Re-Envisioning Christian Humanism

(Martin Jones) #1

distinctive mark of the age is what the Pope’s friend and philosophical colleague
Rocco Buttiglione aptly callednegative anthropology.^23 This crisis is manifest in
the ready affirmation of what manis notcombined with a deep-seated reluctance
to affirm normative anthropological content. It should not be understood merely
as an esoteric philosophy or ideology somuch as an experiential and practical
option familiar to human persons in the twentieth century.
At the Second Vatican Council, Archbishop Wojtyla worked on the an-
thropological sections for the pastoral constitution entitledGaudium et spes.^24
In a debate over how the document should address atheism, he insisted that
atheism is not merely an academic, ideological, or political system, but also‘a
problem of the human person’.‘The human being who is an atheist’,he
continued,‘is one persuaded of his own end—if I may so speak—of his
“eschatological”aloneness.’^25 Wojtyla’s intervention moved the drafters to
distinguish between the external or systematic aspects of atheism (what we
have called the institutional crises) and its anthropological premises.^26 Wojtyla
was convinced that the exaltation of‘Adam’through a negation of his natural
and religious aspects has a mythic structure that overlaps with, and subverts,
what sacred Scripture reports about the‘frontier’of Adam who is resolvable
into neither God nor beast. Adam knows what he isnot.
According to Wojtyla’s reading of modern culture, the negative moment
of Genesis 2:18 becomes the principal item of interest for children of the
Enlightenment, and indeed the experience to be universalized. On one or another
version of the premise that human nature is radically indeterminate, Enlight-
enment theorists tended to conclude, all the more reason for civilizing task of
the state. It was precisely this conclusion that Leo encountered at the end
of the nineteenth century, for the state claimed a monopoly on revealing man
to man himself by giving the citizen a determinate solidarity and relations of
justice under positive law. But given the fact that nature imparts no titles to
rule, on what ground can a man issue a binding word to another man? Who
has a natural right to bind another member of the species?
The answer, of course, is that men give their consent. They command a
commanding voice. This is the state. In other words, the older response to
anthropological indeterminacy was institutional, and this is nothing other
than an artificial man or what Hobbes meant by a‘mortal god’—the state,
which is determinate in every respect. If this is a liberal regime, order is made


(^23) Rocco Buttiglione,Karol Wojtyla(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997), 53.
(^24) Gaudium et spes, the anthropological sections include §§11–39.
(^25) Acta Synodalia Sacrosancti Concilii Oecumenici Vaticani Secundi, 6 vols (Rome, Vatican
City: Typis polyglottis Vaticanis, 1970–8), IV.ii, 660ff.
(^26) Gaudium et spes§§19–20. For Wojtyla’sinfluence, see especially:‘Some so exalt the human
as to empty faith in God of all content, being apparently more preoccupied with the affirmation
of human beings than denial of God’(Gaudium et spes§19).
Christian Humanism and the Crisis of Modern Times 249

Free download pdf