The Project of Christian Humanism
By Larry Chapp
In its penetrating analysis of “the modern world”, the Second Vatican Council reached that most important point of the visible world that is man, by penetrating like Christ the depth of human consciousness and by making contact with the inward mystery of man, which in Biblical and non-Biblical language is expressed by the word “heart.” Christ, the Redeemer of the world, is the one who penetrated in a unique unrepeatable way into the mystery of man and entered his “heart.” Rightly therefore does the Second Vatican Council teach: “The truth is that only in the mystery of the Incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light.”
-Pope John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis, #8
I. Christian Humanism as the Key Project of the Modern Church
Redemptor Hominis was the first encyclical written by John Paul II and with good reason. Its Christocentric theological anthropology was near and dear to everything he believed most constitutively as a Catholic thinker. And I say “constitutively” since for him the truth about what it is that constitutes human dignity was no mere abstraction, but a visceral existential reality of the deepest order. John Paul understood that the central issue of our time is the question of just what a human being is. And he further understood that the source of so much evil in our time resides in the fact that Western civilization has abandoned Christianity’s answer to that question and replaced it with pale but potent secularized substitutes.
Karol Wojtyla, who had lived through the Nazi horrors and the subsequent totalitarian Stalinist oppression of Poland, knew full well the ravages inflicted upon Europe by the various “isms” and secular ideologies of the 20th century. He had a front row seat to the carnival of carnage unleashed upon the world by the secularized utopian eschatologies of Marxism and Nazi racial theory. But he also understood that the capitalist consumerism and technocratic scientistic reductionism of the liberal West posed in many ways an even greater danger, owing to the fact that it was far more attractive and, therefore, more seductive.
Therefore, what John Paul understood and what we need now, more than ever perhaps, is an anamnesis that constantly re-presents to us, through word and image, the full reality of the house of horrors inflicted upon the human family by the many false doctrines of what a human being is, which were created by the modern project. Or perhaps it is better to say, the false doctrines of what a human being is and “ought to be.”
What Wojtyla and his theological allies (e.g., Henri de Lubac, von Balthasar, and Joseph Ratzinger) understood was that the modern world, especially in the West, had succumbed to the allure of a kind of secular, scientistic, promethean project, mislabeled as a form of “humanism,” attempting to build a newer and more ambitious tower of Babel. Only this time, not really a tower at all, since there is no heavenly realm with gates to breach, and is instead a kind of “anti-towers project” where the demolition and deconstruction of transcendence as the enemy of the human race is the chief goal. What we need, they claim, are not towers leading us into the celestial perfections, but a series of lateral liniments and tendons binding together the skeletal structure of a “brave” and revolutionary new form for human society.
And from that starting point, what we need now is the true counter anamnesis of the God-man Jesus Christ, with an eye toward how his truth provides us with the only authentic anthropology and thus the only true humanism. This is a project that began as a pure negation in the modernist condemnations which, despite the often ham-fisted manner in which they were carried out, bore within themselves certain key insights about the dangers posed to the faith by “critical” modernity. But pure negation could not stand up to the political and cultural tsunamis of our time and therefore a new ecclesial project had to be mounted wherein the Church would repropose her timeless truths as providing us with a deeper, and therefore more attractive, humanism grounded in the true form of what it means to be human, provided by Christ.
This project further required the shedding of all tendencies toward a reactionary and somewhat romantic antiquarianism. Vatican II therefore adopted, as pointed out by Msgr. Thomas Guarino in his book The Disputed Teachings of Vatican II, an analogical rather than a dialectical approach to the problem of modernity. Rather than merely condemn errors—a path that had been trod and which failed to gain traction—Vatican II adopted instead a high-risk approach of seeking to find the overlapping points of contact with the world in order to “engage” that world constructively with its own message.
Joseph Ratzinger viewed this project as thoroughly christological and he referred to such texts as Gaudium et Spes #22 as the hermeneutical key to the whole of the Council. This in turn caused him to view the Council, and Gaudium et Spes in particular, as a “counter syllabus of errors” that, instead of resting in the complacency of condemnations, sought an aggressive, positive, Christological project.
In many ways therefore the papacies of John Paul and Benedict were the capstone on a theological edifice whose construction had begun in the 19th century, and which exploded in creative power in the early to mid-twentieth century in the neo-Thomistic revival and in ressourcement theology. My point here is not another encomium to those movements, but to highlight the central theological truth that put fire into their equations. And that truth is the Christocentric theological anthropology latent within the Chalcedonian formulas.
Nevertheless, as Tracey Rowland notes in her book, Introducing Communio Theology,
What Guarino describes as the analogical approach and the use of a more irenic philosophical language may have been diplomatic, but it had a negative side effect of fostering numerous competing interpretations.… Moreover, some documents contain unresolved tensions between different theological traditions…. (pp. 110–111)
The controversies surrounding the Francis papacy can in great measure be interpreted as the result of his apparent preference for the so-called “Bologna School” of conciliar interpretation as an “event” that instituted a process of rupture with the past, as opposed to the hermeneutic of “reform within an overarching continuity” of John Paul and Benedict.
It is to be hoped that Pope Leo will move the Church back in that direction and away from the voices of the liberal ecclesial grumblers who are fine with a Christ safely inside Francis Fukuyama’s end of history party bus, but not with the real Christ of intrusive supernatural truths about what a human being actually is.
II. The Necessity of This Project
I am convinced that centuries from now our era will be viewed as a descent into the madness of a “happy faced nihilism” where the darkness of Freddie Mercury’s Bohemian Rhapsody (“nothing really matters, anyone can see, nothing really matters to me”) paradoxically coincides with the fevered passions of various “critical, liberationist, queer, anti-‘fascist’, and decolonizing” political movements. But it is only an apparent paradox since modernity has long demonstrated that its commitment to deconstructing moral and spiritual normativity as something socially dangerous has always coincided with the spirit of revolution. The modern project is inherently nihilistic in its metaphysical soul but masks this reality with a series of purely invented, stipulative “rights,” which, having no real foundation, change with the shifting moods of the social contract.
This connection between the essential nihilism of the modern project and the various violent revolutionary movements of our time was presciently described by the Italian philosopher Augusto del Noce many decades ago:
The idea of the transition from the reign of necessity to the reign of freedom makes it obligatory to interpret all of past history in terms of repression and violence. …
Hence the idea of responsibility is abolished. But on the other hand, from the standpoint of action, of a new reality that must be built, one must assign responsibility. Therefore, we reach the following paradox: we are not responsible but we are made responsible by others in relation to a project, to the “novelty” to be created. We reach the idea that responsibility is assigned, which means that violence is justified as necessary in order to create a new reality. We reach the mortification of ethics expressed by Nietzsche’s definition: it is the science whose task is to justify successful crimes. (The Crisis of Modernity, pp. 22–23)
Thus we see the rise of illiberal liberalism, grounded in the ethos del Noce describes, and with it the redefining of “free speech” as “hate speech” if it is deemed counter revolutionary. Therefore, the kind of secular “humanism” with which the Church of today must contend is not the rather benign American version of a bygone era, nor even the adolescent thundering version of Nietzsche, but an altogether different kind of animal that isn’t really a form of humanism at all. One of the Church’s toughest challenges today is to convince our culture that the techno-nihilism they are embracing is in reality the death of the entire realm of the humanum.
Through all of it, however, the Christian faith has managed to perdure and has kept alive the “religion question,” much to the annoyance of many of our elites who occupy the finest seats at our cultural and political table of public discourse. In many ways, in the West at least, the Catholic Church remains the single greatest religious obstacle to the nihilism of purely technocratic understandings of the human or, as Shoshana Zuboff calls it, “surveillance capitalism.” Pierre Manent long ago outlined the unique theo-political nature of the history of modern European politics as a long and steady set of renegotiations with the legacy of Catholicism (in An Intellectual History of Liberalism). Therefore, one can sum up the entirety of the ethos of modernity with a simple question: “What do you do with the Catholic Church?” Many folks would not describe it so bluntly and prefer to speak instead of religion rather generically. But as the comedian Lenny Bruce once said, “Why is it that when people speak of ‘the Church’ they always mean the Catholic Church?”
In the Anglo version of the theo-political problem, society was envisioned as a civilization built on the foundational idea that “religions” are both necessary for inculcating the moral virtues necessary for self-governance, but also dangerous to the social peace since they are not verifiable via “public” (aka “secular”) reason except in the most generic of ways, and therefore they must be domesticated for the sake of that peace. Alternatively, in the continental version of that milder Anglo spin on religion, religions are dangerous but also, more fundamentally, retrograde—the recrudescence of superstition, sexual taboos, and bizarre notions of “sacrifice” as appeasement—and therefore the very concept of “God” is to be excluded from our social constructions as a matter of social hygiene. Religions can have “freedom” but only to a point and never in opposition to the principles of “laïcité” (France’s constitutional principle of secularism).
The story of our time therefore really is the narrative of how the Anglo liberal political arrangement gradually lost its mojo and morphed into a version of the continental with its hostility to God concepts intruding into the civil sphere. American style religious “disestablishment,” though in theory “neutral” toward all religions, was in reality simply a kind of pan Protestant, denominational, political peace treaty, wherein the cultural hegemony of pan Protestantism allowed for an unthematized social cohesion that was still largely Christian.
But the end of that Protestant hegemony came with wave after wave of Catholic immigrants, and with the subsequent secularization of America in what amounted to a kind of “second disestablishment,” the pretense of liberal neutrality has been exposed as the tenuous project it always was and that it has never really been theologically or metaphysically “neutral.” Like a cheating card dealer at the Black Jack table, liberalism has always dealt from the bottom of a rigged deck while maintaining the illusion of an honest and equal deal. In reality, liberalism has always already possessed a set of metaphysical commitments that asserts the superiority of purely “secular reason” over all religious claims—unless and until those claims can get beyond their native fideism and appeals to the “unverifiable” supernatural realm, and to thereby position themselves properly as part of this new metaphysical ordo of naturalism, scientism, and an ethics of pragmatic utilitarianism.
The key element here is the pseudo eschatological aspect wherein a certain “perfectibility” of the human condition is envisioned. And I say “pseudo” insofar as there is no true teleological aspect, whether we are talking about human nature specifically or about the manner of historical unfolding in general. To be sure, certain biological and natural physical limits and tendencies are acknowledged, but never as something morally, spiritually, or ontologically normative. Nothing binds us to anything. Or, as it was once famously put by the sociologist Peter Berger, modern people have no “binding address.” Everything is fungible and malleable. Thus, biological and physical “limits” are mere temporary constrictions to be overcome via science and technology, as now seen most paradigmatically in the transgender movement, but also with all of human sexuality more generally.
Therefore, nothing is “home” for us and we are rootless wanderers. Nevertheless, we must not despair. God is real, the Gospel is true, and no matter how attenuated our religious sense has become, and no matter how crudded-over it is with the many digital insults to our soul, there be dragons still, breathing the fire of the divine into us. Nobody is ever really a nihilist. Nobody is ever really an epistemological relativist. People still have spouses and children and friends and jobs. They still sob when they have to put their dog down and they still cry, clandestinely, at saccharine commercials about random acts of kindness. But more seriously, they still feel the sting of injustice when they see it, and despite the near demonic messaging from our social conditioners, they still know deep down that there is a thing called “goodness” and another related thing called “beauty.” And they still know that men cannot get pregnant.
In other words, we are still human beings and therefore the nihilism of our age which I have described is only skin deep. It is as fragile as gossamer and just as transparent. But the Church must face the fact that the well of its reputation has been poisoned. The culture therefore will continue to move in the direction of meaninglessness. The nihilism of our age might be thin, but it is pervasive and covers and smothers everything.
Therefore, the Christocentric theological anthropology I spoke of at the beginning as the essential need of our time, cannot remain a mere theological project. Nor can it be a mostly clerical project. The tragedy of the post-conciliar era was that the empowering of the laity was interpreted clericalistically as a project to see how many lay people occupy positions of power in the chancery (while chanceries themselves morphed into bureaucratic sink holes of useless “ministries” to this and that; salvation by flow charts and PowerPoint alone).
But do we have a laity that is ready to bring the full form of Christ into their world? This requires a skill set and, therefore, the confidence of one steeped in the faith. I think we do have such a laity. And the role of the clergy is to get them to see that they are capable of much more.
I once lived in a neighborhood of anonymous cul-de-sac houses. It was a boring place and nobody knew anybody else. Vinyl sided sound-proof booths with attached garages and no front porches. It was awful. But one day a tornado blew through and many houses were destroyed. People were trapped inside under the rubble, including children. In an instant the surviving neighbors came out and began rescue efforts even while many of them also had injuries. I witnessed heroism. I witnessed charity. I witnessed people doing things they did not know they were capable of. I witnessed friendships fanned into existence from the embers of destruction. All they needed was a reason and a challenge and a provocation.
I witnessed, in other words, human beings. And the Church is blessed with over a billion of them. Now she needs to blow like that tornado through her ranks. I think this is what Pope Francis meant when he asked the young people to “make a mess.”
Indeed, the “mess” of Jesus Christ, God and man.
Dr. Larry Chapp is a retired professor of theology who taught for twenty years at DeSales University. He now owns and manages, with his wife, the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker Farm in Harveys Lake, Pennsylvania. He can be visited online at Gaudium et Spes 22. Read Larry’s other WWNN essays.