To Save the World from the Church Basement: On Christian Humanism
Christian humanism and liberal learning may not save the world—but that doesn’t make them less worthy of our pursuit.
By Justin R. Hawkins
You ask what I seek from virtue? Virtue herself. For she has nothing better, she is herself her own reward. Is this not sufficiently impressive a return?” – Seneca, On the Happy Life
No place is too quotidian for those who take the manger seriously. This was the mantra I repeated often to myself for years as I headed week by week to my off-campus job as a tutor at Grace Academy, a classical Christian co-op in New Haven. We met in a church basement, and I suspect my self-regard required some reassurance after I was consigned to teach theology in the squalor of the boiler room. So I repeated my mantra until I was convinced that the church basement was a site of grace, and proceeded to discharge my pedagogical duties accordingly.
Grace Academy was founded as a homeschool cooperative in New Haven to provide a classical, Christian education to a small group of children. It was administered by capable parents, and the tutoring was primarily done by Yale graduate students on a part-time basis. Classes met twice a week on a college model, which meant that access was limited to families that did not need their children cared for all day long—one of, but not the greatest, of the model’s weaknesses. The greatest weakness was that enrollment was predominantly white in a predominantly non-white city. Enrollment was always small and peaked at a mere thirty, which permitted personal educational support to individual students. Like many homeschool cooperatives, Grace Academy was never intended to outlive the educational span of a single generation of students, who started at Grace in kindergarten, and graduated from high school as it disbanded.
My six years of teaching there are replete with evidence that the church boiler room was, indeed, the site of many graces, and the setting for many of the greatest educational experiences of my time in New Haven. In an elementary school literature class, one student furrowed his brow when I used Haman, from the book of Esther, walking to a party in the shadow of his gallows, as an example of literary foreshadowing. When I called on him to explain his furrowed brow, he said “but Mr. Hawkins, it just seems to me like the whole Old Testament is foreshadowing”— demonstrating an ability to put the pieces of the Bible together to point to Christ that many only learn in seminary. Out of the mouth of children God has ordained strength. Other graces followed. As the 2016 presidential primary unfolded to the surprise of analysts and pollsters, my students cited Tocqueville and Plato to make sense of what was unfolding before them. In parent-teacher meetings, my students’ parents informed me that this kind of analysis was rapidly becoming their practice even beyond the classroom: “I do not know what you are teaching them, but keep doing it: my child talks with so much more conviction at the dinner table.”
The liberal arts treat what is fundamentally and indelibly human, and therefore the texts and methods they employ will be perpetually relevant.
The curriculum I taught culminated in a four-year sequence in the history of theology and philosophy taught to high schoolers from grades 9 to 12. I wrote that curriculum to begin with the Epic of Gilgamesh and conclude with transhumanism and artificial intelligence. I did not anticipate how many interconnections there would be across that curriculum, but perhaps I ought to have. After all, the liberal arts treat what is fundamentally and indelibly human, and therefore the texts and methods they employ will be perpetually relevant. I argued in that first lecture that there is an implicit polemic that the book of Genesis launches against the Epic of Gilgamesh. This is most obvious in their varying depictions of the global flood. In Gilgamesh, the gods drown the earth because humanity was being too loud and disturbing their sleep; these gods are easily enraged and do not check their actions with any sort of morality. When they later repent of their action because they have killed all the humans who once offered them sweet-smelling sacrifices, the trickster god reveals to the others that he foresaw their regret and so has hidden some humans in a boat safe from the floods. Those hidden humans are permitted out on dry land to offer up their sacrifices, upon which the gods descend “like flies”—an image we cannot imagine the author of Gilgamesh intended as flattery. Gilgamesh gives us a world in which the gods are careless with humans, and in return, the humans disdain their gods. Not so in the version of the flood recounted in Genesis. There, God floods the world not because of its inconvenience, but because of its great wickedness. Power here is inextricably bound to and governed by goodness. The polemical point of this story in Genesis is to insist that the Babylonians are mistaken about what the gods are like.
The intention of teaching Genesis alongside Gilgamesh was to insist and to demonstrate that the Bible ought to be read alongside the greatest extra-Biblical sources of the world as being frequently in conversation with them, and therefore undeniably relevant to them. The Bible answers the questions of the pagans, and continues to do so. The more interesting, more insightful, and more dubious debate between the Bible and Gilgamesh is not about Noah’s Ark, but about Gilgamesh’s lofty and everlasting ambitions. He says that he seeks immortality and the ends of the world because:
Here in the city man dies oppressed at heart, man perishes with despair in his heart. I have looked over the wall and I see the bodies floating on the river, and that will be my lot also. Indeed I know it is so, for whoever is tallest among men cannot reach the heavens, and the greatest cannot encompass the earth. Therefore I would enter that country: because I have not yet established my name stamped on brick as my destiny decreed, I will go to the country where the cedar is cut. I will set up my name where the names of famous man are written…
Among these many and confused ambitions, we can detect three that are of great relevance here: the desire to reach to heaven, to bake bricks, and to have one’s name stamped on them at the ends of the earth. The biblically-literate reader can hear the echoes of the ambitions of Babel’s architects: “let us bake bricks, and burn them thoroughly… let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves” (Gen 11:3–4). We can see God’s response to Babel as a referendum on Gilgamesh; God scatters the people and ceases the brick-baking, the tower-building, and the name-making. The story is then followed immediately by a seemingly irrelevant genealogy: “these are the generations of Shem…” (Gen. 11:10). The genealogy seems misplaced until one realizes that the Hebrew meaning of the name “Shem” is simply “name.” Here is a name that lives on: the godly head of a godly lineage, not the Ozymandean architectural ambitions of the pagans. At the same time I made that argument, Elon Musk was preparing his Falcon Heavy rocket to carry into the heavens not only his name, but his very own cherry-red roadster, which even now satellites with the other heavenly bodies. Elon Musk’s desire is perhaps little different than Gilgamesh’s.
This sequence of argument encapsulates much of what I loved most about Grace Academy: the insistence upon reading the great Christian sources alongside and in conversation with the best of pagan learning, with an eye attentive to understanding our own world through the ambitions and desires that formed those texts. This is almost the opposite of the fundamentalist Christian intuitions I grew up with, which operated with the never stated but persistently subterranean fear that the Christian faith, like Cupid’s love, withered away if too attentively inquired into. Close to the heart of my teaching philosophy was to disabuse my students of any shadow of this idea.
If the loftiest ambitions of Christian humanism failed when technique was weaker, what shall we do now that it reigns?
Another mantra I recited often, and which I kept ready at hand when asked what I understood myself to be doing in devoting so much time to this school, was that I was “saving Western civilization.” I said it in parent-teacher conferences, in motivational speeches to my students, in casting vision before parents. By this I meant that the cultivation and study of the Christian liberal arts are a necessary component of any truly flourishing human society. My pedagogical efforts were aimed at ensuring that the great tradition would outlive me in the minds of these students. But perhaps I oversold my case. If education is commoditized and educators need to compete for students’ attention and enrollment, then in short order teachers will become salespeople. And salespeople are prone to overpromise on what their product will be able to deliver.
A former Grace Academy student, now close to graduating from college, recently sent me this message:
Justin, you used to tell us that you were raising us to save the world, or at least Western civilization. You know, for a long time I’ve been thinking about my life that way—how I can be a great [or] impactful man, someone who changes the world, or maybe just the nation. Increasingly I’m thinking that’s a futile pursuit.
This question haunts me, given the dominical guidance that it would be better to have a millstone hung around my neck and be cast into the ocean than cause one of these to stumble. I do not know whether I have said the right thing to these students, or whether, through a combination of the need to vindicate my own liberal arts choices by reproducing them in subsequent generations and the overstatement common of salesmanship, I have exaggerated my case.
Alan Jacobs seems to think I told that student the right thing, and he has historical evidence to support my words. His The Year of our Lord 1943 tells the story of a karass of mid-twentieth-century Christian intellectuals (W. H. Auden, C. S. Lewis, Jacques Maritan, T. S. Eliot, and Simone Weil) who realized at roughly the same time as the Allied War Command that World War II would be won, and that the world would need rebuilding. They insisted that humanistic education ought to play a role in ensuring such a war never happen again, and set about conceiving educational theories and strategies to implement their vision. It is clear that in recounting this saga Jacobs has practical, and not merely historical, intentions behind his book. He writes that “the primary task of this book is to explore this model of Christian humane learning as a force for social renewal,” which is something rather like saying that one intends to save Western civilization—not from the lowly church basement, but from the heights of Oxford, Cambridge, the Manhattan literary scene, and other perches of cultural grandeur.
Yet it is unclear whether Jacobs intends his book to herald or disqualify Christian humanism from the great task of cultural renewal. The book ends on a discordant note. The second-greatest fear that the Christian humanists had, after losing the war, was winning the war not through superior moral standing, but merely through superior force of arms. Yet this is precisely what happened. It was an accident of history and, so far as human eyes can tell, not at all an entailment of the West’s endorsement of humane learning, that Germany’s best scientists defected to America and there created the nuclear weapons that, as Anscombe was so adament about reminding us, won the war at the expense of the Allies forsaking the moral demands of the Christian (and pagan) just war tradition that demanded discrimination between enemy soldiers and non-combatants—a principle violated in the nuclear annihilations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Once the Soviets acquired those nuclear weapons, the world’s peace was held for decades in precarious balance by the threat of weapons the use of which Christian just war theory continues rightly to repudiate in almost all instances.
In Jacobs’s story, the assassin of humanistic learning is not nukes, but a regime of technique described by Jacques Ellul: “Ellul strongly implies… that his Christian elders—a category that, taken literally, would include all of the writers studied here… had failed to discern the rise of the regime of technique and had not addressed it constructively until it was already secure on its throne.” The intervening decades have not, despite the occasional and largely ineffectual murmurations of postliberals Left and Right, seen technique unseated from its throne. If the loftiest ambitions of Christian humanism failed when technique was weaker, what shall we do now that it reigns?
It is a reasonable assumption that just kings and citizens will create a better society than unjust kings and citizens.
Jacobs’s normative argument in favor of Christian humanism has its parallel in another, not obviously related, work: James Hankins’s Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy (Harvard UP, 2019). This enormous tome constitutes in one volume a number of important intellectual interventions. In the realms of political theory and intellectual history, it represents a masterstroke against the still-popular notion that Machiavelli is somehow metonymous for the political theory of the Italian Renaissance and Early Modernity more generally. Hankins insists that “neither the Renaissance nor Machiavelli can be understood if Machiavelli is taken to be typical of the Renaissance,” and over the course of six hundred pages, demonstrates how strange Machiavelli was among his contemporaries. Hankins makes his argument through close analysis of the luminaries of the Italian Renaissance both lauded (Petrarch, Boccaccio) and hitherto obscure (Biondo Flavio, Cyrica of Ancona, Leon Battista Alberti). Hankins seeks commonality among the subjects of his analysis both in their goals and in their means:
Their movement was largely in agreement about its goals: to rebuild Europe’s depleted reserves of good character, true piety, and practical wisdom. They also agreed widely about means: the revival of classical antiquity, which the humanists presented as an inspiring pageant, rich in examples of noble conduct, eloquent speech, selfless dedication to country, and inner moral strength, nourished by philosophy and uncorrupt Christianity.
In Hankins’s terms, what unites this movement is the advocacy of what he calls “virtue politics, [which] by analogy with virtue ethics, focuses on improving the character and wisdom of the ruling class with a view to bringing about a happy and flourishing commonwealth. It sees the political legitimacy of the state as tightly linked with the virtue of rulers and especially their practice of justice, defined as a preference for the common good over private goods….” This is altogether a more aristocratic and political story than that undertaken by the twentieth-century Christian humanists (and, for that sake, teaching high schoolers in the church basement; Petrarch probably did not teach in a boiler room), but the similarities are clear. The advocates of a new paideuma wedded together a revival of the ancient liberal arts with a view to the acquisition of virtues, in the hope that they would permeate and rejuvenate their society. The resultant synthesis stands in refutation against those theorists of decline (paradigmatically in political theory, Leo Strauss and his many heirs) who see in the seedbed of modernity a wholesale repudiation of antiquity. After all, things are never as complicated as they seem; they are always much more so.
The similarities between Jacobs and Hankins go deeper still. Jacobs himself sees the Christian humanists as historically beholden to the Renaissance humanists: “by striving to integrate literature into a specifically Christian model of education, they were, whether they knew it or not, reclaiming a tradition of Christian humanism that had its roots in the early Renaissance.” In both stories, a civilization crisis causes political and military tumult. The military tumult brings in its wake a renewed attention to the educational process that allowed it to come into being. A blend of Christianity and the ancient liberal arts are put forward as a solution. These fail, and are supplanted finally by an emphasis on technique and violence above virtue and art. In both stories, political realists wait in the wings for the eventual failures of humanism to bring about the tasks of cultural renewal—for Jacobs, the realist foil to the story is Reinhold Niebuhr. For Hankins, the realist foil is Machiavelli.
Undoubtedly there is much for Christians and defenders of the liberal arts to cherish in these stories. Since laws cannot prohibit every vice and expect every virtue, even virtuous laws can be no substitute for a virtuous citizenry. Modern political theory’s persistent disinterest in moral and virtue formation is a serious weakness—admittedly, it is a weakness for which theorists of the virtues bear some complicity, given that they often act and speak as if the cultivation of the virtues requires the repudiation of modernity’s gains. Jeffrey Stout’s Democracy and Tradition has led the way for a small number of theorists to theorize the virtuous practices of democracy and showing how they may be bolstered rather than dismissed or ignored. That enterprise seems to me best suited for avoiding both the nostalgic resentment of the postliberal Right, and the inhumane disinterest in moral formation by the regime of technique.
After all, it is a reasonable assumption that just kings and citizens will create a better society than unjust kings and citizens. It is likewise true that one of the hallmarks of a noble society is that it is devoted to contemplating and arranging its life in keeping with humanity’s highest ideals, and building educational institutions to reflect upon, refine, and pass on those ideals. The moral bankruptcy of the average American politician is beyond question. If there were to rise up suddenly a civilizational repudiation of them, led by a Church who had rediscovered the prophetic voice that she so willingly silenced for a seat at the political table and all the complicity it entailed, there would be little doubt that significant steps could be taken toward a more proximate justice. Insofar as Hankins and Jacobs have given us a blueprint for that kind of social, political, and educational vision, their books deserve a wide and attentive readership among Christians interested in civilizational renewal. Christian intellectuals, scholars, entrepreneurs, and donors might discern in them a model for creating and funding the institutions and forms of life in American Christianity in which lives of humane learning and virtuous formation are made possible. If even a fraction of the wealth currently spent on culture war were devoted instead to Christian learning, the face of American Christianity would be altogether different than it is.
The ends of a virtuous society, citizenry, and leadership are unquestionably desirable and salutary. The ways and means for their achievement are nowhere in sight.
Yet likely despite the intentions of both authors, a far more despairing interpretation of these books is also possible. In To Change the World, James Davidson Hunter presents a sociological argument to the effect that cultural change happens not, as liberal democrats (and many evangelicals) might have hoped, from mass movements of sincere people, but from well-connected networks of elites. But well-connected networks of elites are a necessary but not sufficient condition of societal reformation, as is demonstrated from the fact that Hankins and Jacobs both present us with two case studies in networked elites who strove from institutional perches unparalleled by any American Christian (and likely by any defender of the liberal arts) today to reformulate the society, and they both failed. It is therefore reasonable to assume that there is little obvious strategy for societal renewal from Christian humanism to be anything more than a model minority in America today. If Lewis failed, and there is none alive today so great as Lewis, then short of some not-to-be-presumed-upon miraculous intervention, the project of Christian humanism is not going to bring about the renovation of Christendom any time soon. The ends of a virtuous society, citizenry, and leadership are unquestionably desirable and salutary. The ways and means for their achievement are nowhere in sight.
This ought not be thought to entail an indictment of Christian humanism, but only an indictment against overselling its potential. That is to say, it is an indictment of the mantra I repeated often to my students about the formation they were receiving. I argued above that the logic of the market dictates that teachers, who are reduced to merchants hocking their pedagogical wares, will be required almost by necessity to make outsized and insupportable arguments in favor of the desirability of their product. In this case, they say that Christian humanism can change the world, or save Western civilization. But whether a civilization rises or falls depends only in part upon its virtue. Civilizations, like individuals, suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Fortune, as the Stoics and Aristotelians famously warned us, is no respecter of either virtue or of humane learning. Rather, time and chance happens to them all. Despite the best efforts of many premodern moralizing historians to draw ethical lessons from the events of history, the affairs of humanity simply do not carry their moral meaning transparently within them. That is one of the great deliverances of Augustine’s City of God; history is not as open to moral interpretation as we might have hoped. Instead, history proceeds ambiguously, with wheat and tares mixed together inextricably until the eschaton, which stands perpetually in judgment over the affairs of this world, which appears when looking through a glass dimly to be simply an amoral parade of contingencies.
One response to the fact that the virtues are not always accompanied by the goods of fortune in this life is to attempt to render the liberal arts and the virtues themselves into techniques for solving some malady. So we are told that the cultivation of virtue will ameliorate our partisanship (it might, but not without breaking up Facebook, and that will happen only if the right donors have the right money to fund the right congresspeople), or that philosophy majors actually have a decent mid-career wage (they might, but the question is undoubtedly a mercenary one). At their best, arguments like these demonstrate that humanism and virtue are occasionally accompanied by the extrinsic goods of fortune. At their worst (and the slip is an easy one to make), arguments like these make humanism the means by which those mercenary goods are to be attained.
But if the goods of Fortune do not perfectly follow upon the cultivation of virtue, then Christian educators mislead our students when we hide the real price of moral formation. The acquisition of virtue and the cultivation of the liberal arts may, in fact, bring an unintended estrangement from family and friends—as it frequently does when formation in the classical tradition places one into a different social class than one’s friends and family. If one is in a society that is sufficiently hostile to the Good, that form of training may even bring martyrdom, as it did for Socrates. A society in which some enclaves are humanistic while others are not may contribute to the historic polarization underway now in America. In all these ways, humanistic learning comes to bring not peace, but a sword. Bernard de Mandeville famously argued that it was only the vices of a people—their avariciousness and acquisitiveness most centrally—that allows the society as a whole to flourish economically: “from private vices come public benefits.”
Advocates of Christian humanism and of the acquisition of the virtues should commend that learning and those virtues to our students for their own sakes.
It is the rightful object of educators’ and legislators’ energies that the societies in which they live come to make virtue correspond with these goods of fortune as much as possible, so that virtue is easy and vice is difficult. But we have no examples of societies in which the most humane are always the most fortunate. More often, the virtues of all but the most heroic and saintly are feeble and mixed, and the exigencies of life are the occasion for moral compromise even for those who fancy themselves morally serious. This need not be an excuse for cynicism, but it does chasten overconfidence about what the project of virtue acquisition and humane learning might be able to accomplish.
Advocates of Christian humanism and of the acquisition of the virtues should commend that learning and those virtues to our students for their own sakes, apart from any mercenary goods that might accompany that learning and those virtues. To do so would be to follow in the footsteps of Socrates when he was bid by Glaucon to praise justice for its own sake. It would follow in the footsteps of Seneca who insisted that virtue “is herself her own reward.” Likewise, the models that Jacobs and Hankins have set forth for admiration and emulation are worthy guides in the process of liberal learning and the acquisition of the virtues not because they succeeded in their civilizational renewal, but because they were busy with distinctively and admirably human affairs. We should say to our students that formation in this great tradition brings the possibility of accessing our humanity in ways that no other form of education can, and that it is intrinsically worth doing for its own sake, for the purpose of being more human than we otherwise might be. But it may also, as it did in the cases of both Seneca and Socrates, incur the wrath of an inhumane and unvirtuous regime. I continue to believe in the virtues and in liberal learning. I hope that at their best they might have salutary effects upon society beyond the meager church basements in which they are sometimes handed down: “the kingdom of heaven is like leaven….” But I increasingly have my doubts that they will effect, apart from miraculous intervention, anything like the widespread societal renewal we may have hoped from them.
This, I think, is what I ought to have said to that student, instead of giving him lofty speeches about saving civilization. Perhaps he was not yet prepared to hear it. Plato famously thought I should not have taught him philosophy at all until he was far more advanced in age. But Jesus told me to let the children come unto him and not hinder them. At the heart of Christian humanism is the idea that both Jesus and Plato are teachers worthy of our time and attention. But when they disagree, as they do here, it is Jesus, and not Plato, who was correct.
Justin R. Hawkins is a PhD Candidate in Christian Ethics and Political Theory at Yale University. You can contact him, or read more of his writing, at justinryanhawkins.com.