"All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books."
-Thomas Carlyle

by Louis A. Markos

I am a Christian. I believe in a divine Creator who exists outside of his creation and yet is actively involved in it. I believe this Creator, though he transcends historical time and space, is the prime mover of history — both sacred and secular. I believe this Creator created the first man and woman in his own image to live in a state of grace, but that they disobeyed the Creator and fell from grace. I believe that at a precise moment in time this Creator, out of his love for fallen humanity, entered into his creation in the form of a man. I believe this man, Jesus Christ, to be fully human and fully divine and believe that through his sacrificial death on the cross the reconciliation of Man and God was effected. I believe Jesus resurrected bodily from the tomb, is alive today, and can be known personally and intimately by those who open their hearts to him. I believe the Creator and Jesus exist eternally in the relationship of Father and Son and yet share in the same God-head. I believe the Holy Spirit also shares in this God-head. I believe the Holy Spirit is active both in the Church and the life of each individual believer and that he endows each believer with gifts. I believe history is moving unswervingly toward a telos (a purposeful end), at which time Christ will return to establish his kingdom and judge, finally and irrevocably, all of humanity. I believe both that the soul is immortal, and that, at the Final Judgment Day, we will be clothed in glorious Resurrection Bodies like the one that Christ wore when he ascended to the Father. I believe that, after the Final Judgment, those who have received unto themselves Christ's free gift of grace will spend eternity in the presence of God (heaven) while those who have closed their hearts to this gift will be cast forever out of the presence of God (hell). I believe the Bible is a faithful and wholly trustworthy account of God's interactions with and interventions in human history, that, like Jesus, it is fully human and fully divine, and that it holds absolute authority in the life of the believer.

I am a humanist. I believe man is a free and rational creature who possesses innate dignity and value, and whose life and achievements on this earth are of intrinsic and lasting worth. I believe in the power of human reason and creativity to shape and change the world, to delve into the mysteries of nature and of the human psyche, to order human society through the establishment of laws, institutions, and ethical codes, to perfect nature through the cultivation of the arts and the sciences, and to preserve a record, in various mediums, of these accomplishments. I believe the proper study of man is man, and, as the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome constitute the root and first flowering of humanistic thought, I believe that Greco-Roman art, literature, history, philosophy, and religion must form the basis of any true education. I believe it is the duty of every enlightened individual to seek to know and to participate in the flow of human ideas through a study of and a grappling with the major expressions of the human imagination. I believe such a study must lead in the end to the creation of good and noble citizens who seek both to enrich their society without and to fulfill within the Socratic mandate: Know Thyself.

I am a humanist Christian. I stand, like the Colossus of Rhodes, with my legs stretched out across two shores: my right foot poised atop Golgotha (Jerusalem); my left upon the Acropolis (Athens). I feel neither discomfort nor conflict, and, though I do yearn within for the day when my legs will be drawn together in a geographical consummation that will leave both my feet planted firmly in the good soil of Zion (New Jerusalem), I do not perceive that these opposing shores are either hostile or alien. I do not hear, as Matthew Arnold did, the sound of ignorant armies clashing by night. I hear rather the low rumble of deep calling out to deep, as though the Eastern shore were calling out to the Western like a lover wooing his beloved. And I sense (as even Arnold did in a moment of illumination) that the two shores are but torn halves of a single continent. Once unified, now divided, they are yet joined by two criss-crossing lights, two beams in darkness. The guiding light that flows from the one (Jerusalem) illuminates and dignifies the other (Athens), while the searching light that gropes outward from the other loses itself finally in the one.

I am a humanist Christian. Though I admit the euphonic superiority of the alternate phrase, Christian humanist, I must still insist on the grammatical (and perhaps ontological) precision of the former phrase. Christian is the substantive; humanist the descriptive. I am a humanist Christian in the same sense that I am a Greek American. I, like my parents, was born and raised in America. My self-identity, my allegiance, my very reason for being are linked to America. But my grandparents were born and raised in Greece, and there is a something in my soul that yet responds to this ancestry, that resonates with the legacy of three millennia. My firm citizenship in the one frees me to explore those elemental ties to the other that even now flow along my blood like the sound of Derwent water flowed along the dreams of the young Wordsworth. My participation in my Greek heritage individualizes and strengthens me, a strength and an individuality that I carry with me into my primary and fuller citizenship.

Christian is the substantive; humanist the descriptive. Of the two, Christian (and all that it implies) is the more real, the more concrete term. In my own experience, it is the "evidence of things not seen" that forms the firm foundation of my life and thought. The Trinity, the Incarnation, the Resurrection, these are my verities, the touchstones against which I measure all earthly manifestations. I am aware that I have just switched the poles. Like Plato, I have suggested that what we loosely term heaven is in fact the home of the real, the essential, the actual (the Forms) while this world is but the haunt of shadows (indeed of the shadows of shadows). Like Descartes, I have suggested that I have more proof (more real proof) of the existence of God and of mind/soul (Plato's psyche) than I do of the physical world of matter. And to some extent I mean to suggest this. The final locus of reality must belong to the one who created reality, to the cause, not the effect, to the mover, not that which is moved. The one who, though outside time, initiated, controls, and will bring to an end human history must be more truly historical than any mere facet of the historical process itself. The Incarnation is not a mere aesthetic expression of the human need for cosmic reconciliation; it is the historical and meta-historical reality that is both the source of and the answer to the deepest needs (aesthetic or otherwise) of mankind. Christ incarnate, crucified, resurrected seizes the mind with the power of reality, not of myth. It is rather those sublime expressions of humanistic thought that resonate with mythic force and that point, forward and backward, to the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

I agree with Descartes (Meditation III): "we must in the end reach a first idea, the cause of which is, as it were, the archetype in which all the reality or perfection that is in the idea only objectively, by way of representation, is contained formally [i.e., actually]." But this is as far as I go in my agreement. I stop short of any Cartesian dualism that would divide body and soul. For the very essence of reality is the Incarnation, the two-in-one, the perfect fusion of spiritual and physical, soul and body, Christian and humanist. As a humanist Christian, I refuse to mortify, denigrate, or ignore the flesh. As Christ was and (I think) still is one-hundred percent God and one-hundred percent Man, so is mankind one-hundred percent spirit and one-hundred percent body (and, like Christ, will continue to be so when we don our Resurrection Bodies in the New Jerusalem). God's heaven is filled with purely spiritual beings; they are called angels. Man is not such. He is not an angel, but neither is he a beast. He is a two-in-one, a fused double. As the Son of Man, Christ is the perfection of this fusion. Indeed, the controlling metaphor (and reality) of the humanist Christian vision is the Incarnation. To downplay or reject the spiritual nature of Christ (and by extension the spiritual nature of man) is to fall into stoicism, deism, and materialism. To downplay or reject the physical nature of Christ (and by extension the physical nature of man) is to fall into pantheism, gnosticism, and legalism.

Each of these six "isms" (used here as umbrella terms for wide-scale systems of thought and behavior) marks a breakdown in that spiritual/physical fusion that is the very essence of man's nature and that, revealed and perfectly effected in Christ, is God with us, the salvation of the world. They are symptoms of a malaise, a disease that sickens mind and will when the elemental harmony of body and soul is lost. The first three offer examples of what happens when what purports to be true humanism is divorced from the Christian beliefs in a real and personal Creator who controls, enters into, and redeems history. The second three offer counter examples of what happens when what purports to be true Christianity is divorced from a humanistic faith in the innate dignity of man and the redemptive potential of the flesh and its pursuits. In both cases, we are left with a paltry, ineffectual philosophy/religion that can neither fully save nor fully dignify. When carried out to its logically insane end, the former "isms" yield a frightening totalitarian world of Nazi death camps and Communist correctional facilities, a lowest-common-denominator world in which man is terrorized from without and within by what George Orwell has called the Thought Police. When carried out to its insanely logical end, the latter yield an equally frightening world of inquisitions and witch hunts that kill from without and obsessive internalized feelings of guilt and self-hatred that kill from within.

As a humanist Christian, it has long been my belief that when either side of the spiritual/physical make-up of man is downplayed or ignored, when true humanism and true Christianity (phrases that are, in their highest sense, equivalent) are stripped of their full import and integrity, the result is neither an expansion of human autonomy nor an exaltation of man's capacity for spiritual growth, but a lessening, a shrinking both of humanity and the human project. Indeed, an integrated humanist Christianity provides the only firm foundation for the assertion of human dignity, the assessment of human potential, and the achievement of human goals. Only if we can navigate between the Scylla of secular humanism and the Charybdis of dead legalism, can we hope to find our way back home.

Louis Markos is a Professor in English at Houston (TX) Baptist University; he is the author of Lewis Agonistes: How C. S. Lewis can train us to Wrestle with the Modern & Postmodern World (Broadman & Holman, 2003).