Renaissance Humanism and the Modern Humanities

The Southeastern Consortium of Classical Educators, Thales College, August 2, 2025

In his plenary lecture at the Southeastern Consortium of Classical Educators, Prof. Hankins argues that the modern humanities have forgotten their purpose. These disciplines began as promises to make their practitioners more human. Yet modern notions of "humanism" actually corrupt the human potential that was so powerfully harnessed by classical and Renaissance notions of human nature and the humanities.

True humanism has been endangered above all by secularism, scientism, and technology-driven transhumanism – and above all by the worship of these pursuits that has perennially appeared in the guise of a new religion without God. Without fail, modern forms of "humanism" have led to dehumanization.

This is the grand paradox of modern life, and it can only be unwound by returning to a premodern understanding of what makes us human – an understanding enshrined in the classical tradition and the Christian humanism of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.