Christianity and the Humanist Tradition - Part I
by Christopher Dawson
Feast of the Precious Cross that Appeared over Jerusalem in A.D. 351
Anno Domini 2020, May 7
THE PRESENT AGE
has seen a great slump in humanist values. After dominating Western culture for four centuries humanism today is on the retreat on all fronts, and it seems as though the world is moving in the direction of a non-humanist and even an anti-humanist form of culture. […] Man is a means and not an end, and he is a means to economic or political ends which are not really ends in themselves but means to other ends which in their turn are means and so ad infinitum. Man who raised himself above nature and became lord of the world has become reabsorbed into the endless cycle of material change as the blind servant of the economic process of production and consumption.
[T]he situation of humanism has become precarious in spite of our insistence on political liberty and our Charters of Human Rights. Here also man has become the servant of the process of economic production, in spite, and partly because of, the increase of wealth and material prosperity. And the advance of technology and scientific specialism has steadily reduced the prestige and influence of humanism in education.
At the same time Western culture has lost its faith in Man. All the old idealism and, above all, humanist idealism have become discredited, and there has been a marked tendency in Western literature and art—in America no less than in Europe—towards irrationalism, primitivism, and the rejection of all the humanist values.
What is the attitude of Christians towards this anti-humanist tendency? Clearly there are certain values that are common to Christianity and humanism, and to a considerable extent the enemies of humanism are also the enemies of Christianity. On the other hand, there is no doubt that the anti-humanist reaction has affected Christians as well as non-Christians, and in some cases Christians have joined in the attack on humanism and have welcomed its downfall.
THE NEO-CALVINISM OF KARL BARTH
The most striking example of this is to be seen in the neo-Calvinist movement of Karl Barth and his school, which reasserts the traditional Protestant doctrine of the total corruption of human nature. No doubt these theologians are primarily concerned with Liberal Protestantism rather than with humanism, but since they go further than Calvin himself in their denial of human values, the values of humanism must go down the drain with the rest.
But the Christian reaction against humanism is not confined to the Barthians. It has become so contagious that it is now often taken for granted by public opinion. For example, I recently read an article in the New Statesman by a well-known historian on Professor Butterfield’s book, Christianity and Social Relations, in which the writer criticizes Professor Butterfield’s rejection of moral judgment in history. And he goes on:
The explanation is not far to seek. Christianity and humanism are incompatible. Mr. Butterfield believes in God, therefore he does not believe in man. He holds, no doubt correctly, that only Christians can be judged according to the rules of Christianity; and so he does not judge others at all. He does not discriminate among unregenerate mankind; or rather the only judgment he makes is that some men are cleverer than others.
No doubt this is a somewhat extreme view and there are still plenty of Christians who are prepared to defend the humanist position. Notably, there is M. Jacques Maritain who has written a well-known book in defense of the ideal of Christian humanism. But when Maritain talks about humanism he is clearly using the word in a very different sense from that of Professor Butterfield and his reviewer. So, before discussing the problem it is essential to clarify our ideas and to define the real nature of humanism. For “humanism” is one of those words like “democracy” that has been used so loosely during the last fifty years that it can mean almost anything. If we neglect this task of definition and begin talking about Integral Humanism or Scientific Humanism or any of the other rival forms of humanist theory, we are apt to become involved in a fog of ideological controversy that has little relation to any historical reality.
Humanism was a real historical movement, but it was never a philosophy or a religion. It belongs to the sphere of education, not to that of theology or metaphysics. No doubt it involved certain moral values, but so does any educational tradition. Therefore it is wiser not to define humanism in terms of philosophical theories or even of moral doctrines, but to limit ourselves to the proposition that humanism is a tradition of culture and founded on the study of humane letters.
At first sight this does not carry us very far. It will not satisfy the philosophers like Maritain who says that, “whoever uses the word [humanism] brings into play at once an entire metaphysic.” Nevertheless it is, for all that, the authentic humanism of the humanists—the historic movement that has perhaps done more than anything else to establish the norms of modern European culture during the three centuries between the Renaissance and the Revolution.
Thus although the definition appears to reduce humanism from a philosophy to a form of education, it was a form of education which formed the mind of Western Europe for more than 300 years without distinction of philosophy or creed. Whatever we may think about the relations between Christianity and humanism as a philosophy or metaphysic there can be no question or conflict between the tradition of humanist education and the tradition of theological orthodoxy. For the humanist education was also the education of the theologians. It was practically the only education that Europe knew, and it was common to all parties and all creeds with a few insignificant exceptions.
This is not to say that the humanist culture of the post-Reformation world was one and the same in every part of Europe. Religious differences had an important influence on its development, so that although Catholics and Protestants were both alike influenced by their humanist education, it produced different fruits in art and culture and life in the different spiritual environments.
BAROQUE CULTURE OF THE SOUTH
In the South the union of humanism and Catholicism gave birth to the Baroque culture, which was the dominant form of European culture in the first half of the seventeenth century and which maintained its influence in Austria and Germany and Spain and South America far into the eighteenth century.
In the North the unity of the Protestant culture is less obvious owing to the absence of religious unity, as between the Lutherans and the Calvinists. Nevertheless the influence of humanism on the culture of Northern Europe is no less important than in the South, and it contributed no less than Protestantism to the formation of the new bourgeois culture in Holland and England and Scotland, which was destined to have such an immense influence on the future of Western civilization.
Nevertheless, Protestant culture was by no means completely humanist. The educated classes had all undergone the discipline of a humanist education, but they derived their ethical ideals both from the philosophers and the humanists, directly from the Bible, and above all from the Old Testament. This element of Hebraism was strongest among the Puritans who have often been regarded, e.g., by Matthew Arnold, as responsible for the anti-humanist or Philistine character of the culture of the middle classes in England and America. But the popular conception of the Puritan as an illiterate Philistine is a gross caricature. Both in England and New England the Puritans were very much alive to the value of humane letters and humanist culture, and some of the most remarkable types of Christian humanism in England are to be found among the chaplains of Oliver Cromwell, like Peter Sterry and John Goodwin and Jeremy White.
It was rather in the Protestant underworld—among the lesser sects that kept alive the traditions of medieval heresy—that the anti-humanist element was strongest, and though these sects seldom emerged into the light of history, they nevertheless had a considerable influence on the religion and life of the English-speaking world. They survive today above all in the United States, in the Corybantic excesses of Protestant revivalism and in the obscurantism of traditional sectarianism.
These extravagances are very remote from the authentic Puritan tradition. Nevertheless, we must admit that in Puritanism as a whole, apart from the small group of Puritan humanists above whom I have mentioned, there is a hard core of unassimilated Hebraism which, even in a man like Milton, produced a sharp dualism between religion and culture and led him to use his mastery of the humanist style against the humanist tradition itself, as in his denunciation of classical literature and philosophy in the fourth book of “Paradise Regained.”
It was this dualism of religion and culture that prevented the development of religious drama and religious art in seventeenth-century England and destroyed the medieval unity of religion and social life.
In Catholic Europe it was not so. The Baroque culture was far more deeply penetrated by humanist influences than the culture of the Protestant world, since they were not confined to the scholars and the men of letters, but affected the life of the people as a whole through religious art and music and drama which continued to play the same part in the Baroque world that they had performed in the Middle Ages.
Thus there was not that same sharp division or antagonism between religion and culture that we find in Northern Europe. For instance, the drama, instead of being banned by the Church, was used deliberately as a means of popular religious instruction, so that in Spain religious and secular dramas were composed by the same authors, performed by the same actors, and applauded by the same audiences. In the same way, there was no sharp dualism in Catholic Europe between humanist and Christian ethics. The synthesis between Christian and Aristotelian ethics which was perhaps the most important of the achievements of St. Thomas Aquinas remained the basis of the Catholic teaching and it provided an ideal foundation for the construction of a Christian humanism which could integrate the moral values of the humanist tradition with the super-naturalism of Christian theology.
It may be objected that by bringing in Thomism, I am doing just what I objected to do in the ideologists of humanism. But apart from the fact that Aristotle and Plato have always been included in the study of humane letters, the Nicomachaen Ethics
embody the essential principles of humanist ethics and have an incomparable importance in the history of humanist education.
We must remember that “the study of humane letters” was never confined to literature and philology. It was understood in the widest possible sense, as including the whole realm of classical culture. Thus the tradition of humanism takes us back eventually to the tradition of Hellenism, which was the real source alike of the humanist values and of the humanist system of education.
Consequently humanism represents something much wider than the movement with which the name is primarily associated—I mean than the Renaissance of classical studies in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It stands for a continuous tradition that accompanies the whole course of Western culture from its beginnings in ancient Greece down to modern times. In some ages it has been weakened and obscured, and these are what the humanists called Dark Ages. But as E. R. Curtius has recently shown in his great book European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, the continuity is much greater than is generally realized; and though the Italian scholars of the Renaissance were the first to be known as humanists, we have no right to deny the title to John of Salisbury and the scholars of Chartres in the twelfth century or even to some of the Carolingian scholars in the ninth century, like Theodulf of Orleans and Walafrid Strabo. It is this continuous tradition that makes the unity of European literature and European thought, so that, as E. R. Curtius insists, it is hopeless to try to study any of the modern European literatures as though it were an autonomous whole, since they all form part of a greater unity and are only fully intelligible when they are related to the common tradition of Western humanism.
And the same can be said about the different European cultures. Culture does not arise spontaneously from the soil; it is an artificial growth, which has been diffused from its original source in the Eastern Mediterranean by a complex process of transplantation and has been gradually made to bear fruit in a new soil by a long process of careful cultivation. Drama and prose are like the vine and the olive, and they are derived from the same homelands. The difference is that they have spread farther and changed more.
*Originally published in The Dublin Review, Winter, 1952.
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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