from the Latin word humanitas; that is, culture, especially in the sense of literary appreciation. They no longer paid much attention to Peter Lombard's Sentences.
Indeed, humanitas was a word in familiar use amongst the Romans; but in a far different sense, and stood not for the abstract essence of any substance; but was the abstracted name of a mode, and its concrete humanus, not homo. Words are used for recording and communicating our Thoughts.
Do you know the hymn of the Holy Sacrament, 'Adoro te, devote'? No. Yet you are capable of feeling what is contained in these lines. Listen. It is this idea: That on the cross one sees only the man, not the God; that in the host one does not even see the man, and that yet one believes in the real presence. In cruce latebat sola Deitas. At hic latet simul et humanitas.
This is its nobler side; the side which men like Ennius and Scipio seized, and welded into a harmonious union with the higher national tradition of Rome, out of which union arose that complex product to which the name humanitas was so happily given. But Alexandrian culture was more than cosmopolitan. It was in a sense anti-national.
While the Roman senate had first combated and then at the most had simply tolerated culture, the government of the new Italo-Hellenic empire, whose essence in fact was -humanitas-, could not but adopt measures to stimulate it after the Hellenic fashion.
For though the Schools have introduced animalitas, humanitas, corporietas, and some others; yet they hold no proportion with that infinite number of names of substances, to which they never were ridiculous enough to attempt the coining of abstract ones: and those few that the Schools forged, and put into the mouths of their scholars, could never yet get admittance into common use, or obtain the license of public approbation.
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