The Shape of Theological Humanism
76
are others. These aspects of human life were aptly captured by the humanistic imagination in terms of the metaphors of garden, school, and theatre, respec-tively. Each of them discloses the profoundly social natural human existence, reflective creatures who seek to understand their lives, their world, and
the bonds of human connection. The conundrum, of course, is that these various modes of life (finite, social, reflective) are not only vulnerable to death and distortion but are also deeply interrelated in these vulnerabilities. Each mode bears its own goods. We can then identify these interlocking sets
or kinds of goods.life independent of human choice, but which are necessary to sustain human agency. Motivated by biological, affective, and other vitalities, we are situated Basic goods, as they are often called, are those goods which inhere in finite
in life with respect to these goods. Our bodies, the taste for beauty, the fear of death, force of enjoyment and delight, the need for food and shelter, testify that finite life is not just vulnerable but also saturated with appraisal of its worth. The sense of basic goods places constraints on human choice;
choices should respect and enhance these goods when possible. Societies must interpret, rank, and respond to these goods in some way. The saturation with worth is experienced most basically, sometimes inchoately, in the sense of pleasure and pain as motivations for human action. We are drawn to what
gives pleasure; people recoil from pain.is that we can be deceived about pleasure and pain. We can mistake for what is pleasurable that which actually brings death and pain. The basic goods of Of course, a human vulnerability – part of the cruel hazard of existence –
finite life are necessarily interwoven with reflective capacities to discern what is genuine pleasure and real pain. Further, basic goods that surround finite life are interdependent with social existence, whether human or other forms of life. Disease, starvation, and the unjust treatment of human bodies
around the world aptly show that basic goods are intertwined with social goods. Nevertheless, human beings are in the world at the most sensate and brute level as bodies who struggle to live and are vulnerable not only to great pleasure but to searing pain. This means that we are also bound together
in bonds of sympathy, the capacity to which can also be stunted, destroyed.off forces of disintegration, to forestall physical death, in the constant affir-From this angle of vision, the labor of life, in good measure, is to stave suffer with others in their vulnerabilities,
mation of life within the struggle for life. The facts of finite being provide at the level of feeling a beings, all creatures situated in being through pleasure and pain, make some claim to be respected and enhanced, even if that claim can in certain universality of the claim of life upon us. All living