☩ Last week I went to Tom Holland’s Theos lecture. If you go to a talk called “Humanism: A Christian Heresy?” you can be relatively confident the speaker will, at some point, slip coyly out of the question mark and into something more comfortable. So it was at Conway hall. The humanists got both barrels.
If you’re reading this, you’ll likely have heard Holland’s basic argument before. The talk, drawn from his new book, Dominion, is a new take on an old theory: humanism as degraded Christianity. DBH’s stint on the beat was, I thought, especially skillful, though De Lubac’s Atheist Humanism remains the canonical responsa, at least to my mind.
The basic argument goes something like this. Atheist humanists are, in de Lubac’s phrase, people “living upon the perfume of an empty vase”. Their universal ethical principles, derived from Christianity and unjustifiable outwith it, are the “shadow of a shadow”; a gospel without Christ.
And here the Christian, hands outstretched, assumes a philanthropic and charitable air (mistaken, in poor light, for smugness) - and breaks the bad news. The situation, she says, countenance doleful, is unsustainable. Honey - she concludes - you’ll just have to take me back.
As an argument, it’s not especially impressive. But neither are humanists. For a thorough rejoinder, you have to wait (as usual) for a Marxist to have a crack at it. Take Ernst Bloch, one of the most impressive and least comprehensible of the Frankfurt School. Bloch took both religion and Marxism very seriously. Seriously enough to write an entire book - Atheism In Christianity - about their relationship.
Bloch’s response to Holland’s question about humanism being a Christian heresy is this: exactly so. Christianity contains, in germ form, not just humanism, but a complete humanism: communism. That humanism is necessarily atheist, of course, but this doesn’t, in Bloch’s view, debunk Christianity. Quite the opposite.
“To be a good Christian one must be an atheist; to be a good atheist one must be a Christian.” By bringing God down from the heavens and into everyday life, by locating the kingdom of God in the here and now and not in the hereafter, Christianity sets in train her own dissolution. The incarnation, and only the incarnation, makes atheism real.
Here’s what Bloch has to say about it:
“Just as human history to date is simply pre-history, so too the place occupied by cosmic nature does not belong to it. That is the point behind the Eschaton element in the logos-myth, with its symbol of the New Jerusalem, for that is the final, explosive liberation of the Christian Thing: a liberation operating neither high-above nor deep-within, but in a transformed world of total friendship: a world of Home…And “death has now passed away” for this very reason, that the liberation here is of a new earth, not of any a-spatial realm of spirits…”
Here’s the point of Christianity, and of humanism, for Bloch: we make heaven. Following those parts of the bible that speak to the spirit of utopia, we bring “the real content of revolutionary consciousness” - the Kingdom of Heaven - into being. God won’t make it all the way, Bloch thinks. But we will.
Bloch was, as you might gather from the above, something of an optimist. To stay in the Communist Party after Khrushchev’s secret speech and Hungary 1956 you’d have to be. Many of his confreres in post-war marxism weren’t so sanguine.
A combination of the holocaust, Hiroshima, and the implosion of wartime optimism into the warring power blocs of the cold war were chilling revolutionary feet all over Europe. Take Lucien Goldmann: disciple of Lukacs, dissident Communist, devoted student of the German enlightenment, and holocaust survivor.
Goldmann had always been an outsider. A Communist intellectual in an era of determined philistinism, he left the party in the mid-1930s. Studying under the ‘austromarxist’ Victor Adler, inspired, much to Lukacs’ own horror, by Lukacs’ earliest work, he’d never been scrupulous about the party line. But he was always a true believer, too: a humanist, a materialist, a passionate partisan of free humanity. The late 1940s, then, brought on something approaching a crisis of faith.
About Goldmann, and his crisis, I have a longer essay forthcoming. But - in precis - he survived it by an intense engagement with figures almost completely alien to him: Blaise Pascal and the Jansenists. Beginning from the same place as Bloch, he tackled the same crisis of Marxism, drawing on very similar intellectual resources. And came to conclusions that were dramatically, almost diametrically opposed.
Here’s Goldmann, in his 1960 book on the philosophy of the Enlightenment:
“The western world is now engaged in constructing a fundamentally secular and deconsecrated industrial society. This is a society in which—if it is achieved—all men will live in comfort. Perhaps there will also be a large measure of formal freedom and religious and philosophical toleration. But it is a society that threatens to deprive human life of all spiritual content, a society in which the growth of freedom is likely to be accompanied by the growth in numbers of those whose inner emptiness robs them of the desire to use it, a society in which religious and philosophical toleration will be made all the easier to achieve as spiritual impoverishment makes religious and philosophical commitment constantly more rare…Some important thinkers see the inner structure of this self-stabilizing western capitalist society as a sort of ‘end to history’. It may be called heaven or hell with equal aptness, for heaven and hell are alike facets of non-human, unhistorical existence.”
Capitalism contains within itself an ordering of social life that precludes real Christian commitment, Goldmann thought. Marketplace tyrants don’t make for domestic saints, and the marketplace needs - demands - tyrants. But this process, and the corrosion of meaningful social bonds it arrives alongside, eats away at any “trans-individual values”, Goldmann thought: religious or not.
Marxism’s “immanent humanism” and Christianity’s transcendent kind face a common existential threat: a vast, cold, conscienceless consumer-industrial-complex with no time for philosophy and no space for religion. Free to think, unable to act, the believer and the revolutionary sink together below the gelid waters of a wide, waveless river: permanent residents of a city without windows. We’ll all go together when we go.
Bloch answers Holland’s question - Is Humanism a Christian Heresy? - like this: Exactly so. It’s a feature, not a bug. Goldmann answers Holland’s question too, but keeps his eye on history, not philosophy: on the factory and the sweatshop, the death camp and the atom bomb. Is Humanism a Christian heresy? Maybe, Goldmann says: but does it really matter any more?
My recent work includes this reported feature from the North-East of England (£), this review of an exhibition in Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge (£), and this review (no paywall), for Red Pepper, of a new book on the dark side of the “Green Revolution”. 'I’ve given up sugar for Advent, which began last Sunday. It’s dark outside, now, and will be for some time. Wishing you a quiet night and a perfect end. ☩