I find Alan Jacobs’ writing unfailingly “good to think with”, and that’s certainly true of a recent post pondering the relationship between Christianity and humanism in an anti-human age.

He looks to the Christian intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century. Meanwhile I look further back, to Erasmus and especially to his protégé Sebastian Castellio. In the throes of the Reformation they saw barbarity on all sides yet did not succumb to it. They saw war but preached peace, suffered from absolutism and argued for moderation.

But they still lost.

Polarisation and intolerance ravaged and divided Europe for centuries.

The difficulty with charting a course through the coarseness of the present age is that we’re looking for winners to back, when all the time some of the most precious values - civility, honesty, curiosity, care, consideration - quite obviously aren’t going to win by the force of the better argument alone. It seems unlikely that they could ever prevail at all.

On the other hand, in the longer run, the legacy of Erasmus, Castellio and their ilk did prevail. When violence and repression eventually gave way to exhaustion and disillusionment, their legacy was an attractive alternative to endless antagonism.

People only love strife when they haven’t experienced all that much of it. Hatred energises, but it also kills its hosts. Eventually the sponsors of emnity realise they’re going to have to account for the paucity of their gains.

Humanists, religious and otherwise, need to persevere, and stand firm now more than ever (while the strife is only just warming up). Conceding to an easy despair just at the start of these barbarous times is premature. The despots are desperate for an ever-present crisis, are addicted to maintaining a state of permanent “emergency”. We’re in it for the long haul. Our values will literally outlive them.

Erasmus’s motto remains timely: concedo nulli - I concede to no one.