Sacred Humanism: A New Vision for the Humanities

How to bring the students back.

One really can’t get enough of Paul Klee, so we’re featuring his art again today. Here’s his “Senecio.”

Today’s Kindred Letter is on an especially important topic: the decline of the Humanities, and how to reverse it. If you’re a fellow devotee of art, literature, poetry, mythology …please consider sharing.

As an English major in the 1980s, I was so lucky to attend a university whose commitment to wisdom seemed to match the promise of its soaring architecture. It was the end of an era, though I didn’t know it yet – the era in which universities were temples where many of us went to pray, where we went searching for awe and wonder and the far reaches of the human soul. In the late ’80s, books – our beautiful, sacred books – were starting to be viewed as mere “texts” to be “interrogated”. But this view, so curiously disrespectful of literature, seemed still a sideline; I had no idea that it — along with the growing primacy of pre-professional majors, and students’ legitimate worries about making a living — would soon eat up the Humanities departments.

During the last decade, the number of Humanities majors nationwide dropped by a third, according to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. On campus, everyone knows that it’s the STEM and business subjects that get the shiny new buildings and the fiercest competition from hopeful applicants.

Universities are taking various steps to address some of these problems.

But what we really need, I believe, is a new vision for the humanities: one I call Sacred Humanism.

“Garden House,” by Paul Klee

The true purpose of the Humanities is to help us understand the human condition, and each other, and to quench our thirst for meaning, depth, beauty and truth. We need to teach poetry, literature, art and history not only as texts to critique -- but as gateways to the sacred. We need to develop in students a character strength that positive psychologists call the “Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence” (which is a secular, and rather muted, way of saying spiritual awe) -- and which is a fundamentally constructive rather than deconstructive impulse. We should emphasize that which gives us chills, reverence, and consolation.

Studies by the psychologists Jonathan Haidt, Dacher Keltner, and others, show that awe is linked to lower stress and inflammation, higher life satisfaction, generosity and empathy. If the Humanities departments were to place awe at the center of their mission, the students might return -- not to satisfy curricular requirements, but out of spiritual hunger.

Students once flooded the mythologist Joseph Campbell’s classes at Sarah Lawrence College, because he taught them myth and meaning and the art of living a good life; more recently, the Northwestern University literature professor Gary Saul Morson’s classes on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky draw standing ovations for similar reasons. These examples point the way forward for Sacred Humanism.

In contrast, since the 1950s, the prevailing worldview in U.S. academia was “Secular Humanism.” Secular humanism emphasizes reason and ethics while rejecting dogma, supernaturalism, and authoritarianism. This philosophy was, in part, a response to the barbarisms of the 20th century. As a lifelong atheist and now agnostic, who is allergic to dogma and utopianism, I’ve long admired this view, and still do.

But too often Secular Humanism saw the spiritual impulse as a narrow experience shared by a credulous few, rather than a deep yearning that animates us all — and so the thirst for wisdom and elevation gave way to analyses of power dynamics.

“Ancient Sound,” by Paul Klee

Such inquiries are not without value; it’s useful to analyze, say, “Girl with a Pearl Earring” from, say, the perspective of women’s role in society. But no one fell in love with “Pearl Earring” as a statement on patriarchy. They fell in love with its luminosity. They beheld it and wanted to know where this kind of sensitivity and insight comes from, and what they could do to embody it themselves, and inspire it in others. They wanted depth, they wanted solace, they wanted to nourish their souls.

The deepest purpose of poetry and art is to show us what transcendence – the ecstatic apprehension of the world beyond the self -- feels like. In the Humanities, you can study mythology, to explore the depths of the human psyche, around the world, across the centuries. You can study history because if it doesn’t repeat then at least it rhymes, and maybe we’ll get something right next time. You can read literature, to know that humans two thousand years ago experienced the same exact thing you felt last week when you broke up with your boyfriend.

None of this requires adherence to a particular religion, or to any religion. But it does make room for it. And it makes room for the experience of awe that uplifts us all, and brings us together -- whether we’re atheists, believers, or somewhere in between.

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As always, I would love to hear from you, if you’re so inclined.

*Does the phrase/idea of “Sacred Humanism” resonate with you?

*Can you think of a work of art, poetry, literature, mythology, that inspires awe in you?

*If we lose the Humanities altogether, what do you think we lose? If we succeed in restoring them to their former glory, what do you think we gain?

Please do leave a comment below! And, if you have a friend or colleague who you think would like to hear about Sacred Humanism, please do share this Kindred Letter.

© Susan Cain