Recovering Christian Humanism

Confusion over what it means to be human, and over whether human nature has an intrinsic moral shape, remains the source of much of our modern chaos. This anthropological crisis first emerged as an existential concern in a Europe convulsed by two world wars. In retrospect, given the horrors of the occupation, it is not surprising that its most pungent intellectual expressions emerged in France among those who had matured under the Nazi jackboot. Althusser, Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan had their differences, but they were united in their basic repudiation of the possibility of an easy—indeed, of any—answer to the question: What is man?

We now live in the next phase of this anthropological crisis. French theory traveled to the United States in the sixties, where, as Emily Eakin has recently described, its proponents became “academostars”—intellectual celebrities whose nihilism found fertile soil in the very different culture of America, marked by its individualism, consumerism, and self-confidence. The denial of meaning had captured the bleak metaphysical wasteland of postwar Europe. In America, it was perfect for the anti-authoritarian playfulness of a prosperous and confident culture that could assume it represented, in Fukuyama’s Hegelian phrase, the end of history and the last man, as in the fulfillment of human nature. Foucault in America was not the nemesis of meaning so much as the liberator from the straitjacket of bourgeois sexual morality.

Post-9/11, however, America has undergone its own crisis of confidence. History did not end with the fall of the Soviet Union. 9/11 indicated that not everyone admired American culture. The sexual revolution has shattered the moral consensus that helped give American society its coherence. And AI is now forcing the question of what it means to be human upon us in a manner that is proving impossible to ignore. A new, American-led crisis of humanism is upon us. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that various forms of critical theory and thinkers such as Michel Foucault are starting to enjoy a certain vogue beyond their more traditional left-of-center political homes. COVID lockdowns, for example, were ripe for a Foucauldian analysis of biopower, and Giorgio Agamben duly obliged.  

In this context, the need for a new humanism is pressing. But the question of what it means to be human cannot be answered without a metaphysics to give meaning to individual human existence. Even Richard Dawkins gestures toward this with his references to cultural Christianity. Pure materialism will not carry the weight necessary. If human beings are nothing more than lumps of meat, there is no reason why they should be considered anything more than “meat Lego,” to borrow Mary Harrington’s memorable phrase.

Given this, Jens Zimmermann’s What Is Christian Humanism? is a welcome introduction to the topic. Building on his earlier work on humanism, Bonhoeffer, and technology, Zimmermann distills his thinking on key issues. He rescues the term “humanism” from its popular use as a secular alternative to nihilism, and details how Christian humanism should shape approaches to education, technology, and politics.

Zimmermann develops his thinking in constructive dialogue with both traditional Christian sources—Chalcedonian Christology, Cyril of Alexandria, Thomas Aquinas, John Paul II—and those we might not typically expect to find in such a work—Martin Buber, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer. Heidegger is notorious as an opaque thinker whose commentators typically make him even more obscure. Not so Zimmermann, who draws out in pellucid prose Heidegger’s significance for how we understand ourselves and our relationship to the world. The result of this dialogue is a work of more than mere repristination. Zimmermann does not simply translate the wisdom of the Christian past into modern patois. Rather, he draws on the insights of modern thinkers to enrich Christian thinking and to sharpen understanding of the connection between our humanity and our existence as linguistic beings.

Three chapters in particular are important. On education, Zimmermann makes the case for the importance of immersing students in the tradition of the humanities as the basis for teaching what it means to be human, beginning with the idea of human beings as persons. He develops this theme further in the chapter on technology, where he argues that technology that disembodies us and transforms all erstwhile human relationships into those that are technologically mediated is inimical to being truly human. It turns us into things—“bytes and bytes and bytes of digital information,” as Richard Dawkins put it. Human beings have always used tools, but there are tools that do one thing and alter our relationship with our environment (a hammer, for example), and then there are tools that aspire to become the comprehensive mediators of reality and thereby the adjudicators of what counts as reality. They end up remaking us—or at least reshaping our self-understanding—in their image. Zimmermann sees this objectification of the human person as reshaping our politics in the fraught and fractious ways with which we are all now familiar. In that third chapter, Zimmermann appeals for the restoration of the anthropology upon which Western society built its liberal democracy: the idea that man is made in the image of God. And as I read this chapter, I thought once again of the importance of embodiment to personhood: It is in embodied encounters that we recognize each other as human beings. That has to guide our educational policies, our politics, and (underlying both of those) our use of technology.

What Is Christian Humanism? is a rich, thought-provoking book that raises many of the correct questions and points toward appropriate Christian answers. If the question of our day is “What does it mean to be human?” Zimmermann offers a thoughtful, gracious response that draws constructively upon both the Christian tradition and some important insights of modern continental philosophy. Recovering a culture strong enough to make Christian humanism once again plausible will not happen overnight. But contributions such as this set forth elements of a path forward.