(the Catholic) recalled the West’s Christian roots to protest against fascism
and to rebuild Europe on humane political foundations. For the same reasons,
T. S. Eliot (1880–1965) argued in 1939 that‘It is in Christianity that our arts
have developed; it is in Christianity that the laws of Europe have—until
recently—been rooted. It is against a background of Christianity that all our
thought has significance.’^27 The same conviction drove German Nazi resisters
to emphasize Christian values as the moral foundation for a new, secular post-
war constitution.^28
Recalling this moment of cultural crisis shows us at least one reason for the
contemporary importance of thinking about Christian humanism. Many
believe that we are currently experiencing, although in a different way, a
similar cultural crisis, a similar uncertainty about the ultimate purpose of
culture and its institutions. In some ways, our current cultural crisis is more
profound because it is more subtle. The West is not immediately threatened by
war and obvious deprivation. To be sure, acts of terror by radical Islamists are
changing Western nation’s cultural climate in profound ways, yet it would be
absurd to compare this situation to the kind of warlike climate and depriv-
ations experienced by many other countries in the Middle East and elsewhere.
And yet even in the midst of affluence, indeed perhaps because of it, we have
lost a sense of higher ends for our cultural activities. Our culture suffers from
the separation of what we do from an ultimate reality that lends our activities
purpose—beyond merely eating, getting along, and being entertained. Alasdair
MacIntyre’s analysis from over three decades ago still holds true: the
culture of modernity that forms our mental habits and moral horizon has
lost a shared vision of a common good towards which human nature tends.
Humanistic ideals, at least as they arose within the classical cultures of
antiquity, were wholly dependent on a discernible telos intrinsic to human
being. We have lost this vision because we no longer believe that‘human
beings have an end towards which they are directed by reason of their specific
nature’.^29
From the ancient world up to the late medieval period, by contrast, people
had a strong sense that proper thinking and acting were based on the natural
moral order of the cosmos. Religion, science, and moral reasoning in the
ancient world operated on the premise of an intrinsic link between mind
(^27) T. S. Eliot,Christianity and Culture: The Idea of a Christian Society and Notes towards the
Definition of Culture(New York: Harcourt, 1968), 200.
(^28) ‘The state declares the Christian faith to be the most important moral and ethical
foundation of its orders’and, for this reason, the state supports‘the practice in all its dimensions
of the Christian faith in public’(Dietrich Bonhoeffer,Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke, vol. 16:
Konspiration und Haft 1940– 1945 , ed. Jørgen Glenthøj, Ulrich Kabitz, and Wolf Krötke
(Gütersloh: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1996), 596–7.
(^29) Alasdair MacIntyre,After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory,3rd edn (Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), x–xi.
8 Jens Zimmermann