CALVIN’S ANTHROPOLOGICAL HUMANISMIn one of his recent writings, the well-known contemporary German philoso-
pher Jürgen Habermas remarks that radical naturalism and radical historicism
both strike at the heart of what he calls‘the humanist project’.^26 It is obvious
that Habermas is not referring here to Renaissance humanism. What he has in
mind by‘the humanist project’is a certain‘humanistic’understanding of the
human person as possessing inherent dignity and even sacrality. Humanism of
this sort is not in opposition to scholasticism. Rather, it is in opposition to the
reductionist understanding of the human person characteristic of radical
naturalism and historicism. Such reductionism is what Habermas has in
mind. I judge this to be a common use of the term‘humanism’nowadays.
I propose calling such humanismanthropological humanism.
Calvin was an anthropological humanist as well as a Renaissance humanist.
More specifically, he was a Christian anthropological humanist. His anthropo-
logical humanism is rich and complex. Here I will have to limit myself to
calling attention to just two components of Calvin’s anthropology: Calvin’s
understanding of the role of grief in our existence, and his way of developing
the biblical idea of human beings as images of God. Both of these are important,
but it is the latter that constitutes the core of Calvin’s anti-reductionist under-
standing of the human person.
In hisConfessionsAugustine describes, in words of extraordinary elo-
quence, the grief he felt upon the death of his boyhood friend:
My heart grew somber with grief, and wherever I looked I saw only death.
My own country became a torment and my own home a grotesque abode of
misery. All that we had done together was now a grim ordeal without him...My
soul was a burden, bruised and bleeding. It was tired of the man who carried it,
but I found no place to set it down to rest. Neither the charm of the countryside
nor the sweet scents of a garden could soothe it. It found no peace in song or
laughter, none in the company of friends at table or in the pleasures of love, none
even in books or poetry. Everything that was not what my friend had been was
dull and distasteful.^27In this passage Augustine is looking back at his grief after his conversion. The
root cause of his grief was now evident to him, as it was not at the time: he had
been too much attached to a mere mortal. His misery was that of‘every man
whose soul is tethered by the love of things that cannot last and then is
agonized to lose them’.^28
(^26) Jürgen Habermas,Essay on Faith and Knowledge, 40, available to the present author in
typescript.
(^27) Augustine,ConfessionsIV.4.5–7, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (London: Penguin, 1984), 76–8.
(^28) Augustine,ConfessionsIV.6.77.
The Christian Humanism of John Calvin 87