The Debt that Sophisticated Moderns Owe to Christianity (and Even to Pagan Monks) is Immense
Reflections on Secular Humanism, Shogun, and the Angelic Doctor
Matthew explains that “humanism is a delusion.” The problem with humanism in its secular form is that it stands up without any props. It assumes that human beings are individually entitled to respect and dignity while also holding that humans are an accident and insignificant. As I noted in a prior post on the Human Extinction Movement, the endpoint of secular humanism seems to posit that we contribute nothing to the universe except misery and will improve the universe's condition by disappearing. (See The Coming Religious Wars.)
A commonsense Scholastic axiom is that an effect cannot receive a property that does not exist in the cause. If goodness, dignity, and entitlement to respect are absent from the cause — i.e., humanity — then the belief that any individual has those properties is solemn nonsense or delusion.
If you ask a Roman or an Aztec if humans have intrinsic moral worth, they would have no idea what you were talking about. Indeed even the idea that somehow humanism dawns in the world of Pre-Socratic philosophers ignores the plethora of highly religious beliefs everyone in that world held and sees the history of thought through a selective secular gaze. It is unavoidable that humanism is a self-styled religion dependant on a delusional view of our enlightened progress by which we uniquely transcend the contingencies of history.
Likewise, consider Japan in the 17th century — the period of the currently popular Shogun television series. John Dougill, the author of In Search of Japan’s Hidden Christians, offers an interesting account of the history of Japan’s Kakure Kurishitan community, which was driven underground by Tokagawa. Dougill seems like a typical modern. He is not sympathetic, in general, to the Christian elements of the story. He is befuddled by why Japanese peasants would embrace martyrdom for a foreign religion. Dougill writes:
When the prisoners reached the site of the execution, they embraced their crosses with joy as if welcoming their fate. The executioner was puzzled by the fervor, and reading Diego Yuuki’s account, frankly so was I. For anyone who treasures the gift of life, who sees it as a miracle in itself, the death desire is hard to fathom without an unswerving certainty in the afterlife. Even then it begs the question: why would God create human life if his greatest wish is for people to sacrifice it? Why indeed create the earth at all? (p. 82.)
Elsewhere, Dougill gives a clue to the answer to his question. Consider his description of the place of the peasant in Japanese culture:
Summary execution was normal practice, even for trivial crimes and the sight of corpses was commonplace. They were used by samurai to test the sharpness of their swords, and bodies were sometimes piled up to five high to see if swords could cut through the layered navels. Francesco Carletti reported seeing a lord sever a body in half and then calmly inspect the blade to make sure it had suffered no damage (the sword’s value was judged accordingly). Afterwards, his followers tested their own swords on different parts of the body, leaving chunks of human flesh scattered all over the ground. The whole thing is carried out as a pastime, without turning a hair, very much as with us the anatomy of dead bodies is carried out in the interests of medical science,” he concludes. (p. 101.)
Likewise, Dougill’s book offers a glimpse of a comparison between the Christian idea that there is a core of dignity in the human soul and that of the Japanese culture, where lords could order subordinates to commit suicide and expect their orders to be carried out. However, as Japanese Shoguns learned, Christianity presented some objections:
An incident involving the samurai called Zensho Shichiemon illustrates the point. Though Christianity was forbidden on pain of death, he chose to convert and even the priest who baptized him warned of the dire consequences. When brought before his daimyo, he remained adamant in his refusal to recant. “I would obey in any other matter,: he declared, “but I cannot accept any order that is opposed to my eternal salvation.” He was beheaded, just four months after his baptism; loyalty to a heavenly lord had overridden loyalty his worldly lord. Feudal loyalty was given special emphasis under Tokugawa neo-Confucianism, in which allegiance to one’s superior was made into a supreme virtue. In this clash of Christian and Confucian, there would be little room of compromise.(p. 107.)
In Japan, Christian ideas about being ordered to an absolute good above the secular ruler were disruptive.
Last night at my Aquinas reading group, we read this from Article 79 of the Summa Contra Gentiles:
But God, from the fact of willing Himself as the end, wills other things that are ordered to Him as to the end, as has been proved.3 He therefore wills the good of the order that the whole universe has to Him, as well as the good of the order that the universe has in the mutual relations of its parts. But the good of an order arises from singular goods. Therefore, God also wills singular goods.
Aquinas, St. Thomas. Summa Contra Gentiles: Book One: God (p. 252). University of Notre Dame Press. Kindle Edition.
The technical theological point is that God’s will extends to singulars. Still, you can’t help but notice that this technical theological point is also the basis of “humanistic” concern for equal rights, the dignity of the individual, due process, and the rest of what we consider “humanistic values.”
Aquinas’s point is that God’s will in providing existence and the ability to cause goes down to you, individually, rather than being limited to the group that you belong to. According to St. Paul in Galatians 3:38:
28 There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
God’s will — and therefore his relationship with the object of His will — is immediate. It is not directed to a group, be it Romans, Aryans, or the Proletariat. This means that the individual has an unmediated relationship with the Highest Good. The Common Doctor observes in Chapter 78, Book One of the Summar Contra Gentiles:
[2] For to will implies a relationship of the one willing to the thing willed.
According to Christianity, as explained by a Doctor of the Catholic Church, the good is not found in the totality such that the totality is everything and the individual is nothing; rather, good is found in the order of things — not merely being a part of something, but being in an order to other things which make up the whole — which gives individual things a dignity that they would not have if all that mattered were the State or the lumpenproletariat.
More importantly for those of us who treasure the goods of the Enlightenment, the good of the entire order is found in the individual good of individual things. Thus, if individual things are denied their own good, the order cannot be good.
Aquinas frames this in terms of the “common good.” It is the idea of the common good that makes it illicit to harm the innocent:
An individual man may be considered in two ways: first, in himself; secondly, in relation to something else. If we consider a man in himself, it is unlawful to kill any man, since in every man though he be sinful, we ought to love the nature which God has made, and which is destroyed by slaying him. Nevertheless, as stated above (Article 2) the slaying of a sinner becomes lawful in relation to the common good, which is corrupted by sin. On the other hand the life of righteous men preserves and forwards the common good, since they are the chief part of the community. Therefore it is in no way lawful to slay the innocent.
(Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-II, Q. 64, article 6.)
This idea is core to the Christian commitment to protecting the innocent, its refusal to accept that the ends justify the means, the Just War theory, and similar ideas. Steven N. Jensen in Good and Evil Actions, observes:
Contrary to contemporary intuitions, then, the common good is not opposed to the good of the individual but provides the very basis by which the individual is protected. (p. 125.)
Of course, it didn’t start with Aquinas. It is baked into Christian ideology…..or theology, as some call it.
This is worth considering after being exposed to Medium’s torrent of ignorant essays about how Christianity is repressive.
Before you accept those arguments, ask yourself what a Japanese peasant — whose status was little better than livestock — found in Christianity that made him willing to embrace an ugly death.
