Twentieth-Century Christian Humanists

Consider that by the turn of the twentieth century, the Nietzschean vision of humanity had “arrived,” and the West was surprised to find that it was exterminating itself by the millions and then plunging the survivors into “the great nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism.”

For example, in The Civilization of the West, Crane Brinton asserts, “The declarations of war in 1914 came as a profound shock to most of the Western world, which had come to think of a major war as impossible in the industrial complex of the twentieth century.” Calling it a “profound shock,” Briton argues convincingly that the modern world was thoroughly surprised by the Great War, and that it was so horrific, it was considered by historians to be an “epochal fact” in the history of culture. That is, it became one of the few landmark events in history so significant it actually demarcated and changed its own epoch. Just twenty years later, like a giant aftershock, World War II blazed full bore. When the dust settled, estimates ranging as high as 100 million people in Europe and Asia were killed by war, famines created by war and inhumane policies meant to decrease populations, and outright genocide.

While the West was making some of its most significant progress technologically, it was arguably simultaneously in its steepest decline, morally. Modern thought that lauded the absence of God, the preeminence of man, and the superiority of reason reached its zenith early in the twentieth century and it would be an understatement to say the world was surprised by what it learned.

Further, as 20^th-century Western Civilization clamored to reconcile its progress with its dehumanizing results, the Christian humanists of the period had a vision for a different kind of progress, a more human progress—one that included both faith and right reason. For instance—and quite Germaine to the point—in his book, J. R. R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth, Bradley Birzer argues that Tolkien’s vision for literature “attempted to use myth to return the Western world to faith and right reason,” and that his own sentiment “parallels the sentiments of numerous twentieth-century scholars and artists collectively known as Christian humanists.”

A list of these 20^th-century visionaries identified as  Christian humanists includes writers like Irving Babbitt, Nicholas Berdyaev, Willa Cather, G.K. Chesterton, Christopher Dawson, T. S. Eliot, Romano Guardini, Etienne Gilson, T. E. Hulme, Aurel Kolnai, C. S. Lewis, Jacques Maritain, Paul Elmer More, Wilhelm Roepke, J. R. R. Tolkien, and to some degree, Simone Weil.

Following close in age were still other Christian humanists with a very similar vision, like Hans urs Von Balthasar, Russell Kirk, Ralph McInerny, Peter Milward, Flannery O’Connor, John Paul II, Josef Pieper, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Granted this list is not exhaustive, nor does it signal any kind of ideological movement that prescribes itself to a stated manifesto—many of these writers and thinkers disagreed with each other on important issues—it serves to demonstrate a sampling of the influential men and women of letters who in and around Tolkien’s lifetime abhorred the dehumanizing results of modern thought and spoke out against the progressive ideology that was robbing culture of its humanity.

To emphasis and restated the point, it was 20^th-century Christian humanists like these listed who were, in specific ways, arguing for a standard of human flourishing amidst one of the most strikingly horrific periods of cultural decline in human history. And it seems that by studying the Christian humanists of the 20^th-century, post-modern social critics can grasp a better understanding of the standard by which to measure the decline of the West.