Twentieth-century Christian humanism as retrieval of the premodern Real—part II
Continued from paper given at the annual meeting of the Ciceronian Society, in Harrisonburg, Virginia, 3/15/25.
Epistemology: Retrieval of realism vs idealism – healing the mind-world divide
The twentieth-century Christian humanists’ epistemology was a war of “realism against idealism.”[1] They sought to heal the modern divide between the mind and the world – and their realist arguments are almost always anchored in premodern, or to be precise, pre-nominalist materials.
One instance of this, among many, is Chesterton’s 1933 biography of Thomas Aquinas—which was as thorough a Christian humanist retrieval of premodern ideas against the modern epistemological and ontological divides as you can find. In it, Chesterton identifies the Incarnation as the central doctrine not only of Thomas but also of Christianity as a whole—and as a “humanizing” doctrine as well. At the same time, Chesterton calls Thomas himself a humanist—quite confusingly no doubt for those who identify humanism as a purely renaissance phenomenon, having never encountered for instance medievalist R W Southern’s substantial work on scholastic humanism.
In the biography, Chesterton skewers idealist epistemology with his customary acid wit. This is not sophisticated argumentation—Chesterton was no scholar. But I can’t resist a single quotation. Chesterton has just laid out contemporary idealism, inherited from such thinkers as Kant and Hegel, as a confused thought-system running against the common sense of the man on the street by insisting that we have no access to the Real. He ripostes,
“Against all this, the philosophy of St. Thomas stands founded on the universal common conviction that eggs are eggs. The Hegelian may say that an egg is really a hen, because it is a part of an endless process of Becoming; the Berkeleian may hold that poached eggs only exist as a dream exists; since it is quite as easy to call the dream the cause of the eggs as the eggs the cause of the dream; the Pragmatist may believe that we get the best out of scrambled eggs by forgetting that they ever were eggs, and only remembering the scramble. But no pupil of St. Thomas needs to addle his brains in order adequately to addle his eggs; to put his head at any peculiar angle in looking at eggs, or squinting at eggs, or winking the other eye in order to see a new simplification of eggs. The Thomist stands in the broad daylight of the brotherhood of men, in their common consciousness that eggs are not hens or dreams or mere practical assumptions; but things attested by the Authority of the Senses, which is from God.”[2]
Participatory Ontology
Much more can be said, of course, of the twentieth-century Christian humanist epistemological retrieval of Realism, the healing of the modern mind-world divide. But let’s now turn to premodern ontology, the healing of the modern world-God divide. This amounted to a retrieval of nature as viewed by premodern eyes—in other words, as theophanic and sacramental—against modernity’s march toward what Charles Taylor has called a “closed immanent frame.”
According to that premodern ontology, both our creation in the image of God, and the incarnation as God entering his creation, license us to find God in the beauty and orderliness of his creation. This is the “re-enchantment” sought by Christian humanists living in Weber’s disenchanted world. We are connected to the transcendent in and through the immanent: allowing us to come to God and our own true humanity as it were “empirically.”
This is in fact what Lewis meant by calling himself an “empirical theist” who had “arrived at God by induction.”[3] As he described his own conversion, he had as a young classically trained atheist examined his own responses to experiences of beauty in nature and culture, accepted that those experiences also pointed to a transcendent truth and goodness in the world, and thus arrived at the God of creation. This was a thoroughly Christian humanist move.[4]
[1] “It is not entirely clear when participatory metaphysics fell apart and along with it a holistic view of reality. We know, however, that the history of philosophy, especially from the Enlightenment onward, was more or less defined by the battle between idealism and realism, in which the question of God and religion always played an important role. The philosophical issue (a realistic versus an idealistic worldview) remained intertwined with the theological problem of how revelation of divine transcendence can exist within the realm of being.” Zimmermann, Incarnational Humanism, 165.
[2] G K Chesterton, Thomas Aquinas, in Collected Works, vol II (Ignatius Press, 1986; orig pub. 1933), 515.
[3] C. S. Lewis “Early Prose Joy” (unpublished); see Andrew Lazo, “Early Prose Joy” VII: Journal of the Marion E. Wade Center Vol. 30 (2013), 5-12.
[4] In the words of Jens Zimmermann, citing Louis Dupre, “along with Platonic philosophy, [premodern] Christianity held to the foundational idea of our participation in a transcendent reality as ‘an ontological core in which all things share and which intrinsically links them to one another.’ Without such an ontological synthesis, language, art, poetry, indeed all the human disciplines of knowledge, lose the vital link that makes them truthful expressions of reality.” Zimmermann, Incarnational Humanism, 122; citing Louis Dupre, Religion and the Rise of Modern Culture, Erasmus Institute Books (University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), p. 116.