whether we can reform ailing social institutions based on our contemporary,
often radically different imagination.
Certainly one area that requires such philosophical attention is the arena of
higher education. Very few academics are happy with the kind of mercenary
pragmatism university administrators are apparently quite eager to embrace.
But most of these critics are unable to come up with any convincing argu-
ments forwhywe should pursue wisdom and character formation if no
transcendent realities exist. One of the most astute writers on the university,
John Sommerville, has pointed out that by becoming purely secular institu-
tions, universities cut‘their lifeline to ultimate sources of meaning’. The
upshot is that‘relentless secularization reduces universities to trade schools,
even though we like to imagine them as something more’.^25 As a result, we
learn ever better wayshowto make money, but we can no longer convincingly
teachwhatwe should spend the money on. In the eighteenth century, the
Christian humanist and university professor Giambattista Vico could still
encourage his incoming class with the words,‘We must learn, O youth of
great hope, in order to know how best to be able to relate humanely to
others.’^26 Wisdom, coming from understanding what it means to be human,
was the goal of the liberal arts.^27
In sum, many Western cultures are currently at a unique historical juncture,
when their identity crisis resulting from uncertainties about some of their key
values and institutions coincides with the rapidly diminishing credibility of the
secularism largely responsible for this problem. The German philosopher
Jürgen Habermas was one of thefirst secular thinkers to admit that for our
‘post-secular society’ the time has come for renewed attentiveness to the
religious sources of Western values, even if only, in his case, to‘shore up the
cognitive content of religious traditions’.^28 Following Habermas’s suggestion,
the best way to address the humanistic challenges we outlined above is for
Westerners to recover their own religious roots of what it means to be human,
and the best way to identify these roots is to use the label Christian humanism.
(^25) John C. Sommerville,Religious Ideas for Secular Universities(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans,
2009), 48–9.
(^26) Giambattista Vico,On Humanistic Education (Six Inaugural Orations, 1699–1707)(Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 82.
(^27) The traditional liberal arts curriculum of the‘seven liberal arts’was thetriviumof grammar,
logic, and rhetoric and thequadriviumof arithmetic, geometry, and music—with philosophy and
theology as capstones. The goal was ethical: the formation of the virtues of self-control and
prudence. The method was the reading of afixed canon developed over time, embodying the
accumulated wisdom of generations that constitutes a standard of judgement for‘humane leader-
ship’. See Robert C. Coon’s article,‘Dark Satanic Mills of Mis-Education: Some Proposals for
Reform’,The Imaginative Conservative(7 October 2012), http://www.theimaginativeconservative.
org/2012/10/mis-education-some-proposals-for-reform.html, accessed 25 October 2015.
(^28) Jürgen Habermas,‘Die Grenze zwischen Glauben und Wissen’,inKritik der Vernunft,vol.5,
Philosophische Texte (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2009), 342–87, 384.
Christian Humanism and Contemporary Culture 143