CHRISTIAN HUMANISM
I am a humanist, but
not that kind
of humanist. Humanism is a term that gets thrown around a lot these days—but
like most terms that once had a strong philosophical foundation, humanism has
been so thoroughly detached from its philosophical substance it is another
empty term in public consciousness. That said, it is an important concept and
one that Catholics should reclaim.
All students of philosophy, both irreligious and religious, will
learn that humanism—whilst having antecedent roots in Cicero and Plotinus—was
really the result of Catholic anthropology. Humanism, on one hand, is a life
embodied by the art of reading and writing—“the man of letters.” But more
explicitly as it relates to philosophy, humanism is the belief in human nature,
that human nature has a telos (or
end), and that the end of human nature is eudemonia (or happiness). Humanism
also extols the dignity of mankind, seeing humanity as occupying a special
place within the world—Judaism and Christianity call this dignity and
specialness the imago Dei.
When
studying humanism St. Augustine looms large. Augustine is widely seen as the
father of humanism, and the tradition of anthropology that Augustine
established helped shaped and form the emergence of humanism come the
Renaissance and beyond. After all, part of the core of Augustine’s philosophy
of the self, rational introspection, and the importance of reason to humans and
humanity’s ability to understand oneself and one’s nature, was one’s search for
understanding oneself, which led to the discovery of God since one is made in
the image of God. True self-knowledge, then, is also a coming into communion
with the Divine.
The problem, however, with neo-Platonism’s proto-humanism was
that it extolled only man’s capacity for reasoning. Reason may help cultivate
virtue and push humans toward the want for knowledge of the One (the
neo-Platonic conception of God), as Plotinus rightly knew, but neo-Platonism
erred in never extolling the beauty and goodness of the human body or the
material world. While the Manicheans and Gnostics were heretical Christians and
heretical Platonists, there is a certain truth in seeing the heresy of the
Manicheans and Gnostics as ultimately rooted in neo-Platonism’s tacit rejection
of the goodness of matter. It was precisely this worrying tendency of seeking
flight from the material world in neo-Platonism which had come to take on a
theologized character in Manicheanism that Augustine confronted in Confessions.
This is the great achievement of Catholic humanism—it promotes a
true dignity of the fullness of human nature, which includes the body.
Everything that God decreed was good, and so too does this extend to
materiality. Though through the Fall humans no longer have the harmonious union
between eros and logos, which necessitated the incarnation of the Word to restore the
imago, but not even the Fall renders the body and materiality evil. This is why
the Apostle Paul obsesses over the importance of resurrection—which itself is
the other half of the incarnational drama, without the resurrection of the dignified
human body the incarnation of the Word loses its power.
The incarnation of the Word, in taking on material corporeality,
brings an added dignity to the human body beyond simple creation and imago Dei. The importance of the Word becoming
incarnate into the world is also important in understanding the restoration
of imago Dei in
Augustine’s anthropology. The incurvatus
in se—the inward curve to the self—is the root of all sin; it is the
attempt to find wisdom and happiness apart from the source of wisdom and
happiness. In other words, “man is the judge of all things.” This was the
Original Sin that destabilized the unity of desire and reason. The end result
is humans seeking happiness through pure concupiscence without the ordering
force of logos and
being perpetually unsatisfied and alienated with their soul. Christ’s
incarnation, since Christ is Word and wisdom—the logos as the Early Church understood—also embodies the unity
of eros and logos, of desire and reason, in his perfect nature. The Word’s incarnation,
as Augustine knew and wrote about in De
Trinitate, reflects and embodies the highest calling man can strive
for—the restoration of the imago
Dei.
St. John Paul II best summarized this calling for excellence and
dignity in Theology of the Body and
in his constant claim that humans are “called for greatness.” Properly
speaking, Catholic doctrine and Augustine’s philosophical anthropology does not
view desire as something bad. It is something good—desire is written on the
human heart for wisdom and happiness as the Catechism proclaims which should properly lead one
to God. As Augustine wrote, “Thou hast formed us for Thyself, and our hearts
are restless till they find rest in Thee.” The problem of concupiscence is when
it detaches itself from the source that it seeks.
Plotinus knew that man’s search for truth brought him into
a henosis (union)
with the One. But Plotinus’s work carries the implied detachment of reason from
the body, something that Catholicism strongly opposes. Catholic concerns over
“restriction” of bodily action is not a constraint against liberty, it is the
highest promotion of liberty: true human flourishing. Those who denigrate their
bodies, and their souls in the process, only grow more and more alienated and
conflicted with themselves. We are called to greatness with dignity; it is
startling that our society has greatness and dignity confused with alienation
and denigration.
Today’s
“humanism” is hardly the dignified humanism of Augustine, Giovanni Mirandola,
or Erasmus. It is essentially an anti-humanism that rejects all the core tenets
of traditional humanism and maintains the highest end of humanity is free
choice to be whatever one wants to be. Basically modern “humanism,” which is no
humanism at all, is a rebellion against humanism—the ultimate outcome of
Hobbesian anthropology that reduces humanity to mere “matter in motion” with
nothing more than an insatiable desire for power, consumption, and material
self-advancement. The self-exhausting end to Hobbes’s materialist anthropology
is trans-humanism, itself the logical end of the implicit atheism and sensual
hedonism that his anthropological philosophy begets.
Rather than happiness being internal and rooted in the health of
the soul, which when found and cultivated, dignifies the human body and the
whole world, Hobbes and anthropological liberalism lowers the bar to the lowest
common denominator in man. As Leo Strauss explained in Natural Right and History, Hobbes’s explicit
hedonism and implicit atheism rejects the entire Greco-Christian ethical
tradition of excellence. “Free Choice” rather than teleological flourishing,
sensual hedonism rather than bodily dignity, and ethical egoism rather than
common good, are the new heights for humanity to strive for. That is to say
there is no striving for excellence at all.
The humanism of Hobbes, and the “secular humanism” of today, is
no humanism at all. It advances a fallen man, rather than an incarnate Word, as
the highest image of existence. It advocates for a modified Epicurean hedonism,
rather than virtue ethics, as the highest calling for human behavior. It
de-humanizes the human body, through an implicit atheism, and calls this
de-humanized and exploited body true dignity. Secular humanism celebrates the
destruction of the human body and the incurvatus
in se as the highest expression of freedom and human
flourishing.
Anthropology,
which is the study and understanding of what it means to be human, has far
reaching consequences regarding which school of anthropology dominates culture.
Catholic philosophy inaugurated the elevation of anthropological philosophy
precisely because Catholic philosophy, with its marriage to the incarnation of
the Word, must get human nature and human existence right. At the heart of
Catholic anthropology, which is ultimately founded in Augustine, values and
extols the virtues of the body, magnanimity, and prizes ontological
flourishing—life—as the heart of human existence and living.
Hobbesian
anthropology, on the other hand—and Hobbes’s anthropology dominates the heart
of Western liberalism—values egoism, emancipation, and is rooted in not harmony
and life as Catholic anthropology is, but conflict and violent death. After
all, Hobbes maintains that the starting point of human existence is not the
harmony of man and God in a beatification vision, but a “war of all against
all” in the state of nature that exhausts itself in a life that is “solitary,
poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Hobbesian anthropology, and the Whiggish myth
of progress, is flight from the human condition—it logically and necessarily
exhausts itself in what C.S. Lewis called the “abolition of man.”
In
Hobbes’s account humans are a random assortment of atoms bouncing off each
other that propels us into motion. In Augustine’s account humans are made in
love to love, in wisdom for wisdom, and in communion for communion. Happiness
and flourishing is our end, not material possession, choice, or emancipation,
and we know, as Catholics, where human flourishing is to be found. The happy
human cannot be happy unless he is in communion with the source of the
beatitudes. And culture will not beget life unless it has the source of life at
its center.
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