Defining Christian humanism is a potentially arduous task for at least three reasons.
First, there is the misgivings of Christians and conservatives who, when first encountering the word humanist, tend to meet it with consternation and disapproval because it is associated with atheistic and materialistic views of the world and, just as often, a strong commitment to scientism.
Bradley Birzer recalls in Beyond Tenebrae, “when I mention the term ‘humanism’ among conservatives, I am almost alway greeted with silence, head shaking, or actual and visible disgust. Almost all conservatives, it seems, associate humanism with secularism and atheism and radicalism. They see it (very incorrectly) as a deification of the human being.”((Birzer, Beyond Tenebrae, 3.))
It is ironic so many folks in the modern world assume this position given it is not at all the view the Renaissance humanists possessed of themselves. Margaret King suggests “The humanists of Renaissance Europe would have been astonished to learn what is meant by today’s ‘humanism,’ or ‘secular humanism,’ or ‘Humanism,’ with an initial capital as some of its proponents suggest.” King explains,
Modern humanism, which has been around since at least the 1920s, dispenses with theism and replaces divine providence with the scientific method, social justice, and multiculturalism. Not so the Renaissance antecedents of today’s humanism, whose passions and commitments arose from and extended the legacy of the Latin Christian Civilization of medieval Europe. Their humanism embraced both Cicero and God.((Margaret L. King, Renaissance Humanism, ix.))
Second, defining a clearly Christian humanism depends on a clear understanding of humanism at its origin (i.e., Renaissance humanism) and then distinguishing between the streams of thought that flowed from it and eventually bifurcated into modern secular humanism and that humanism which remained Christian, as it was in its inchoate form.
But because Renaissance humanism was not a philosophy or an ideology in its original conception, a complete understanding of humanism is difficult to nail down. “Although there is a consensus on certain essentials” regarding the elements that constitute humanism, “scholars have not reached full agreement” about what it is. “Renaissance humanism,” says King,
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. ((Margaret L. King, Renaissance Humanism, ix.))
Alan Jacobs confirms the difficulty of establishing a definition or history of humanism when, in his book, The Year of Our Lord 1943, he stresses that “‘Humanism’ is a much-vexed, highly contested word whose meaning has zigged and zagged in strange ways over the centuries, and has equally often been used to praise and to damn.”((Alan Jacobs, The Year of Our Lord 1943, 37.))
It seem that best efforts to establish clear boundaries about what is and what is not humanism in its inchoate state relies on studying an approach to education that became popular in the fifteenth century. Around the time of the fall of the Byzantine Empire to the Ottoman Turks (1453), the flood of pilgrims from the East brought with them manuscripts that had been virtually lost to the West. This marked a growing interest in reading the classics in the original languages as a way of discovering and imitating virtue.
In an essay titled, “What is a Liberal Art,” Chris Schlect treats this fact when he notes some of the distinguishing factors between the liberal arts and the humanities. In an effort to demonstrate what a liberal art was not, Schlect, in effect, provides some clarifying insight into what it meant to be a Renaissance humanist. He states,
For clarity’s sake, we should differentiate the liberal arts from the humanities. The program of study known as the humanities emerged in fifteenth-century Italy. The humanities curriculum trained up virtuous young men not merely for leadership in church or civic life, though it did entail as much; but more than that, that they would become men of affairs, men whose orientation is more cosmopolitan than provincial. The humanists believed that virtue was instilled most effectively by immersing students in powerful examples of classical virtue, which they accessed through the best literature of classical antiquity. Through reading, students experienced the charismatic presence of ancient writers, and by reading these writers the students could become more like them. Thus they learned Greek and Latin grammar, which opened them up to readings in rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy. Whereas the liberal arts aim to build culture by imparting to students the sound precepts that will shape their habits, the humanities aim to build culture by immersing a student with the best examples of human attainment, examples that they appreciate and emulate, which in turn forms their habits.((Chris Schlect, What is a Liberal Art?))
Unlike the liberal approach to education facilitated by classicists like Cicero or scholastics like Aquinas, the humanists sought to instill virtue by immersing themselves and their students in the most powerful examples of classical virtue. It was not expected that the books they read would necessarily teach them didactically as much at they would serve as premier examples of human attainment the students could both appreciate and emulate.
To be clear, students would not necessarily study philosophy for philosophy’s sake or read history as a remedy for a sick mind, as Livy would posit, but they would read all literature primarily for its literary character. In other words, the humanists were not interested “in keeping with the dialectical approach of the medieval scholastic tradition,” a tradition “which they scorned.” They were interested in the beauty and wisdom of the literature itself.
Jacobs is helpful in explaining that “one who advocated for this model and taught according to it was known as an umanista—an inevitable coinage, since a teacher of jurisprudence had long been known as a jurista, a teacher of canon law as a canonista, and so on. So the term ‘humanist,’ from which ‘humanism’ in turn derives, was originally the product of student slang.” Nevertheless, “The umanistas were doing something unprecedented in keying the search for wisdom—including specifically Christian wisdom—to the study of literature.”((Alan Jacobs, The Year of Our Lord 1943, 37.))
Unfortunately, although discovering more about the humanist project by looking at their approach to education, it also adds one more dynamic to the difficulty that lies in properly defining, and thus understanding, humanism. Because the Renaissance humanists rejected the scholastic method of reading and education, it is often assumed they also rejected the “scholastic interests—especially theological interests.” But this was not the case, especially in the humanism that emerged in Northern Europe. On this point, King contends,
The Christian humanism of which Erasmus is the primary exemplar is completely Christian—in all of his endeavors, Erasmus pleads for a non-dogmatic, practical and heartfelt Christian commitment—and also completely humanist: he insists on an advanced and error-free study of original Greek and Latin texts, which he himself edits, translates, and explains to people who find their meaning alien…The case of Erasmus, like that of his equally important predecessor Petrarch, is a caution to those who wish to equate humanism with secular modernity. Both were deeply Christian.((Margaret L. King, Renaissance Humanism, xi-xii.))
The convoluted and frequently misleading narrative regarding the theological interests of the Renaissance humanists appears to lie, unfortunately, in the historical narrative of both branches of humanism that developed downstream from the Renaissance. It was a “secularizing story that came to be told by admirers of the humanist enterprise and its detractors alike,” confirms Jacobs. He explains that, “Thinkers of the Enlightenment saw the humanists as their predecessors, those who had pried open a locked door and let the light of the non biblical knowledge in; and (largely Catholic) defenders of the scholastic enterprise saw the humanists as enthusiastic participants in the dismantling of the beautiful edifice of medieval thought.”
There are two notes worthy of mention which require further treatment at a later point. The first addresses what Jacobs is referencing in the last quote, “the largely Catholic defenders of the scholastic enterprise,” which alludes to the Church’s reaffirmation of Thomistic Scholasticism in the nineteenth century. Members of this party felt a particular antipathy for the Renaissance humanists for what they believed was their role in dismantling Thomism in the Church largely via the Galileo Affair. The second point is to note that the later humanists, it seems, would attempt to incorporate forms of education and writing that tethered the liberal arts approach with the neo-classical humanist approach, drawing from the best of both.
The final reason defining Christian humanism is a difficult task is because there is a particular heretical view of Christian humanism that has retained the Christian identity without retaining its orthodoxy. This “brand” of Christian humanism was popularized by liberal theologians like John Shelby Spong and Anthony Freeman. It further adds to the difficulty of defining Christian humanism because it seeks to use Christian terminology in its activities, but it boldly denies orthodox Christian doctrines like the Incarnation, the Resurrection, and even the actual existence of God. Anthony Freeman affirms the heretical nature of the brand of Christian humanism thus referenced when he writes,
Even a sympathetic reader may feel that I have now cut off the branch I am sitting on. Having denied the existence of God, who might have provided some absolute values as a basis for this earthly life, I now make the whole possibility of a meaningful life depend upon its values. But this is the whole point of a radical Christian humanism. When we bade farewell to the supernatural ‘other world,’ we did so totally. Not only the absolute existing-out-there God has gone. So have the absolute exiting-out-there values such as peace, joy, goodness, beauty, love, etc.((Anthony Freeman, God in Us, 54.))
What this heretical brand of Christian humanism seeks to do is draw its values from the Christian tradition but substitute all forms of theism with less mystical, alternative concepts. Freeman says, “Christian humanism directs us to the Christian tradition for our choice of values in creating our own lives and giving them meaning.”((Anthony Freeman, God in Us, 55.))
As will be demonstrated later, because it denies orthodoxy, this brand of Christian humanism fails to provide the redemptive basis necessary to facilitate real human flourishing, which is the primary goal authentic Christian humanists like O’Connor, Lewis, and Tolkien would seek to accomplish.
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