This essay was inspired by the interesting article of Franck Biancheri on Secularism and Political Correctness which has appeared recently in Newropeans Magazine (read the article). Also by the article in EU-Observer titled “Spirit of Voltaire still hinders European Muslims” which reports some interesting findings by the European Policy Center in Brussels. There, Dr. Jocelyne Cesari, a senior research fellow at the CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research) in Paris and Harvard in the US stated on June 9, 2004 that “Europe is the only part of the world which has a general hostility toward religion...Europeans tend to explain every sigh of backwardness in terms of religion….The European tendency to equate Muslim religion with fanaticism—already present in Voltaire’s Mahomet, of Fanaticism (1745), still lives on.” The phenomenon was documented by the World Values Survey on religion conducted last year by a group of social scientists who identify its roots in the enlightenment period.

I'd like to offer to this debate on Transatlantically Incorrect on religion and secularism, a different take on the relevancy of a Humanism rooted in Christianity (some would call it Christendom) within Western Civilization, wholly independent from one's practice of religion, or even belief or non-belief in God.

After participating for three years now to the debate on the future of Europe, I am now more convinced than ever that post-modern secular culture looks upon the possibility of an authentic Christian Humanism as problematic at best if not an outright discredited and anachronistic concept. This is a culture born of the French and Russian revolution which tends to look at religion as a sort of mystification diminishing Man’s human stature, blunting his creativity, and retarding his growth toward full maturity. Madalyn Murray O’Hair used to go around lecturing that it is the lame who need crutches not healthy people, and therefore healthy mature people ought to throw religion out the window. But as Karl Jung has demonstrated in his world-wide research on myth and archetypes, throw religion out the window, and it will come came the back door. To wit the former Soviet Union and the present so called People's Republic of China which substituted ideology for religion.

The temptation on the part of those who believe that religion can be the cement to unite diverse people (and we have the example of Islam that united the Arabs 1300 years ago) is that of resorting to the praise and evocation of the Medieval Christian humanism of the past: a sort of nostalgic look back to the thousand years between the Patristic Age and the Renaissance when allegedly life, joy, sanity and creative abounded. All one needs to do to help one’s imagination perform this trick is to listen to the late medieval music of the 14th century. If that music does nothing else, it will forever relieve the listener of the 19th century positivistic cliché that the Middle Ages were times of darkness, not to speak of its cathedral, its literature (Dante, Petrarch), its painting (Giotto), its architecture (Brunelleschi), its philosophy (Bruno, Campanella, Ficino). Even an atheist such as George Santayana could not deny that the culture of Medieval Christendom and the humanism of Christian and European Renaissance were decisive steps in Man’s growth and that in fact such a culture is the very foundation of our present post-modern world with all its blemishes and glories. But of course he was a scholar and never confused opinion for truth.

But such an appeal would be ambivalent, ambiguous and even misguided. How so? Not so much because of the paradox of at the same time denying and affirming the world, something which applies to most great religions besides Christianity, but because of the complexity and ambiguity of Christian culture. Unfortunately, it has become all too easy for Christian apologists to have things both ways and advance a ready explanation for almost any issue including those revolving around science and technology. They will simply point to a Christian that has distinguished himself in a field, usually a saint. Do we want an example of Christian Humanism: voilà Thomas More the friend of Erasmus, the layman, the statesman, the family man, the student of the classics. But we gave however better examples of Christian openness to all forms of profane knowledge in the Middle Ages. For example, the school of Notre Dame with Abelard and St. Bernard of Clairvaux debating fine points of pagan philosophy, the School of Chartres with its patronizing of scholars deeply intrigued by the natural world, the School of St. Victor which declared, “Learn everything, you will find nothing superfluous.” And above all there is St. Thomas Aquinas and his openness to Aristotle, to Moslem culture, and the claims of reason, nature and man. But to declare that Christian humanism is a living force in the world today simply because this world remains in cultural continuity with the Christendom of the past, would be quite equivocal in a secular world which has coined the phrase “post-Christian world.” For the post-Christian world Christian values are a mere residue. What obtains is Stoicims at its best; at worst, one notices rampant narcisism or worship of the self individually or collectively, soccer games on Sunday, Epicurianism, life-style, and even hedonism, among ordinary people; ideology among the intellectuals. Dostoyevsky describes this kind of nihilism quite well in his "The Devils" a hundred years before its arrival.

So the problem is not so much to celebrate the glories of an eternal humanism stamped with classical reason and ennobled by Christian faith. The more difficult and disquieting task is the inquiry as to what conditions Christians can establish today by their outlook and action the claim of being true participants in the building of a new humanism. Which is to say: can our Christian Faith suggest appropriate and original answers? Is there a certain unique light which Christianity alone can provide? Is this light shining all by itself, self-evident, or rather is it made evident by the creative activity of Christians in the world as it is? What are the insights that Christianity can contribute as to the value of Man and his/her intrinsic and inalienable dignity as a free person? Is it the truth that makes one free as humanism believes, or the other way around as secularism seems to advocate?

To even begin to answer those questions would mean to recognize that a subjective sentimental disposition to love everyone does not dispense anyone, believer or non believer, from social action to restore violated rights, so that the oppressed, the hungry, the workless may have a chance. Just sentiments will not do the trick here. Mere almsgiving without social action is hopelessly inadequate in today’s social world. The very dimensions of Christian love must be expanded and universalized as the Second Vatican Council has suggested, by proclaiming that “ …we are witness of the birth of a new humanism, one in which man is defined first of all by his responsibility to his brothers and to history.” (Constitution on the Church and the Modern World, n. 55). After this proclamation, to continue to appeal only to the medieval form of Christian humanism, cannot but render the message of the Council downright confusing. How do we then get rid of this confusion that identifies the Christian culture and world view of Western society and civilization from the fall of Rome to the French Revolution with “Christianity” pure and simple? We canno forget that such kind of Christian culture was more often than not opposed to the dynamism of historic development and social change. Even Providence was often conceived as a rigidly predetermined plan in the mind of God to be imposed on Man. Where is the freedom here for new creative ideas? The unfortunate treatment of Bruno, Campanella and Galileo by the Church are witness to this kind of mental rigidity. And yet if one reads the Prophets and the New Testament seriously one has to recognize that if Christianity is a religion of love, then it is also at the same time a religion of change. The very word metanoite (repent, in the Christian message of salvation) means to change one’s life individually but also socially. The summon is to a permanent newness of life. Christian order ought to mean something much more dynamic than the classical hierarchic pyramid with God at the top, man halfway down, and prime matter at the bottom—all predetermined. One of the historic paradoxes resulting from this fixation with a static concept of the Christian world view, is that the dynamic aspect of Christianity was left to be rediscovered and emphasized by thinkers who were highly critical of it.

Feuerbach and Marx were two such thinkers. But their criticism had occult Christian elements which need to be taken seriously. For Marx religion is a process of mystification and alienation wherein Man projects his own reality outside himself, impoverishing and dehumanizing himself and ending up with a fantasy life centered on an abstract idea of God. Marx insists that it is not in constructing a religious system of ideology and worship that intervenes between himself and his real world that man can find truth and happiness; rather he must enter into a direct and concrete relationship with the world of matter, with his brother, and with himself. Man humanizes both himself and his world by working to better the conditions of all men in the world. Religious ideologies and forms of worship merely prevent Man from being himself, from being human. Consequently, there can be no such thing as a religious humanism; that is an oxymoron. The first step to an authentic humanism is the rejection of religion.

From what we have argued above, it would appear that, unless the Christian is willing to face this criticism, there is no further point in talking about Christian humanism today. And when we face it, we ought to discern that Marx’s criticism rests on a gross misconception about the essence of Christianity. Marx was not only following Feuerbach’s critique of Hegel’s essentially un-Christian theology, but also accepting as “Christian” the superficial and decadent manifestations of Christianity which he saw around him in early-nineteenth-century Germany, without bothering to read the criticism of such respectable middle class Christianity in Kirkegaard. Now, if this pseudo-Christianity is mistaken for genuine Christianity, one can easily destroy its claims to being humanistic. If Marx had instead taken the trouble to open the New Testament at random, he would have immediately discovered that Jesus’ preaching is directed precisely against what we have come to know as religious alienation. A typical one is “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2: 27). In working miracles on the Sabbath Jesus is emphasizing the priority of human values over conventionally “religious” ones. Throughout the New Testament we find the contrast between a mere interior religiosity, abstract, mental, intentional, or even a matter of fantasy, and that long-suffering love which in uniting man to his brother of flesh and blood, unites him to the truth in God (see John 13: 34-35; 1 John 4: 7-11). The Christian loves because God is love and because God is manifested in actual love, not only in pious ideas and practices. This is a God that far from remaining isolated in a remote heaven, has “pitched his tent” among men in order to manifest himself in man. He has become Emmanu-El. Furthermore, She wills to do this only with the free cooperation of the human being her/himself. As John aptly explains it (John 17: 3-23), it is the free decision of men to love one another in Christ that enables them to cooperate positively and creatively in the definitive manifestation of God on earth. Men are now free from the domination of abstract religious systems; they are sons of God and such brothers to one another, united in a community of freedom and love, guided by the Spirit dwelling in the Church and each of its members, the spirit of sonship. This is a far cry from an abstract proclamation of "fraternitè" based on universal Western values. For Paul the whole meaning of the Cross is that Christ has died to the law and risen to a new life of liberty. One does not have to keep an ancient ritual law in order to please God.

The very heart of Christian humanism, in its full theological dimension, is to be sought in the revealed doctrine of the Incarnation, man’s sonship of God in Christ, and the gift of the Holy Spirit as a principle of divine life and love in man. Another crucial factor within the heart of this kind of humanism is that of forgiveness. Christianity is not an explanation for evil but a life of dynamic love which forgives evil, thus enabling love to transform evil into good. This is the dynamic of Christian love: a dynamic of forgiveness. Thus the true secret of Christian humanism is that it has the divine power to transform man in the very ground of his being into a son of God. This is forgiveness and mercy. The whole meaning of Christian teaching is that man far from being alienated from himself has now a new relationship to God and everything that is God’s becomes ours, provided that we love.

And here we come to the crux of the issue: the question of love and the problem of narcissism which is related to that of alienation. Narcissism is regressive, undeveloped, infantile love. In Christian theology this regression is called original sin. The narcissistic personality is centered on the affirmation of itself and its limited desires. It sees others as real only in so far as they can be related to these desires. Primitive forms of religion tend to be associated with narcissistic thinking. But this is even a bigger problem in highly developed modern technological cultures which has its own form of superstition, idolatry and magic, its obsessions, neuroses, parading as religion. Erich Fromm points out that much of modern society is nothing else but organized narcissism. There is a fascination with the self at the root of all idolatrous forms of religion. Narcissism spontaneously projects itself onto an idol from which the satisfaction of its desires is thought to be obtained. It is the projection of a selfish and infantile need for love or power. This narcissism is essentially anti-humanistic. It is hostile to the true development of man’s capacity to love. It reduces man to a slave of things: money, machines, commodities, luxuries, fashions, pseudo-culture. This produces a sort of fake humanism deifying man and enslaving him to “the rat race” for riches, pleasure, power. Whole societies can fall into narcissism and idolatry: the worship of the products of one’s mind or hands. Collective self-worship was not unknown to the Romans or the Nazis or the Communists or to modern sophisticated Man. Hence this Faustian narcissism and self-idolatry is perhaps the greatest single threat to all genuine humanism in our post-modern world devoid of transcendence. We have seen that the mythologies of totalitarian societies are a much more powerful “opium” than any of the traditional religions ever were. For indeed, despite the genial social diagnosis practiced by men like Marx and Feuerbach, and in spite of the theoretical optimism of Marxian eschatology, with its hope that Man will finally free himself from alienation and create himself by humanizing his world, we have seen serious limitations to this vision. Like the Hegelian eschatology from which it stems, this modern secular humanism is merely concerned with Man in the abstract, with the human species. It is abstract Man who will one day reveal to the world the Absolute made conscious of Itself, not the free and concrete human person, the man of flesh and blood, but man in general, as a collective totality manifesting in himself the latent divinity which the Hegelians say is his. Or, for Marx, it is again Man, scientific and objective man, who will one day humanize himself and the earth; but it is well known that Marx had little patience for the claims of fallible human persons and no interests in such values as love, compassion, mercy, happiness. The abstract and scientific doctrines of modern humanism become means by which the individual person is reduced to subjection to man in the abstract. This secular humanism is so fair and optimistic in theory but so utterly merciless and inhuman in practice. Pasternack described it so well in his Dr. Zhivago that his book had to be banned from the Soviet Union and was published in Italian first, in Milan, Italy.

Secular humanism is in fact so abstract that it easily lends itself to idolatrous interpretations. One ends up loving abstract humanity as an idolatrous projection of self while hating and persecuting one’s concrete fellow man. Mercilessness is not only permitted but it becomes a duty within every form of totalitarianism and ideological fanaticism. The particular is sacrificed to the Absolute. The fathers of Humanism, Dante and Vico turn this upside down and begin with particular Man in its own particular existential conditions to arrive at the universality of humanity. In that sense, they are much more faithful to the Humanism in its origins, than Hegel ever was. Within Hegelian-Marxism philosophy you have the love of an abstract good and ideal to justify relentless hatred of certain men in the concrete. Social Darwinism becomes acceptable and even desirable: no mercy, just rational inevitable progress. Even genocide can then be contemplated.

It is true that today Man is in the midst of a revolution that is scientific, political, economic, cultural spiritual and affecting every aspect of human life, but the hopes of modern secular eschatology can contribute nothing to the building of a new humanism as long as it pretends to attain its ends by purely objective positivistic application of science without consideration of living human values incarnated in men of flesh and blood. No humanism has retained the respect for Man in his personal and existential actuality to the same extent as European Christian humanism, for at its center is the idea that God is love, not power, and being love She has becomes human and through the Incarnation this love becomes manifest and active, through Man and the history that the human being makes.