Fourth Epistle to the Prince of Humanists
A Christian Humanist Manifesto in the Form of Letters
Venerable Erasmus, exemplar of Christian erudition, Greetings:
As to you have requested, I will not belabor my case any further than necessary. Notwithstanding, I must thank you once again for your smart and generous compliments. Our last couple exchanges were unanticipated but most necessary. In any case, although I would prefer to have your complete blessing, I am thankful to have your understanding and your continued audience. I heretofore present you with my Five Goals for A New Christian Humanism; or, at least these are the five goals I would like to see a second birth of letters strive to accomplish in our post-Christian age.
Goal #1
My first goal is to revitalize the expression and meaning of Christian humanism in our post-Christian culture. How can I begin to convey to you just how far removed Western society is from any semblance of a Christian culture in my day? For this reason, we need to recover the very idea of Christian humanism. Ironically, it is an oxymoron in modern parlance. Christians, by and large, deplore the words humanist or humanism, as the terms immediately conjure the idea of atheist (or anti-theist) human endeavors. Likewise, secular humanists deplore Christianity because they believe humanity can only flourish in the absence of religion, especially our beloved Christian faith.
In this age of secularism, faith has been cruelly divorced from reason. Epistemology serves as a buffer between what can be known by the public and what can be believed in one’s own private affairs. If a Christian humanism is to be recovered in our age so that Christianity can, once again, receive the full consideration of its purchase on human flourishing, not only within the halls of our dysfunctional universities and schools, but also in the dissolute public square, we must first creatively reintroduce the idea to the thinking population.
To achieve this goal, I am relying on those Christian humanists who did similar in their day as you did in yours. If only you could be blessed enough to know for yourself the works of men like C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. And, would you believe it, there have even been women humanists—are you surprised? Two notable examples are women called Dorothy Sayers and Flannery O’ Connor. The former was a writer of inquisitor fabulae and advocated for a recovery of the artes liberales while the latter, herself a Roman Catholic, wrote for a modern audience in the style of Rabelais.
Goal #2
Next, as my previous letters indicated, we must foster even more dialogue toward reconciliation and unity (not uniformity) between the Christian traditions (i.e., Orthodox, Roman, and Protestant, etc.). This, my insightful tutor, is an enormous task, but one that is an essential tenant of Christianity itself. As you, who were so sincerely committed, know as well as anyone, until there is unity within “the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints,” the Church will not take its rightful place as stewards and arbiters of culture.
Yet, instead of humility, the Church continues to exude hubris; meanwhile Christ’s society is not taken serious by civitas hominis. Of course Christians will always remain an object of ridicule within the culture, as our Lord and Redeemer exhorted us to beware, but how much less effective is ecclesia militantis where there is division in its ranks. It is quite evident that you anticipated the results of a schism, otherwise you would not have gone to such lengths to caution Luther, as well as cardinals in the Collegium, to temper their arguments. Moreover, you knew Jesus’s prayer for the Church was unity:
And I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, keep them in your name, which you have given me, that they may be one, even as we are one. -John 17:11
Saint Paul, too, exhorted the church to this end:
I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call— one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. -Ephesians 4:1–6
In my own era (now three-score years past), a World Council of Churches attempted to establish a joint statement on Unity, now called the New Delhi Statement on Unity. Although I am not so naïve to believe such a goal will be achieved in my lifetime, I do believe it elegantly expresses what I am convinced it will take to realize this unity. What follows is part of its third paragraph:
We are not yet of a common mind on the interpretation and the means of achieving the goal we have described. We are clear that unity does not imply simple uniformity of organization, rite or expression. We all confess that sinful self-will operates to keep us separated and that in our human ignorance we cannot discern clearly the lines of God’s design for the future. But it is our firm hope that through the Holy Spirit, God’s will as it is witnessed to in Holy Scripture will be more and more disclosed to us and in us. The achievement of unity will involve nothing less than a death and rebirth of many forms of church life as we have known them. We believe that nothing less costly can finally suffice....
Faithful Teacher of the humanities, I am hopeful that a recovery of Christian humanism in this age will naturally foster such a unity because, as you demonstrated in your own life’s work, Christian humanism tends to transcend dogma and polemics; instead of war, it emphasizes irenic theology toward piety and human flourishing, which our Saintly Father Irenaeus taught us is the glory of God.1
Goal #3
My third goal for a renewed Christian humanism is to promote a more extensive conversation on civic policies that transcend ideological frameworks that merely range from Marxism on one hand to various Nationalisms on the other. Ah! please pardon me. I’ve done it again. How could you know of what I speak, unless I explain the terms that came into being three hundred years after you took your heavenly flight.
To provide you with the shortest possible explanation, Marxism is an ideology that arose from a German thinker called Karl Marx. He believed there could exist such a thing as a classless society, the very paradox your most genial friend, Thomas More, satirized in his Utopia. Yet, in every place that this political system has been tried—and it has been duly tried—it has, without fail, resulted in mass genocide on a scale so enormous you would not believe me if I told you. Summarily, you might conceptualize Marxism as a Christless imitation of Christian society; and without the Holy Spirit to empower generosity, equality is enforced by despotism.
Nationalisms, on the other hand, consist of variations of theocratic republics, ranging from bordered nation-states divided by racial boundaries to what amounts to coerced Christian culture. While recognizing national boundaries and legal jurisdictions are essential to preserving justice and fostering human flourishing via a sensus communis, the concern with Nationalism in our own day is not that governments and boundaries must exist; it is the way it so often employs the ideology of a Florentine who was your contemporary, Niccolò Machiavelli—although most likely you would not have read his work, The Prince, since he did not travel in your circles. I can assure you my fellow Citizen of the World, his ideas were too brutal for your wise and congenial tastes.
Christian humanism would view successful civic policies as expressions of wisdom extending from Natural Law and existing in historical secularity—that liminal space between Secularism and the various forms of Theocracy. As a Christian humanist, I can’t help but believe the ultimate manifestation of gospel dominion (Matthew 28:18-20) is a divine work of the Holy Spirit, not the work of Christian actors employing Machiavellian tactics in the political arenas. To state it most succinctly, although our second goal will be much harder work than waging culture wars, if I read Saint Peter correctly, it must take priority over the culture-warrior impulses. Namely, if judgment must begin at the house of God, so must harmony of culture and civilization.
Goal #4
The fourth goal, dear man of letters, will be to reintroduce and cultivate what I am calling holistic cultural discernment. It would be difficult for you to fathom, Mentor, the level of disintegration that exists in our present society, especially in the universities. You were concerned in your day? I am more concerned. It’s doubtful you would even recognize the universities of my day. Their rigor is often so feeble, it would undoubtedly be overshadowed even by the soulless education of your youth at Gouda and Bois-le-Duc.
Since, as you are so keenly aware, humanists are interested in studying the best artifacts humans create, particularly those symbols called letters that convey the human experience and condition eloquently, Christian humanism would promote the consideration of those artifacts and experiential aspects of the humanities through the lens of our faith, especially through the lens of the Incarnation. How else could they be valuable for the soul you are surely going to ask? In the modern world, you will be surprised to discover ideas are segregated into subjects, each distinct from the other, so that reality can only be conceptualized in fragments.
The influence of this sin and cultural crime is remarkable: society itself is now conceptualized in fragments as a result. Would you be surprised if I told you modern society has more new books printed every year than existed in the entire world when you stood annotating your great Adages? Yet, simultaneously there is such little interest in reading books that inversely proportionate to their negligence our society suffers from the greatest ennui, dysphoria, and debauchery your beautiful mind could fein to imagine. My dear Erasmus, you would not believe me if I told you the number of youth who believe a man can actually become a woman and vice versa; and, if one such as I told you the freedom for anyone to live out that delusion is further protected by the magistrate, certainly you would call me a liar or a mad man. But it is true.
Therefore, one of the goals of another renaissance of Christian humanism will be to explore the human condition, along with our beliefs and artifacts, in an integrated fashion once again. Ours would transcend the modern approach of segregating ideas into specialized fields—and I know you will upbraid me for my foolish talk when I tell you—subjects like “literary humanities” or “medical humanities,” or “digital humanities,” etc. I know you do not believe me, but I would not lie to you, especially about such matters as this; I go so far as to swear it.
Goal #5
Finally, my fifth goal is something you will assuredly find almost silly at first, but I believe you will come to understand in the end—culture making. A recovery of Christian humanism in my own day would mean nourishing culture makers on Scripture, Church history, and what later humanists began to call the Great Conversation of the Western tradition. I trust, good teacher, you will think it is folly to say we must reintroduce and nourish a generation on something as natural to you as water is to fish regardless of the degree to which piety waned in your day. In our day, there is little to wane from.
We must accomplish this fifth goal so we can once again learn to ask the right questions about our purpose as human beings, and to think Christianly about what it means to create culture. In other terms, because Christian humanism seeks to cultivate the moral imagination of writers, teachers, artists, architects, engineers, musicians, financiers, entrepreneurs, politicians, and law enforcement officials, etc., another renaissance will ensure more and more culture makers view the cosmos, and especially the material world as God’s creation for humanity that is inexorably tied to eternity.
Keenly aware, most generous Mentor, that I have drawn long upon your patience when I told you I would attempt to be brief, I have finally laid out my project for your brilliant and timely critique. I acknowledge my project is ambitious, and more so than you are probably still aware, but every journey must being with a series of first steps. And that is why I invite, yea, covet your insights and corrections. As always, I sit with my anxiety as I patiently await your reply. In the meantime, I will continue to apply myself as you have instructed and modeled. Be assured of my diligence and desire for the work.
Until you write again,
I remain your devoted interlocutor,
Agapetos Mathetes
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Irenaeus, Against Heresies (4.20.7) in Alexander Roberts et al., The Ante-Nicene Fathers: Translations of the Writings of the Fathers Down to A.D. 325 (Edinburgh, Grand Rapids, Mich: T. & T Clark ; Eerdmans, 1989), 490.