these secular critics of humanism come close to the theological critiques of
‘hard humanisms’put forward by such Catholic thinkers as Robert Spaemann
and Karl Rahner, opening the possibility of meaningful dialogue between
secular and Christian humanisms.
This new opportunity for dialogue between religions and secular human-
isms is another reason that we should pay attention to Christian humanism in
our day because we can now recover the full spectrum of humanism’s rich
religious past. Contrary to the false equation of humanism with secular
humanism (atheism, for short), a broader focus naturally combines Christian
and secular interests on the question of our humanity and the good life. For as
soon as we utter the word‘humanism’, we evoke a vast and profound legacy
reaching back to antiquity, on the question of what it means to be human. This
legacy encompasses ancient Greco-Roman thought, its Judeo-Christian adop-
tion and transformation, together with the further developments of these
ideals through the Renaissance into modern times. The term humanism
derives from the Latinhumanitas, and even Niethammer, in coining the
termHumanismusfor nineteenth-century humanistic education, was con-
scious of the Roman statesman, orator, and philosopher Cicero’sfirst use of
the termhumanioraor humanistic studies, in which philosophers and poets
transmitted to students insights into human nature. Cicero’s own view of
education borrowed heavily from Greek culture, which the historian Henri
Irénée Marrou (1904–77) had famously labelled a‘civilization of paideia’, that
is,‘an educational effort, pursued beyond the years of schooling and lasting
throughout the whole of life, to realize ever more perfectly the human ideal’.^12
In light of our modern obsession with professional training and educational
pragmatism, it is worth noting that ancient Greekpaideiacentred on litera-
ture, and the poetry of Homer particularly, to such a degree that the word
paideiacame to mean literature. Apparently, ancient Greek educators had a
higher view of literature and its social function than we do today. It was
precisely this literary focus that later allowed early Christian theologians to
transform Greek into Christianpaideiaby placing biblical literature at the
moral centre of education.^13
The ancient Greek concept ofpaideiawas taken up into Roman Stoic phil-
osophy and became, in the formulation of the pre-Christian Stoic philosopher
Cicero, thestudia humanitatis, an educational programme for the formation of
a noble and balanced soul. Latin culture bequeathed to us another name
for essentially the same programme, long before Renaissance humanists took
up this term: theartes liberales, a humanistic course of studies modelled on
(^12) H. I. Marrou,A History of Education in Antiquity, trans. George Lamb (Madison, WI:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1956), 98.
(^13) Werner Jaeger,Early Christianity and Greek Paideia(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1961), 91–2.
4 Jens Zimmermann