Christian Humanism

Spiritual Life, Fall 2004 by Merton, Thomas

Above all we must understand the crucial importance of forgiveness as the heart of Christian humanism. Christianity is not merely a religious system which attempts to explain evil. It is a life of dynamic love which forgives evil and by forgiving it enables love to transform evil into good. The dynamic of Christian love is a dynamic of forgiveness and the true secret of Christian humanism is that it has the divine power to transform man in the very ground of his being from a miserable enslaved and confused being into a free son of God. This divine transforming power is forgiveness, Christian mercy. Where this merciful love is absent, there can no longer be any claim to an authentic Christianity (1 Cor 13:1-3):

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

The whole meaning of Christian teaching is precisely that man is not alienated from himself by his new relationship to God, but on the contrary everything that is God's becomes ours in Christ. We discover our true selves in love. To put it more concretely, everything that is God's is our own, provided that we love,

Authentic Love

Here we come to the central point: the question of love.

The key problem of true humanism is the problem ofthat authentic love which unites man to man not simply in a symbiotic and semiconscious relationship, but as person to person in the authentic freedom of a mutual gift. Here we come to the question of narcissism which is closely related to, in fact inseparable from, alienation. Alienated man is also in fact narcissistic because his love is regressive, undeveloped, infantile. It would be interesting here to examine the possible analogies between this modern psychological concept and the traditional Christian idea of sin, particularly original sin. They have much in common. The narcissistic personality is centered on the affirmation of itself and its own limited needs and desires. It sees other things and persons as real only in so far as they can be related to these selfish desires.

Psychology and anthropology today teach us that primitive forms of religion, particularly those which make considerable use of magic rites, tend to be associated with narcissistic thinking. But we must not place all the blame only on primitive people. Narcissism remains a problem of enormous magnitude especially in our highly developed modern technological culture, which abounds in its own hidden forms of magic thinking, superstition, ritualism. Our sophisticated modern culture has its taboos, its obsessions, and all that goes into the formation of the neuroses, individual and collective, which so often take the place of formal religion in the minds of men. Erich Fromm even goes so far as to say that much of modern society and its attitudes can be summed up as highly organized narcissism.