If it is possible to mend the fractures in Western civilization and cultivate real human flourishing again, you can be certain we will first have to recover something called Christian humanism.
Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles.
But there are dangers. Particularly, there are various ideas and movements posturing themselves as humanism, or Christian humanism. I discussed these wrong-headed ideas here.
In this post, I want to help clarify some more of the nuances and ambiguities that need to be addressed if we are to recover the kind of Christian humanism that actually promotes human flourishing.
If you haven’t been following the series, you can catch up on the conversation by starting here.
Renaissance Humanism
Christian humanism is most often associated with the Renaissance humanism of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but it really had its substantive beginning in Italy a century earlier.
Generally speaking, what has come to be known as the Italian Renaissance began in the mid-fourteenth century as Italian thought began to shift away from the Church and its Scholasticism, and gained a growing interest in secular Classicism.
In The Great Conversation, Norman Melchert explains that the Italian Renaissance was “greatly influenced by the rediscovery of classical literature—poetry, histories, essays, and other writings—that followed the rediscovery of Aristotelian philosophy.”
This literature was often referred to in the French as belles lettres, meaning fine writing. In other cases, they were sometimes referred to as “humane letters,” or the humanities. “These Greek and Roman works breathe a spirit quite different from the extreme otherworldliness of monk’s vows, on the one hand, and the arid disputations of scholastic theologians on the other. They present a model of style, both in language and life, that seems worthy of emulation,” notes Norman Melchert.
The “humanists” of this period are made up of an “aristocratic stratum of society that had leisure to cultivate the arts, paint, compose, or write.” Some were churchman, but many were not. Nevertheless, the movement was generally amicable toward Christianity and usually expressed itself in Christian terms.
Melchert also explains that another reason the great thinkers of the Renaissance were called humanists is that “Their concern is the development of a full and rich human life—the best life for a human being to live.” To state it succinctly, Renaissance humanism sought to promote and celebrate human flourishing in the context of humane studies.
Thought to have reached its zenith in the mid-fifteenth century, the Italian Renaissance eventually ended in the mid-sixteenth century after Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, sacked Rome in 1527.
But this was not before “a whole generation of elite youth schooled in the classics extended the reach of humanism into every corner of contemporary life.” Margaret King explains how Renaissance humanism soon became an international phenomenon:
Miraculously, the printing press arrived soon after the midpoint of the century, and by 1500, nearly the whole of the classical tradition—both Latin and Greek—had been published in small manageable editions that flew off the presses and soared over the Alps to other communities of the learned who eagerly awaited them. Already in the fifteenth century, travelers from the north had come to study in Italy and became imbued with its humanist culture. By the sixteenth century those interactions multiplied, while at the same time numerous Italians traveled abroad, exporting humanism to such distant lands as England and Poland. Humanism was now an international phenomenon.
Christian Humanism
By the time Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the door at the church of Wittenberg in 1517, Renaissance humanism had proliferated throughout Europe as far north as England. In varying degrees and kinds, humanism became the basis of most intellectual endeavors, including those in the schools and colleges that would be newly erected by the feuding Catholics and Protestants.
The Renaissance humanism that rose up north of the Alps differed greatly from their southern counterpart in one important aspect. Though they both shared the same passion and appreciation for Classicism and celebrated the abilities of humanity with a similar bold confidence, the North did so primarily in the context of their Christian faith, while the Italians became known for their more secular vision of humanism. Philosopher and theologian, Francis Schaeffer, explains:
Their humanism meant, first of all, a veneration for everything ancient and especially the writings of the Greek and Roman age. Although this past age did include the early Christian church, it became increasingly clear that the sort of human autonomy that many of the Renaissance humanists had in mind referred exclusively to the non-Christian Greco-Roman world. Thus Renaissance humanism steadily evolved toward modern humanism—a value system rooted in the belief that man is his own measure, that man is autonomous, totally independent.
This distinction between the humanists of the North and the humanists of Italy will become more important when the discussion returns to this period a later post, but for now it is enough to establish that the expression of Christian humanism we are seeking to recover in this series, is, for the most part, that kind which flourished in northern Europe, and not surprisingly, found its principles rooted in the Incarnation and teaching of Christ himself.
In a subsequent post, I intend to explore a brief history of the roots and development of Christian humanism. Be sure to subscribe if you’d like to stay up with this series.
Leave a Reply