kind of entertainment industry MacFarlane represents is a far cry from the
commentaries and prayers of Erasmus and Thomas More. In a more serious,
critical vein, Samuel G. Freedman, religion writer for theNew York Times,
asked shortly after the tragic Newtown mass shooting,^57 amid the many signs
of religious belief and action, a faith expressed in extremis,‘Where were the
humanists?’The well-known atheist Greg Epstein, who also works as human-
ist chaplain for the secularist–atheist community at Harvard, commented that
the shooting showed a‘failure of community’. For Epstein, the value of
religion in such moments lies in offering a strong sense of community, and
secular humanism has tofind a way to duplicate this kind of solidarity.^58 As
we have seen, Epstein’s implied opposition between religion and humanism
was foreign to Renaissance humanists.
The more dynamic, robust versions of humanism can still be found, ones
that better honour Renaissance roots, but we must admit that a better known
and more pronounced presence of Christian humanism would be desirable in
our institutions of higher education, and also amid our established and
emerging Christian artists of various stripes.Image Journalprovides one
religious humanistic model that inclines towards the arts. Its editor, Greg
Wolfe, believes that literature mattered for the Renaissance humanists because
it was concrete and experiential, and grounded ideas in people’s lives. Others
see today a more complex multi-vocalic landscape that demands alterations to
our basic designation, humanism. For example, we have to take into consid-
eration increasingly prominent references to trans-humanist ideas and move-
ments, often connected with post-human studies, robotics, or cyborg studies.
Especially in bioethics, these new trends question the status of human bodies,
agency, cognition, and consciousness. A few thinkers have carried out studies
of anti-humanism, including Professor Zimmermann’s, who traces its rise in
Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. Stanley Fish recently criticized ver-
sions of anti-humanism and with his usual, highly readable, provocation,
he locates the depths of anti-humanism in the evacuation of Renaissance
humanist ideals of the self in postmodernism. Fish argues that seventeenth-
century Christian poets such as John Milton or George Herbert were motiv-
ated by the anti-humanist tendency to seek the abdication or‘stilling of the
self’before God for the sake of acknowledging his grace in obedience. Yet they
could never go as far as dissolving the self, for, as George Herbert realized,‘the
stilling of the self is an impossible project, and...the very effort to prosecute it
(^57) On Wednesday 11 February 2015, atheist Craig Stephen Hicks murdered three Muslim
students in their home in North Carolina.
(^58) Samuel G. Freedom,‘In a Crisis, Humanists Seem Absent’,New York Times, 28 December
2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/29/us/on-religion-where-are-the-humanists.html?_r=0,
accessed 11 February 2016.
Christian Humanism’s Legacy in Renaissance Poetry 189