There were, undoubtedly, classicists among the Greeks too, and it may be a little unfair to try to assess their role from this distance. I do not know what they managed to accomplish, but there is little reason to believe it was their influence that made Greek culture either humanistic or classic. Nor does our admiration for the humanism of other times and places make humanists of us now, any more than does tracing our ancestry to a hero who fought for civil rights in the American Revolution mean that we have any stomach for the civil rights battles of our own generation. Indeed, I must note that the most heroic figures in today's struggle for human values regard their ancestors more in pity than in pride. Humanism is then, as I see it, not something we revive.
Revivals are the work of classicists.
Humanism, instead, has to do with the present, the novel, the defiant, the alive, and with what the classicists often argue cannot be done. Where the classicist documents historical certainties, the true humanist fumbles with present uncertainties. The humanist is aggressive, and hopes thus to achieve better things, but the classicist, threatened by the humanistic enterprise, equates aggression with hostility, and hostility, in turn, with destruction. Now there is another theme in humanism. It is a secondary theme that derives from the first, and I think it makes sense only when expressed in the context of human audacity.