I just recently read a paper detailing in brief 7 definitions or perspectives on humanism written by John Weston a former minister of Unitarian Universalist church that I attend on a regular basis. I thought I should share it with the rest of you. While I am aware of the 3 paragraph rule, the paper will be printed below the divide in its entirety since there are no links available to paper online and many people may have difficulty finding article in their local library. The paper's focus is the commonality that UU's share with each other in the humanist tradition even with those members who do not describe themselves as humanists. In this paper, many of you may find some commonality and reasons behind some of our own conflicts with each other.
The Seven Humanisms And How They Grew
By John H. Weston
Published in Voice, 1996
Transcribed by C. Norcott-Mahany, Jan. 2010
[N.B. Please attribute any errata to the transcriber.]
"My real ambition is to lead us to the recognition that in Unitarian Universalism, those who refer to themselves as Humanists—with a capital H, so to speak—and those who don’t are all in fact in the humanist tradition. The humanist tradition is the common currency of our movement." John Weston
In James Joyce’s Ulysses, the young Stephen Dedalus is forced to endure a moral lecture from a Poloniuslike figure whose language is larded with abstractions. Finally Stephen’s impatience breaks through, and he says, "I fear those big words which make us so unhappy." Humanism is a big word, and sometimes it, too, makes us unhappy: unhappy in the sense of disputatious, even mutually alienated, over differences in what humanism is, what its value is, what it is to be a humanist, and what it is not to be one. Protestants quarrel about repentance, Catholics about penance, and Unitarian Universalists about humanism. It is our ongoing doctrinal controversy.
It takes only a minute to realize that the term humanism is capable of being used in several ways: as valuefree description, as in "the humanism of the Italian Renaissance"; as technical description, as in "humanistic Psychology"; as ethical honorific, as in "the superb humanism of Albert Schweitzer"; and as a fighting word, as in "those secular humanists." In charting the meaning, or rather meanings, of the word humanism, I have three secondary goals in mind. One is to recognize seven descriptive meanings of the word. I’m going to leave the honorific and the fighting word out of this. Second is to suggest with all respect that Unitarian Universalists who refer to themselves and others either as Humanist or non-Humanist need to do more to be certain of being understood. They need to say which of the seven meanings they are using. And third is to uncover what I believe is the common core of meaning in all seven of those meanings. Not that I am going to lay out what humanism "really" means; that way lies madness. But it does seem to me that there is something essentially humanistic about all seven descriptive uses.
Those are all secondary goals. My real ambition is to lead us to the recognition that in Unitarian Universalism, those who refer to themselves as Humanists—with a capital H, so to speak—and those who don’t are all in fact in the humanist tradition. The humanist tradition is the common currency of our movement. If there is an ideological center to this movement, it lies there, or so I will contend: that we are all in the humanist tradition. If we dispute with each other about how much we are Humanist and how much we are something else, then we are carrying on the ignoble habit of liberals everywhere, focusing on what divides us rather than what we have in common.
Thus I have a well-defined criterion for success for this piece. By its conclusion, if any Unitarian Universalist is unable to say with some real pride, "I am in the humanist tradition," or "I am in the humanist tradition in ways I have been unaware of," then it will have failed. And I too will have failed: I will have failed to grasp something very important about the religious sensibilities present among us, and I will look forward to the opportunity for new learning.
Well, I am posing a tall order, so let me get to it.
The word humanism only came into the English language 165 years ago, shortly after having been coined by German scholars not many years before. They used it to describe the system of education and inquiry that developed in Florence and northern Italy during the 14th century.
This first humanism of seven, Renaissance humanism, designated the study of Latin composition, political science, moral philosophy, history, rhetoric, and poetry. A fair amount of Plato, more Virgil, lots of Cicero and, mark this well, very little religion and no theology. Students, everybody from children to princes, were expected to emulate this material: to imitate it without appearing to. The professors themselves were known as umanisti, and their responsibility was to develop in their students something called humanitas. Humanitas wasn’t just a liberal education, or even humaneness. It was more like a virtue: on the one hand humanity—open-heartedness, mercy, and benevolence—and on the other hand nobility; commitment, courage, moral excellence in action. Love your neighbor like a Christian, deliberate like an Athenian, administer like a Roman, and fight like a Spartan. But the goal did not end with ever-more-virtuous individuals. Through them, humanitas would radiate into the culture at large. The overwhelming goal was the transformation of culture: out of the passive ignorance of the "dark" ages, as they saw it, and into—dare I say it?—a "new world order" reflecting the fullness of human potential.
It is easy to wax lyrical about Renaissance humanism, and about the literature and art it produced. I will restrain myself. Like every historical movement, the Renaissance happened because a whole batch of conditions came together. The princes and the merchant princes of the little city-states in the north of Italy were being hemmed in by high taxes and imperial regulation. It was time for devolution of power. Get the empire and the church off the backs of the Florentine people.
Economically and politically it might have been time to declare independence of Empire and church, but was it time psychologically? If the only way you can understand your relation to the cosmos is as a child of God claimed by baptism, inhabiting your ordained niche in the one and only community there is, the City of God, how can you declare independence? Who will you be then?
A new idea of what it is to be human was needed, an ideological tool, really, to break apart this City of God idea, and it was the umanisti who supplied it. They did so by unearthing the art and writings of Greece and Rome that had been kicking around for centuries. They used them to prove that great ideas and great civilizations do not depend on Emperor and church. ‘All that is necessary is mere human beings thinking and acting with humanitas.
The umanisti were the brain trust that did the ideological work that brought the fixed medieval world to an end. They reinvented the natural human person: not the child of God laid claim to by baptism, but the particular human person in her or his particular experience, thinking, conversing, fighting, loving, suffering. Not the Christian man, as they would have said, but the natural man. Not the old idea of Christianitas, but the new one of Humanitas.
Humanisms number two and three grew directly out of this localized movement. Number two was Christian humanism. I’m afraid that my description of Renaissance humanism made it sound anti-Christian, maybe even antitheological. It wasn’t. It opposed scholastic thought, sort of the intellectual counterpart of the Gothic cathedral, and it opposed the Holy Roman Empire. But God remained in his heaven, with Jesus at his right hand. The Christian humanists opposed the same things, but they remained much more in the bosom of the church. Some of them were Italians, and even became popes, but most came from the north of Europe. The greatest was Erasmus of Rotterdam.
Erasmus is one of my heroes. He downplayed the importance of dogma. In a time in which a difference of opinion about the proper age at which someone ought to be baptized could get you burned at the stake, downplaying the importance of dogma was heroic. He said it was deed, not creed, that was important in the eyes of God. And further, he said that God wanted not partisanships, but tolerance.
Erasmus was another umanist. He translated the Bible with up-to-date philological tools, and he found that nowhere did Jesus say that God cared what you believed. It was how you lived—your piety, your compassion, your love of neighbor—that counted. He also turned up the fact that the old Vulgate text that had been in use for a millennium was corrupt in many places. It had Jesus saying, "Do penance, for the kingdom of Heaven is at hand," where in fact the original Greek was, "Repent, for the kingdom of Heaven is at hand." Big difference. What God wanted was not self-sacrifice and contribution to the church, but a change of heart.
The Christian humanists did one thing more. They downplayed the sacrifice of Christ, and played up the example of Jesus. Jesus was not God to be worshipped, but a guide to be followed. In fact, for many of the Christian humanists, if Jesus was able to respond to the divine command to love one’s neighbor, others could, too. They came very close to saying that just as Jesus became God, so could anyone else.
The other humanism that spun off of Renaissance humanism was classical humanism. Classical humanism is the academic program of Renaissance humanism as it continued in politics and the arts long after the Renaissance had ended. The founders of the United States, for example, saw themselves as Roman senators. For classical humanists, the cultures of Greece and Rome were twin high points that have never been equaled.
Classical humanism survives. You can still find people who believe that Greek tragedy is more true to the human condition than anything written since. On the one hand there are the powerful, irrational forces which are called gods. On the other hand there are human beings, destined never to understand why those forces act as they do. The only nobility possible, and the only standard by which you can be judged, is compassion toward other people, courage as far as your fate goes, and humility in the face of those overwhelming forces. Classical humanism appeared most recently in European existentialism, which was classical in everything but humility. Renaissance humanism and Christian humanism are creatures of history, and their time has passed.
Classical humanism survives, but it is a minority report. The fourth humanism, cultural humanism, is far from dead, but it is on the defensive. Cultural humanism is what used to be found in the divisions of arts and sciences of colleges and universities as well as in the culture at large. It continued the Renaissance idea that the proper study of
humankind is humankind. It studied and admired and criticized the productions of the human mind—poetry, philosophy, art, language, scientific method, and scientific theories—in order to develop them further. But for more than a century now there has been an ongoing controversy between some cultural humanists and some scientists. We will encounter these scientists again when we get to secular humanism. The scientists in this controversy rule out all questions not answerable by scientific method as "soft," and the cultural humanists involved look upon science as reductionistic and ethically insensitive. And recently, cultural humanism has been undermined on its own turf by deconstructionism and post-modernism. When these new ways of thinking make the claim that human beings can only speak out of their social locations, and that our every perception or affirmation is merely a screen for self interest, the very foundations of cultural humanism tremble.
The fifth humanism is also alive in the wider culture as well as among Unitarian Universalists: humanistic psychology. Humanistic psychology began as an anti-; it was anti-behaviorism and anti-psychoanalysis. The first humanistic psychologists, like Rollo May, Carl Rogers, and Abraham Maslow, objected to any method that looked at individuals from a detached, objective, scientific point of view. They said behaviorist psychology was rat-running, and they said psychoanalysis reduced the human person to nothing more than the deterministic outcome of conflicts among a small number of biological drives. In this use of the term "humanism," the nature of the individual human being and his or her awareness is emphasized, the unique person who does the experiencing and who, through awareness and the effort of will, can change his or her life. The human being is one only so long as he or she is being human: developing, changing, above all, growing.
In one sense cultural humanism and humanistic psychology go in opposite directions: cultural humanism is horizontal, horizon expanding; humanistic psychology is vertical, emotionally deepening. But they also have two things in common. One of them is that both put process before content. You can be a Christian or an atheist or a pagan and still be either one. The other is that both of them are suspicious of science. But that is not true, resoundingly not true, of the last two humanisms: religious humanism and secular humanism.
Religious humanism arose with Unitarianism. A Humanist Manifesto of 1933, signed by 34 persons, the most influential being John Dewey, outlined this sixth humanism. Religious humanism is first and foremost antisupernatural: everything that is, including humankind, came about through natural process and "the time has passed for theism (or) deism." Religious humanism is developmental: "the complete realization of the human personality (is) the end of (human) life." Religious humanism is anti-traditional; it believes that modernity has presented us with a new situation, so that "religious institutions, their ritualistic forms, ecclesiastical methods, and communal activities must be reconstituted as rapidly as experience allows, in order to function effectively in" this
new situation. And religious humanism requires that human beings become "aware that (they) alone (are) responsible for the realization of the world of (their) dreams." These things religious humanism is. What it is not, however, is anti-religious. Religion must be transformed, but not scrapped. "Old attitudes involved in worship and prayer," it ways, must give way to "religious emotions express(ing) a heightened sense of personal life and...a cooperative effort to promote social well-being."
Humanism number seven, secular humanism, goes further. In the second Humanist Manifesto of 1973 and the Secular Humanist Declaration of 1981, both written by Paul Kurtz of the American Humanist Association, all reference to the transformation of religion is dropped. It’s time to do away with it. Although a lot of the secular Declaration isn’t much different from what is in the first Manifesto just quoted, it absolutely rejects religion, which is old hat, in the name of science, which is modern. If not A, then not B. If B, then not A. "The modern secular humanist outlook has led to the application of science and technology to the improvement of the human condition...(it has also) led to the emancipation of hundreds of millions of people from the exercise of blind faith and fears of superstition and has contributed to their education and the enrichment of their lives." You can see how secular humanists and cultural humanists might tangle.
Renaissance humanism, Christian humanism, classical humanism, cultural humanism, and secular humanism. Do you have a foot in any one of these camps? Two of them? Three? Four? For me it’s four: classical, cultural, and religious humanism, and humanistic psychology. But my heaviest foot is in the cultural humanist camp: the productions of the human spirit, religion prime among them but scientific thinking by no means absent,
are endlessly fascinating to me. As I recollect the people I know and the cultures and ideas I have been made aware of, sometimes I feel like I’m in an enchanted fern forest in the spring, with thousands of dew-laden fronds around me unfurling into their own individuality, separate but related.
If there is any Unitarian Universalist who has read this far who does not hear an inner voice saying to at least one of these humanisms, "yes, that’s right; that’s the way it is," please, please let me know. A conversation with you will greatly expand my awareness of the religious sensibilities among us.
Well, it’s time to ask: What is the common thread or threads that run through all seven of these humanisms? What, in other words, is the continuity in the humanist tradition? As I see it, a braid of three strands runs the length. One is fascination with the human. The second is affirmation of human responsibility. And the third, without which human responsibility is just wishful thinking, is conviction that human beings can take responsibility. Human beings and being human are fascinating, that’s one. Human beings must take responsibility, that’s two. And they are so endowed that they can, that’s three. In possessing these three strands, the humanist tradition runs against the major strain, by all means not the only strain but the majority strain, in the Christian tradition. I am referring to the strain that denies human capacity due to depravity, that allocates responsibility away from human beings to a transcendent power, that all too often looks upon humankind with pity and even revulsion. The humanist tradition in all its forms says not only that humankind should and that humankind must, but also, that humankind can accept responsibility for being human.
The experience of being human is up to human beings to shape. Would any Unitarian Universalist wish to deny that? We may differ on the range of alternatives open to us. We may differ on the limits we face. We may differ on the powers we recognize and what we call them. We may differ on whether we should take more control or exercise less over the natural world in which we are situated. And we may differ on the proper reach of our capacities. Over these things and others we may well differ. But over the humanist tradition itself—over the joint affirmations that the human project is endlessly fascinating, that we are collectively responsible for our fate, and that within limits we have the capacity to exercise that responsibility—do we differ on this? And if we do not, for how long should we fear the big word? For how long should it make us unhappy?
John H. Weston received a B.A. from Dartmouth, a Ph.D. from Columbia, and, in 1988, an M.Div. from Meadville/Lombard.
He served as minister of All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church, Kansas City, Missouri, from 1992-1999