ZBORNIK - Matica srpska

1. The archipelago of Third Humanism
The idea of a Third Humanism takes its roots in Ulrich von
Wilamovitz-Moellendorff's Platon, published immediately after the
destruction of the First World War in 1919, where this famous classicist
points that neither science nor human consciousness can pursue
their way without the help of classical philology. In classical
philology, Wilamovitz sees the European culture's saviour and conceives
the necessity of its Renaissance, what he calls a Dritter Humanismus.
The very notion of Third Humanism is still largely unknown
today. One of the reasons for that is that it never took the form of a
structured movement, but rather, recalling an expression used by
Karl Kerrényi, of an “archipelago" of thinkers and poets. 1 Among
them, we find people coming from a variety of different countries,
often forced to move away because of the persecutions caused by
the Second World War: Anica Saviã-Rebac (Serbian classical philologist),
Hans Leisegang (German classical philologist), Thomas Mann
(poet and novelist who fled Nazism and moved away in California),
Robert Graves (great English poet and scholar), Karl Kerényi (Hungarian
classicist who also fled persecution and settled in Switzerland)
and Rolf Lagerborg (great Finnish Scholar).
The study I present here is part of more general study whose
aim is to try to define what Third Humanism is, by uncovering that
very notion from the works of those cited authors. By 'works', I
mean not only officially published studies or novels, but also private
correspondence. Indeed, it appears that the expression of Third
Humanism naturally adopted the form of a private transmission.
This may be explained by obvious reasons such as the difficulty or
even impossibility to publish freely because of the dictatorial state
of Europe in the thirties and forties. But there is, actually, another
reason, directly related to the very essence of Third Humanism,
namely its mystical approach of Mankind and Knowledge: Mankind
cannot take place without Knowledge and Knowledge, in turn, is
something transmitted outside public eyes, trough private initiations,
like in ancient Mysteries.
We find lots of examples of those kinds of correspondence. A
very important one took place between Thomas Mann and Karl
Kerényi who both were bound to flee from Nazism and in which
we find elaborated a very profound approach of Humanism. But the
1 As described by Karl Kerrényi, Third Humanism is “eine res publica doctorum
virorum" or “eine archipelagische Harmonie von Inselstimmen".
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