words, eloquence—was‘one of the fairest and rarest gifts that God doth give
to man’.^69
Despite this ostensibly Christian platform for education and social
reform, the humanists encountered plenty of fellow Christians who were
rather suspicious of learning. One humanist warns his students that they
‘will be confronted by the opposition of the shallow Churchman’,^70 who
will denounce classical learning as awaste of time. (Apparently such clergy
have not died out and are now joined by an increasing number of univer-
sity administrators.) The immediate defence of humanists against such
zealous ignorance in the disguise of religious piety is pointing to the
church fathers’ interest in pagan poetry. After all, Jerome, Augustine,
Cyprian, and Basil the Great‘did not hesitate to draw illustrations from
heathen poetry and sanctioned its study’.^71 Besides, as humanists pointed
out to their Christian critics, the Bible itself contains metaphors, poetry,
andanalogies;indeed,theysaid,isnottheology‘poetry about God’?^72 In
short, what theopoetics in our day seeks to recover—namely a return to a
fuller view of truth in the wake of modernity—Renaissance humanists
already advocated against the rise of narrow theologians and reductive
rationalists in their day.^73
CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND RE-ENVISIONING
THE LIBERAL ARTSSo far we have outlined the present cultural need to answer the question of
what it means to be human and sketched the contours of Christian human-
ism as they emerge from the patristic,medieval, and Renaissance periods.
We now conclude by claiming in a general, non-programmatic way, that
Christian humanism, as the historical foundation for liberal learning, could
play an important role in responding to the present crisis of the humanities
in higher education. The complaint about declining higher education is by
no means new. The Protestant reformer Philipp Melanchthon already com-
plained about a crisis of education due to insufficient humanistic learning in
(^69) ‘The Schoolmaster’, in Joanna Martindale (ed.),English Humanism: Wyatt to Cowley
(London: Dover, NH: Croom Helm, 1985), 179–84, 184.
(^70) Piccolominaeus,‘De liberorum educatione’, 149.
(^71) Piccolominaeus,‘De liberorum educatione’, 149.
(^72) Trinkaus,In Our Image and Likeness, vol. 2, 690.
(^73) For an accessible summary of theopoetics, see L. B. C. Keefe-Perry,‘Theopoetics: Process
and Perspective’,Christianity and Literature58/4 (2009), 22.
Christian Humanism and Contemporary Culture 153