In my last few posts, I’ve been trying to provide some context for some of the foundational fractures in Western culture, particularly as they are currently manifesting themselves in America.
My view has been the fractures we see on the surface come all the way up from the core and can be classified with a basic, three-part taxonomy: the censorship of public discourse, the degradation of the arts, and an ideological divide of identity. Of course, these are not the root cause; but the straightest route to the root cause is via these classifications, in my opinion.
Because I’ve addressed these in more depth previously, I won’t rehash them here. (Feel free to click the links to go back and read these articles if you haven’t already.)
The solution, I argue, is fairly simple but, simultaneously, accomplishing it will be extremely difficult.
By simple I mean the solution in view is not complex. A few simple steps in the right direction could “effect” great change.
My assertion is that recovering Christian humanism is the best hope for cultural renewal.
The fact that Christian humanism focuses on “the primacy of rhetoric, a return to the sources (Ad Fontes!), and the development of a historical sensibility” means, in medieval terms, all the gold needed for cultural renewal—and then some—is safely tucked away in the dragon’s lair at the top of the mountain. Climb the mountain, recover the gold, renew the culture. Simple as that.
Nevertheless, to say it is extremely difficult, is to acknowledge there is a dragon that will have to be slain in order to acquire the gold.
As C.S. Lewis remarked of Eustace in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, those who have read the right books know things about dragons, namely that they guard their gold closely, breathe fire when threatened, and do all that other nasty stuff dragons do.
Said another way, recovering Christian humanism will greatly benefit the culture, but it will be extremely difficult because the nature of the human heart is to fiercely resist renewal any way possible—and defend its loot to the death.
What Will Be Required
Negotiating the extremely difficult challenge of recovering Christian humanism will require faith, courage, and wisdom.
It will require faith to believe what cannot be seen.
For everyone living in this generation, the modern vision of state, culture, and society first promulgated by the likes of men such as Rousseau, Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche have dominated the human imagination. Unless one has been fortunate enough to read the old books, his mind has not been treated by the clean sea breeze of the centuries and his experience is limited to guessing the meaning of the shadows on the wall of the cave.
It will also require courage, fortitude to face the angry dragon of the human heart which has made the notion of Christian humanism unpopular.
On one hand, it is often unpopular with Christians who have yet to answer Tertullian’s notorious inquiry, “What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?” These, believing they would be committing the sin of loving the world (1 John 2:15), stumble at the idea of reading pagan literature and plundering it for the splintered light of God’s wisdom.
It is also unpopular with secularists who despise everything “Christian” and see the modifier as an attempt on the part of Christians to create their own subculture of humanism, a concept the secularists believe they formulated.
Finally, it is unpopular with the young and unmotivated by virtue of the work involved in recovering Christian humanism from the lair at the top of the mountain. And why should they be motivated when education is now about job training, the culture wars can be fought from a smartphone, and the hard work of slaying dragons can be left to Hobbits?
As would be expected, the young and unmotivated tend to agree with Lady Folly that the hard work of education is a fruitless waste of one’s precious life. In the Praise of Folly, a delightful work written by Christian humanist, Desiderius Erasmus, she opines that the “man who devotes his entire youth and early manhood to acquiring the arts and sciences loses the best part of his existence in perpetual study, pain, and anxiety.”
When the man who commits himself to education dies, Lady Folly says, it will be of no matter seeing he has never really lived because he “has not enjoyed in all the rest of his life so much as a scintilla of pleasure, always sparing, saving, sad, solemn, severe, and strict on himself, morose and melancholy with others, afflicted with a pallid complexion, a gaunt figure, a stooped posture, premature senility and white hairs, departing life before his time.”
Most of all, negotiating the extremely difficult challenge of recovering Christian humanism, will require wisdom.
Primarily, it will require the wisdom to not formulate Christian humanism into its own ideological movement that sets itself up to join the already overcrowded arena of existing ideologies competing for the top position in the political dog pile.
Understanding the extremely difficult challenge that lies ahead, what remains will be an effort to establish a definition of Christian humanism, demonstrate why it offers a viable vision for cultural renewal, and finally conclude with a proposition for defeating the dragon and applying the salve innate in Christian humanism to the present cultural malaise.
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