Christian Humanism

Spiritual Life, Fall 2004 by Merton, Thomas

Like the Hegelian eschatology from which they stem, most modern secular humanisms are concerned with man in the abstract, with the human species. It is abstract man who will one day reveal to the world the absolute made conscious of itself (Hegel). It is not the free and concrete human person, the man of flesh and blood, but man in general, as a collective totality, who will manifest in himself the latent divinity which is supposed by the Hegelians to be his.

Or, for Marx, it is again man, scientific and objective man, that will one day humanize himself and the earth: but Marx had little patience for the claims of the fallible human person and no interest whatever in such values as love, compassion, mercy, happiness. Thus it is not difficult for the abstract and scientific doctrines of modern humanism to become means by which the individual person is reduced to subjection to man in the abstract. And as Gabriel Marcel has pointed out, this vast and awful abstractness hovers over the abyss of mass society to bring forth from it the anti-humanist and irresponsible monstrosity that is mass-man.

Secular Humanism

This explains in part why modern secular humanisms are so fair and optimistic in theory and so utterly merciless and inhuman in practise. They are so abstract that they easily lend themselves to narcissistic and idolatrous interpretations. It is very easy in fact to treat man in the abstract as a narcissistic idol for concrete self-worship. And it is therefore very easy to complacently love abstract humanity as the idolatrous projection of self while hating and mercilessly persecuting my concrete fellow man. Indeed the unforgiving character of narcissism demands a scapegoat that can "explain" evil and bear the burden of evil on its back. The scapegoat is by definition to be treated with absolute mercilessness for he bears all the evil in the world-he is the source of all evil. Mercilessness is not only permitted, it now becomes a sacred duty. We observe this mercilessness at work in every form of totalism, every form of extreme fanaticism. No matter how much the theoretical doctrines may differ, the practice of all concurs in this: love of an abstract good and ideal is taken to justify relentless hatred of a certain group of men in the concrete.

From this we can conclude that the hopes of modern secular and revolutionary eschatology can, in fact, contribute nothing to the building of a new humanism as long as it pretends to attain its ends by the purely objective application of science, without any consideration for living human values as they are incarnate in men of flesh and blood. No humanism has retained the respect for man in his personal and existential actuality to the same extent as Christian humanism. The center of Christian humanism is the idea that God is love, not infinite power. Being love, God has given himself without reservation to man so that he has become man. Henceforth, by reason of the Incarnation, the love which is also the infinite creative secret of God in his hidden mystery becomes manifest and active, through man, in man's world.