The Importance of Humanism to Christianity

Carravaggio's "The
Entombment"--a fruit of
Renaissance humanism  

When Pope Francis announced to the Italian Church at their national synod in Florence this past November that there was a need to bring the idea of humanism to the front again, many of the Katholik Krazies went even more than usually berserk.  To those ignorant of the history of our Christian faith the idea of “humanism” is somehow opposed to authentic Christianity when, in fact, it is an essential component of our Christian faith.  The earliest writer on Christian humanism is no one less than the Apostle Paul himself who in his letters gives us a foundation for a philosophical view on what it means to be truly human.  For Paul we arrive at the fullness of our human nature when we

Have among yourselves the same attitude that is also yours in Christ Jesus, Who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross. (Philippians 2:5-8.)

The key to realizing full human potential is found in kenosis, the emptying of self and self-interest in favor of conforming ourselves to Christ.  In orthodox Christianity, we see Christ to be the ideal human person and to the extent that we conform ourselves to him even as he conforms himself in obedience to the Will of the Father, we reach our potential to be truly human.  This is very counter-intuitive and certainly runs contrary to most of the various humanisms advanced by the philosophers of the ancient world.  Christianity has always taken a remarkably unique approach to the human ideal and the understanding of what makes us human.  Both the various secular humanisms that have emerged since the Enlightenment and the perspectives offered by the other great world religions have some similarities with Christian humanism but also are, at the core, essentially different.  This is because Christianity begins with an understanding of the Godhead that differs not only from the religions of the East but from the other two Abrhamic faiths, Judaism and Islam.  Christianity sees the human person as having the potential to share in the Divine Nature.  The Church Fathers, notably Iranaeus and Athanasius, went to far as to speak of our being sharers in the Divine Nature when we so conform ourselves to Christ that we surrender our own selves to indeed become essentially united to Christ with Christ being the life-principle within us.  “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live but Christ Jesus who lives in me.” (Galatians 2:11).    “God became human so that humans might become God”—a statement which, were it not from the fathers, would seem to be counter to all Christian orthodoxy but which has become a cornerstone of all genuine Christian anthropology or humanism ever since. Beginning with Paul, the authors of the Christian scriptures—both Gospels and Epistles—laid the foundation for a genuine understanding of what it means to be truly human.  The parables of the Good Samaritan, the Pharisee and the Publican, Lazarus and the Rich Man, The King and his two debtors, The man whose barn wasn’t big enough, Lowest Seat at the Banquet, The persistent widow, the Last Judgment and others all give us insights into human nature at its best and at its worst. 

It was Origen, and probably even more, Tertullian, the second/third century theologians who organized much Christian thought into a philosophical system, who gave us the more abstract or philosophical view of human nature—though Origen tended to be a bit over-positivist with his belief that all will eventually be reconciled to God, and Tertullian a big over negative with his objection to the idea that sins committed after baptism cannot be forgiven.  Perhaps for us in the West, the great Christian humanist is Saint Augustine. 

Augustine is, at least for us in the Western Church, the great Christian thinker who takes the Scriptures and the Apostolic Tradition and tries to weave a coherent Christian theology.  His appreciation for human nature is, I think, spot on—in this regard I am much closer to Pope Benedict than to most other Catholic thinkers.  Augustine is often seen as too negative, even sin-obsessed but sin, for Augustine, is not his topic but only the foil against which we can see Grace.  Augustine is the Doctor Gratiae, (the Doctor of Grace).  While Augustine thinks that the human person without grace (should such a creature be even conceivable much less a reality) is pretty much the bottom of the barrel, transformed by Grace the human person mirrors the God in whose image and likeness we are created.  Augustine was an extensive writer who looked not only at the human person in se (I love Latin except for Mass) but in our place in The City of God and in the context of the City of Man.   What I like about Augustine’s humanism is that it is not iced with that overly sweet frosting of a supposed innate human goodness but recognizes the far more bitter-sweet ambivalence of the human heart as it is caught between our natural concupiscence and supernatural Grace. 

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?  The answer is not “The Shadow” but Saint Augustine.  My friend, the late theologian Monika Hellwig, used to rag me about my Augustinian leanings but I just find him to be the most honest and soul-searching of Christian writers.  

Over the Middle Ages a number of Christian authors continued to deal with the subject of a Christian humanism.  The Early and Central Middle Ages was not a great time for intellectual life in the West, though Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Job is highly significant for our topic.  The Renaissance of the 12 century however opened the flood gates of Christian literature and crucial—but conflicting—approaches to Christian humanism were taken by Bernard of Clairvaux and Peter Abelard.  The dispute between Bernard and Abelard also marks the divide between the Fathers and the Scholastics and while Bernard may have won the day it was Abelard who would ultimately win the war.  While Thomas Aquinas and the other Scholastic theologians shied away from embracing Abelard by name or by explicitly affirming his more radical ideas, they embraced his Aristotelian method and did, in fact, come up, as Abelard did, with a much more positivist anthropology than Augustine and most of the Patristic tradition had.  Personally, I think the Scholastics’ positivism regarding the human person have provided the seedbed for the semi-pelagianism that has plagued our Catholic tradition ever since.  But then Monika Hellwig always chided me for my attachment to Saint Augustine. 

Christian humanism exploded in the Renaissance with such figures as Dante Alighieri, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pius II), Nicholas of Cusa, Geert Groote, Desiderius Erasmus, Basilios Bessarion,  Baptist of Mantua, John Colet, Thomas More, Giles of Viterbo and many others.  The impact of these thinkers in turn created the magnificent baroque and rococo art with Donatello, Durer, Ghirlandaio, Grunewald, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, El Greco, Tiepolo, Caravaggio and so many more.  Indeed, without humanism the renaissance would not have hatched and the Tridentine Catholicism which so many hail as the apex of Catholic faith and culture would have been—at best—a pallid and ghostly shadow of the energetic and animated revival it was in its day. 

Hopefully Pope Francis’ call for a new humanism can trigger the same energy that was unleashed in the Renaissance.  I will look at Francis’s suggestion in an upcoming post, but I think my next posting will bring you some recent comments by one “FrankieB”—a Katholik Krazie if there every was one and let you see just what we faithful Catholics have to deal with when the self-appointed magisterium gets on our tail.  

Foundations of the Anglican Church XXIV: Crying Wolf: The Question of Valid Orders, continued

In the previous post we looked at the issue of the “validity” of sacraments and I mentioned that while claims that the sacramental systems of rival groups within the Church (and without) were invalid stretch all the way back into the third and fourth centuries, the criteria we use today—matter, form, minister, and intention—emerge in the Middle Ages with the switch to scholastic theology from the patristic theology of the first millennium. 
We looked at “matter” and “correct minister” in that earlier posting.  Matter is the material—bread and wine for the Eucharist, water for baptism, etc. necessary for the sacrament.  The correct minister is the person having the authority to administer the sacrament—in some cases a bishop, in others a priest, in the case of baptism and matrimony, a lay person can be the minister of the sacrament.  In this post, we will look at “form” and “intention.”  The “form” are the words used, the formula for administering the sacrament.  The “form” of baptism is “I baptize you in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”   In Penance, or Reconciliation as it is sometimes known, it is “I absolve you in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” 
There can be much variety in form.  In the Eastern Rites, followed by Byzantine Catholics (among others) as well as Orthodox, sacramental formulae are usually in the passive voice: “The Servant of God, N., is baptized in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”  Ever since the days of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the form for the Eucharist has been: This is my Body; This is the Chalice of my Blood…”  But about twenty years ago a question came to the congregation of Rites regarding an ancient Eucharistic Liturgy, the Holy Qurbana of Addai and Mari used in the East Syrian Tradition since apostolic times, in which there are no such “words of Instiution.”  That is to say, the bishop or priest never says: “This is my Body; This is my Blood.”  Faced with an apostolic tradition to the contrary, the Catholic Church backed down about the necessity of having these words for a “valid” Mass.  Moreover, while the Western Church had claimed that the Words of Institution were essential to the Eucharist, the Eastern Church—Catholic and Orthodox, always claimed that the Epiclesis, the Prayer calling down the Holy Spirit, was the actual consecratory prayer.  The various approved Rites of the Church do not all follow the same formulae in administering the sacraments so we need to be clear that there is no one set of words required for a sacrament—any sacrament—to be valid.  There is legitimate variety in sacramental form. 
As for “intention”—this is the trickiest of all criterion.  If a priest says the right words, but does not intend to forgive the penitent, is the penitent forgiven?  If a priest says “This is my Body” but does not himself believe that in the Eucharist the bread becomes the Body of Christ, does the bread remain only bread?   If a priest, in his dotage, goes into a bakery and says: “This is my Body,” does all the bread in the bakery become the Sacrament of the Eucharist?
Here is the real rub that we must consider: if a bishop, in ordaining a priest, intends to ordain him for preaching but not for offering the Eucharistic Sacrifice, is the man validly ordained?   And what, if in addition to not intending to ordain a sacrificing priest, the bishop uses words that do not mention that the priest is being ordained to offer sacrifice—does the “form” prove to be insufficient for validity?  And what if, the bishop himself is not a validly ordained bishop—is then the priest not a validly ordained priest?   Keep these questions in mind as they will become very important points of dispute between the Anglican and Papal parties and continue today to be unresolved points of dispute.
It will take a while for this issue to surface.  When Henry VIII separated the Anglican Church from Communion with the Papacy, he did not change any theology.  Nor did the liturgy—including the rites of Ordination—change in Henry’s day.  The bishops and priests ordained under Henry were validly ordained. No one disputes that.  But after Henry’s death, during the reign of his son, King Edward VI, there were changes in the ritual and changes in the doctrine that raise serious questions about the continuation of sacramental life in the Anglican Communion.   

Roots of the Reformation I: Don't thank Gutenberg, it was the Muslims

Gutenberg usually gets all the credit, but that is grossly unfair.  The invention of  movable type (c. 1450) certainly speeded up the processes of challenging the authority of the Church because the printing press made books so much more readily available, but the fact that Europe had been experiencing an educational revolution for at least three centuries gives a wider angle to the picture of European society ripe for intellectual revolution. 

Avicenna, the Arab Philosopher
whose works helped introduce Aristotle
to the west

Where does it start? I suppose some would say the roots of the Reformation can be found with the rise of the universities in the later part of the twelfth century while others would look to the eleventh century cathedral schools which were themselves the “pollywogs” from which the universities matured.  Certainly, by the thirteenth century universities were springing up all over Europe and grammar schools in most cathedrals, urban friaries, and collegiate churches were providing the basic education that allowed the sons of the rapidly expanding middle class to acquire the basics they needed to study law, medicine, or theology at the universities. 

While these universities were intimately linked to the medieval Church they were not catechetical centers—far from it.  The medieval university was an intellectual hothouse which was jumping with ideas.  No doctrine or dogma of the Church went unexamined in the classroom nor unchallenged in the debate hall.  While today few study theology and theology departments rest (or are supposed to rest) firmly under the thumb of the local bishop, in the Middle Ages theology (along with its adjunct, philosophy)  was the hot topic of the intellectually curious.  Granted many studied law (so as to take their places in the royal administration) and some studied medicine—but it was Theology that made the reputation of a school and none more than the University of Paris, the premier university of Christendom.  And it was not merely doctrines that were challenged at Paris and Cologne and the Oxbridge schools—but entire philosophical systems on which the Church had constructed its doctrines.  In the thirteenth century the neo-platonic philosophical structure on which Christian doctrine had been built since late antiquity  was not only challenged but ultimately replaced by the more experiential Aristotelian system, newly rediscovered through the works of the Arab (and Muslim) philosophers such as Avicenna and Averroes.   Neo-Platonism depended heavily on the “authorities”—that is the long history of previously determined philosophical and theological “truths” –as taught by those whom “Tradition” has validated.  Aristotelianism, on the other hand, taught that empirical evidence and logic  together trumped “Tradition.”  While initial efforts to subject the doctrines of faith to the questions of reason led to the condemnation of Abelard, Aristotelian thought eventually was vindicated by such brave new (and revolutionary) theologians and philosophers as Aquinas.  But at the same time that the triumph of scholastic Aristotelian thought led to Aquinas as the premier Catholic apologist in history, it also undermined the foundations of Tradition and Authority.  This would, in turn, lapse into Ockham and nominalism which would undermine the notion of belief all together.  Note—I said undermine, not destroy, because while nominalism would raise the questions that challenged  belief it also, for believers, demanded to know of them precisely what it is in which they believed, not as mere words or formulas, but as realities that transcended the words and formulas, and even transcended “universals” or concepts which those words and formulas were meant to convey.  In the hands of mystics like Meister Eckhart and those who would be associated with apophatic theology such as the author of The Cloud, this would disassociate personal religious experience from doctrinal affirmation and threaten to make religion purely subjective.  (Like it is for so many today.) While Eckhart himself would never have said this, and indeed his pledge to renounce any “heresy” that might be found in his writing in favor of the faith of the universal Church testifies against his radical subjectivism, it did create the theological ground from which Luther and others could challenge the staid (and indeed embalmbed) doctrines of last medieval scholastic thought.  There is something ironic in Scholasticism’s having challenged the authority of Tradition only to end up having its own authority challenged by its post-scholastic heirs.  But then where would history be without irony?  tomorrow: the renaissance and the roots of the Reformation.