the New Pantagruel

Christian Humanism, Past and Present

by Dan Knauss

This essay, though it is slightly updated here, was written about five years ago, well before The New Pantagruel was a living reality, but in retrospect it contains a lot of the ideas that have gone into tNP and was helped through some revisions back then by two other people who have been a part of our project. -DK

rom the standpoint of postmodernist thinkers like Jean-François Lyotard, western cultures universalize assumptions about what is “human” and “rational,” as if these concepts are not culturally and historically specific, the malleable products of power and ideology. According to Lyotard and others, in the hands of science and the modern state, idealizations of human autonomy and rationality have become parts of an oppressive and imperialistic apparatus. They support a “grand narrative” (or “metanarrative”) about the nature and direction of humanity and history which justifies violence and injustice carried out against marginal groups that do not conform to the beliefs and values that inform western notions of truth, justice or freedom.

If postmodernism can be generalized, then, as an effort to expose and challenge western modernity’s valuation of the autonomous, rational human individual, the Enlightenment is commonly seen by postmodernists as the period in which the ideal of the autonomous, rational self achieved cultural dominance while the cultural impulse toward that end is typically located centuries earlier, in the Renaissance, often in relation to the humanist movement. This postmodernist intellectual historiography is in large part a reaction to that of modern humanists, or simply modernists, who considered themselves the heirs of the Enlightenment and Renaissance humanism. Unlike contemporary postmodernists, modernists celebrated the historical development of modernity as a liberatory drama that climaxed in the triumph of the individual and nation states constructed on rational principles. As Leo Spitzer put it in Linguistics and Literary History: Essays in Stylistics, “the Humanist believes in the power bestowed on the human mind of investigating the human mind.” However, in the wake of a century of unprecedented warfare, totalitarianism, genocide, weapons of mass destruction, state propaganda, terrorism, and a host of other unprecedented ills, the modernist’s confidence in “culture” and “liberal” or “humanistic” education was profoundly shaken, if not destroyed. Often cited as a foundational postmodernist manifesto, Martin Heidegger’s influential “Letter on Humanism” expressed a profound post-war disillusionment with the humanistic project of European educational systems since the nineteenth century.

Detail of Martin Luther; “Frühbürgerliche Revolution in Deutschland” (1987)
(Das Bauernkriegspanorama)
by Werner Tübke

Given the trajectory of modern history, it is understandable why Postmodernists radically disagree with the modernist/humanist view of humanity and history to the point of declaring themselves to be anti-humanists and anti-modernists. Nevertheless, Postmodernists still accept most of the modernist historical narrative as valid in itself. That is, they do not question the premise that the Renaissance saw the birth of the autonomous individual. The difference for postmodernists is that the autonomous individual is not a good thing or even a reality. Rather, it is a fallacious ideological construct that serves the oppressive interests of a modernity conceived according to western, Eurocentric values and presuppositions. Postmodernists are inclined to regard self-proclaimed “modern,” “first-world” nations with suspicion as they constitute a global minority of people who nevertheless put themselves at the center of world maps, dominating international affairs with their own interests and native forms of discourse. It is not my intention here to dispute the accuracy of this view but rather the accuracy of the historical narrative that is frequently employed to support it.

In the opinion of many scholars who study medieval and renaissance culture in a variety of disciplines, the historical narrative that modernists and postmodernists both accept should have been discarded many years ago. In Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe, Charles Nauert refers to it as a “historical myth, … the product of the secular, liberal intellectuals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who were searching for the origins of their own beliefs and values.” Similarly, Charles Trinkaus, one of the most influential Renaissance intellectual historians in recent times, argued in “Marsilio Ficino and the Ideal of Human Autonomy” that late twentieth-century scholars who saw the autonomy ideal arising in the Renaissance were subscribing to an interpretation “fueled by Nietzsche … and developed, especially in the 1930s and 1940s, as a counter to the gloomy forebodings of Marx, Weber, and others.”

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