Last summer, I was amused to see that organised atheism was facing the possibility of a serious schism. Perhaps it wasn’t so very surprising – most religious traditions end up having one sooner or later. The American Humanist Association (AHA) withdrew a Humanist of the Year award given in 1996 to perhaps the world’s best known non-believer, Professor Richard Dawkins. His offence was questioning the tenets of transgender ideology, which has rapidly replaced gay marriage as the ultimate test of progressive credentials.
The de-awarding of Prof Dawkins is reminiscent of a punishment used by some ancient cultures, which has become known as damnatio memoriae, “condemnation of memory”. This involved the removal of all images, records or mentions of a particular person from archives, inscriptions, monuments and artworks. It was revived in 20th-century totalitarian countries, like the USSR, when those who had fallen foul of Stalin and been purged would be removed from official photos and never mentioned again in the press or official documents.
Christians on social media, whose faith has often come under fire from Dawkins, were understandably amused by the episode, and emphasised its irony, given the ferocious polemics directed against Christian censoriousness – whether alleged or actual – by both Dawkins and his new critics in the AHA. How empty those jibes about our intolerance look now. The jokes write themselves; here are the champions of free thought squabbling about the expression of an entirely innocuous opinion that just happens to be uncongenial to a powerful ideology.
The whole kerfuffle was a sad reminder that the idea of humanism has, wrongly, taken on strong anti-Christian connotations. This is not a new development. Ever since the Enlightenment, talk of “the religion of humanity”, as the French atheist Auguste Comte called his philosophy, has been associated with at the very least anti-clericalism and man-made belief systems, if not outright atheism. But it has certainly intensified in the last few decades, to the point where to describe oneself as a “Christian humanist” is to invite confusion.
In fact, Christianity properly understood is indispensable to the true humanist, because it grounds the dignity and value of human beings in something solid and objective, namely the fact of their being made in the image and likeness of God. The great Christian humanists of the Renaissance, men like Erasmus of Rotterdam and St Thomas More, were committed to the Church even while producing superb scholarship. Their sense of the potential and importance of the human individual was not in conflict with the truths of the faith, but premised on them. In our own time, Pope John Paul II was often associated with the philosophical approach known as “phenomenology”, which takes seriously the study of human experience, emotion, and perception.
Consider also the field of poetry. It is arguably one of the most humanist of art forms, because it attempts to capture, describe and render beautiful the normal and routine matter of human life, in all its endless variety and idiosyncrasy. And Christians have been among some of the finest of English-language poets, from John Donne and George Herbert through to Gerald Manley Hopkins, RS Thomas and TS Eliot. Great poets who were not religious believers, or had an ambivalent attitude to faith, like Seamus Heaney or Ted Hughes, very often came from religious backgrounds or had exposure to Christian liturgy, with all its poetic richness and its range of allusion and metaphor, in their early lives. Poetry needs some sense of the transcendent; it draws on the human instinct that there are meanings and truths that go beyond what can be conveyed in words. This is what Eliot meant when he called poetry “a raid on the inarticulate”. At the heart of the poetic endeavour is the conviction that there is something else behind words, of which we can get little glimpses through words. Such an insight points away from atheist conclusions, towards those of religion.
That resounding question from Psalm 8:4, “What is man that you are mindful of him?”, is a spur to all kinds of creative and scholarly endeavour, anchored in the grand tradition of Christian theology, which provides a framework and a context for exploring the range of human experience. By contrast, the strictly materialist assumptions of modern humanism impair understanding of many important aspects of that experience. Its inevitable association with moral fashions also limits its scope, as we have seen in the Dawkins affair. It will always struggle with the age-old atheist difficulties, not least the problem of finding morality and meaning in a mechanistic universe.
The Church has a glorious treasury of humanism on which to draw. It is common for Catholic evangelists to say that beauty is important for our outreach in the modern world. Perhaps we can also make our mark with careful and sympathetic attention to all the complexity, depth and texture of human life.
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.