A review
of Christian Humanism:
A Critique of the Secular City and
Its Ideology by Thomas Molnar
(Franciscan Herald Press, 1979)
A Critique of the Secular City and
Its Ideology by Thomas Molnar
(Franciscan Herald Press, 1979)
The National Review Years, April 27, 1979 — Secular
humanism (as Irving Kristol has pointed out) is virtually an established
religion, with the added advantage (as James Hitchcock has pointed out) that it
doesn’t suffer the disabilities currently imposed on acknowledged religions.
Joachim
of Flora predicted the advent of a new “Age of the Spirit,” in which man would
outgrow the need for Christian and ecclesiastical authority and achieve an
autonomous perfection.
At
one time it was plausible to say that this humanism was common sense, plus a
little science and history: reason herself as she speaks when liberated from
superstition and dogma. It was the light at the end of the tunnel of the
Christian era, when man would return to the sunny rationality of the ancients,
a condition enhanced by modern scientific method. This view is expressed in the
very names given to historical eras: Dark Ages, Renaissance, Enlightenment.
Christian
Humanism abounds in startling linkages; …it is an excellent short
genealogy of a nihilism that was conceived in hope. Sartre’s Nothingness didn’t
come out of nowhere. In defining man as the desire to be God he is in a sense
deeply traditional.
Specialists
in these areas have long since found that such terms fit only very loosely, at
best. A new historiography, exemplified in the work of Eric Voegelin, has
suggested a radically new scheme, in which humanism is found to be, not mere
secularism, but a positive creed, an ideology, informed by the Christian heresy
of Gnosticism, and even traceable to that heresy
as promulgated in the twelfth century by Joachim
of Flora.
Joachim
predicted the advent of a new “Age of the Spirit,” in which man would outgrow
the need for Christian and ecclesiastical authority and achieve an autonomous
perfection. Although modern humanism adopts profane accents, its structure
remains that of the old heresy, so it is not strange that secular humanism
should find allies within the church from which the heresy sprang in the first
place. Hence the phenomenon of Christian humanism, which cooperates with the
superficially secular brand in seeking to impose utopian regimes. The
superficiality of the differences is apparent in that formal credal positions
seldom inhibit that cooperation. The distinction between a George McGovern and
a Robert Drinan seems merely sartorial.
Thomas
Molnar wisely reminds us that many of the ancients were offended by
Christianity in the first place because of the very “humanism” of the
Incarnation: what an indignity for a god to become a mortal!
In Christian Humanism, Thomas
Molnar sketches the shape and history of that ideology. He
wisely reminds us that many of the ancients were offended by Christianity in
the first place because of the very “humanism” of the Incarnation: what an
indignity for a god to become a mortal! It was like becoming a head of lettuce.
Given this apparent derogation of divine transcendence, it was inevitable that
humanistic excess should become a permanently tempting position for Christians.
Molnar
finds adumbrations not only in Joachim but in more familiar gures like Nicholas
of Cusa, William of Ockham, and Pico della Mirandola. Contrary to modern
mythology, the Renaissance’s optimism about human potential was not a return to
paganism, whose fatalism (cf. Homer, Aeschylus, Aristotle, Vergil, Seneca) gave
little warrant for faith in human perfection or general progress. Ancient man
saw himself as locked into the natural order. Pico saw man as “fashioner of his
own being,” or as Molnar puts it, “a pure indeterminacy”: a phrase that places
Pico nearer to Sartre than to Sophocles. Christian Humanism abounds in such
startling linkages; among other things it is an excellent short genealogy of a
nihilism that was conceived in hope. Sartre’s Nothingness didn’t come out of
nowhere. In defining man as the desire to be God he is in a sense deeply
traditional.
The
doctrine of the Incarnation makes the transcendent God paradoxically present. The
paradox is intellectually unfathomable and psychologically hard to bear.
The
doctrine of the Incarnation makes the transcendent God paradoxically present.
The paradox is intellectually unfathomable and psychologically hard to bear;
the easy way out is for man to seek to “abolish this duality and turn,
single-mindedly, toward tasks that his earthly existence prescribes to him.”
Yet
the idea of divinity, once known, is less easy to banish. It becomes
assimilated to humanity entirely. Man becomes God, in a reversal of the
Incarnation. When the conception of man is collectivized, the entire human race
becomes the locus of divinity. Man is the measure of all things, but this “man”
includes men unborn. Since it is obvious even to ideologues that those men who now
exist are far from perfection, divinized man must be something as yet
unrealized, a “new man,” man as he will (according to ideology anyway) be.
The
idea of divinity … becomes assimilated to humanity entirely. Man becomes God,
in a reversal of the Incarnation. When the conception of man is collectivized,
the entire human race becomes the locus of divinity. Man is the measure of all
things, but this “man” includes men unborn.
Thus
humanism gives its energies to utopian politics. Having abandoned the eternal,
it loses interest in (and even resents) traditional criteria of sin and virtue;
personal behavior is a matter of concern only as it bears on man’s collective
destiny. (Exit chastity.) The real action is at the level of the state. Those
who think that what has happened to American government can be summed up as
“secularization,” as in abortion, have failed to notice the way secular
humanism (backed by the Christian kind) has aggressively tried to engulf
traditional values.
Profound
and incisive as usual, Molnar identifies the project of Christian humanism’s
theology: “the complete assimilation of the Church to the World.” But that
world is the world of the future — as imagined by humanism itself. And if we
are to be “open” to the future, as the Rahners and the Kungs tell us to be,
how, Molnar asks, can they presume to say in advance what it will be like? If
they already know its nature, they hardly need wait and see.
Thus
humanism gives its energies to utopian politics. Having abandoned the eternal,
it loses interest in (and even resents) traditional criteria of sin and virtue;
personal behavior is a matter of concern only as it bears on man’s collective
destiny. (Exit chastity.)
The
secret of humanism turns out to be not that it is open to the future but that
it is closed to the past and therefore to the permanency embodied in the past.
It is really a posture of revolt and repudiation, its idealism an excuse for
demolishing the actual. And its deepest sin is ingratitude.
###
Copyright
© 2018 by the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation. All rights reserved. “Piety for
the Future” by Joe Sobran was published originally in National Review magazine
on April 27, 1979. This is one of 34 articles in the Sobran anthology, Joseph Sobran: The National Review Years published
by FGF Books in 2012. The book is currently out-of-stock, but the Fitzgerald
Griffin Foundation hopes to reprint soon.
