Christian Humanism, Past and Present
by Dan Knauss, The New Pantagruel
From the standpoint of postmodernist thinkers like Jean-François Lyotard, western cultures universalize assumptions about what is “human” and “rational,” as if these concepts are not culturally and historically specific, the malleable products of power and ideology. According to Lyotard and others, in the hands of science and the modern state, idealizations of human autonomy and rationality have become parts of an oppressive and imperialistic apparatus. They support a “grand narrative” (or “metanarrative”) about the nature and direction of humanity and history which justifies violence and injustice carried out against marginal groups that do not conform to the beliefs and values that inform western notions of truth, justice or freedom.
If postmodernism can be generalized, then, as an effort to expose and challenge western modernity’s valuation of the autonomous, rational human individual, the Enlightenment is commonly seen by postmodernists as the period in which the ideal of the autonomous, rational self achieved cultural dominance while the cultural impulse toward that end is typically located centuries earlier, in the Renaissance, often in relation to the humanist movement. This postmodernist intellectual historiography is in large part a reaction to that of modern humanists, or simply modernists, who considered themselves the heirs of the Enlightenment and Renaissance humanism. Unlike contemporary postmodernists, modernists celebrated the historical development of modernity as a liberatory drama that climaxed in the triumph of the individual and nation states constructed on rational principles. As Leo Spitzer put it in Linguistics and Literary History: Essays in Stylistics, “the Humanist believes in the power bestowed on the human mind of investigating the human mind.” However, in the wake of a century of unprecedented warfare, totalitarianism, genocide, weapons of mass destruction, state propaganda, terrorism, and a host of other unprecedented ills, the modernist’s confidence in “culture” and “liberal” or “humanistic” education was profoundly shaken, if not destroyed. Often cited as a foundational postmodernist manifesto, Martin Heidegger’s influential “Letter on Humanism” expressed a profound post-war disillusionment with the humanistic project of European educational systems since the nineteenth century.
Given the trajectory of modern history, it is understandable why Postmodernists radically disagree with the modernist/humanist view of humanity and history to the point of declaring themselves to be anti-humanists and anti-modernists. Nevertheless, Postmodernists still accept most of the modernist historical narrative as valid in itself. That is, they do not question the premise that the Renaissance saw the birth of the autonomous individual. The difference for postmodernists is that the autonomous individual is not a good thing or even a reality. Rather, it is a fallacious ideological construct that serves the oppressive interests of a modernity conceived according to western, Eurocentric values and presuppositions. Postmodernists are inclined to regard self-proclaimed “modern,” “first-world” nations with suspicion as they constitute a global minority of people who nevertheless put themselves at the center of world maps, dominating international affairs with their own interests and native forms of discourse. It is not my intention here to dispute the accuracy of this view but rather the accuracy of the historical narrative that is frequently employed to support it.
In the opinion of many scholars who study medieval and renaissance culture in a variety of disciplines, the historical narrative that modernists and postmodernists both accept should have been discarded many years ago. In Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe, Charles Nauert refers to it as a “historical myth, … the product of the secular, liberal intellectuals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who were searching for the origins of their own beliefs and values.” Similarly, Charles Trinkaus, one of the most influential Renaissance intellectual historians in recent times, argued in “Marsilio Ficino and the Ideal of Human Autonomy” that late twentieth-century scholars who saw the autonomy ideal arising in the Renaissance were subscribing to an interpretation “fueled by Nietzsche … and developed, especially in the 1930s and 1940s, as a counter to the gloomy forebodings of Marx, Weber, and others.”
Max Weber was influenced by Karl Marx’s idea of alienated labor and famously argued in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism that capitalism is a socially impoverishing force that developed from the ascetic, individualistic spirit of Luther and Calvin. Many scholars who dissented from Weber’s jaded view of modernity reacted with a vision of the Renaissance as the origin of a dynamic, liberating, and post-religious, post-medieval humanistic spirit centered on the ideal of human autonomy. This, Trinkaus writes, “is the vision of man commanding his environment with the resources of science, creating his own rules of personal behaviour, free from the restrictions imposed by theologians, and governing his relationships with his fellows in an open, psychically informed, and mutually tolerant discourse.”
While it may have been an understandable reaction to the temper of the times, the modernist alternative was too extreme in its emphasis on the achievements of modernity and the triumph of the individual. This triumphalistic modernist historical narrative tended to be predicated on the eclipse of religion by science and “rational” thought, so Christianity tended to be left out of the picture. It was either overlooked, or diminished in its role, or else characterized as a doddering old belief system superseded by a vibrant new secularism. In his masterwork, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian and Humanist Thought, Trinkaus pointed out that this account is far too simplistic, and he demonstrated the fundamentally non-secular, Christian nature of Renaissance humanism – a humanism that flatly denies the autonomy ideal prized by modernist scholars. (Earlier, Jacques Maritain made the same point when he distinguished between anthropocentric and theocentric forms of humanism in Humanisme Intégral. One might also consider Eric Voegelin’s view of modernity as the revolt of egophanic, as opposed to theophanic, individuals or Herman Doyeweerd’s similar diagnosis of modernity’s crypto-religious autonomist-individualist “ground-motive.”) Scholars like Trinkaus who are genuinely attentive to history point us toward an understanding of the early modern era – the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance – as a flowering of existing, primarily Catholic and Classical traditions that did increasingly emphasize the human individual and human rationality as somewhat more autonomous than was common previously. But as Trinkaus writes, “the ideal [of individual autonomy] was formulated ordinarily with a deep awareness of the limitations that God, the physical universe, and the human polity placed upon it.”
Unfortunately, Trinkaus’ reappraisal of the Renaissance and Renaissance humanism has not been as widely disseminated as it deserves to be. Many people throughout the past half-century have assumed a reactionary and reductionistic position much like that of modernist and postmodernist scholars. Partisan, confessional historiography has gone by the wayside among professional historians, but it retains a strong hold on popular opinion. Conservative Protestants especially are inclined to read or be taught that the Renaissance, and particularly Renaissance humanism, was a spiritually and intellectually compromised movement that led to a modern, secular society which valorizes human self-sufficiency in all areas. Conservative Catholics often take a similar view but tend to lay blame on the Reformation for the rise of a modernity that lauds the autonomy of the rational individual and is presumptively hostile toward communities of tradition in its valorization of individual rights, reason, and freedom. Like postmodern thinkers, in both of these cases the Renaissance and Reformation era is described as a critical turning point where the culture began to move in earnest toward deluded and dangerous ends. Furthermore, because not a few modernist intellectuals with hostile opinions of Christianity claimed the name and tradition of humanism for themselves, Renaissance humanism is often regarded with suspicion, if not hostility, by many Christians, especially conservative Protestants.
Influenced in large part by the Dutch philosopher Hermann Dooyeweerd’s critique of western culture, Francis Schaeffer frequently used “humanism” as an unqualified polemical term to refer to thinkers and ideas he objected to from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. In his most acclaimed book, How Shall We Then Live?, which was highly influential in Anglo-American Reformed and Evangelical communities, Schaeffer specifically attacked Renaissance humanism and linked it with modern secular humanism. More recently, in popular surveys of postmodern thought and culture aimed at Evangelical Protestant and Reformed readers, Stanley J. Grenz (A Primer on Postmodernism), and Brian Walsh with J. Richard Middleton (The Transforming Vision: Shaping a Christian Worldview and Truth is Stranger Than it Used to Be) have followed Schaeffer and secular postmodernists by reductively asserting that there is an integral relationship between the Renaissance, Renaissance humanism, and the modernist myth of human autonomy. But contrary to the many facile characterizations of Renaissance humanism by modernist intellectuals and their critics, a proper understanding of humanism exposes the poverty of both positions and the false dichotomy between modernist optimism and postmodern skepticism. Many Renaissance humanists believed that original sin had strongly negative epistemological implications. Often their thinking in this regard was formatively shaped by the writings of St. Augustine. Christian humanism of the Augustinian variety actually resembles, and perhaps even anticipates, the deep-seated skepticism that characterizes postmodern thought and what Paul Ricoeur calls “the hermeneutics of suspicion.” The crucial difference is that Augustinian humanism is neither naively optimistic about the human person as the modernists were naively optimistic, nor is it excessively pessimistic as their postmodernist opponents have been.
Etienne Gilson observed in The Christian Philosophy of St. Augustine that “[r]educed to its abstract form, Augustine’s experience may be said to amount to the discovery of humility. Errors of understanding are bound up with the corruption of the heart through pride.” Put even more starkly, Søren Kierkegaard suggested that from the divine perspective, we are always in the wrong. In the same vein, Walsh and Middleton concede in Truth is Stranger that postmodernists are right: “We do tend to construct perspectives, worldviews and metanarratives that erase difference and marginalize whatever does not fit. And therefore, a Christian epistemology will be profoundly suspicious of all totalizing epistemological claims precisely because it recognizes the situated particularity of all finite knowing and the universal brokenness of all human subjects.” This is entirely consistent with a major theme of Renaissance humanism, which asserts the dignity and magnificence of the human creature as well as its fallenness and finitude.
As a consequence of their theism, the Augustinian humanists had a way to counterbalance their recognition of human corruption and errors of understanding. They held that truth exists as more than a human construct produced by the limited perspectives and desires of individuals locked in their own interpretations of reality. The humanists following Augustine believed that there is something outside the hermeneutic circle – and outside the self – that can get to us. Postmodernism in its most extreme expression is a residual humanism with its intense critical faculties intact but without any openness to truth or reality beyond the realm of the intramundane where we find finite, feeble people whose thoughts, words, and actions are governed by scant, partial knowledge, and by desires that can be all too rational. For Christians, this image is accurate only as part of the whole picture of creation, fall, and redemption – and for that reason it can be the worst sort of lie, deceiving many because it contains seeds of truth. However, Christians have much to learn from the often negative analyses of postmodernists because Christians are frequently inclined to err in the other direction, presuming that they have unequivocally more, better, and easier access to truth, or that they are somehow not as implicated in the delusions, errors, and evils of our communities, nations, and cultures nearly as much as others are.
It does not take much reflection on our finitude to realize that all our knowledge is partial, limited, perspectival, and influenced by the ways in which we perceive and interpret our situatedness in time and space, history and culture. Like contemporary postmodernists, Augustinian humanists understood all this. They made human finitude an integral aspect of their worldview, and this brought them to a number of rather “postmodern” positions that are nonetheless thoroughly Christian as well. For instance, according to Sources of Hermeneutics by Jean Grondin, professor of philosophy at the University of Montreal, humanism historically “acknowledg[es] that as finite beings we never cease to learn.” Indeed, we never stop learning or growing, and neither our knowledge nor our nature is fixed. In postmodern parlance, the rejection of a static, universal human nature is often lauded as “anti-essentialism,” and “essentialism” is invariably traced, not entirely without warrant, to Christian thought. But for humanism, which Grondin links with Augustine, the rejection of a fixed, definitive human nature is embraced as a denial of anthropocentrism and human autonomy. The positive corollary of that denial is a “thankful openness to the enlightening perspectives of others and of those who have preceded us and bequeathed to us the opportunity of their experience.”
In the literary culture of Renaissance humanism, the bequest of other perspectives is given and received through languages and literature with diverse cultural and historical backgrounds. For this reason, the relative nature of human perspectives and interpretations took on great significance for the humanists, just as it has for postmodernists. Kathy Eden, Chair of Literature Humanities at Columbia University, argues that as rhetoricians influenced by Augustine, Renaissance humanists were highly attentive to interpretation and actually developed the basic principles of modern hermeneutics. Similarly, Grondin takes Augustine and the humanists to be two of “the forgotten historical sources of hermeneutical thought” behind contemporary philosophy.
Grondin and Eden attest to the enduring and contemporary relevance of Renaissance humanism, especially in the fields of study concerned with interpretation – particularly the interpretation of literature, history, culture, and human nature itself. Rather than being simply opposed or irrelevant to postmodern thought and hermeneutics, Renaissance humanism has much to teach Christian thinkers and the contemporary academy. In support of this claim and to suggest some constructive points of contact, in the following sections of this essay I will sketch out some of the major concerns, values and motivations of Renaissance humanism with its Augustinian inflections, especially in its understanding of the human individual, language, and interpretation. My touchstone is Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536), the “prince of the humanists.” Erasmus’ Praise of Folly both exemplifies and justifies a radical skepticism akin to that of postmodern thinkers because of its profound awareness of the implications of our proclivity for sin, error, and prideful presumption. Postmodern perspectives, like Erasmus’ Dame Folly, can be seen as useful tools in the effort to expose and contend with the prejudices of the will and idols of the intellect that always hamper us. Yet Erasmus’ Christian skepticism goes well beyond the wholly negative theses of postmodernism. It is not an end in itself but rather a necessary precondition for openness to understanding God, ourselves, others and the world as they are disclosed and made present to us through language.