Humanism Revisited

Humanism is a practice of mental and emotional askesis, a mode of resistance to the temptation ever present to human fancy to imagine an escape from mortality and the life of this world into immortality and the life of another world. Humanism, even in its more charismatic formulations (Romantic humanism, religious humanism) is a sober insistence that, in the words of G. K. Chesterton's incredulous gum-shoe cleric Father Brown,"...it's natural to believe in the supernatural. It never feels natural to accept only natural things. But though it wanted only a touch to tip you into preternaturalism about these things, these things really were only natural things" ("The Miracle of Moon Crescent").

The American Romantic poet Wallace Stevens characterized human existence as an epic struggle in which the hero successfully negotiates the pressures exerted upon him by what he called "imagination" and "reality." For Stevens, a "successful negotiation" of these pressures is one in which the escapist tendencies of the imagination are held in check (if not chastened) by the everyday demands of ordinary life on earth (i.e., reality); and yet, at the same time, reality is enriched and enlivened by the vivid hues of the imagination's palette. His life as an insurance company executive by day and modernist (though slyly Romantic) poet by night was a demonstration--one might even say an extreme demonstration--of the practical viability of his humanistic project.

The epic struggle that is humanism runs through all of the religious traditions that locate their original mythical impetus in the people called "Israel." In "ancient Jewish philosophy," the struggle took the form of the divergent ways in which the people's God was imagined: as immanent or transcendent (see Efros, Ancient Jewish Philosophy). During the Second Temple Period, political factions arose among the Judahist inhabitants of Palestine that were expressive of this tension: the Sadducees, representing the traditional priest-caste and sacrificial cult, resisted the Pharisaic party's introduction of "transcendentalist" notions imported from Iranian religion--e.g., bodily resurrection, an afterlife, angelology, a Satan figure, apocalypse. This is not to say that the Sadducees were the true humanists and the Pharisees something else: rather, the ideologies of both groups combined elements of humanist immanentism and transcendental speculation in different proportions and with often conflicting emphases. Such were the Palestinian parties and politics that shaped not only the "Old Testament" (as Morton Smith rightly argued) but also helped to determine the shape of the "New."

With the rise of the Jesus Movement among Second Temple Judahists and the introduction into the Near Eastern religious imagination of Graeco-Roman notions of apotheosis, the struggle continued in the articulation of incarnationist Christology and, eventually, trinitarian theology. What was originally at stake in the strange, post-mortem history of the Galilean proto-Rabbinic figure (Yeshua)--who, in his all too brief public career, attempted to forge an alternative to the predominant Judahist parties of his day--was the question of where to draw the line between human reality and an imagination given to flights of super-human fancy. In Wallace Stevens's words, it was a struggle to find "what will suffice."

With the Roman Empire's adoption, in the 4th century C.E., of Christianity as its official cult, the politics implicit in this struggle became not only explicit but were writ large in public life. By the mid-5th century (the Council of Chalcedon), a specific Christological formulation became a legally enforceable ideology and test of citizenship in the Empire. The specifics of that formulation marginalized those who felt it did not adequately express their own sense of "what will suffice" and so, for them, humanism--as they conceived it--became a matter of conscience. Such individuals and, unquestionably, groups of individuals, sought refuge in the Empire's hinterlands, and constituted, for the most part, informal communities of conscience. Too "Jewish" to be "doctrinaire" Christians (i.e., to consent fully to Chalcedonian Christology) and yet too Christian to be Rabbinic Jews, these individuals and groups languished on the periphery of the Byzantine and Sasanian empires, unorganized and voiceless, until the early 7th century C.E. At that time, in oasis towns of the Red Sea basin, a new movement arose that would, within a century, reconfigure the religious and political landscape of the Afro-Eurasian ecumene: the movement that would come to be known in time as "Islam."

Despite this reconfiguration, however, the struggle between imagination and reality, i.e., the epic struggle that is humanism, continued apace. Among Muslims, it would take new forms--even as it had among the convictional communities that were now known separately as "Christianity" and "Judaism." But the struggle remained then as now, in its essentials, the same. As concisely expressed by the title of one Stevens poem, the struggle amounts to this: "How To Live, What To Do."