Christian Humanism: Beyond Secularism and Augustinianism

By

Seth Farber

(Excerpt from Eternal Day, Regina Orthodox Press (800-636-2470), 1998. Used with author's permission.)

An account of an experience I underwent in 1984 while completing my dissertation may help clarify why I believe secularism is inadequate. As I was preparing the final chapter of my dissertation, a phenomenological study, I decided that for the sake of completeness I had to make a response to some of the metaphysical questions implicit in the material covered: Does life have meaning? Is it meaningful to speak of God?

During the two to three weeks that I worked on this chapter, I found myself engaging in an internal dialogue with one of the seven subjects of my study: "Oscar," a Unitarian minister in his early fifties, an atheist, and a long-term member of the American Humanist Association. Although in two interviews with me Oscar forcefully articulated a radical philosophy of moral and epistemological skepticism, he had been involved in a number of movements for social justice and humanitarian change, including the Civil Rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, and various environmental causes.

Oscar first acknowledged that he felt these movements were "important," but when I pressed for further definition he reversed himself and stated that he believed that his own sense of importance was "merely subjective," and that he did not believe that there was an "ultimate purpose" in the universe. He said that he thought that morality is relative (as evidenced by the fact that it differs from culture to culture), and he stated that there were no "absolutes." As a "rationalist," he believed that human beings’ unwillingness to acknowledge these facts was a result of our tendency to choose comfortable illusions over unpleasant truths.

I felt some identification with Oscar, as I had been involved in many of the same movements and felt a commitment to the same causes. On the other hand, I found his worldview unappealing: I had spent much of the last ten years of my life studying mystics in various traditions (Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist), and although I did not identify with any particular tradition at that time, I strongly believed in God, and found that some of my most profound experiences occurred in the process of worshipping God—occasionally in a church or in a temple, but for the most part when I was alone, and most often when I was surrounded by "nature."

No sooner had I begun work on the conclusion and initiated my internal dialogue with Oscar, than I was plunged into the most profound crisis I had experienced since adolescence. As I remember, one incident marked the beginning of this period of confusion. I was having dinner with a friend. I felt tenderness for her and silently admired her delicacy of expression. But these feelings were nipped in the bud by the thought that—no, the vision, rather, of myself as an animal that was trying to endow its instinctual reactions with a sense of value, trying to feel important.

For over two weeks my ability to love and appreciate the world was stifled. Every time I would feel a reaction of love, appreciation, awe, or wonder, I would fear that I was deluding myself. The specter of meaninglessness made it virtually impossible for me to appreciate any person or event. Always the thought would intrude: I am allowing myself to be deluded. The bottom line was that I did not know. And I never could know. It was logically possible (at least), and would always remain so, that Oscar was right: that meaning was merely a subjective feeling. To affirm anything as meaningful seemed to be a betrayal of the truth.

I had lost the world I loved. My deep fear was that this loss would be permanent, that I would never regain the world I had lost. I would forever be plagued by this idea that Oscar might be right. I vacillated between despair and anxiety tinged with hope, engendered by the thought that there might be a solution. But there might not. Sometimes despite my distress I felt a sense of excitement, as if I was on a great adventure, as if I anticipated a miraculous providential solution to a dilemma that struck me as insoluble.

Through grace and effort I was gradually freed from the secularist demon. In the first place, after a few days I realized the obvious: that the appeal of Oscar's "rationalism" was entirely deceptive. Oscar claimed that he acknowledged no values, that he was free of illusions.

Yet I realized that even Oscar lived by a value: truth, reason. It was in the name of truth that he abjured all other values. But if he was consistent, he would acknowledge that reason/truth were themselves relative—tools that had only pragmatic value for biological beings engaged in a struggle for survival.

Oscar's position inevitably led, when thought through, to a profound state of confusion. Its seductiveness lied in its promise to liberate those who dared from the emotional fetters that bound the majority of weak human beings to their illusions, and to enable those courageous few to enter into the realm of truth shorn of all illusions. But if his premise was correct, then truth itself was merely another illusion!

If what we experience as valuable, e.g., beautiful, is merely an accidental result of a set of biological or chemical processes that just happened to have been initiated on our planet billions of years ago, then it is not really valuable—its apparent value is purely "subjective," illusory. If human life and values are essentially valuable then they cannot be the product of an accident. If meaning is the product of nonsense, then it is not really meaningful.

Every value or object exists within a horizon: the cause, the explanation, or the story of its genesis and existence. Its horizon constitutes its essence. If its essence is different from its appearance—how it seems to us—then the latter is ipso facto false, a delusional product of our subjectivity.

Typically, secularists are convinced that life is a product of random genetic mutations maintained by nature because they were conducive to the biological survival of a species. Thus the universe has no objective value, and secularists, insofar as they are consistent, cannot genuinely affirm the meaningfulness of life. They cannot love fully, for their surrender to the feelings of love or reverence must be checked by the thought that the object of these feelings is really worthless.

Thus, my own process of internal questioning and questing led me to the conclusion that in order to vouchsafe the value of the world we must affirm the existence of God, of an infinite being who is ipso facto without horizons, and who is the explanation for the meaning of the universe that He has Himself created—the alternative is a self-refuting relativism.

Yet, I was still troubled by the idea that the universe might not really matter, that our existence was not of absolute importance. I asked myself, Why did God create the universe? Is our existence a matter of divine caprice or whim? Is it an arbitrary expression of God's will? Is it an accident? And if it is not an accident, what is it? I wrote, "What could God’s justification possibly be? Is it that God has no justification? Here we reach the limits of the mind; it is as if it is poised over an abyss of meaninglessness, of absurdity."

The typical theistic explanation for human existence is more convincing to me than the secularist, but here, too, the threat of human existence subsumed under the rubric of an accident cast an ominous shadow. However, I reasoned, the world makes sense. "The very possibility of communication is proof of this, this is certain to me now ... Therefore, it cannot be an accident that sense—meaning—exists. For that is to say that sense is a product of nonsense, that its own horizon contradicts it .... It is no accident that we exist, that truth exists, that love exists."

In my search for a coherent narrative explanation for existence, the best I could think of was that God created the world for mysterious reasons that lie beyond the grasp of the mind; nonetheless, this was sufficient at the time to banish my fears that the world was suspended in an abyss of meaninglessness.

Approximately ten years later I discovered several ,books written by Philip Sherrard. The mistake in the traditional theistic view, Sherrard argued, lies in the premise that God "could quite as well have chosen not to create it (the world) as to create it.”356 If this were the case, it would mean that "creation is in no way necessary to God's self-fulfillment."357 But what is not a necessary consequence of God's being what He is, is "something adventitious, gratuitous, and even a kind of appendage."358 The problem with this account is that it evokes the image of a hiatus—of a rupture—between God and creation, between the infinite and the finite. It posits that God in Himself is perfect, self-sufficient, absolutely meaningful while God's own creation is at least partially a product of an accident—it is unnecessary. Furthermore God Himself in the act of creation remains subject to chance. Thus, the traditional theistic account suffered from the same kind of dualism that afflicts Augustinianism and secularism, although in a more attenuated manner.

But does not Sherrard's assertion that God had to create the world entail that God is not free? No, because God is not compelled by any force external to Himself to create the world but by the "inner compulsion" every being has to fulfill its own nature."359 Sherrard explains, "It is in accordance with this compulsion from within—with this necessity for self-determination—that God acts when He creates the world .... It is an act in which absolute freedom and absolute necessity coincide ....”360

Our existence is not accidental: It had to be. God must love, and God must create: “The reality of love is a property inherent in the essence of the lover .. the Divine Lover—God—cannot not love at all or love to a limited extent, or not extend His love to the furthest limits of possibility and so abstain from loving fully. He does not have that choice."361

The same holds for creation. "Creation is intrinsic to God's very life, it is the inner landscape of His own being, God making Himself visible to Himself and simultaneously making Himself visible to us. It is in some sense His very self.”362

No account can completely explain the mystery of the relationship of the Infinite to the finite, of God to man. But a coherent narrative account—speculative metaphysics couched in the language of myth—will  evoke the recognition of the psyche and bring the intellect and intuition into harmonious resonance. It does not dispel the mystery but illuminates it in such a way that as we look through the glass we do not see quite so darkly as we did before. This is the accomplishment of the narrative Sherrard has umbrated, in which God not only creates the world but is bonded to it as a manifestation of His own transcendent essence.

Worship as Mode of Knowing and Being

Secularism arbitrarily privileges one particular mode of inquiry: natural scientific investigation. It not only excludes the revelations of religious traditions, but the revelations of mystics throughout the centuries, and of contemporary human experience. It denies that love (worshipping, wondering, marveling, etc.) can itself be a mode of cognition. But if the object of inquiry is sacred or divine, then there can be no genuine knowledge without love, without worship.

Schmemann states that it is only in worship that human beings can attain true knowledge of the world as well as knowledge of and communion with God. He writes of worship that: "Being knowledge of God, it is the ultimate fulfillment of all human knowledge."363

It is an axiom of the Christian faith that we know God through worship. As Eastern Orthodox philosopher Paul Evdokomiv wrote, “We prove God's existence by worshipping Him and not by advancing so-called proofs. We have here the liturgical and iconographic argument for the existence of God. We arrive at a solid belief in the existence of God through a leap over what seems true, over the Pascalian certitude. According to an ancient monastic saying, 'Give your blood and receive the Spirit.'”364

By the time I finished the final chapter in my dissertation, I realized that secularism's quarrel was not merely with religion—it was with life itself. For the appreciation of life is already instinctively religious, an attitude toward the world, an orientation, an act of submission to that which is felt to be greater than oneself, to the objective goodness and beauty the world’s qualities manifest. Worship,365 I concluded—affirming the infinite holiness of God and giving thanks for the life that He has granted to us—is the completion of the spontaneous movement that begins with the recognition of life as valuable.

The secularist will not worship. He regards any ritual affirmation of life as a betrayal of reason or a capitulation to superstition. And so, his surrender to life is not complete, cannot be completed. It is as if one were to have a love affair and never say, "I love you."' The lover might act generously, lovingly, selflessly, but something would be missing. The secularist may be committed to life, but she is unwilling to affirm this commitment.

By separating the world from God, secularism causes a split in our own being—for we are essentially worshipping beings. In other words, secularism results in a diminishment in the sense of being, and prevents one from realizing the natural depth that life possesses when it is conscious of its own roots in the infinite, in God.

In their own respective ways, both secularism and Augustinianism represent a Promethean revolt against the conditions of creaturely existence. Secularism accepts human beings' appreciation of creation, but seeks to prevent the gesture of thanksgiving that points beyond creation to that which it symbolizes, to its transcendent source, to its infinite ground, to the Transcendent God. Augustinianism denies the world as a means of God's revelation, refuses to accepts God's immanence in creation, and affirms only His transcendence. One denies God, the other denies creation. In both cases there is the denial of the sacramental dimension of human existence—which results in an impoverishment of the ability to love. Orthodox sacramentalism affirms that there is no antithesis, no gulf between creation and God; to affirm one at the expense of the other is to alienate oneself from both.

Christian Humanism

Sacramentalism does not deny that human beings have a special role to play within creation. The sacredness of the world reaches conscious awareness only in man. In that sense there is a hiatus between God and nature. But it is bridged by the human being, the ambassador of the divine in the world of nature, by the priest of God who gives voice to the silent holiness of being.

Philip Sherrard states that worship is the means of effecting what he calls the "nuptial union between God and nature." "It is in and through us that the physical world is hallowed and that its intrinsic sacramental quality is revealed. It is we who are the priests of the temple of this world."366 It is this understanding of the human vocation, as the priests of creation, that is the basis for Eastern Christian (Orthodox) humanism.

Alexander Schmemann also argues that man's dominion over creation is fulfilled in priesthood. He holds this power by sanctifying the world, by "'making" it into communion with God.367 By gratitude and adoration the created world is transformed by human beings into a spiritual world that reflects God's presence. "The first, the basic definition of man is that he is the priest (emphasis in original). He stands in the center of the world and unifies it in his act of blessing God, of both receiving the world from God and offering it to God—and by filling the world with this eucharist, he transforms his life, the one he receives from the world, into life in God, into communion with Him."368

From this point of view all human beings, not merely the clergy, are called to be priests, to consecrate creation.369 It should be noted that those who are deemed "mentally ill" are not exempted. that is to say they are not "mentally ill"; the very concept of mental illness rests on a covert Augustinian premise that is incompatible with Christian humansm: that the core of the person's identity—his soul—has been tainted, damaged by an event in his history—his worth has been diminished or vitiated. As against this premise, true Christianity posits that all human beings, including those labeled mentally ill by the mental health professionals, are worthy of the priesthood to which they have been summoned by God. In fact, one of the reasons for the distress of the ostensibly mentally ill may be that they have difficulty adjusting to a world in which they are not invited to exercise their own functions as priests of God. The Orthodox Christian view stands in stark contrast with the Augustinian view that human beings are inherently depraved, with the Freudian view that human beings are naturally and essentially pathological, and with the assumption underlying biological psychiatry that a human being is a functional or dysfunctional biochemical machine.

The Christian humanism of the Eastern, Orthodox Church is antithetical to modem psychology, as well as to classical Augustinianism in both its Roman Catholic and Protestant forms. Modem psychologists frequently blame many of the problems of modern life on "low self-esteem." Christians frequently respond to this by claiming that we are called upon to esteem only God, not ourselves. This is an Augustinian response, not a Christian response, as it sets up a false opposition, which is countered by the sacramentalist perspective. The issue is not either God or humanity but both God and humanity.

Secularists, on the other hand, do not understand that it is impossible to truly esteem human beings while denying our relationship to God and positing that a human being is essentially a natural creature seeking to fulfill biologically determined needs, "merely a neutral specimen of created natural being."370 Instead, dignity is imparted to us by God and by the fact that "man is the creature in and through which God seeks to express His own nature as spirit, personality, and holiness."371 “The One who called you is holy: like Him, be holy in all your behavior, for scripture says, 'You shall be holy, for I am holy'" (1 Peter 1: 1516, citing Leviticus 19:2).

Many Christians influenced by Augustinianism fail to understand that it is impossible to truly reverence God without reverencing humanity. We do not do honor to the artist by praising his personality and denigrating his creation. Because human beings have the potential for holiness, because we bear the image of God within ourselves, because as priests of God we are called upon to bring God's work to completion and to transform nature into a temple of enduring praise—because of all this, genuine reverence for God requires reverence for humanity. But, perhaps above all, it is because Christ is the model for our humanity—as Christian revelation makes clear that Christianity provides a basis not for the denigration of humanity but for the fullest affirmation—for a profound humanism.372