ABSTRACT
The humanist origins of the tradition link it to the great European tradition of Catholicism and of France. The value of the human being was vindicated by discovering in him something more than the individual and merely animal. There is an admirable Catholic Humanism that is not only the mother of the rest but that has distinctive characteristics in its respect for tradition and for the values enshrined by tradition. It is expressed not only by a Catholic such as Erasmus, who was first a humanist, but also by a humanist such as Thomas More, who was first a Catholic. The Humanism of the Renaissance was a rebirth of culture, although in a new form from that of the antique world. The Anglo-Saxon Tradition takes its rise in the Sixteenth Century out of the common European culture of Catholic Christendom.
