Christianity and Humanism
Agape and Eros : a Study of the Christian Idea of Love. By Anders Nygren. Translated by A. G. Hebert. (S.P.C.K. 6s.)
TUE traditional culture of Western Europe, and of the new peoples which derive from it, is drawn from a fusion of Christ- ianity with the legacy of the classical civilization. But the fusion has never been complete. It has never been unattended by conflict, and the spiritual history of the West might be written in terms of this conflict of forces. The Renaissance and the Reformation provide the two crucial examples : but the tension exhibited at that period is straining the loyalties of our contemporaries. This age is essentially Hellenic, and for the moment the Jewish-Christian tradition seems to maintain but a very precarious hold in it. Indeed, this conflict between the two traditions is the chief problem before the western world. It is not surprising that in our own time the issue should have been raised in an acute form, and that some thinkers on both sides of the line should suspect an inherent incompatibility between Christianity and Humanism. Of that misgiving this book is a symptom. The whole tendency since the Renaissance has been in a humanitarian direction, regarding Man as sufficient to himself ; it is Humanism without Christianity. The reaction is now setting in from the Continent, in the so-called Barthian Theology, towards Christianity without Humanism.
Dr. Nygren's book is a highly important study as a chapter in this unresolved controversy. Love is the key-word of both systems, alike of Christianity and of Platonism, which thus seem to be made for one another. As the author insists, the idea of Eros is fundamental not only to Plato, but to Aristotle and the neo-Platonist and indeed to the whole philosophical structure on which Christian theology was built. Love is the fundamental concept of the New Testament and Christian devotion. But does love mean the same in both cases ? Are Agape and Eros identical, or are they in fact sharply opposed terms ? In other words, is the traditional Christian humanism an illegitimate union of contradictories ? This is the question which the author examines from an objective, philological standpoint, with no desire (as he claims) to prove a thesis.
The examination is easily conducted. It is a comparatively easy task to exhibit the two terms in opposition. It is clear that the " heavenly Eros " means, for Plato, the desire of the soul for perfection. It is the impulse which inspires the ascent from beauty of sense to beauty-in-itself. It is bound up 'both with the doctrine of Ideas and the absolute values of Beauty, Truth and Goodness, and with the conception of the human soul as an iddestructible spark of divinity reascending from the world of sense to its eternal and divine origin. In its developed, Aristotelian form in which it literally " makes the world go round," Eros explains the " movement " of the universe. It is the attraction of matter towards form, of the moved towards the unmoved First Mover which " moves it as the object of desire " (KIvel Ws tp6ievop). But there is here no mutuality : the Aristotelian God or First Mover does not merely not " love the world " but is not even aware of its existence. This is certainly not the Love of Christianity. Dr. Nygren quotes Willamowitz as asserting that the author of 1 Cor. xiii and the author of the Myth of Eros had in fact no point in common, and " if they could have met and conversed would have made nothing of one another."
To all this Agape stands in sharp contrast. It is not man's desire but God's gift. It is the outpouring of the divine initiative—undeserved (as St. Paul always insists) and un- motived, save as the essential activity of the divine Being itself. It is not that God loves those who deserve it, or those who have purged their souls for the ascent to Him. He loves, simply because " God is Agape." The point of some of the most difficult parables, which seem to do violence to our sense of justice—e.g., that of the Labourers in the Vineyard--is, says Dr. Nygren, to emphasize that the " cause " of love is not in the object but in the sole nature of God. (While we were yet sinners Christ died for us.) Thus the love of the Christian towards God and towards his neighbour and even his enemies appears to be the exact antithesis of the man-centred Eros of Hellenism. All man's worth is a gift of God—for Christianity does not believe in the innate value of the human soul ; it is God's love that endows us with worth in His sight-- and all his love a response to Agape : " we love because He first loved us." The distinction seems to be absolute and complete.
Now it is no doubt of the highest importance that we should be thus confronted with the contrast between Christianity and Platonism. For it is at least open to very serious doubt whether authentic Christian experience can be interpreted in Platonic terms. There is no true pathway from the Abso- lute Values to the kind of God whom the Christian religion worships. The Christian religion, when all is said, is not the ascent of purified souls into the realm of " eternal values." It is the response of the common man and sinner to God's activity in the world of history. The dis- tinctive conviction of Christian Theism is that because God is Agape, He is self-revealing and self-imparting, endowing the creatures with His own excellence and redeeming men's hearts by His work through Christ. We are redeemed in the world, not out of it, and redemption is wrought by the divine initiative. It is by God's " grace " that we are saved.
It is most important to make this distinction ; for the native quality of the Christian ethic and its most characteristic valuations draw from this conception of Agape. The author is justified in claiming that it was the supreme achievement of Luther to recover this utterly central Christian emphasis and vindicate Agape against Eros. Yet Luther's achievement has another side to it. Creator and Redeemer are one God. The attempt to set forth a theology of redemption torn out of its context of creation—which has been the post-Reforma- tion tendency—has brought Christianity to its present weak- ness. In his reaction against Roman legalism Luther also, con- sciously or unconsciously, repudiated the Renaissance Human- ism. As Mr. Christopher Dawson observes, " he eliminated the philosophical and Hellenic elements [in Western Christ- ianity] and accentuated everything that was Semitic and non-intellectual." Reformed Christianity has not yet re- covered from it. It has been its nemesis that personal piety has remained intraverted and isolated, out of touch with the currents of life and the forces that shape the patterns of civilization. To this, as much as to anything else, it is due that the Humanism of the twentieth century remains unre- deemed by Christianity and is sinking fast into impotence and despair. Nor can the new continental theology offer much to remedy this predicament. We cannot hope to heal the hurt of the world by any reversion to the old dualism between Redemption and Creation—which means, in effect, between religion and culture. Nor, in truth, shall we strengthen Christianity. Religion, withdrawn from admixture with the world, too-easily becomes pathological. Christianity without Humanism may be something as crude and ineffective as
Humanism without Christianity. F. R. B.tunr.
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