The Third Corbishley Memorial
Lecture - 1979
Christianity and Humanism
by the Rt. Rev. and Rt. Hon. LORD RAMSEY of CANTERBURY
P.C.
Tom Corbishley was to me a greatly loved and inspiring friend, and I was never more honoured than when Tom Corbishley dedicated to me a book which he had written. The title was "The Contemporary Christian". The book was published in 1966, and the first part of the book was a series of lectures with the title "The Christian as Humanist", and I want tonight to recall Tom Corbishley’s explorations in the field indicated by the title "The Christian as Humanist", and then to dare to discuss with you some of the questions which seem to be at stake.
Tom was convinced that Christians should not attack professed humanists with head-on arguments and denunciations. I quote him. "The movement which calls itself humanism is one with which no Christian need have any quarrel. On the contrary, the humanist earns our gratitude for recalling us to some aspect of the truth which some of us are in danger of forgetting." Indeed, clarifying this a little he adds "You cannot be Christian without being, in some sense, a humanist, but you may be a humanist without feeling the need for the fuller truth of Christianity." In this work Corbishley was unsparing in his criticism of Christians for leaving to the humanists ground which he felt they should be engaged upon themselves. This neglect sometimes takes the form of an unsatisfactory attitude of religion to the sciences. "The disastrous Galileo episode is still poisoning the wells, and in modern times the unhappy debate between Bishop Wilberforce and T.H. Huxley has had lasting effects."
Drawing out the reason for these judgements he goes on to say it is our urgent duty to make plain to our critics that we Christians are one with them in the search for any and every kind of truth that can assist with the knowledge of God, for God is disclosed in the wonder of the universe no less than in his own prophets. If we fail, he says, in this, we make the eternal Creator of the world a kind of tribal deity, concerned with our local practices of religion and caring little for the splendid, wonderful achievements of his children.
Corbishley develops the theme that Christianity has always needed God-giving media in the secular world, the world of the culture that surrounds it, for its own health and for its own expression. He says, for instance, that the early church would have been at a loss with its doctrine of the incarnation had there not been neo-Platonic philosophy at hand for it to use to explain what that doctrine meant intelligently, and Christianity needs something in the human mind and finds something God-given and noble.
At the same time he made some trenchant criticisms of humanism as generally understood. Let me mention three of those criticisms made very pungently. He criticised humanism for having a very naive idea of freedom. One of the extraordinary fallacies of the humanist position is that its supporters seem to imagine that if only they can free man from the thraldom of belief in God, they will somehow have rendered him supremely free to go his own way.
Then he criticised humanism for, while claiming to understand the whole phenomenon of man in its unity, yet being unable to cope with tragedy and suffering. At least he says the Christian believes that God cares about evil and suffering, and that he came to take upon himself the burden of man’s sorrows so that suffering might be transfigured into its antidote. And indeed he also criticises humanism for failing to do justice to certain kinds of human goodness, for by interpreting human goodness within the evolutionary scheme and in terms of the benefits that goodness can give to the human race, it fails to do justice to that kind of human goodness which seems neither to stem from the evolutionary process, nor to contribute to it, but just to be mysterious and absolute in its own right.
Yet making these trenchant criticisms of the humanist, Corbishley in the final section, indeed the peroration of these lectures, returns to the charge, the charge against Christians, about their unsatisfactory attitudes in the matter. He quotes a striking passage from St. Augustine, a rather uncharacteristic passage from St. Augustine I would say, in which that great thinker talks of the nobility of God’s creatures, and their inherent worth in their beauty and themselves for their own right. And quoting this great passage, Corbishley finishes by saying that he was afraid that St. Augustine might be rather shocked with him, but he really must say it was sad that concerning this, we Christians have usually more to learn from the humanists than they have to learn from us.
Well, it is well that those of us who have a strong belief in the Christian faith and a conscientious rejection of the humanist thesis, should yet be exposed to that trenchant process of self-criticism with which Tom Corbishley indicts us. His words are indeed the words of a man of utter integrity if ever there was one.
But let us now dare to make our own discussion of the main issues, urged on by the stimulus of Corbishley’s words.
In order to try and avoid verbal ambiguities which again and again creep into this discussion, I turned to that great mine of learned information, the Hastings Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics. In it, not to my surprise, I found a good many very learned and documented pages devoted to this matter, but these learned pages are not in one article, but in two articles. One of them is called "Humanism" and the other is called "The Humanists", and that is very exciting and suggestive.
Humanism - under that head there are discussed certain theories, mainly academic theories which sprang up in the post-Darwinian era, and occupy about half a century since their beginning and the time when Hastings Dictionary tackled the matter and wrote about them. Half a century. And that is under the title "Humanism".
"The Humanists" - under that heading there is a vast company of figures through many centuries, some religious, some very non-religious, men of letters, men of science, philosophers, poets, statesmen and the rest, all legitimately called the humanists because they have an ideal for humanity derived directly or indirectly from the great literature of ancient Greece, and though it is a daunting task, I think we just have to glance at this immense phenomena of "the humanists" before we come on to tackle "humanism.
Christianity from its very beginning saw and encouraged the flowing together of two streams. The stream of belief in the dignity and beauty of man in himself that comes from ancient Greece - remember the words of Sophocles, "many things are marvellous, and nothing is more marvellous than man", and the other stream coming from Israel through the Lord Jesus, the stream of belief that man is creaturely, frail, mortal needing a Saviour, subject to the eternal God, the I am that I am. It was a flowing together of those two streams that produced what can fairly be called a Christian humanism. It involved being sure of man’s wonderful dignity, but also remembering his creatureliness and frailty, and the need for him one day to face a judge.
It was that which created Christendom and began to create what we call Christian Europe, and it was that which had an immense influence on the different kinds of national character that went to the making of Europe, Greek, Latin and Teutonic as well. But the clear water of the springs of Greece within that humanism did not really last through the subsequent Middle Ages, because it seems that the dominance of Christian theology and the dominance of ecclesiastical authority caused a kind of depression of that authentic autonomous human spirit which Ancient Greece had stood for.
Thus, if the Middle Ages give us a Christian humanism, it is a very imperfect Christian humanism indeed, that cried out for a revival. The renewal of humanism in the authentic, original Greek sense, came with the Renaissance, and it came partly in a spirit of revolt and it came indeed as a very mighty flood. What happened to that flood, the subsequent behaviour of that flood through the centuries has really made our modern Europe what it is, and indeed has created the problems that Tom Corbishley used to discuss so penetratingly and which we are trying to discuss now.
Because in the great stream of post-Reformation humanism in the sense of "the humanists" in that classical sense, it soon appeared that there were two broadly different sorts. Humanists who cared for religion, and who saw religion as a factor in the understanding of man, and humanists who did not care for religion and indeed believed that the proper understanding of man is better conducted without religion, so it was that any history of the humanists has to show that in these post-Reformation, post-Renaissance centuries, it isn’t just one stream, it is something more like a delta.
Just let us glance at some of the different streams or branches in that delta. On the one side, especially through the political revolution in France near the end of the eighteenth century and the contemporaneous and subsequent scientific revolution in many forms there came about these kinds of phenomena. The French revolution type of humanist ideology which sees human progress as requiring freedom from God, freedom from religion, freedom from dominance by the church, and any dominance by clergyman, as the combination of human progress.
Again, the development of sciences saw particular sciences naively confident in their own omnicompetence to describe man and man’s problems. Then still more difficult, not only sciences, but mythologies about the sciences, mythologies about what particular sciences in a state of great euphoria were able to do for the human race.
On the other side of this delta, the delta that was originating from the humanists, we have religion. Religion strong and faithful, but religion too often making the great mistake of being afraid of the scientific revolution lest it should undermine its security, afraid of various contemporary movements lest they should undermine its security too, so you get the religion that is bound up with biblical literalism and is antagonistic not only to the scientific spirit, but sometimes also to the humane spirit as well.
But, when we come to "humanism", the humanism that has an article to itself in the ERE amongst trends of thought in the post-Darwinian era, it seems possible to distinguish two phases. The first phase, in which scientific humanism had a strong mythology concerning evolution, the discovery of the evolution of species seemed to produce such euphoria about itself, that the word evolution became not only an account of the group of species, but a kind of mythological term covering many different areas of human activity, with the kind of view that inevitably man gets better and better because the evolution umbrella has come to cover all that man is and thinks and does.
But a second phase scientific humanism, at least in this country, has become far more modest in its claims. I refer to the volume edited by Dr. Ayre "The Humanist Outlook" published in 1968, two years after the work of Corbishley from which I have been quoting. This book, "The Humanist Outlook" designed to present to the people of this country what humanism stands for, is rid of many of the big claims that had been made earlier. The idea of inevitable progress is not there; the idea of the perfectibility of man is not there, but there is only the claim that the application of the sciences to human affairs is likely to make the human race happier, more efficient and better intellectually and in a way morally better as well.
This cause, now more modest in its ideological pretension, still holds that religion is a real obstacle, and the two grounds of complaint about religion still stand.
First, that religion is anti-scientific and that its influence impedes the growth and application of its sciences. Of course religion can be like that. Bad religion, we know, has all too often been like that. The other complaint is that religion involves a kind of other worldliness. People are preoccupied with fantasies about a spiritual salvation and getting to heaven, and a vast amount of moral energy goes into that channel instead of going into the channel of human welfare on this planet.
Now, in the context of this discussion it is time that we recalled what Christians believe about man, and I try to describe what I believe is the authentic Christian tradition about man: tradition and belief about man which amongst Christians has altered very little through the Christian centuries.
Man, we believe, is created by God, in God’s own image, after God’s own likeness, to use the biblical terms, and that means that, though there is the impassable line of distinction between Creator and creature, there is wonderful affinity to God his maker. The power of reason, the power of thought, the power of memory, the power of purpose, the power of understanding moral distinctions, the power of recognising beauty, the power of making beauty, amazing gifts whereby we in our frailty do indeed resemble God our creator. And this resemblance of man to God points to the closest fellowship possible between man and God, and the hope of that closest possible friend-ship is indeed the Christian tradition. But there is fellowship and fellowship, and man’s fellowship with God in the Christian meaning still retains the recognition of creatureliness and frailty, and thus it is a fellowship with God shot through by the sense of awe and dependence, and this strange blending of fellowship with awe and dependence is expressed in the really untranslatable biblical word glorify. Man glorifies his Creator by coming more and more to resemble his Creator and to reflect the light of his Creator’s beauty, but as he does so discovering more and more his utter dependence in an ever-deepening humility.
This relation to God, which is the real meaning of man, points on to heaven as its goal. The belief in heaven is the corollary of the belief that we are made in God’s image. The fellowship of us with God indeed matters to him so greatly that he will not let it ever be destroyed unless we wilfully so behave as to destroy it, and heaven is the goal of this. And as heaven is the fulfilment of man in his loving relation to God, perfectly loving God and perfectly loving his neighbours in God’s presence, no selfish motive or selfish desire or action can get anyone a single step nearer to heaven. And further, because love is one and indivisible, the love that drives man towards the quest of heaven is the very same love that inevitably will be leading him to care about his fellows and to be serving his fellows in this world with all his powers. The two are inseparable, and those acts of service that man is able to render to his fellow creatures here in this world, are the anticipation of that love of which heaven is the perfection and the goal.
That is what we Christians believe about man, but we have to go on and say that we are not as human beings floating in space - perhaps if we were floating in space it might be a bit easier to fulfil this role and to get to heaven somehow or other - but we are not floating in space, we are part of the world of nature on this planet. We are also dust of the earth and it is on this world of nature, also created by God, that we are here to worry out our service of God and of man.
In relation to the world, in the biblical traditional, God has given man two great prerogatives -to rule the world to a large extent and to explore it and learn about it, and both of those are biblical themes. But man’s rule of the world with wonderful powers over it, powers that the course of history has so marvellously demonstrated, are all subject to God’s own ultimate sovereignty; and we are here, as human beings, to rule the world, to explore it, not in a kind of grab-grab spirit of individuals and groups and nations exploiting it for their benefit at the expense of the others, but all in mutual service and loving kindness, and with the glory of God as the goal.
Thus, while in ruling the world and exploring the world our job is very much here in this world, an occasional thought of heaven is not, as our humanist friends sometimes say to us, an irrelevance and sort of fantastic distraction. No, it is the key to our proper ruling the world and serving the world.
In two ways the perspective of heaven and eternity is important. It gives us that true perspective of humility, reminding us how small we are in relation to God’s eternity. And asserts the eternal dignity and worth of every single man, woman and child. Indeed it appears from contemporary history that where belief in eternity is lost, the belief in the supreme worth of the individual man, woman and child is also lost and they get regarded as items in the system, rather than God’s eternal children.
Well, there is a description of man’s role in the world, towards the world, towards himself, towards God as it is meant to be. But alas we know that nothing is as it is meant to be, and Christians believe that something has gone radically wrong, and that something, in traditional language, is the fall of man. Man, our human race, now finds itself not using his power over the world in mutual unselfish service and humbly for the glory of God, but rather in forgetting God altogether and using it in terms of different species of self-assertion. The self-assertive person, the self-assertive group, the self-assertive tribe, and self-assertive nation, race and so on. Doing it for self, rather than for God’s glory and for each other. With this most disastrous result that instead of being ruler over circumstances and the world’s processes, man now finds him self to a large extent ruled by circumstances and the world’s processes, and a lot of what is very wrong in the world goes running on being wrong because human beings are somehow helpless within the system and the structures of which they are part. Man is not the world’s ruler, but is in bondage to the world; and all because he has forgotten that God is the ruler and maker both of him and the world.
How do we Christians believe that this is remedied? Well, if God’s creation has gone as radically awry as this, it can only be put right by the action of the Creator himself, and Christianity believes that the Creator has ceaselessly been at work, never over-riding that human free will which is a condition of our universe. The Creator is at work through the divine logos, bringing life and light to consciences and minds. Far outside any religious covenant this divine logos is at work in the human race, but Christians believe that in Jesus this same God did nothing less than give his own self to man. We believe that the life and death and resurrection of Jesus means God giving his own self to share in our human life, in all its sorrow and estrangement. And perhaps I could add that the real significance of Jesus Christ in the Christian scheme is this. Jesus is one more messenger, one more of a host of messengers, sent to tell the human race that God cares about it very much; but Jesus is the act of the divine self-giving. God in Christ gives himself to humanity so as to free humanity to give itself to God in Christ. Jesus the new man is God giving himself to man, so that man in Jesus can be giving himself to his Creator.
Therefore, if this Christian belief, which I have tried very briefly to describe, has a radical quarrel with the scientific humanist thesis, even as put forward in the very courteous and modest form in the volume of essays to which I refer, that quarrel is really this. We are bound to say that scientific humanism gives a wrong diagnosis of the human predicament. The human predicament is not that we are insufficiently scientific and progressive, but that we have a deep radical estrangement from the Creator. The words of the prophet come to mind. "What doth the Lord thy God require of thee but to do justly, and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God." It is the last clause that is missing in our modern world.
Our second quarrel is this, that we are bound to say that in scientific humanism there is not only a wrong diagnosis, but also a wrong solution. We believe the solution to be not progress, but rather redemption.
Thirdly we believe that the scientific humanist thesis gives an inadequate goal for man. Man exists not only to become an efficient citizen of this world, but a saint, a saint ready for heaven. There are aspects of human goodness, even in the world as we know it, which point to nothing less than that latter as being man’s true goal.
Now it inevitably seems that Christianity is a rather lonely thing with few friends to help it. We find ourselves thinking on those lines when we remember that within the present century in England and in Europe - (and that Tom Corbishley cared a great deal about Europe) - there has been not only the decline in religious faith, there has also been a decline in respect for law, respect for conscience, and there is the moral anarchy that is very distressing indeed. It is because of this last phenomena that Christian teachers, preachers and theologians sometimes have a kind of despairing attitude towards the world and give up natural theology, give up the belief in God’s created order and rather dwell upon a gospel of salvation preached in a kind of vacuum of darkness and depravity.
Now, if Christians take that line they are in great error and they deserve every bit of the castigation that Tom Corbishley gave to Christians for an unintelligent attitude to the world. However evil the world may seem to be, religious faith is not friendless, and cannot be friendless because there is the divine image in every man, woman and child. However defaced, however hard to see, that divine image is there, and it will be there unless or until God the Creator chooses to destroy it, and there seems to be no likelihood of him wanting to do that. With the divine image in man we know for certain that there is in man potentiality for goodness and goodness itself and a concern for truth which are friends and allies to Christianity. Christian theology in its attitude to the world around it sometimes makes the mistake of attaching too much importance to passing ideologies and fashions of thought, rather than looking to the unnecessary fact of human goodness, conscience and reason and using that for the reconstruction of a natural theology.
I should like to be allowed to quote some words which Lord Hailsham used in the first of these lectures in memory of Tom Corbishley. "My plea is for the re-consecration of common sense, the development of natural philosophy. If the intellectual energy hitherto reserved for theological controversy could be given to the defence and rehabilitation of philosophia perennis the common background of belief which the cultivation of these can engender." He pleaded for that and he also said that "Any attempt to reassert the importance of natural theology, philosophia parenis, or in jurisprudence, natural law, natural justice, is met with enormous incredulity. Do not myself understand why this should be so." I can only add for myself that neither can I understand why it should be so! Let it be remembered that the Christian gospel did not come at first into a kind of intellectual and moral vacuum, but both in the Jewish world and in the Greco-Roman world, it was addressed to those who had some training in law and reason and conscience as a preparation for the gospel. And today there is the need to revive law and reason and conscience as the environment in which the Christian faith can speak in the contemporary world.
If we believe that there is in man real nobility, then we can learn from Tom Corbishley to go as far as possible in reverencing that nobility and learning from it as the context in which the supernatural grace and power of a Christian faith will operate. And if people are able to say, like Sophocles, "Many things are marvellous, and nothing is more marvellous than man", they may be helped to go on to say, with the psalmist, "I thank thee, O God, for I am fearfully and wonderfully created".