Contradiction may signal futility, but paradox is pregnant with the possibility of resolution and harmony. Paradox is an ally of truth.

G. K. Chesterton: 

Rallying the Really Human Things

by Vigen Guroian

“We need a rally of the really human things; will which is morals, memory which is tradition, culture which is the mental thrift of our fathers.”

That was the judgment of G. K. Chesterton some seventy years ago in an essay entitled “Is Humanism a Religion?” In order to rally the really human things, Chesterton proposed a new Christian humanism, while he simultaneously warned of the dangers and deceptions of a popular secular humanism that is behaving as if it were a religion.
Chesterton distinguishes this modern secularist humanism from a much older tradition of Christian humanism with which he strongly identifies. The headwaters of this Christian humanism are the writings of such ancient church fathers as Basil of Caesarea and John Chrysostom, Saint Augustine and Gregory the Great. The stream is replenished by such late medieval and early Renaissance figures as Dante, Erasmus, and Thomas More. Chesterton extols the efforts of these humanists. “I doubt,” he writes, “if any thinking person, of any belief or unbelief, does not wish in his heart that the end of mediaevalism had meant the triumph of the Humanists like Erasmus and More.”[2]

In recent decades “secular humanism” has become a term of opprobrium among conservative Christians who identify it with the forces they believe are undermining the religious foundations of Western civilization. Chesterton’s criticism is aimed more specifically at the philosophical outlooks of significant writers of his own time, including Aldous Huxley, George Bernard Shaw, and H. G. Wells. He admires all of these men for their often insightful social criticism and their literary talent. But he ultimately rejects their brand of humanism because it is entirely anthropocentric.

True humanism, argues Chesterton, is theocentric and not anthropocentric. Christian humanism honors the fact that, though created of dust, the human being is the sole creature that God has made in his very own image and likeness. Christian humanism answers humankind’s need to be redeemed from a fallen condition in which this image is tarnished, and in which death works like a rust that destroys even the most beautiful bronze statue. Because it knows the difference between God and man and the effects of sin, Christian humanism rejects the spurious notions of human progress and perfection espoused by some secular humanists. Christian humanism builds upon the human person’s “innerdirectness” toward the transcendent. It nurtures and disciplines this yearning (eros) for the divine life—for truth, goodness, and beauty—that God has planted in every human being.

Christian humanism is grounded in the doctrine of the Incarnation and gains its special character from that doctrine. God in Christ affirms our enfleshed and historical existence and gives meaning to it in spite of death. Within human culture and through the elements of this material world—bread and wine, oil and water, flesh and blood—the incarnate Son saves us body and soul from sin and death. God has given human beings compelling reasons to labor with him and within and through this physical world to redeem the whole creation.

These Christian facts, Chesterton argues, are the inspiration of Christian humanism, which stands in contrast to man-centered philosophies of life that embrace matter to the exclusion of spirit, or reject the material world in a flight to something deemed “spiritual.” Such secularist philosophies are not necessarily atheistic, but they cannot sustain either faith in a personal God or the dignity, freedom, and eternal worth of the human person. The loss of this faith is the principal symptom, argues Chesterton, of the decline of the Christian paradoxical imagination.
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