How Does One Teach Christian Humanism? A Narrative Course Outline

Virgil Nemoianu

After crying out against the many ideologies that dominate American intellectual and cultural life (from secularization to political correctness), most people become mute—indignation rarely leads to the formulation of constructive alternatives. Ironically, conservatives are thoroughly baffled by our current cultural and spiritual crisis. They have themselves become so politicized that they are either ignorant of the importance of culture or they are anticultural. More often than not, conservatives act as if they have conceded the realm of culture to the nihilistic ideologies of the day. Culture itself is seen as the realm of the enemy.

Conservative rhetoric often seems to write off the humanities as a lost cause, when actually the opposite is true: by their very nature the humanities belong to the traditions of harmony, spirituality, and hope, not to negation. The humanities were “invented” in order to nurture the spiritual ecology of the human race; they were never meant to be yoked to a utilitarian agenda. The humanities have always shared a common goal: the quest for a reconciliation between the need for human solidarity and inclusiveness on the one hand and the dignity of individual, concrete persons, situations, and facts on the other. An opening toward the possibility of transcendence was “always already” (to use a deconstructionist phrase) part of the whole project.

That is why we urgently need to revive the tradition of Christian humanism. Some Christians (whether starting from Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox religious positions) will suspect that such a revival would be designed to water down the values and discourses they cherish and to which they are earnestly committed. Others, perhaps even more numerous (from outside Christian horizons or even from within them), may regard a choice of this kind as chiefly an oblique or sly attempt at proselytizing; their distrust of any kind of religion (particularly Christianity, as the shaping force of the West) is an inverted article of faith.

Such opposition ought not to be discouraging. Resistance to Christian humanism stems from the doubts and anguish felt by those who refuse to explore the uncertain contours and intersections of the human heart. In some ways, Christian humanism seems more closely related to fractals and turbulences than to the firm geometries of Euclid and the causalities of Laplace. In other ways, however, Christian humanism is nothing but reclaiming the basic inheritance of the world as it is: the natural and organic connection between works of culture and the religious roots and vistas of the human being. It is the current separation that is artificial, not the other way round.

What I will sketch below is a broad outline of the tradition of Christian humanism. It is meant more as a challenge, as a spur to further reflection, than as a definitive map.

I

What came to be called “Christian humanism” seems rooted in the very earliest stage of a movement that perhaps was not even describing itself as Christianity at the time. It is no exaggeration to say that these roots stem from the Gospels of Luke and John. The Lucan text is clearly addressed to a more cultivated and rationalistic public than the other Synoptics; it is, much more than the others, the “Roman” version among the founding accounts of Christianity. The Gospel of John is also a highly intellectual text—it clearly aims for a combination of the spiritual, the symbolic, and the factual. Let us add in passing that even Pilate’s notorious question—“What is truth?”—with its disillusioned, ironic, slightly weary tone (not necessarily a mean-spirited, perhaps not even a hostile question), is also one of the beginnings of Christian humanism. A strain of skepticism announces itself here—a way of thinking which never gains hegemony within this tradition, but which is never fully suppressed either.

The other driving force behind Christian humanism in the early church is more obvious yet. At least some of the early Christians had expected Jesus’ Second Coming to be imminent, together with the general renewal or rebirth of nature and society. When it became clear that this was not the case—that it was more prudent to interpret the Holy Spirit as an abiding presence of long duration—it became imperative to construct an alternative framework for handling the world and its cultures.

Historically, things seem to have happened in the following way. One of the strong, widespread, and unspoken arguments against early Christianity was the argument from snobbishness. Christianity was seen by the imperial establishment and by the upper classes as a quaint and modest doctrine, devoid of those enlightened and sophisticated qualities that would always be beyond the grasp of fishermen, peasants, and house slaves. This was actually a quite powerful (and sincere) argument for many Roman citizens and Mediterranean intellectuals who feared that the triumph of Christianity would endanger the aesthetic amenities, the social balances, and the interactions with nature that had been formerly assured by different variants of polytheism.

II

It was not at all absurd to argue that Christianity was ill equipped to cope with the complexities of the world and that its message was simple, naive, and linear. Emperor Julian (“the Apostate”), a highly interesting and complex figure, but also a major persecutor of the Christians (A.D. 361–363), exactly illustrates this state of mind. The texture of a whole civilization, its security, and its delights were threatened, Julian and others felt. Indeed, it can be argued that the emergence of Neoplatonism as a doctrine was precisely a response constructed (rather deliberately) by pagan antiquity to the challenge of Christianity. Neoplatonism supplied the demand for an ideological vision that was philosophical and rational, and yet could take on a variety of religious forms and preserve a lively dialectic with the aesthetic and natural realms.

Granted, by that time the beginnings of a Christian philosophy and theology were already in place; even some rudiments of Christian art can be noticed (about A.D. 270, the year of Plotinus’s death). Thus Christians could boast the allegiance of somebody of the stature of Origen, a powerful and fertile intellectual by any standards. Nevertheless what happened next was as if Christianity had collectively decided to pick up the gauntlet and meet its adversaries on their own ground. Soon after the establishment of Neoplatonism, we witness what is probably the most formidable century of Christian intellectual achievement, all around the Mediterranean, fueled by Africans and Greeks, Latins and Syrians, Egyptians and Dalmatians, in a truly cosmopolitan spirit.

In this period, roughly between A.D. 350 and A.D. 450, St. Jerome was translating the Bible into Latin, using the most advanced philological methods then available; St. Athanasius was playing a decisive role in formulating the Creed; meanwhile, perhaps the first great Church orator, St. John Chrysostom, emerges. Toward the end of this period St. Augustine begins to acquire his reputation, while in Milan St. Ambrose displays extraordinary managerial power combined with profound spiritual vision. Out of this amazing group I would single out however the Cappadocians (St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory Nazianzen, and St. Gregory of Nyssa) because more than anyone else they engaged their polytheistic rivals on their own terrain. In a bold strategic move they actually appropriated Neoplatonism; they turned the tables on it and Christianized it.

In time this action was to become the most typical and fundamental gesture of Christian humanism: to respond to the world by taking it over, by embracing it, by showing that all that is beautiful, true, and good is not alien to Christianity or incompatible with it. On the contrary, everything that is beautiful and harmonious, all wisdom and all objects of curiosity are already parts of the divine design, are already prepared by divine providence to enrich human existence and human options.

In the case of Neoplatonism (an appropriation that culminated with Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite and Maximus the Confessor), things happened roughly as follows. Plotinus and his followers had constructed an image of the historical universe as something at the same time centralized (in its origin) and decentralized (as layers of matter move out from their remote origin). The history of the universe was also both linear (evolutive) and circular (created by a “Big Bang,” but yearning for a return to that very same point of origin). Christian thinkers chose elements out of this description of the universe and energetically reorganized them. Over time, features such as the primacy of beauty (and/or its equality with truth and goodness), the validation of localism and decentralization (without abandoning the virtue of unity), the metaphysics of “descent” and grace, and other concepts became fixtures in Christian theology. They also laid the foundations of future Christian humanism.

III
It may seem puzzling that for the next 1,000 years or so, Christian humanism does not seem to have been very prominent. While this idea is little more than a vague impression in most people’s minds, it does contain a strong element of truth. Christian humanism tends to appear more strongly and prominently when Christianity is challenged. Throughout much of the Middle Ages in the West, but also in large parts of the Middle East (the realm of Byzantium), there was a great flowering of Christian culture: the cathedrals and the philosophical systems, as well as Christianity’s impact on the social structures (including the first outlines of health insurance, as well as old-age and unemployment benefits, obligations which until then had fallen almost exclusively on the shoulders of family and other blood and tribal groups). One German scholar has argued that the kairos of Christian art (the moment of maximum vicinity between the divine and the artistic) was the historical moment when simultaneously and independently of each other, the Romanesque style was devised in the West while the art of the icon appeared in the East (A.D. 800–1100). In the history of Christianity this was truly the age of Christendom. Nevertheless, even in this unique age, Christian humanism (as opposed to Christian accomplishments) continued to flourish in figures such as Albertus Magnus, an encyclopedic mind, and in the formidable figure of Hildegard, the abbess of Bingen in the Rhineland, who was at the same time a composer, a painter, an author of mystical visions, and a sage whom kings and emperors sought for advice. More generally, I tend to think of at least two movements of the Middle Ages—that of the great women mystics and that of the Franciscans—as being Christian-humanistic in some of their most important features. The women mystics brought together the emotional and the rational better than many others at the time (although the movement developed around the Abbey of St. Victor in the twelfth century is good evidence that such goals were not gender-restricted). The Franciscans belong to the tradition of Christian humanism because of their involvement with nature and, eventually, with the beautiful (St. Bonaventure in particular).

IV

Louis Bouyer, himself one of the great Christian humanists of our own age, wrote in 1959 Erasmus and His Times which is to this day as good an introduction to Christian humanism as any I know. A similarly good book, not yet translated from the French, is the one by Henri de Lubac (later Cardinal Lubac) about Pico della Mirandola. The Renaissance figures examined in these two studies may well represent the peak of Christian humanism: Erasmus, Pico Della Mirandola, St. Thomas More, Nicholas of Cusa. They include Popes Eugene IV, Nicolas V, Pius II, and Paul III, and Cardinals Pole, Contarini, Barberini, and Bessarion. Protestants (particularly in the seventeenth-century Church of England) developed their own Christian humanism, informed by the sweet erudition of John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, and Izaak Walton.

A narrower and more precise use of the term would confine Christian humanism to the High Renaissance era of the early sixteenth century. Historians often present this movement as almost anti-Christian, or at least as a departure from Christianity. Many commentators argue that the Christian idiom was merely a thin protective layer hiding what was in effect a farewell to the past of “Christian mythology.” This theory is not supported by the biographical evidence or the written works of key figures such as Erasmus, Thomas More, and Pico della Mirandola. More was ready to put his head on the block for his beliefs; Pico went so far as to approach the fiery religious figure Savonarola toward the end of his short life; Erasmus stubbornly and ingeniously pursued a course that steered between personal independence (and cagey doubt) and a refusal to abandon tradition and community. With brilliance and philosophical depth, Nicholas of Cusa had already demonstrated ways in which radical skepticism and intensely honest faith can enter into a fruitful dialogue. This was the model chosen in one way or the other by many pontiffs and cardinals of the sixteenth century. In essence, during the Renaissance we witness a reinscribing of the Cappadocian gambit—an appropriation of the best cultural achievements of the ancient world, of Platonism in particular—as well as the dramatically heightened presence of the Church in the world of culture. The humanism of the Renaissance was in many ways elitist, as opposed to the much more broadly popular sweep of medieval efforts. On the other hand, Renaissance humanism strongly affirmed Christianity’s capacity to be inclusive and to reclaim areas of the past (and present) in which its universality could shine forth again.

At bottom the humanism of the Renaissance can be defined as an attempt to explain how the “two revelations” overlap and intersect and come to support each other. (A similar attempt is found in the writings of the Romantics.) God reveals himself, yes, through the Scriptures, but also through his works, through nature, and through other religions, even when those might be incomplete or unclear. Nevertheless, the essential message of the other major religions is ultimately analogous to that of Christianity. All religions are engaged in a common endeavor, that of speaking with God and about God. This argument was later put forward with particular eloquence and philosophical talent by both Catholics and Protestants such as Malebranche and Leibniz. The latter gave us what is still today the best fusion of rationality and faith. The former talked with wonderful eloquence about the connection of belief with the book of nature and how the two are geared to one another.

The issue of “universalism” is a perennial theme in Christian humanism. The history of Christianity can be read (sociohistorically) as one of expanding inclusiveness. A local, small, and highly coherent sub-branch of Judaism expanded in an effort initiated by Paul of Tarsus and others and continued through the end of the patristic age until it turned into a Mediterranean-wide body of doctrines and visions—Greco-Roman primarily, but with significant other “oriental” accretions. A tough early propagandist such as St. Clement of Alexandria was already speaking of the mysteries of Eleusis as a kind of prefiguring of Christianity. A second phase (from A.D. 800-900 on) saw the incorporation of the tribes of Germanic, Slavic and Celtic descent into the Church.

The next stage, though apparently slow in getting off the ground, began from 1500 to1600 and aimed at the globalization of Christianity; perhaps the Jesuit Matteo Ricci’s experiments with Confucian religious traditions will be seen someday as those of a prophetic thinker.

Many humanists (including Erasmus and della Mirandola) lobbied actively for universalism, for ecumenical attitudes, for a variety of forms of dialogue with other religions, and created unifying schemes or scenarios. Moreover, missionary work was rarely an oppressive kind of imposition. Just recall that a number of our first non-Western dictionaries come from missionaries. Many missionaries tried to understand local cultures and present them in a good light. On several continents interesting syntheses between local traditions and cultures and Christianity enjoyed longer or shorter durations.

V

By the eighteenth century it was becoming clear what the principles of Christian humanism were. People were beginning to understand what has become even clearer to us now: that there are certain fundamental or structural commonalties between humanistic culture and Christianity that unite them, irrespective of the wishes and plans of writers, artists, and intellectuals.

One of those principles is the relational nature of the godhead. Unlike the strict (“binary”) connection of polytheistic or rigidly monotheistic visions of the divine, Christianity’s concept of the Trinity posited from the very beginning an abundance of mutual activities within God’s nature—processes and dialectics, reciprocal engendering, sacrifice and giving, and a great variety of relations with the created world. On a closer look, the works of culture were trying to do the same: stake out a territory of freedom, openness, and creativity. In other words, human culture was trying to imitate on a finite scale the infinitely creative and gratuitous freedom of God. Culture could be seen as the faithful imitation of God. A humanity created in God’s “image and likeness” was following the God of Genesis: incessantly creating, as a free gift, new faces and possibilities of the universe in architecture, music, verse, or philosophical speculation. The humanity of Christian humanism was one that was trying to supplement, in its modest way, the majestic gestures of original Creation.

Furthermore, Christianity could serve as a model for culture because the most crucial and indispensable part of its belief was not given in one indisputable and brutally unambiguous text. The Bible contains no fewer than four separate accounts of the central event of the birth and incarnation, actions, sacrifice, and resurrection of the Second Person of the Trinity. These accounts provide a multitude of overlappings, angles, reverberations of eternity—eye-witness reports, but also secondhand accounts, summaries and reconstitutions, as well as built-in hermeneutical materials. According to the perspective of Christian humanism, the supernatural power of the narrative eludes the constrictive, simplifying categories of earthbound reason and representation—hence the need for a prismatic account. This very special kind of description brought Christianity close to the modes of operation of literature, for example, with its ambiguity, processes, and lack of closure and monolithic meaning.

No less suggestive culturally was the concept of tradition, the continuing work of the Holy Spirit. Briefly put, there is in that particular part of the Church’s life a special connection between stability and expansion, between growth and continuity, that never ceases to amaze the observer. This also served as a model for the pursuit and the shaping of art, philosophy, and other intellectual endeavors.

Other commonalities could be added. Suffice it to say that they were all wrapped up in two large realities on which nobody cast doubt and which, I think, are still valid. The first is that any kind of human society must contain as an indispensable feature an opening toward transcendence. The relationship between the human person and God is constitutive and unavoidable, no matter what channels of communication or religious idioms are employed. The second commonality is the equally incontestable fact that culture is derived from religion: architecture from temples of worship; drama from religious ritual; universities from the acquisition of sacred knowledge; music, sculpture and painting from the praise of the divine; indeed science and economy themselves perhaps from categories generated by sacred narratives.

By the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, such views were crystallized and widespread, and, surprisingly, accepted by skeptics, agnostics, and lukewarm believers.

VI

Therefore it was around this date that Christian humanism finally took on its current form. This was due in large measure to the French diplomat and writer François-René de Chateaubriand, who invented an idiom at the boundaries of the theoretical and the literary in which the great harmonies of the world could be spoken and highlighted. In his The Genius of Christianity (1802), the beautiful emerges as an indispensable key to any grasp of the true and of the good, not the other way round. His example was followed by many Romantic and nineteenth-century writers and thinkers, not only in France, but also in Germany and England, and even in Russia and Eastern Europe. The amazing appeal of Chateaubriand derived from his ability to turn the privileging of nature (the great innovation at the end of the eighteenth century) into an argument for sacrality, and to legitimize the spheres of the emotional and the aesthetic as valid replacements for those of the rational and the social.

Chateaubriand was, of course, not alone. Many German and some English Romantics (Coleridge for example) worked toward forging this alliance between the beautiful and the world of religion. The Swiss Alois Gugler, today virtually forgotten, argued that biblical writing was the prototype of all sublime expression. The Catalan Jaime Balmès engaged directly the philosophies of history of his time, and his contemporary Donoso Cortés argued that politics derives from (or is wrapped in) theology. Cardinal St. Clement Mary Hofbauer gathered around himself in Vienna a dazzling circle of intellectual and artistic stars. The Oxford Tractarians, whether they remained Anglican or turned toward Rome, revamped the whole moral-religious landscape of England for almost a century. The apologetical writings of Hannah More smashed all the best-seller records known in the Anglo-Saxon world. Friedrich Schleiermacher reinvented hermeneutics by starting from religious principles. Lamennais and Görres demonstrated how crucial religious concepts could still remain operative in the context of obsessive social and national preoccupations.

It would be idle to deny the crisis of Christianity in the twentieth century or the fact that we have entered a post-Christian age. While this is usually seen as a dangerous and ambiguous place to be, it is also possible that “post” can be read not only as an indication of rupture and rejection, but also as signaling finality and continuity. It can be argued that without the organizing force of Christianity the main cognitive activities and the social dynamics of the modern age would have been entirely different from what they are and perhaps impossible. Thus nobody can overlook the enormous resurgence of original intellectual thought and artistic creativity associated with the names of Romano Guardini, Josef Pieper, Jacques Maritain, Henri Brémond, Jean Daniélou, Henri de Lubac, Bernard Lonergan, Karl Rahner, Paul Claudel, Charles Péguy, G.K. Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, C.S. Lewis, Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, Vladimir Solovyov, Vladimir Lossky, and Mikhail Bulgakov, not to mention Miguel de Unamuno, Simone Weil, Nicholas Berdyaev and Leo Shestov—and these are only a small number among those connected with Christian humanism.

It cannot be emphasized strongly enough that parallel phenomena can be noted inside Judaism and Islam, synchronically, with many structural analogies and some cross influences. The vigor of religions outside the sphere of monotheism is equally notable. More generally, there is a continuing and efficient presence of religion in virtually all the societies of our globe.

Here I would highlight the name of Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988). His work offers a kind of summa of this revival of Christian humanism in the early twentieth century. He tried to bring together the insights of most of these thinkers. Balthasar provided historical outlines of the Catholic tradition in culture, and he strove toward erecting a kind of explanatory system for ordering the rather individualistic views of many of his predecessors. Significantly, his system resorted to the values of the aesthetic, the dramatic, and the symphonic in order to communicate a tentative synthesis of Christian humanism to the twentieth century.

VII

When all is said and done, what is the nature or design of Christian humanism? One way of putting things in perspective is to say that for the Christian humanists, culture is seen as a kind of crossroads where the spiritual, social, historical, and psychological collide. For them the human being individually, and the human species collectively, act as a key, as the intersectional locus where all areas of the cosmos can meet.

At this crossroads, Christian humanists believe, culture actually behaves as a powerful mediating force between the creaturely and the divine. Thus aesthetic culture is that which seeks to articulate the opening toward transcendence that appears as a constant in all human societies known to us.

Aesthetic culture can do so because, more obviously than other human activities, it is an imitation of divine creativity. The great majority of Christian humanists do not shy away from uncertainty, nor do they bemoan it; rather they seem to receive it in a joyful spirit, whether on the metaphysical level or in matters political and ideological. They accept imperfection and the ephemeral endeavor of human efforts without lassitude or resentment. If God is seen as primarily the creator, the disinterested builder, then imitating the fundamental gestures and behaviors of God must be the proper human vocation.

Along with this constructive experimentalism, Christian humanists uphold courage as a key Christian virtue. This follows naturally from the strain of doubt (sometimes prominent, sometimes barely perceptible) in Christian humanist writings. A close reader of these writings will notice that hope gains a slight precedence over faith and charity. But hope without courage would be sheer irrationality—and the tradition described in this essay is always rational.

Mystics, visionaries, and dogmatists have their own justification, ecclesial not less than existential, but they are less often Christian humanists. On the other hand, monasticism is not necessarily (and historically has not proved) contrary to the humanist impulse. Sociohistorically, monasticism began as an alternative, utopian mode of communitarian life. Nevertheless, rather soon, many monastic communities turned to the preservation of skills and knowledge, no less than to innovation in matters economical and technological. Their hostility toward a violent and stagnant world (e.g., in the ninth to twelfth centuries) was a tenacious and well-considered response and was definitely informed by a patient, farsighted vision. It remains to be seen whether similarly creative movements will be repeated in our own time.

The implosion of the Communist experiment signals, at the very least, the weaknesses of any exclusively secular socioeconomic mode. Does it also warn us of the collapse of the capitalist-democratic mode? This may be an exaggeration, but it is not entirely impossible. Leaving aside apocalyptic scenarios, we can still begin to reflect on how a renewal of our world, a world founded on the hollow premises of the Enlightenment, might come about. In that case, the vision of Christian humanism may well prove even more valuable in the future than it has in the past.

Issue #16 • Summer 1997