Against European Humanism

Justin Popović’s cultural and philosophical polemic: his diagnosis of European humanism — from the Renaissance through rationalism to modern secularism and nihilism — as the tragedy of the man-god, his counter-proposal of a “philosophy of the God-Man” against every anthropocentrism, and Svetosavlje, the way of St. Sava, as its Serbian embodiment. This file presents his position in full and notes where it is criticized.

Tradition: Serbian Orthodox (glorified 2010)

The Diagnosis of Humanism

The most public and most controversial of Justin Popović’s ideas is his critique of “European humanism.” By humanism (humanizam) Justin does not mean simply the classical revival of letters, nor the ordinary care for human dignity; he means the deep spiritual principle he takes to underlie the whole trajectory of Western modernity — the principle that makes man, rather than the God-Man, the measure and the master of all things (Justin Popović, Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ, trans. Asterios Gerostergios et al., Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1994, esp. “Humanistic and Theanthropic Culture” and related essays; Andrew Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present, London: SPCK, 2015). This anthropocentrism, he argues, is the common root of the successive forms of modern Western civilization, and it is a religious error before it is anything else: the substitution of the man-god (čovekobog) for the God-Man (Bogočovek) (see Christ the God-Man).

Justin traces a genealogy. The turn to anthropocentrism, on his account, begins within Western Christianity itself and only later becomes secular. He reads the Roman Catholic doctrine of papal primacy and infallibility as the first great “humanization” of the Church — the substitution of a man for the God-Man at the Church’s head — and the Protestant Reformation as the same principle carried further, making each individual his own infallible pope (Popović, Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ, 1994, on papalism and Protestantism as forms of humanism; and see the ecclesiological development in The Orthodox Ecclesiology). Two things should be distinguished in this reading: the genealogy — papalism as the seed from which secular humanism grows — is Justin’s own construction, and a sweeping one; but the underlying dogmatic judgment is the Church’s, not his alone: the Orthodox Church has never received the doctrines of papal supremacy and papal infallibility, and that non-reception is settled Orthodox teaching, not one position within an intra-Orthodox debate. From these religious roots, in his telling, grow the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, rationalism, and finally the secular ideologies of the modern age; and the terminus of the whole development is nihilism — the discovery, once God and the God-Man have been dismissed, that man alone cannot bear the weight of the absolute he has claimed, and the collapse into meaninglessness, and then into the mass violence of the twentieth century (Popović, Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ, 1994; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; Paul Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology: Behold, I Make All Things New, London: T&T Clark, 2019).

The Dostoevskian and Wartime Roots

This is Dostoevsky’s argument, taken up and generalized. Justin’s lifelong reading of Dostoevsky — the subject of his unsubmitted Oxford thesis and of the books Dostoevsky on Europe and Slavdom and The Philosophy and Religion of F. M. Dostoevsky — gave him the master-images of the critique: the Grand Inquisitor, who takes Christ’s freedom from men in the name of their happiness; Kirillov and the other man-gods of The Devils, whose self-deification ends in suicide and destruction; the whole prophetic diagnosis of a Europe that had lost Christ (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, on Justin’s Dostoevsky; and see Petrograd, Oxford, and Athens and The Commentaries and Letters). And the critique was confirmed for Justin by history: he had lived through the Balkan Wars, the Serbian Golgotha of the Great War, the Russian Revolution, and then the Second World War and the communist seizure of Yugoslavia — the fruits, as he read them, of a humanism that had first killed God and then began to kill man on an industrial scale (Popović, Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ, 1994; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; and see Formation and the Great War).

The Philosophy of the God-Man

Against humanism Justin sets what he calls the theanthropic principle, or the “philosophy of the God-Man.” Where humanism is anthropocentric, the true philosophy is theanthropocentric: it does not begin from autonomous human reason and build up to God, but begins from the God-Man, in whom God and man are already and permanently united, and understands man and the world from that center (Popović, Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ, 1994, on theanthropic versus humanistic culture; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015). The philosophy of the God-Man does not despise the human — on the contrary, Justin insists it is the only philosophy that truly saves the human, because it fulfils man in Christ rather than isolating and finally destroying him (Popović, Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ, 1994). The whole difference is the difference between a man who receives his greatness as a gift in the God-Man and a man who seizes at godhood by himself: the first is deified, the second is dehumanized (see Christ the God-Man).

Culture, education, ethics, and politics all follow. Justin distinguishes a “humanistic culture,” built on the autonomous man, from a “theanthropic culture,” built on the God-Man; a humanistic education that produces skilled man-gods from a theanthropic education (Svetosavska education) that produces saints; and so on through every sphere (Popović, Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ, 1994, “Humanistic and Theanthropic Culture” and the essays on education). The proposal is radical and comprehensive: not a Christian adjustment of a basically humanist civilization, but the replacement of the anthropocentric principle by the theanthropic one at the root.

Svetosavlje: The Serbian Embodiment

Justin gives this vision a Serbian form under the name Svetosavlje — “Sava-ism,” the way of St. Sava, the founder of the autocephalous Serbian Church (see St. Sava of Serbia). In his programmatic essay Svetosavlje as a Philosophy of Life (Svetosavlje kao filosofija života), Justin presents the tradition of St. Sava as the concrete, national instance of the philosophy of the God-Man: an entire people’s life ordered around the theanthropic principle — the liturgy, the saints, the ascetic-monastic ideal, the “theanthropic” ethics of the Gospel — as against the humanist civilization of the West that Serbia was being pressed to imitate (Popović, Svetosavlje kao filosofija života, in the Sabrana dela, ed. Bishop Atanasije Jevtić; Klaus Buchenau, Auf russischen Spuren, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2011, on Svetosavlje and the interwar Serbian Orthodox current). Svetosavlje is thus not narrow nationalism — Justin’s God-Man is universal, and salvation is offered to all nations — but the claim that the Serbian people has a genuine, saintly, theanthropic tradition of its own, older and truer than the imported humanism, to which it ought to return (Buchenau, Auf russischen Spuren, 2011; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015).

Criticism and Assessment

Justin’s critique of humanism is powerful, prophetic, and, to his admirers, vindicated by the catastrophes of the twentieth century. But it has been criticized, and the criticism should be stated plainly.

[Disputed: the value and the dangers of Justin’s critique of European humanism. (a) The sympathetic reading — held by his disciples and by scholars who see in him a genuine prophet — is that Justin diagnosed with rare depth the spiritual root of modern nihilism, that his theanthropic principle is a serious and coherent alternative, and that he wrote as a learned man who knew Western thought from the inside (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology, 2019, granting the force of the critique). (b) The critical reading is that Justin’s account of “European humanism” is sweeping and undifferentiated — collapsing the whole diversity of Western Christianity and thought into a single degenerative principle — that it can shade into an essentialized anti-Westernism, and that the Svetosavlje current with which it is associated has, in other hands, been enlisted for ethno-nationalist purposes Justin himself would not have sanctioned (Buchenau, Auf russischen Spuren, 2011, on the ambivalent political uses of the Serbian “anti-Western” Orthodox current; Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology, 2019, noting the sweeping character of the polemic). This collection reports both: the critique is a serious theological diagnosis and, in its rhetoric, a totalizing one whose reception has been mixed; it does not adjudicate, per METHODOLOGY §4.]

The essential point for understanding Justin is that this polemic is not separable from his dogmatics. He attacks humanism because he confesses the God-Man; the negative and the positive are one movement of thought. And the same principle that drives the critique of humanism drives his ecclesiology and his critique of ecumenism — the subjects of the next files.

References

Popović, Justin. Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ. Trans. Asterios Gerostergios et al. Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1994. (“Humanistic and Theanthropic Culture”; the essays on humanism, education, and the man-god; the philosophy of the God-Man.)
Popović, Justin. Svetosavlje kao filosofija života [Svetosavlje as a Philosophy of Life] and the Dostoevsky writings, in the Sabrana dela, ed. Bishop Atanasije (Jevtić) et al. Belgrade: Manastir Ćelije.
Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (Justin’s critique of humanism and his Dostoevskian roots.)
Ladouceur, Paul. Modern Orthodox Theology: Behold, I Make All Things New. London: T&T Clark (Bloomsbury), 2019. (The theanthropic critique and its sweeping character.)
Buchenau, Klaus. Auf russischen Spuren: Orthodoxe Antiwestler in Serbien, 1850–1945. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2011. (Svetosavlje, the anti-Western Orthodox current, and its ambivalent political uses.)