Modern Humanism

With today's style of education, we can only assume that it is a modern comparison of scholasticism being lost to humanism. To get a more clear understanding, read this article about an address at Dartmouth University (which is now under the care of the St. Joseph Province Dominicans).

With an increase in persecution against Christians, we can see that what our country was founded upon (a Christian understanding of God as the director and politicians as those who aided God by protecting life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) is too oppressive for some, and so it happens that it often offends those who would even call themselves Christians. Christianity is too oppressive for some? (That is another topic for another day.) But Hinduism, Buddhism, and the like are not? Is it because Christianity, or more specifically Catholicism, as the epitome of all religions, has too many "rules and regulations?" Or, is it because people just want to do something new and different, against the flow?

In the Renaissance when Humanism was chosen as an "evolved" form of scholasticism, it varied in one key aspect: a lack of logic. While humanism started to look at literary devices to help understand the Bible, a good thing, the scholastics worried that since the humanist studies did not include logic, it wouldn't matter how many chiasmi you could find in the Gospels. If you didn't understand it correctly in the first place, then no matter how much you look at the poetic devices found in the Bible, it would all be for naught. The Protestants revolutionists fell in to this by interpretting the Bible in their own method, which just so happened to contradict 1500 years of understanding the Sacred Scriptures.

But, even with humanism lacking logic, it wasn't void of God. Many of the humanist authors still held to the Church's teachings (at least in thought). Many repented when they realized that some things they wrote might have been heretical. Boccaccio tried to recall his Decameron because he realized how scandalous it was. Humanism wasn't void of God; it just didn't understand Him correctly.

But, the new way of things is the change from humanism to secular humanism, a change that is possibly even more ill-forsaken. This change not only misunderstands God and misinterprets His Divine Word, but also it seeks to destroy Him completely. It seeks to separate all that is held sacred by the Christian faith and make it the scapegoat. It seeks to repel the Word of God if it infringes upon one's "freedom of conscience." It is a good thing that Benedict XVI is the Pope to battle this unfortunate skewing of nature. Yes, Christianity is natural. It makes logical sense (and with logic gone from the humanist studies, it is not hard to see how the secular humanists don't even think that logic is logical). It works with natural law. It works with reason. It works with human emotion. It makes the mind, body, and person's self (a more complete understanding of this would be a person's soul) become more perfect; perfect as can be while still living on this earth. It is real and makes sense. Yet, people feel threatened? It is a sad, sad day when reality becomes unreality.

"Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil, who change darkness into light, and light into darkness, who change bitter into sweet, and sweet into bitter!" (Isaiah 5:20)