IN 1934, THOMAS MANN HAD TO WRITE AN OBITUARY for a man who had always been like a father to him: Sammi Fischer, his Hungarian Jewish publisher in Berlin, the man who, to a considerable extent, had made his authorship possible. Mann recalled the following exchange, during his last meeting with the old man—who was already very ill—several months before. Fischer expressed his opinion about a mutual acquaintance:
— Kein Europäer, sagte er kopfschüttelnd.
— Kein Europäer, Herr Fischer, wieso denn nichts?
— Von großen humanen Ideen versteht er nichts.
The great humane ideas. That is European culture. That is what Mann had learned from his teacher, Goethe. And Goethe himself, in his autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit, indicates as a date of birth of this European humanism: October 25, 1518. On that day the scholar and humanist Ulrich von Hutten wrote a letter to his friend Willibald Pirckheimer, in which he explained that although he was of noble birth, he didn’t wish to be a nobleman without having earned it: ‘Nobility by birth is purely accidental, and therefore meaningless to me. I seek the wellsprings of nobility elsewhere, and I drink from that source.’ Here, once again, we can witness the birth of nobilitas literaria: true nobility is the nobility of the spirit. The arts, the humanities, philosophy and theology, beauty; each exists to ennoble the spirit, to enable mankind to discover and claim ownership of its highest form of dignity. It is the cultural legacy, the major works by poets and thinkers, artists and prophets, which a person must make use of for cultura animi (the phrase is Cicero’s), the cultivation of the human soul and mind—so that he can be more than what he also is: an animal. On the last page of his Lessons of the Masters, George Steiner sums up the essence of culture and liberal education in a single sentence: ‘Liberal education directs us to the dignitas in the human person, to its homecoming to its better self.’ This is the tradition of European humanism in which he, from an early age, was taught by his father. In which he himself became a teacher, when he realized he had a gift: ‘To invite others into meaning.’ This last phrase, ‘to invite others into meaning’, is George Steiner’s own, and it is the most profound description I know of what it means to be a Lecturer in the Humanities.