One of the most memorable lines in all Modernist poetry comes from the pen of W.B. Yeats:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
Can the centre hold? Not in the Modern/Postmodern world. Not in a secular humanist world. What is the centre in secular humanism? Humanity. What is humanity? Ultimately, whatever human beings say it is. But which human beings? Humans are apt to disagree. The centre cannot hold.
Secular humanists usually point to ethics, science and reason as the centre. We can build human and humane societies according to human values (approximating the Good), human understanding (approximating the True) and the human senses (approximating the True in the sciences and the Beautiful in the arts). But the Good, the True and the Beautiful are transcendental ideals that must be grounded in ultimate reality if they are not to slip and slide into relativism. Things fall apart.
We can see this empirically. Yeats wrote The Second Coming in 1919. Secular humanism has dominated the West (and by extension, the rest) ever since then. Look what happened to the fortunes of the Good, the True and the Beautiful in the twentieth century. Never have human beings been more confused and divided.
Christian humanism is not secular humanism. What is the centre in Christian humanism? The cross. What is “the cross”? It is self-emptying (kenotic) faith and revelation. At the centre of the centre is God. God is One. But everything is God. God contains everything. Somehow the One and the Many are unified. How? Through the Trinity.
The centre can hold. Because it is eternally self-emptying, it can hold all things. As such, it is “omnipresent”. Because it has absolute faith, it can achieve anything, so is “omnipotent”. Because it has infinite understanding, it can comprehend everything, so is “omniscient”.
Christianity is the only religion that has a human being actually present in the Godhead (as the second person of the Trinity) at the centre of reality. Consequently, it is the only truly humanist religion. Christianity invites us to call God “our Father” and to participate in the “Sonhood” of Christ. It calls us to be children of God through the Holy Spirit. It asks us to manifest the imago dei (the image of God) in our human, all-too-human lives.
For Christians, to be human is not just to be homo religiosus in the abstract, but to be actually, existentially, grounded in the One, in God. To be fully human is to be a child of God, and to participate directly in the source of reality and creativity, not through human principles and reasons, laws and commandments, not even through divinely ordained laws and commandments (as in other religions), but through direct spiritual contact with the centre.
Christian humanism implies Christian mysticism and ultimately, Christian shamanism.
We can hold onto the centre, “the cross”, through kenosis, pistis and gnosis, and it can hold us.
Lao Tzu says, “Hold fast to the centre.” (Tao Te Ching, chapter 5).
bread of life 