being as oriented towards God in freedom and responsibility,^20 the only
defensible Christian anthropology is a negative one, because the only true
theologicalstatement about human nature is that‘[man] is a being who loses
himself into God’.^21 If the essence of human nature lies hidden in the
incomprehensible God, Christian humanism cannot be an essentialist ideal
but undermines and destroys (aufheben) any absolute humanism. No histor-
ical Christian humanist iteration is of permanent value.^22
Christian humanism is not an unchanging, eternal ideal, but concerns the
implementation of Christian anthropology within the concrete political and
social circumstances of our present time. Christian humanism, as Jacques
Maritain put it, is the temporal task of the Christian not to erect a particular
Christian order, but‘to work here on earth for a realization in social and
temporal terms of the truths of the gospel’.^23 This activity may well require the
formation of new social structures, but it does not require the recovery of
Christendom or medieval education.
The well-known Trappist monk Thomas Merton points us in the same
direction:
Our problem is not so much to celebrate the supposedly acquired and well-
established glories of an eternal humanism stamped with the seal of classic
reason and ennobled by the Christian faith. We face the much more disquieting
task of inquiring under what conditions Christians can establish, by their
outlook and their action in the world today, the claim to be true participants
in the building of a new humanism. Hence, it is a matter not so much of giving
an obvious answer to an often-repeated question, as of asking ourselves whether
we Christians are really in a position to understand questions that are in their
way altogether new, and whether our Christian faith can suggest appropriate
and original answers.^24In order tofind such appropriate answers, however, we mustfirst thoroughly
understand how the philosophical frameworks have shifted, and then ask
(^20) Karl Rahner,‘Christlicher Humanismus’,inSchriften Zur Theologie: Theologische Vor-
träge und Abhandlungen, vol. 8 (Einsiedeln: Benziger, 1967), 239–59, 242. More recently,
Linda Woodhead reaffirmed Rahner’s conclusion that theological anthropology, not least
within the context ofdeification, is necessarily‘apophatic anthropology’:‘since human nature
is fulfilled through participation in God, it shares in themysteryof God—and can never be
pinned down’(‘Apophatic Anthropology’, in Kendall Soulen and Linda Woodhead (eds),God
and Human Dignity(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006), 233).
(^21) Rahner,‘Christlicher Humanismus’, 245:‘daß er ein Wesen sei, das sich in Gott hinein
verliert’.
(^22) Rahner,‘Christlicher Humanismus’, 247.
(^23) Jacques Maritain,True Humanism(London: Geoffrey Bles, 1954), 34.
(^24) Thomas Merton,‘Christian Humanism’,inLove and Living(San Diego, CA: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1985), 137. Merton was convinced that Christianity‘can not only throw light
on the most typical and most urgent problems of the modern world, but that there is a certain
light which Christianity alone can provide’(‘Christian Humanism’, 138).
142 Jens Zimmermann