In order to understand the value of the Christian humanists’ perspective, it will be necessary to define exactly what is meant when the expression is used.
The New World Encyclopedia defines Christian humanism as “the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles.”
Working from this definition, Christian humanism marries two apparently contradictory ideas. On the one hand is Christianity and its doctrines and moral practices. On the other hand is classical humanist principles that appear to consist of human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry.
All of this seems to suggest there is a way in which Christian humanists envision reality that embraces both faith and right reason.
Further, humanists tend to be loosely connected through a Republic of letters. Given this literary nature and the prolific volumes of letters left behind by the Christian humanists, it is safe to assume they value literature as one of the vehicles for steering culture toward a worldview that promotes human flourishing and away from the modern notions of progress.
As a result, this dissertation will examine three of the previously mentioned twentieth-century Christian humanists, Flannery O’Connor, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien in order to show how these writers, addressing the decline in their particular 20th-century modernist milieu, used imaginative literature to pin down the idea of decadence in Western civilization in precise ways.
In an epoch where human reality had been reduced to materialism, human knowledge to scientism, and human ethics to utilitarianism, these three championed a vision of reality that included both metaphysical and material reality, a historic epistemology that included both faith and reason, and a Christian humanist vision for the human being (i.e., the existence of an incorporeal soul and telos of human flourishing).
What specifically unites these three as the focus of this dissertation is their similar use of the grotesque in their imaginative literature as well as their respective popularity and subsequent influence in the literary world.
By using grotesque characters to signal something of a distorted human being, these writers helped readers organically intuit a reality that is eternal, an epistemology that is common to all, and a human telos which truly constitutes excellence, vitality, and prosperity. By illuminating a standard for human flourishing in this way, a higher state of existence from which civilization has declined is more clearly grasped and reasonably established.
Looking forward to the rest of your dissertation.