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.  

The Sack of Rome--which sack???

The passagetto (“secret” passage from

the Vatican to the Castle Sant’ Angelo)

is contained along the wall to the right

of the picture. You can see the Vatican

in the distance at the end. 

Let’s take a look at the Sack of Rome as it affects the progress of the building of Saint Peter’s.  Rome was sacked a number of times in its history.  It was sacked by the Gauls in 387  B.C.E., by the Visigoths in 410 C.E. (aka A.D.), Vandals in 455, Ostrogoths in 546, The Arabs in 846 (Well, just the Vatican, not the city itself), and the Normans in 1084.  To be honest, for much of its history Rome wasn’t worth sacking.  For most of the Middle Ages Rome was only an overgrown cow pasture with ruins of where the mighty Empire had once been, but by 1527 it was the flourishing center of the Renaissance with a booming economy and a rapidly growing economy.

     What triggered the 1527 attack was that in order to check the awesome power of the Emperor Charles V (who ruled what is today Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, and much of northern Italy) France, Venice, Milan, Florence and the Papacy teamed up in the League of Cognac.  Great name, but not a great idea.  It was the mice out to kill the cat and it was a disaster.  The Imperial army handily defeated the French—the only ones in the coalition who had a real army (and in those days the French were considered the best fighters in the world—who knows what happened to them)  but the Emperor didn’t have any money to pay the troops for their service.  Their commander, Charles de Bourbon was French—yes, a French commander for the German Army fighting France!  It seems that when Charles’s wife, Suzanne died—she had been the Bourbon heir—the Queen Mother of France, Louise of Savoy, seized the Bourbon lands and wouldn’t give them back to the widowed husband to whom they had been left by Suzanne’s will.  The King refused to intervene against his mother and so Charles, pissed, sided with the enemy despite his position of Marshal of France. (The Marshal was the head of the army.)  Pity because Charles de Bourbon was a good soldier, a great soldier.  Anyway now he had a German army who hasn’t been paid and no money to pay them. The army was restless.  Pope Clement VII knew this was a dangerous situation and that he was in trouble and sued for a truce, but the army was in no mood to pay attention—the loot from Rome would suffice for the money due them from the Emperor.  Charles de Bourbon had excellent command of his army and could have negotiated a settlement with Clement, but the artist Benvenuto Cellini shot and killed Charles in the initial attack.  That was the mistake.  The army was enraged and went wild, storming the city.  With Charles dead there was no one who could bring the army under control.  Rome had only about 12,000 troops to defend it.  The Imperial attack was a massacre—all but 42 of the Pope’s Swiss guard were killed defending the Pope, but because of their bravery Pope Clement was able to flee  through the “secret” passage way linking the Vatican with the Castel Sant’Angelo where he would be safe.  As Clement fled through the passagetto, Imperial soldiers took pot shots at the papal figure as he passed the occasional break in the wall.  The worst of the sack lasted three days but for a month the Imperial troops dominated the city without discipline.  Churches were pillaged of their ornaments and relics.  The palaces of the Cardinals were ransacked, art destroyed, precious objects carried off.  Monasteries and convents were destroyed, monks and nuns killed, the nuns often raped.  Ordinary Romans were not safe—those who took refuge in Churches were often slain as the clung to the altars begging for mercy.  The Emperor had the upper hand.  Clement feared him and was anxious to win his alliance.  The Pope had some dynastic concerns for which he needed the Emperor. (We will talk more about that when we get to Henry VIII and his failure to get an annulment.)   The Emperor Charles V was Catholic—devoutly so—but he wasn’t on the scene and many of the Imperial troops, being German, were recent converts to Lutheranism.  That certainly didn’t help restore unity to Christendom.  Some historians claim that it brought the renaissance to a crashing end, but in fact Rome recovered quickly and went on to bigger and better triumphs of art, architecture, music, literature, and certainly to a papacy that would become imperial in its own right.  As for Saint Peter’s it brought the construction to a temporary halt but by 1534 Clement had commissioned Michelangelo to fresco the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel (it would be frescoed between 1537 and 1541.)  Michelangelo would be named the chief architect of Saint Peter’s in 1546.  And so the work continued.  But don’t let me forget to tell you about Antonio da Sangallo and his stealing from the basilica in the interim before Michelangelo.    

Roots of the Reformation VIII: Reformation or Reformations

reliquary bust of Charlemagne

I was asked why I keep referring to the Protestant Reformations—note the plural.  I think “the Reformation” is often misunderstood  because we do not nuance the term correctly and in a historical context.  There was no single Reformation.  Indeed the Church has known a series of Reformations—some of which happened within the unity of the Church and some of which happened in such a way as to separate groups within the Church from one another and divide the Church.  And that was not the end of it—within some of the Churches formed by the divisions, there were further Reformations.  Perhaps we can look at the history and see this.  

First of all, let’s remember the axiom: ecclesia semper reformans, semper reformanda—the Church, always reforming; always in need of reform.  History has borne that out.  Human nature being what it is, the Chuch—which after all is a collection of humans with all the faults and failures of the residue of original sin—keeps slipping from the ideal is Founder set for it and, like the individuals who comprise it, needs to do penance and amend its ways. 

When I teach the history of the Church, the earliest reformation of the Church, or at least the Church in the West, that I treat is the Reform of Charlemagne.  I suspect that one might be able to look back to Gregory the Great (c.600) and argue for a Reform, though personally I don’t see that being a time of Reform but more of a pristine idealism in a Church had had yet to be corrupted.  On the other hand I am probably naïve; human nature being what it is the Church has probably needed Reform from the time of the Apostles.    Some might speak of “Constantine’s Reformation”—after all he did call the Council of Nicea and he reshaped the Church to fit into the Roman world, but I guess I come out of the Niebuhr school that judges Constantine’s influence on the Church to have been deforming rather than reforming.  That will be an interesting series of blog entries—the Constantinian heritage.  Hmmm  have to think about that.

In any event, we will start with the Carolingian Reformation—which was part of the Carolingian Renaissance—renaissances and reformations often travel together through the pages of history books.  Charlemagne was faced with a problem.  He had a vast empire which today would cover France, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, most of Germany, the northeastern corner of Spain, parts of Austria, and Italy as far south as Rome.  There were, in this Empire, huge variances in language, culture, and religion.  When I say there were differences of religion, most of the region had been Christianized but there were significant differences in liturgy (worship practices and rites), monastic practices, and church discipline.  While the pope had the title of Patriarch of the West, in actual fact he had no power and there was no central authority.  Each bishop was elected in his diocese and was pretty much independent.  Charlemagne wanted to unify his empire and so he decreed that there would be one language for all official business-Latin, the language of ancient Rome.  And as for religion—he decided that Roman practices should be used throughout his empire.  The Roman liturgical books were made standard.  Now, in the ninth century liturgical books contained the texts of prayers, not the rubrics.  Matters such as the number of candles on the altar, the color of vestments, when to bow or genuflect—that still varied from city to city according to the local custom.  Charlemagne imposed a uniform calendar (again, allowing for additions of local usage) and the text of the prayers. Thus, for example, the Roman Canon (today’s Eucharistic Prayer I) became the standard consecratory prayer used throughout the empire.  Similarly the structure of the Mass and the various collects for Sundays and major feasts were determined for all the empire, which meant practically speaking, for all Western Europe.  The Roman martyrs and saints began to be venerated throughout Europe, while the memory of local saints were still honored in their home region.     

Charlemagne also imposed the Roman Rule for Monks—that is the Rule of Saint Benedict—on all the monasteries of his empire.  There were innumerable monasteries of nuns and monks in the ninth century and again, in various matters such as the arrangement of the monastic garb or what foods were eaten at which season, local custom remained, but in the essentials of monastic organization and discipline, Charlemagne established a uniformity. Every monastery had an abbot.  Every monastery fasted from “the ides of September until Easter Day” as Benedict prescribed.  The round of daily services—Matins, Vespers, Compline, etc. was followed as it was in Rome.  Charlemagne also mandated that all the monasteries, at least of men, should have a school as education was very important to his program.  Of course, other than future monks few attended these schools but it did preserve learning and culture.  By the way, the nuns’ monasteries often had schools every bit as good as the monks’ and though they were primarily for the education of future nuns they did provide an opportunity for women to learn not only how to read and write, but Latin, music, art, astronomy, mathematics and other disciplines.  

In many ways it was Charlemagne’s Reform that created a “Roman” Catholic Church although it would not be called that for several centuries.  Charlemagne did his best in the Reform of the Church, but there were many issues left pending.  Economically the Church was deeply immersed in the feudal system and its offices and incomes would be exploited by kings and nobles alike—bishoprics and abbacies were too often filled with men (or in the case of abbacies, with women as well as men) whose only qualification was their parentage or patronage.   Monasticism was limited to the upper classes and the ordinary peasantry was relegated to a life that was more superstitious piety than Christian discipleship.  The primitive Church’s idealism regarding pacificism was forgotten as the demands of political situations required warfare.  Nevertheless, Charlemagne’s efforts should not be dismissed.  While he did not do all the Church needed for reform, given the resources with which he had to work, he made an honest effort and it was not without its benefits, most notably in regards to education.