On the Integrity of Life
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Further, the Anselmic idea of perfection, that is, the idea that perfection means necessary and unchanging being, underscores the non-causal relation between human beings and God, because humans, created good and change-able, can fall away from what is good and true, or they can seek it. The
insight is that the logic of perfection, as a test about right thinking about God, and the idea of human beings as created good but changeable, are part and parcel of the belief that human beings have a capacity for the divine. On this classical Christian picture, the capacity for a relation to God is defined
in terms of the possibility that a person, through the development of virtues, might become and be made like God – that is, necessarily real, unchangea-bly good, immortal. Further, that human possibility, the possibility, that is, that one might become unchangeably real and good, might become immortal
and so escape the torment of death, seems, on many Christians’ account, to find testimony in the human heart. Our hearts are restless till they rest in God, as St. Augustine put it. Human beings have a capacity for that relation even as their lives manifest a longing for the divine, for the perfection of
unchanging reality.the divine was a longing for completion in light of the fallibility and incom-pleteness of human existence. Insofar as classical thinkers thought about The classical Christian humanist conception of the human capacity for
perfection in terms of unchangeable being, it is obvious that does not char-acterize actual human life, even if it names a human aspiration. We are mortal, only mortal. This is just the other side of the coin to what was noted above about perceptions and intuitions of what is unsurpassably important.
For classical theologians, what was of supreme concern was conceived in relation to a profound sense of the fleetingness of human existence, whether that fleetingness is believed to be natural or, for Christians, the punishment for original sin. The human capacity for God was experienced as a longing
or a mood to overcome the transience of existence into a condition of permanent and unchanging reality (say, heaven). The point, then, is just what one would expect. The set of ideas that characterize the logic of classic Christian humanism links the human capacity for God with its
other ideas while ing for what is of unsurpassable concern. While true about Christian human-ism, the unity of being and necessity is not the core of theological humanism. Here we must strike out in new paths that take us beyond inscribing itself in the deepest human desires and long-
classical Christian humanism.denotes an unsurpassable concern of our age and then how it unfolds the human capacity for the divine. There seems to be widespread longing in our The real question, again, is whether or not the idea of the integrity of life