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What is Christian humanism? I will attempt a definition by way of a brief history of Christian humanism from its patristic inception through medieval, Reformation, and Renaissance iterations all the way to its resurgence in modern times. In doing so, I will apply the label of Christian humanist to people and cultural periods retrospectively. Is this legitimate? After all, many of those ancient and modern figures whom I here characterize as major exponents of a Christian humanist vision—St. Paul, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, C.S. Lewis, or Dietrich Bonhoeffer—did not identify themselves as Christian humanists. Yet it is in fact legitimate, even if the precise term “Christian humanism” is a late invention, a “post-hoc coinage” as Andrew Copson puts it, dating from the early twentieth century. For even if “Christian humanism” is a modern label, it captures a clearly identifiable set of beliefs and values about human identity.
We recognize Christian humanism whenever Christian existence is defined by the incarnation and lived out of one’s union with Christ, in whom all of reality finds its unifying centre. “God became human in Christ so that human beings may become most perfectly human by becoming like Christ.” This phrase sums up the biblical, theo-anthropological foundation of Christian humanism. Striving for transformation into Christ’s image constitutes the fundamentally educational ethos of humanism, reflected still in the German definition of education as image formation (Bild-ung literally means formation according to a Bild, an image). More specifically, we know we are in the presence of Christian humanism when we encounter an integrative, christologically configured view of reality for which a love of God’s Word is reflected in a love of human words, a stance toward reality in which Christian philanthropy is accompanied by philosophy, philology, and artistic creativity in the service of the good, the true, and the beautiful.
So, what is in a name? The label “humanist” was first used by Latin-speaking elites to designate liberal arts education in the service of virtue formation. Roman Stoic philosopher and statesman Cicero (106–43 BC), for example, famously championed the liberal arts for developing one’s humanitas, one’s full human nature or “moral goodness,” by becoming truthful, just, courageous, and self-controlled. By the fifteenth century, the term had become well established in Italy (umanista), designating masters who taught the particular academic subjects of grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy. These humanists distanced themselves from the narrow, professionally oriented teaching of the scholastics and championed a literary-moral education for developing one’s full potential as a human being. They devised curricula for schoolboys as well as for the aristocratic elite, including princes. Reading classic examples of virtue and wisdom, along with the Scriptures, became important exercises for rulers and established the influence of the umanista.
For instance, the famous humanist educator Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (1405–1464) impressed on Ladislas, the young king of Bohemia, the “importance of Philosophy, and of Letters,” because “by this twofold wisdom, a Prince is trained to understand the laws of God and of man, by it we are, one and all, enlightened to see the reality of the world around us. Literature is our guide to the true meaning of the past, to a right estimate of the present, to a sound forecast of the future. Where letters cease, darkness covers the land; and a prince who cannot read the lessons of history is a helpless prey to flattery and intrigue.” Most Renaissance humanists did not regard themselves as atheists but often were devout Christians who pursued learning for the love of wisdom. The Christian liberal arts tradition of Renaissance humanists was revived in John Henry Newman’s influential book The Idea of University (1852), and Christian humanism was rekindled as a crucial civic influence on seminal articulations of human dignity during the early and mid-twentieth century, when Europe was suffering under two world wars and totalitarian regimes.
The Patristic Beginnings of Christian Humanism
The defining features of Christian humanism were established when Christians began to unfold the full meaning of the incarnation, of the astounding mystery that God revealed himself most fully in the god-humanity of Jesus. The result was that for roughly the first six hundred years of early Christian theology, both in the Greek Eastern and Latin Western churches, salvation was defined as “deification” or theosis. Within Eastern Orthodox theology, another term for theosis is “Christification,” the putting on of Christ. Theosis, in short, defines the goal of the Christian life as becoming fully human or godlike by being shaped into Christlikeness. So when Athanasius (296–373) wrote in his treatise on the incarnation that “God was made human so that we could become gods,” he did not mean in any way that our human essence changes into a divine nature. Rather, he envisioned our transformation into the newly inaugurated, perfected humanity of Christ. Even Maximus the Confessor (580–662), a passionate advocate of deification, insisted that it never erases the distinction between creature and Creator. This patristic understanding of human salvation as transformation into the new humanity inaugurated by Christ is squarely based on apostolic teaching. According to the New Testament, God became human in Christ in order to create one new humanity (Ephesians 2:15; 4:24) and through it a “new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17; Galatians 6:15). If the goal of Christianity is transformation into “a measure of maturity of the fullness of Christ” (Ephesians 4:13)—that is, our becoming like Christ by being shaped into his image (Romans 8:29; 2 Corinthians 3:18; 4:4; Colossians 3:10)—then becoming fully human is to become like Christ.
Protestant Christians often worry that this patristic notion of deification implies our becoming like God in nature; yet this is not how patristic authors use the term. For them deification meant becoming transformed into Christ’s humanity not by nature but by participation—that is, only by the power of God’s grace. As Notre Dame theologian Alexis Torrance points out, deification denotes “a radical ontological distinction between the gift of deification and created human nature.” Deification is not simply a perfection or topping off of our current nature but a radical transformation into what Paul calls our transfigured, glorified soma pneumatikos, “spiritual body” (1 Corinthians 15:44).
Until the final transformation of body and soul into this spiritual body, the main emphasis of deification is virtue formation—that is, becoming like God in character. For example, Basil of Caesaria (330–379) defines deification this way: “If you become a hater of evil, free of rancor, not remembering yesterday’s enmity; if you become brother-loving and compassionate, you are like God. If you forgive your enemy from your heart, you are like God. If as God is toward you, the sinner, you become the same toward the brother who has wronged you, by your good will from your heart toward your neighbor, you are like God.” We retain the true meaning of theosis, without sacrificing its essential teaching, when we translate this ancient formula into language adapted to modern Christians ears: “God became human so that by being transformed into Christlikeness, human beings can attain their true humanity.” In short, Christianity is the archetypal humanism because the central mystery of the Christian faith, the incarnation, purposed the deification or theosis of our humanity. Patristics scholar Henri de Lubac rightly called this grand patristic, biblically grounded vision for humanity “an all-embracing humanism.”
This patristic humanism had important anthropological and epistemological ramifications for human identity. In terms of anthropology, human beings, as those created in Christ’s image, receive an unprecedented dignity, and the purpose of human life is defined by the calling to become like Christ. This vocation is rendered possible because the incarnation revealed Christ as the unifying centre of reality, who ensured both an intelligible cosmos and the ability of human reason to know it. It is a fundamental Christian assertion that the creator God in whom all things live, move, and have their being is identical with the Word (Logos) who became flesh “for the life of the world” (John 6:33). This assertion endowed the universe with intrinsic rationality and purpose. Christianity inherited the idea of a sovereign creator God from the Jewish conviction that a transcendent, all-powerful God rules over the cosmos, liberating human beings from the capricious humanoid deities of polytheism or from implacable fate. Yet Christianity added a new dimension to Jewish cosmology. The incarnation brought with it an unprecedented trust in the mediation of truth through the material world, and thus the confidence that rational investigation into nature would yield reasonable results without fear of becoming mired in skepticism. The church father Augustine (354–430) famously formulated this trust in knowledge as “faith seeking understanding.”
Augustine’s conviction that Christians ought to unfold their belief with the help of rational reflection is grounded in his broader metaphysical conviction that everything good derives its being from participation in God. Augustine believed that “God alone is the truth and the light of the rational soul,” that “every good of ours, after all, is either God himself, or derived from him,” and that “everything that is true comes from the one who said, I am the truth (John 14:6).” This notion that all truth is God’s truth makes Christianity inherently integrative and interdisciplinary. Modern Christian educational institutions often stress the need to integrate faith and learning, but for Christian humanists like Augustine, reality is already integrated by the one in whom Christians place their faith. Thus, integrating one’s belief in Christ with all other areas of human knowing and living is more a process of discovery than an artificial effort to unite unrelated aspects of a divided reality. After all, in Christ all things already are united and sustained (synesteken; Colossians 1:17).
Moreover, the notion that all truth is God’s truth, no matter the source, shaped Christianity’s educational ideal of drawing on all sources of knowledge, Christian or not, that promoted true insights into the human condition and the fabric of creation. The church father Irenaeus (ca. 120–203) was likely the first to use the analogy of “plundering the Egyptians” (Exodus 12:36). According to Irenaeus, Israel’s exodus from Egypt was orchestrated “by God as type and picture of the church’s future exodus from paganism” to encourage the use of pagan wisdom for Christian education. By the time of Augustine, this image had become a standard justification for the assimilation of non-Christian insights into Christian learning.
We recognize Christian humanism whenever Christian existence is defined by the incarnation and lived out of one’s union with Christ, in whom all of reality finds its unifying centre.
On the basis of the incarnation, early Christian humanists thus embraced a Christ-centred realism as the foundation for an educational program dedicated to human formation into Christlikeness. In the Latin West, the most influential manual for training into Christlikeness was Augustine’s De doctrina Christiana. In this book, Augustine adapts the long-standing model of Greco-Roman education for Christian formation, with the Bible as the central text to be studied and the humanity of Christ as the goal to be achieved. All secular arts, sciences, and sources of insight into God’s world and the human condition were harnessed to illumine self-knowledge and knowledge of God. Echoing Irenaeus, and citing the precedent of other church fathers, Augustine claims that all sources of wisdom prior to the incarnation are useful for Christian education:
All true learning benefits the Christian faith as long as it is subordinate to growth in charity. According to Augustine, the whole purpose of education was the formation of one’s desires to become Christlike in one’s love of God and neighbour. Augustine encouraged Christians to enjoy all things as God’s good gifts but warned against their enjoyment apart from their transcendent source. He was convinced that pursuing good things for pleasure alone would eventually result in dehumanizing, self-destructive behaviour. Instead, all things should be enjoyed in the light of God. This right ordering of our love establishes wisdom, because now we can truly love things in their proper relation to God the source of all good. Augustine calls this assimilation to godlikeness a journey of homecoming to the source of our true identity. Christ came in the flesh to offer himself, he says, “not only to be possessed by those who have arrived, but also to be the way there for those who have come to the beginning of the ways.” Christ says in effect, “It is along me that you come, at me that you arrive, and in me that you abide.”
Augustine’s manual for Christian formation with its model of harnessing liberal arts education for interpreting God’s Word became a standard text for medieval education. In establishing medieval theological culture, Carolingian court theologians and educators relied heavily on Augustine’s text. His advice on grammar for exegeting and rhetoric for preaching became central to the education of early medieval preachers.
Medieval Christian Humanism
The image of the medieval period as the “Dark Ages” has long been abandoned as an unfair designation for an era dedicated to the accumulation and preservation of knowledge. Even the designation “Middle Ages,” implying a middle period or interim between more formative ages, proves inadequate for a culture that laid the foundation of modern science and advanced our understanding of what it means to be human. For this time, too, was strongly influenced by the basic incarnational, Christ-centred worldview that motivated the early church. The transition was far from seamless, however. The medieval period began as a break from classical antiquity with its established Greco-Roman culture and outlook that still determined the world of someone like Augustine. Augustine’s world collapsed with the invasion and overthrow of the Roman Empire by northern Germanic tribes, Arians who later converted to Nicene Christianity. Yet, as Josef Pieper points out, instead of destroying the conquered culture, “the young peoples who penetrated into the Roman Empire from the north . . . considered it their task to master and assimilate the accumulated body of tradition they found, including the enormous harvest of patristic theology as well as the wisdom of the ancient world.”
This desire for appropriating both received pagan wisdom and the treasures obtained from Christian antiquity was, again, rooted in the incarnation. A medieval author, Pieper writes, was motivated by “his utter conviction that the event of the incarnation made accessible a truth which possesses a power to reveal reality transcending any human insight, and which very precisely concerns the subject matter of the philosopher’s thinking.” The incarnation endowed medieval scholastics with a deep confidence in the intelligibility of creation and human reason’s ability to explore it.
The results of this confidence were the two central characteristics of medieval scholasticism: a nearly boundless trust in human reason, and the accumulation and compilation of human knowledge. We are often told that the Protestant Reformation made possible the emergence of modern science through its more literal readings of the Bible and its confidence in individual interpretation. Yet long before the Reformation, the medieval trust in reason laid the groundwork for such developments. Medievalist Edward Grant reminds us that “the age of reason began in the middle ages,” and it was this age that marked the real beginnings of the intense, self-conscious use of rationality in Western culture. Medieval scholars possessed a fearless spirit of inquiry. Their “questioning method,” Grant continues, “is the driving force in science, social science, and technology.” This trust in an intelligible universe open to relentless probing and exploration, and in human reason as the fundamental criterion for arriving at answers, was foundational to the development of modern science.
Moreover, the incarnation grounded medieval belief in the unity of all human knowledge. In the words of historian R.W. Southern, medieval scholastic humanists gradually began “to embrace the whole field of revealed truth, not only about the nature of God, but also about the organization of human life in accordance with God’s will and intention for the whole universe.” In fact, medieval Christians believed that the unity of all knowledge in Christ could provide the basis for recovering a unified knowledge of all things that had been lost in the fall. They did not believe that everything knowable would be known, but that “at least all reasonably obedient and well-disposed members of Christendom would have access to a body of knowledge sufficient for achieving order in this world and blessedness in the world to come.” This conviction motivated not only the love for liberal arts that continued from the cathedral schools into the early modern universities but also the immense effort by medieval scholastics to compile, organize, and catalogue received materials.
The first universities in northern Europe, which emerged in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, followed Augustine’s lead. They were dedicated to a Christianized version of liberal arts education, thus continuing in principle the patristic tradition of Christian humanism. Medieval universities in general arose from two institutions: Christian schools of letters and canon law run by cathedrals or monasteries, and secular law schools that were independent of the church. The University of Paris, and later institutions like Cambridge and Oxford in England, were of the first type, while the University of Bologna in Italy evolved out of the second.
Within the universities, liberal arts were preparatory to the three subjects of medicine, law, and theology. Theology was commonly regarded as the Queen of the Sciences, not because it ruled over the others, but because God was the only true ground and unity of all subjects of study. Well into the thirteenth century, university education remained focused on assimilating the wisdom of ancient culture, guided by the ideal of ordering all wisdom and knowledge to the study of theology. Indeed, when we understand the inspiration behind medieval universities, we will not hesitate to call the much-maligned scholastics “Christian humanists,” for they continued in the patristic belief that education contributes to the restoration of the divine image. This conviction is summarized in Hugh of St. Victor’s Didascalion: de studio legendi. The book’s subtitle, translated as “on the study of reading,” reaffirms the humanistic conviction that transformation into godlikeness involves careful, meditative reading: “This, then, is what the arts are concerned with, this is what they intend, namely, to restore within us the divine likeness, a likeness which to us is a form but to God is his nature. The more we are conformed to the divine nature, the more do we possess Wisdom, for then there begins to shine forth again in us what has forever existed in the divine Idea or Pattern, coming and going in us but standing changeless before God.”
Medieval or scholastic humanism would ultimately fail for two reasons. First, the dream of recovering a complete knowledge of reality became untenable in light of reality’s complexity. When a few hundred books constituted all human knowledge, this dream may have appeared reasonable, but the increasing number of publications produced by medieval scholars, and the eventual flood of texts that followed Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, soon demonstrated the impossibility of this hope. Second, its lack of experimentally verified scientific knowledge doomed the scholastic project to failure. The rise of empirical science made it obvious that merely summarizing and rehashing ancient assumptions about the cosmos did not advance our knowledge of nature.
Renaissance Humanism
When we now turn to our next formative cultural period in Europe, we have to resist the view that Renaissance humanism is secularism waiting to come out of the closet. Few doubt that most Renaissance humanists were Christians; but evangelicals, Reformed worldview enthusiasts, and secularists show a rare agreement in the opinion that humanists were more interested in paganism than in Christianity, and that their whole project was a Promethean attempt to enthrone man in the place of God. It is true, of course, that in the Renaissance the individual took a more central place than it did in the medieval age, and that a historical consciousness emerged that was stronger than in preceding Christian cultures. Yet, on the whole, we ought to conceive of Renaissance humanism not as a break from tradition but as a Christian movement in continuity with earlier Christian thought.
Consider, for instance, that Renaissance humanists retrieved not only Aristotle and Plato but also, and with great religious earnestness, patristic sources such as Augustine (in the case of Petrarch) and Origen, Jerome, and Irenaeus (in the case of Erasmus). Consider also that Renaissance humanists’ apparently idolatrous language extolling the greatness and godlike stature of humanity will appear less radical when we understand it as a continuation of the patristic language of deification. When Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) goes on about the greatness of man and urges the subordination of our baser instincts to reason so that we may live up to our divine image, he is not far from Augustine’s educational program. Pico celebrates humanity’s God-given dignity, not human autonomy. Pico may not have been your average churchgoing evangelical, but neither was he, as is usually assumed, the Renaissance villain (to Christians) or hero (to secularists) who proclaimed the sovereign self of secularism. De Lubac hits nearer the mark when he claims that Pico’s Renaissance manifesto, Discourse on the Dignity of Man, is theologically not opposed to traditional Christianity. Like the church fathers and the medieval theologians, Renaissance thinkers regarded the ability and drive of man to cultivate and shape his world as “an emulation of divinity, since it was in this respect that man was created in the image and likeness of God.”
Like every other prior Christian humanist tradition, Renaissance humanism sought to harness and transform the best of human culture in light of the incarnation. Renaissance humanists knew well that the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus set Christianity apart from previous philosophies and religions. As Petrarch (1304–1374), whom many call the father of Renaissance humanism, put it, “Only Christianity truly joins heaven and earth.” For however close Platonic thought may have come to Christian truth, that the divine Word “became flesh, [and] how, joined to the earth, it dwelt in us, these the learned Plato did not know.” Petrarch grasped as clearly as did Irenaeus the importance of the incarnation for human identity:
We see in this quotation that Petrarch, like Pico della Mirandola, echoes the ancient Christian language of deification. In Christ, humanity was deified, demonstrating and inaugurating the destiny of humanity. Petrarch argues that “humanity had to be raised up, and divinity brought down,” because without this “celebrated union” of God and humanity in the incarnation, “humanity would have lain sick and languishing forever.”
Pico celebrates humanity’s God-given dignity, not human autonomy.
Renaissance humanists are known for their infatuation with philology, literature, rhetoric, and poetry. What fewer people realize, however, is that their love for the word was consciously based on the incarnation of the eternal Word of God. Giovanni Pontano (1426–1503), for example, provides a christological justification for the creative power of words. According to Christianity, being exists by the power of God’s Word, and human beings, made in his image, participate in this appearing of being through the word. Renaissance humanists believed that words form and change our perception of reality and thus are crucial in shaping human history. Because human language shares in the divine Logos, they reasoned, language possesses an infinite possibility of meaning. For them, the theology of the Word made language what twentieth-century philosopher Martin Heidegger would call “a clearing of being”—that is, language allows us to see things in new constellations and discover new meanings. Literature and the arts are indispensable sources of insight into our world, inexhaustible treasure troves for our self-understanding that the natural sciences cannot even begin to rival.
Based on their religious beliefs, then, Renaissance humanists bequeathed to Western culture a deep love of learning, poetry, and literature for transformative education into Christlikeness. Their ultimate goal was Christian character formation, and their view of the arts is neatly summarized in Erasmus’s adage: “Reading shapes moral character” (lectio transit in mores). Indeed, Renaissance humanism was above all a literary movement dedicated to cultivation of the Christian liberal arts as inherited from Greco-Roman culture. As Italian educator Battista Guarino (1434–1513) explained to his student, “What the Greeks call paideia we call learning and instruction in the liberal arts. The ancients also called this humanitas, since devotion to knowledge has been given to the human being alone out of all living creatures.” The same Christian humanism was still alive in the eighteenth century, when Catholic university professor Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) told his incoming students that the goal of learning was to mirror God’s philanthropy: “We must learn, O youth of great hope, in order to know how best to be able to relate humanely to others.” After all, Vico concluded, “what goal is more honourable than to wish to help the greatest number of men and in so doing become more like Almighty God, whose very nature is to help all?” For Vico, education was primarily spiritual formation for the sake of wisdom and virtue because “the spirit is the most manifest image of God.”
Vico’s educational ideal epitomizes the legacy of Renaissance humanism in Western culture, holding that humanistic education is formation into godlikeness for the sake of the world. The gaining of self-knowledge through studying the past and the schooling of our imagination through literature, poetry, and the arts must reflect God’s own love for humanity. Education must be subservient to the common good of society. Today, very few institutions, whether Christian or secular, can offer such a cogent theological rationale for their educational programs.
Modern Christian Humanisms
Christian humanist cultural influence waned greatly with the onset of the modern era. Despite exceptions such as the eighteenth-century evangelical revivalism as represented by John Wesley (1703–1791), and occasional nineteenth-century figures such as John Henry Newman (1801–1890) and the statesman William Gladstone (1809–1898), the story of Christian humanism from the seventeenth to the twentieth century is one of progressive secularization and finally collapse. It is a complex story that deserves its own history.
In the twentieth century, however, Christian humanism was rediscovered and articulated during the interwar and postwar periods of 1920 to 1950, beginning most likely with the Catholic Church’s changing disposition toward secular modernity. Until the late nineteenth century, the Catholic Church had viewed modern scientific and social developments mostly as hostile and external to a static, unalterable ecclesial culture. Now, however, theologians rediscovered Christ as the unifying centre of reality and as the ground of the church’s solidarity with “the whole human family” and thus with human development in the modern world. This change of heart was partially prompted by influential Catholic theologians who retrieved the “all-encompassing Christian humanism” of the early church fathers. Theologians such as Maurice Blondel, Yves Congar, Henri de Lubac, and Jean Danielou in France; Hans Urs von Balthasar in Switzerland; Erich Przywara in Germany; and Karol Wojtyla in Poland developed the Christian humanist theology that greatly influenced the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965).
Another important Christian humanist impulse came from Anglo-Catholic theology. Newman, arguably the most important English theologian of his century, revived the humanistic emphasis on the confluence of faith and reason when he stressed the importance of Christian liberal arts education for ennobling humanity through intellectual pursuits. Inspired by Newman, a group of Oxford theologians under the direction of Charles Gore (1853–1932) published an essay collection titled Lux Mundi: A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation. The essays evidenced the Christian integral humanist spirit in delineating the importance of the incarnation for “interpreting life and knowledge” in all relevant areas of human existence, from the existential problem of suffering to matters of education, ethics, and politics.
Likely the most important historical impetus for the revival of Christian humanism, however, was the collapse of the modern period’s optimism about humanity’s development. The dream of material and social progress through scientific and technological means, cherished by Western thinkers since the seventeenth century, was crushed by the atrocities experienced in the trenches, concentration camps, gulags, totalitarian regimes, and genocidal policies of the twentieth century. Christian intellectuals of this era, Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant, warned that the biblical view of the human being as made in God’s image, which had long sustained humane Western political, legal, and social structures, was quickly disappearing from cultural memory. Drawing deeply on the theology of the early church, they argued in particular that biblical anthropology alone anchored the irrevocable dignity and therefore the irreplaceable worth of each human being, without which society would descend into bestial inhumanity.
The twentieth-century recovery of Christian humanist anthropology contributed greatly to the modern concept of the person. For example, in his encyclical on education and two subsequent ones directed against Nazi and communist regimes, Pope Pius XI (1857–1939) established as the foundation of human society the human person, whose origin and destiny is the triune, personal God of biblical revelation. As those made in God’s image, human persons possess rights, freedoms, and obligations that cannot be sacrificed to the supposed greater good of state concerns.
Severing human identity from this transcendent, biblical root by redefining humanity in materialistic terms, as communist regimes do, or in racial terms, as German National Socialists did, will end up sacrificing human dignity to ideology. For instance, Pius warned that the Nazis in their nationalist obsession disregarded “the fundamental fact that man as a person possesses rights he holds from God, and which any collectivity must protect against denial, suppression or neglect.” For that reason, human persons should never be sacrificed for the greater good of society. The Nazis overlooked the fact that “the true good of the community is ultimately determined and recognized based on human nature in its harmonious balance between personal rights and social dependency.” Pius demonstrated an appeal to natural law—that is, to principles inherent in creation, according to which the divinely ordained purpose of true community is to enable the best possible human development of each person. Violating this precarious balance between personal rights, social dependency, and the common good will usually produce dehumanizing political practices.
Pius’s emphasis on the person links Christian humanism closely to a movement called personalism. Personalism was a philosophical counter-reaction to the tendency of materialist, rationalist, and idealist philosophers to subsume individual persons under the greater impersonal realities of either matter or mind. For materialists, personal experiences were merely epiphenomena of biochemical processes. Even critical idealists like Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) or G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831) ended up reducing persons to mere instantiations of some impersonal universal reason, mind, or spirit. Against dehumanizing reductions, twentieth-century philosophers such as Max Scheler (1874–1928) and Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel (1907–1972) advanced deeply personalist anthropologies of the human that extolled embodied personhood and moral accountability to others. The humanistic ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) and the hermeneutic philosophical anthropology of Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) continued this humanistic emphasis on interpersonal accountability.
Many personalists were influenced by Christianity, but within the broad tent of personalist philosophy, this influence could express itself as anything from a general theism to a distinctly Christian personalism rooted in biblical anthropology and the incarnation. The explicitly Christian personalism that is deliberately rooted in the incarnation and that made the mystery of the human person as created in God’s image central to human identity and to the perception of reality spans the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century and occurs among authors of many nationalities. “Personalism,” writes Russian philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev (1874–1948), a prominent representative of this movement, “is the realization in man of the image and likeness of God.” According to Berdyaev, personalism emphasizes freedom, originality, creativity, rationality, and sociality as constitutive elements of the human person. French theologian, philosopher, and educator Emmanuel Mounier (1905–1950) also grounds human identity in God. Mounier was passionately concerned with applying the primacy of the person to the educational, political, and economic dimensions of life. In his Personalist Manifesto (1938), Mounier writes that “we shall apply the term to any doctrine or any civilization that affirms the primacy of the human person over material necessities and over the whole complex of implements man needs for the development of his person.” A healthy society, he argues, should structure its policies, institutions, and economy on the basis of the material and spiritual needs of the person and avoid all impersonal or depersonalizing tendencies. Like many of his contemporary intellectuals, Mounier was critical of the increasingly technocratic direction in which society was heading, but his personalism helped him view technology positively: provided that machines serve the person, they could be a powerful tool for improving living conditions.
Another highly influential French personalist was Christian philosopher Jacques Maritain (1882–1973). Recognizing the progressive secularization of Western society, Maritain urged Christians to work toward “a new form of civilization which would be characterized by an integral humanism,” based on “a real and effective respect for human dignity and for the rights of human personality.” Christians should strive toward the realization of this “evangelical concern for humanity” in a secular society. Maritain worked on the UNESCO committee that informed the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), a prime example of translating the principles of Christian humanism into secular values. The committee and drafters agreed that human rights are rooted “in the dignity and worth of the human person.”
The influence of American personalist thought as developed by the Bostonian philosopher Borden Parker Bowne (1847–1910) reached as far as the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr., whose Christian personalism undergirded his fight against racial segregation. As he put it in his famous letter from Birmingham Jail, “An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality [King’s term for person] is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality.” King’s political application of Christian personalism reminds us that one cannot be a Christian humanist without also being a personalist. The humanism of the incarnation is inherently linked to the moral formation into Christlikeness and to the unity of all human beings as those made in God’s image.
It is therefore no surprise that Christian personalism and humanism, which are practically identical, come to the fore when the dignity of the person is diminished or violated. Distressed by two world wars and the totalitarian regimes of National Socialism and atheist communism, Christian humanists were convinced that ultimately only a biblical view of reality could successfully establish the primacy of the person, without which societies would eventually succumb to the depersonalizing influences that always end in totalitarianism. This conviction unites many of the Christian humanists of the twentieth century, whose vocations and nationalities are so different: Emil Brunner, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dietrich von Hildebrand, T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis, Thomas Merton, and Pope John Paul II.
These modern Christian humanists are united in the conviction that dignity, rationality, and morality flourish best when nourished by their Judeo-Christian roots. They also agree that only a proper valuing of the human person can provide the basis for a humane society, and they are united in their critique of any cultural trends that diminish personal dignity, freedom, and responsibility—as do, for example, the increasing technologization and bureaucratization of modern societies.
The Future of Christian Humanism
This brief historical sketch of Christian humanism illustrates that the theology of the incarnation, originating with the early church, has informed a definable humanistic ethos across the centuries. The Christian humanistic ethos, rooted as it is in an incarnational anthropology, stresses the importance of education, the arts, philology, civic duty, and, in modern times, personalism and democracy for human flourishing in community. With its guiding conviction that all human beings are persons possessing equal dignity as those made in God’s image, the humanist tradition has profoundly shaped the institutions central to Western societies, such as schools, universities, libraries, hospitals, orphanages, and libraries. As former Anglican archbishop Michael Ramsey notes, “Europe knew a long tradition of avowedly Christian humanism drawn from the confluence of the stream of biblical theism from Palestine and the stream of classical humanism from ancient Greece.” Emil Brunner, along with many other Christian intellectuals, was correct in urging Western cultures to recall and revive this tradition to work toward a humane culture. Brunner, however, rightly reminds us that, like any tradition, Christian humanism is not simply a static repetition of past truths but requires the open and risky task of critical appropriation. “True Christian humanism,” as he puts it, “is still an unfinished project in a world hitherto called Christian. It is a debt which the Christian Church owes to the world to this day.”
This debt is rooted in the gospel demand on the church to provide visible testimony to the new humanity revealed in Christ. To pay this debt, Christians must articulate a biblical humanism in light of the best available knowledge from all relevant disciplines. Such a humanism must grapple with Christianity’s own historical shortcomings and acknowledge the influence and contributions from all cultures.
