The Myth of Renaissance Secular Humanism
- sofiapbaker
- Mar 21, 2021
- 1 min read
"Christian humanism” seems an oxymoron. Since the nineteenth century, humanism has been widely understood as by definition non-religious, or as a substitute for religion. As Europeans and American elites lost their belief in Christianity following the Enlightenment, many people began to worry that the social order would come unglued without Christian dogma to hold it together. Some new source of moral authority was needed. Thus the modern humanist movement tries to base morality in the dignity of human nature itself, above all its rationality, shorn of its religious orientation.
This idea of humanism is very far from the Christian humanism of the Renaissance. That was about humanizing Christianity and civilizing religion in general—an issue, in my view, far more pressing at the present time. Understanding Renaissance humanism as a movement that humanized and civilized Christianity makes far better sense of the surviving sources than an interpretation which sees it as part of a story about the secularizing of Western culture, for reasons I will now try to explain…