Theocentric Humanism: A Catholic Response to Modernity

The Enlightenment’s atomization of truth to human reason delegated ethical questions previously entrusted to the Church to the individual. 

Ethical behavior was no longer effected through divine grace and human freedom but by individual autonomy. In a Nietzschean estimation, it was no longer in God Whom “we live and move and have our being,” but rather, “God dies; materialized man thinks he can be man or superman only if God is not God” (Revised Standard Version 2nd Catholic Edition, Acts 17:28; Maritain, “Integral Humanism,” 172). 

Instead of relying on religion to confer dignity upon human life, secular “humanists” endeavored to promote human flourishing by scrutinizing traditional authority and championing extra-religious economic and socio-political liberties and rights. The apotheosis of reason had imprinted an unprecedented change upon the human condition. Modernity celebrated ideologies like secular humanism that seemed inimical to Catholic intellectual teachings. However, Catholics could not simply flee from an age subversive to the faith. How then could a Catholic live in an environment hostile to the Church?

In their responses to modernity, Pope Leo XIII and French philosopher Jacques Maritain propose a social framework geared towards actualizing Christ’s everlasting message in the Gospels through a theocentric approach to human affairs. They suggest that one must not concede that Catholicism is merely an ossified tradition. Rather, modern Catholics should live to actualize the Gospel, the timeless Good News that transcends secular economic and political ideologies and truly humanizes one’s condition. “It is in vain,” Maritain suggests, “that one affirms the dignity and vocation of the human person if one does not work to transform conditions which oppress him” (“Integral Humanism,” 211). Leo and Maritain strive to integrate the best of progressivism — that is, only the modern social tenets that are congruent with the Gospels and Church teaching. The shared position of Pope Leo XIII and Maritain is bidirectional, such that it lends credence to orthodox ecumenical teaching and coalesces the best of what modernity has to offer.

Nearly a century after the French Revolution, Pope Leo XIII reproaches “the spirit of revolutionary change, which has long been disturbing the nations of the world.” (Pope Leo XIII, “Rerum Novarum,” 1). Thus begins Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII’s most famous Papal Encyclical that denounces the secularized economic ideologies of both capitalism and socialism that had materialized since the Enlightenment. Leo rebukes the “moral degeneracy” of capitalism and socialism, yet affirms the right imbued in human nature to own private property, while simultaneously maintaining that governments should implement distributive justice measures in their economic systems (“Rerum Novarum,” 1). Pope Leo XIII’s social teaching originates from the notion of Christian charity, which transcends political divides, defies secular economic policy, and uplifts the dignity of every human being. In Aeterni Patris, Pope Leo XIII advocates for a traditional yet renewed intellectual response to the novel philosophies of modernity by revitalizing the “golden wisdom of St. Thomas” (Pope Leo XIII, “Aeterni Patris,” 1). Pope Leo XIII calls upon Catholic philosophers to utilize the permanent value of the scholastic method by harnessing reason and argumentation to fortify the Catholic faith.

On the eve of WWII, French Thomistic philosopher Jacques Maritain responded to Pope Leo XIII’s exhortations to “[restore] the renowned teaching of Thomas Aquinas and [win] it back to its ancient beauty” in his text Integral Humanism (“Aeterni Patris,” 25). Maritain offers a vision of modern Christendom buttressed by a robust understanding of the history of humanism. While Maritain refutes the errors of modernity, he traces its shortcomings back to the blunders of the Middle Ages. Maritain frames his narrative as “the tragedy of humanism,” which is both an “anthropological” and a “theological” issue (“Integral Humanism,” 157). He illuminates a “certain theological inhumanity… of medieval Catholicism” prior to Aquinas, which emphasized man’s salvation through compliance with objective truth, but trivialized the subjectivity of human experience in this pursuit. Medieval man lived by the telos of human life, namely God, but neglected his own condition simultaneously. “What mattered the losses, the disasters?” Maritain remarks, “A divine work was being accomplished by the baptized soul. The creature was severely lacerated… it forgot itself for God” (“Integral Humanism,” 161). Suddenly, when the Medieval man ruminated on his condition, he suffered an existentialist dread, dismayed by the predicament “of being nothing” (Ibid). Such is the “catastrophe of the Middle Ages,” giving rise to the “engendering of secular civilization” and departure from the salvific miracle of Christ (Ibid).

The plight of Medieval man incited an “anthropocentric rehabilitation of the creature,” which first materialized during the Reformation and Renaissance (Ibid). Following the Middle Ages, man “believes in God and in His grace, but he disputes the terrain with Him” (“Integral Humanism,” 164). The “terrain” that Maritain refers to is the “efficacy of grace and freedom,” challenged by Protestant theologians like Luther and Calvin in the 16th century, adapted by Molina, and eventually upended by an “absolute humanist theology” (Ibid). In Maritain’s words, “Just as the pure Protestant theology of grace is a theology of grace without freedom, the pure humanist theology or metaphysic of freedom is a theology or a metaphysic of freedom without grace” (“Integral Humanism,” 164-165). In modern metaphysics, the freedom of the human mind usurps divine grace to ameliorate the human condition. Grace, according to absolute humanist theology, is “reabsorbed in nature” — that is, man is no longer stained with original sin, but becomes “naturally holy” according to thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau (“Integral Humanism,” 166). Man begins to peer inward, not upward, and the “rehabilitation of the creature turning back upon itself” is “separated from its transcendent vivifying principle” (“Integral Humanism,” 168). The grace that was previously transcendent becomes immanent, and a certain reverence towards the human being satiates man’s yearnings instead of divine worship. Heaven becomes secularized and materialized; an “absolute immanentist metaphysic” emerges and Heaven is no longer supratemporal, but instead occurs “in history” in the form of Hegel’s Utopia (“Integral Humanism,” 186-187).

This progressive philosophy of history is adopted by Karl Marx, who modifies the historical idealism of Hegel into a materialistic, communist system. He conceives of a “utopian messianism,” wherein the “secularized kingdom of God which, though terminating history, remains in history and in the time of this world” (“Integral Humanism,” 189). Marx’s philosophy is atheistic in essence, as it suggests that Utopia can be obtained solely by human means. Original sin is rendered null, and salvation is not sought through Christ, but rather communal “salvation” becomes the prerogative of the State. No longer is the Church the intermediary between Heaven and Earth, but in Maritain’s analysis, the State becomes the sole means to Utopia. The political regime is divinized, and Marx’s metaphysic materializes into a contorted “atheistic religion” (“Integral Humanism,” 175).

Marx’s fundamental error according to Maritain was his “failure to recognize the eternal in man” (“Integral Humanism,” 208). With the divine impulse severed from human nature, “the creature takes his ease and makes himself the center, in his own lower order itself” (Ibid). In other words, when man isolates his humanity from his divine origin, he diminishes his own human dignity. No longer does human nature bear the likeness and image of God, but man is reduced to a “lower order.” Thus, in degrading the value of human life, “anthropocentric humanism merits the name of inhuman humanism” (“Integral Humanism,” 169). In Maritain’s words, man becomes a “monster dear to himself” by “[deifying] within himself the titanism of human nature” (“Integral Humanism,” 170,182).

Pope Leo XIII addresses a similar question of humanism in Rerum Novarum, particularly as it relates to the economic systems in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. Much like Maritain, Leo contends that the Church should not be a tacit bystander in modernity. Instead, he affirms that it ought to engage with modernity by spearheading economic and social issues concerning human rights, “for no practical solution of this question will be found apart from the intervention of religion and of the Church” (“Rerum Novarum,” 16).

Pope Leo XIII’s social theory is anchored in that of Aquinas and adapted to address the novel economic innovations of modernity. Leo acknowledges man’s natural right to own private property and dispose of it in accordance with Aquinas’s precepts of natural law without government intervention (“Rerum Novarum,” 6). True humanism according to Leo holds that “the first and most fundamental principle… must be the inviolability of private property” (“Rerum Novarum,” 15). In the same vein, he defends the nuclear family as the fabric of society and rebukes the noxious suggestion of Marx to unweave it, for “the contention… that the civil government should at its option intrude into and exercise intimate control over the family and the household is a great and pernicious error” (“Rerum Novarum,” 14).

Embedded in Rerum Novarum is Pope Leo XIII’s conviction that the Church be the leading voice in the pursuit of authentic humanism in the economic sphere. He emphasizes that “no practical solution of this question will be sound apart from the intervention of religion and of the Church” (“Rerum Novarum,” 16). Likewise, amidst the frenetic clamor of modernity, Pope Leo XIII reminds Catholic faithful that “God has not created us for the perishable and transitory things of earth, but for things heavenly and everlasting,” just as Christ reminds us that we “are not of this world, even as I am not of the world” (“Rerum Novarum,” 21; Jn. 17:14).

Pope Leo XIII’s vision for modern Christendom is strikingly similar to that of Maritain: true humanism must be theocentric. A conception of human nature without God is deficient. Any initiative to humanize man without recognizing God in him will be of no avail, for “it is not man’s own rights which are here in question, but the rights of God, the most sacred and inviolable of rights” (“Rerum Novarum,” 40). Human rights connote God’s rights. Only through this recognition will man come to behold the image of God impressed upon fellow man, and treat humans as ends in themselves, rather than mere means. Only then will social and political divides be amended, and capitalist and laborer can recognize each other by their innate human dignity, rather than by their economic status.

Both Pope Leo XIII and Jacques Maritain “think that the theology of St. Thomas will dominate a new Christendom” (“Integral Humanism,” 199). “The task which imposes itself upon the Christian” that Leo and Maritain aim to resolve, “is to save the ‘humanist’ truths disfigured by four centuries of anthropocentric humanism” (“Integral Humanism,” 197). Both Leo and Maritain recognize that man must be “rehabilitated in God,” and that the “one solution for the history of the world” is “theocentric humanism, rooted where man has his roots,” and “integral humanism, humanism in the Incarnation” (Ibid). To avoid an “inhuman humanism” and salvage the positive components of the humanist movement, one must acknowledge that “God is the center of man” (“Integral Humanism,” 169). With a charitable reading of modern socialist intentions, Maritain pioneers the notion of “integral humanism,” which synthesizes the veritable insights of thinkers like Marx and redeems them through a theocentric implementation of their theories. According to Maritain, by peering through a theocentric lens, a sincere humanist can rectify “all the truths affirmed or glimpsed by socialist humanism, by uniting them in an organic and vital manner with numerous other truths” (“Integral Humanism,” 208). 

The questioning Catholic, then, should not circumvent modernity, but resurrect it with a theocentric humanism.

According to Maritain, Marx’s conception of human nature is deficient. Although many scholars of Marxist thought would disagree, Maritain interprets a “metaphysical radicalism” underlying Marx’s atheistic project (“Integral Humanism,” 191). Marx’s ambition to “oust the transcendent God of whom he is the image” distorts human nature profusely — man himself becomes a mundane god confined by space and time, deindividualized and devoted to a materialistic collective (Ibid). The rehabilitation of man that Marx seeks denies the “essential exigencies of human nature and that image of God and that primacy of transcendent values which precisely permit and excite a renewal” (“Integral Humanism,” 211). Maritain responds to what he deems an erroneous assessment of human nature by detailing a “veritable socio-temporal realization of the Gospel” (Ibid). In other words, the Christian must fulfill the good works outlined in the Gospels as a renewed creation. Maritain exhorts Christians to actualize the “transfiguration — whereby man, consenting to be changed and knowing that he is changed by grace, works to become and to realize the new man that he is through God” (Ibid). In the words of St. Paul, “if any one is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come” (2 Corinthians 5:17). Unlike the Middle Ages, the theocentric humanist movement must reflect its noble intentions with tangible results, and truly better man’s earthly condition.

Fortified by a robust Thomist framework, Jacques Maritain codifies Pope Leo XIII’s renewed social vision. In a Leonine appeal to Christians facing modernity, Maritain urges Catholic faithful to mitigate the errors of Medieval Christendom and aspire towards an actualized Christianity, where every man “can eat his bread with dignity” (“Integral Humanism,” 211). 

Only then can an integral, theocentric humanism be realized, and the errors of a pernicious age be mended.

_

Works Cited

Maritain, Jacques. “Integral Humanism” in The Collected Works of Jacques Maritain. trans. Otto Bird, Joseph, Evans, and Richard O’Sullivan. ed. Otto Bird. Indiana, University of Notre Dame Press, 1996).

Pope Leo XIII. “Aeterni Patris: Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII on the Restoration of Christian Philosophy.” The Holy See. 4 August 1879, https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_04081879_aeterni-patris.html. Accessed 4 April 2025

Pope Leo XIII. “Rerum Novarum: Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII on Capital and Labor.” The Holy See. 15 May 1891, http://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum.html. Accessed 4 April 2025.

The Bible. Revised Standard Version, 2nd Catholic ed., Ignatius Press, 2024.