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.
In the last post, I attempted to establish the kind of Christian humanism we want to recover is rooted in the Incarnation of Christ. In this post, I want to recount a brief (and very truncated) history of Christian humanism from Christ to the European Renaissance.
In other words, I want to show how Christian humanism of this kind continued on after Christ’s ascension to the right hand of the Father, first in the life of the Apostles and, ultimately, throughout the entirety of church history.
(If you haven’t been following the series, you can catch up on the conversation by starting here.)
For starters, consider the author of James (either the Son of Alphaeus or the brother of the Lord) quotes from Plato’s Phaedo in his letter to the church when he asks “whence come wars and fightings among you?”
Also, in Luke’s famous record of Paul’s conversion, when Jesus confronts Paul on the road to Damascus, he uses a Greek idiom famously used in Aeschylus’s play, Agamemnon. Jesus says to Paul, “It’s hard for thee to kick against the pricks.”
Speaking of the Apostle Paul, he was a classically-educated man of letters—he was educated classically in Tarsus and theologically at the feet of Gamaliel—who often employed his knowledge of pagan literature in his sermons and writings.
For example, when he preached to the Athenians on Mars Hill, he quoted both Epimenides and Aratus, Greek poets, to make his arguments.
Again, in his letter to the church at Corinth, Paul even uses arguments and rhetorical language clearly lifted from Plato’s Apology—most certainly familiar to his audience—to discuss how he was driven to the task of trying to teach the arrogant Corinthians what real wisdom looks like.
Later Christians, like Athanasius and Justin Martyr, of the second century, were educated in philosophy and pagan literature, and after coming to faith in Christ, frequently used their knowledge of the liberal arts to defend the Christian faith.
Born in Alexandria about 297, made a deacon about 318, and attending the Council of Nicaea in 325 as a secretary, Athanasius would famously affirm what the Apostle John wrote in his gospel, that in the person of Jesus existed the hypostatic union of two natures—one divine and one human.
To do this, however, Athanasius would have to borrow language from a pagan concept (homoousios) and explain that Christ was of the same substance as the Father, rather than of similar substance (homoiousios) as the Arians contended. These Christian thinkers rightly understood the consequences of emphasizing one nature over the other.
To emphasize the divine nature of Christ over his humanity would be to fall into an error something akin to Docetism or Apollinarianism which deny the real humanity of Jesus. And to emphasize the human over the divine would be to fall into an error something akin to Arianism which denies the deity of Jesus. In other words, many of the early Christians, being at least aware of classical ideas if not actually being classically educated, sought to explain the truths of Christianity—particularly the tensions in and related to the Incarnation of Christ—in terms of the pagan language of the culture.
Next, take for example Christians like Clement of Alexandria, in the third century, Gregory of Nyssa, Jerome, and St. Augustine of Hippo, in the fourth and fifth centuries. These men of letters were educated in the classical tradition and frequently “plundered the Egyptians,” gleaning the splintered light of the pagan ideas for a fuller understanding of the Scriptures and a means by which to communicate more difficult concepts.
Nevertheless, it was Charles the Great, a.k.a. Charlemagne, in the late eighth and early ninth centuries, who most notably inspired the first Renaissance of the medieval period. There would be three such “rebirths” of culture that would ultimately lead to the fifteenth and sixteenth century understanding and expression of Christian humanism, but Charlemagne’s revival of classical education and the integration of its best literature and virtues into the culture, alongside the Christian faith, was the first.
Einhard says of Charlemagne, “He believed that his children should be brought up so that both sons and daughters were first educated in the liberal art, which he himself had studied.”
Notker recounts an exchange between Charlemagne and Alcuin that demonstrates the fervor the king had for reviving and cultivating Christian humanism:
In this way the most famous Charles, seeing the study of letters flourishing throughout all his kingdom, but lamenting that it did not reach the ripeness of the earlier fathers, though he was striving more than was human, burst out in disgust: ‘Oh, if only I could have twelve clerics as learned as Jerome and Augustine were.’ To which the most learned Alcuin, rightly thinking himself most unlearned in comparison to those two, full of great anger but scarcely showing it, dared to do what no other mortal would do in the sight of dread Charles, replied: ‘The creator of heaven and earth did not have many like those men, and you want to have twelve?’
This is but one example of the blooming passion the medieval learned had for the study of letters. And given the body of literature that was written and studied in the medieval world, it is a shame the Renaissance academics of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries thought of this period as “the Dark Age.”
Perhaps an argument could be made for a Dark Age between the sacking of Rome in 476 and the coronation of Charlemagne in 800, but that would be the extent of any period but with works like Augustine’s City of God and Confessions written in the fifth century, and Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy being written in the sixth, that might be a stretch.
The second major Renaissance happened in the twelfth century, largely because of the recovery of Aristotle from the Islamic humanists. These writings had been lost to the West and their recovery became the seedbed for the Renaissance, known also as Scholasticism.
Previously, Platonic thought had been dominantly influential, largely due to the writings of Augustine. But now, scholars and churchmen like Albert Magnus, Bonaventure, Peter Abelard, Peter Lombard, and Thomas Aquinas would lead the church to proverbially baptize the writings of Aristotle by incorporating his thinking to work out their theological propositions.
Despite not being part of the Scholastic movement, other notable Christian thinkers and writers influential in this rebirth of letters were Anselm of Canterbury, Bernard of Clairvaux, and St. Francis of Assisi. More arid and pedantic, and arguably less imaginative than the humanists of the High Renaissance, the Scholastics were educated in the classical tradition of the artes liberales and painstakingly explicated the doctrines of the church using pagan literature, reason, and logic.
Having now come full circle to the third “rebirth,” the Italian Renaissance in the fourteenth century, it is helpful to note Renaissance humanism was not organized by a manifesto or a particular creed; it was never considered a philosophy, like Platonism or Stoicism. However, there were some essential philosophic nuances unique to the projects and passions of the Renaissance humanists of the particular regions: Italy in the south and Europe in the north.
Margaret King’s summary of the general nature of the Italian Renaissance is quite insightful and her description is helpful in demonstrating this nuance:
It entailed no common set of principles (other than those that were the common assumptions of the age) about the natural, social, or political world. It was more like a way of life. It involved a commitment to the world of ideas guided by the classics, which were to be read in the original Latin (more rarely, Greek), mastered, imitated, and to some extent enacted, in communities that gathered in schools and homes and shared public spaces. The process was consistent: humanists read and interacted with the classical tradition. The content, however, varied: over time, from setting to setting, according to circumstances, and among actors of different social classes and occupations.
In the Italian Renaissance, there seems to be less of a focus on any one particular aspect of Classicism. Its virtue was in its variety and aristocratic way of life.
Those of the north, on the other hand, while sharing much of the heterogeneous nature of Italian Classicism, appeared to be more philosophical in their humanism, due mainly to the prominence of their Christian worldview. As previously stated, the Christian humanism of the North was essentially focused on the primacy of rhetoric, a return to the sources, and the development of a historical sensibility.
In any case, what has hopefully come through is that some of the important principles of Renaissance humanism—a passion for the liberal arts and human flourishing—can be found in varying degrees throughout Western Civilization’s history. What also has hopefully come through is the tradition revived by the Renaissance humanists in northern Europe was a recovery of basically the same tenets but in a more elevated and Christian context.
This is not to suggest in any way Christian humanism claims an unbroken line of apostolic or patristic succession–or anything like that. Rather, what I hope to affirm is what many scholars and historians have often pointed out, that “wherever the gospel is planted, the academy follows.”
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