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Christian Humanism
Spiritual Life, Fall 2004 by Merton, Thomas
Man possesses a dual destiny-human and divine-and if he neglects either facet of that destiny he is, to that extent, less a man and less a saint. This question is brilliantly examined by the celebrated Thomas Merton, a writer of deserved international prominence and astonishing literary talent, in a new article, composed specially for SL [Spiritual Life].
THE TOPIC OF CHRISTIAN HUMANISM must be frankly faced by the Christian today as both problem and temptation. A problem because the very possibility of an authentic Christian humanism is questioned by a secular culture, a culture of revolution, which declares religion to be a social mystification which diminishes man's human stature, blunts his creativity and retards his growth toward maturity. This, of course, suggests the temptation: the easy answer which can be drawn from the Christian humanism and culture of the past.
Anyone who has seriously studied the Christian culture of the thousand years between the patristic age and the renaissance knows well enough how it abounded in life, sanity, joy, and creative power. Only those who are still clinging to nineteenth century cliches can still regard the middle ages as a time of unrelieved darkness.
There is no doubt whatever, even in the minds of those who attack Christianity, that the culture of medieval Christendom and the humanism of the Christian and European renaissance represent decisive steps in man's growth. This culture was responsible for the formation of our present world-with all its glories and all its blemishes. But this facile recourse to the past might well be both ambiguous and insincere.
Why ambiguous? Not because of the paradox of a "Christian humanism" which at the same time denied the world and affirmed it. This is a curious and quite sophisticated cultural phenomenon which is, incidentally, in one way or another common to all the great spiritual world religions. Even in Buddhism, which is far more radically world-denying than Christianity, one often finds an exquisite affirmation of life and of human values. The student of Asian religions knows well that having established a certain distance and freedom, by means of detachment, their believers were able to love the world all the more freely and purely because they were liberated from it. So too with the Christian saints. But this is not the ambiguity I mean.
Because of the historical complexity and the many-sidedness of Christian culture, it has become all too easy for the Christian apologist to have things both ways and indeed to advance a ready explanation for almost anything. Science? Technology? Humanism? Progress? Evolution? Even revolution? One can always point to some Christian who has distinguished himself by devotion to one or other of these and infer, without further argument, that all Christians are just on the point of agreeing with him unanimously.
After all, it is not enough to have a saint for everything. It is not enough to display Thomas More as the example of the Christian humanism, the layman, the statesman, the father of the family, the student of the classics and the friend of Erasmus (who himself is unfortunately not on display as another humanist "saint" since for various obscure reasons he did not quite make it with the right officials). Nor is it enough to repeat once again the familiar arguments about the culture of medieval monks. What point is there in asserting today that though St. Gregory the Great did not like the grammar of Donatus, he was nevertheless a gifted and well-formed writer in his own way? Or that the fulminations of St. Jerome and St. Peter Damian against the liberal arts did not prevent them from being well formed in the classic curriculum? There are better and more uncompromising examples of Christian openness to all forms of profane knowledge in the middle ages-the School of Chartres for instance, with its Platonizing scholars who were also deeply intrigued by the natural world and in some ways foreshadowed Teilhard de Chardin. The School of St. Victor which declared, "Learn everything, you will find nothing superfluous." Above all there is St. Thomas and his openness to Aristotle, to the Arabs, and to the claims of reason, nature, and man.
Yet a historical apologetic is not conclusive. It is unfortunate that the renaissance popes and their love of art do not offer completely convincing arguments for Christian humanism when we remember the Galileo affair. To go further and to declare that Christian humanism is a living force in the world today simply because this world remains in cultural continuity with the Christendom of the past would in fact be quite equivocal. Let us not forget that certain writers have coined the invidious phrase "post-Christian world" to designate our age in which the moral climate is poisoned by a residue of once Christian values that have now been perverted and abandoned. We will not pause here to debate about this provocative concept, which nevertheless gives food for thought.
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