121 Christian Anthropology and the (W)Holistic Approach 3 Delsol (2021) referred to the 20th century as the age of the dismantling of the idea of humanity. In this context, technology and science have reached altitudes of development that have brought about previously unimaginable possibilities and prosperity, although humanity has lagged behind, ‘even so far as to be in crisis’ (Hábl, 2017, p. xiv). Hábl referred to the worldwide gap between rich and poor, hunger, refugees, illiteracy and backlogs in the Global South for which the supposedly cultivated West, due to its own problems, has continually failed to formulate a working solution. To these specific problems of Western culture, Hábl added some important side effects of the highly developed technocracy: alienating individualisation, ignorance and the ‘depersonalizing of human relationships’. He also referenced a ‘decrease in moral literacy, a dramatic decline in social capital (nobody trusts anyone), the global threat of self-destruction, conflicts of civilizations, various forms of extremism and the like’ (Hábl, 2017, p. xiv). While the need for humanity elsewhere arose through social disintegration and secularisation, in Czechia it is now mainly felt through the void left by the dehumanising totalitarian communistic regime after its fall in 1989. The Czech search for humanity caused Hábl to a plea for child-centredness. Comenius’ views provided a good model for doing so. Hábl, however, warned that Comenius’ Christian worldview, as the central axis of his approach, cannot be overlooked. It is there that the lines of reasoning of the Western Comenius and the Czech Komenský come together. Knowledge, morality and spirituality form a strong unity in Comenius’ work (Hábl, 2011, p. 65). In particular, this unity is missing from modern Western society. ‘Since the Enlightenment and the onset of Modernity, the anthropological paradigm, the definition of humanness, has been determined by a self-imposed restriction on metaphysics, which has deprived humanity of a transcendent dimension’ (Hábl, 2011, p. 14). Just like D.I. Smith (2017), Hábl (2011) perceived the added value of Comenius mainly in the connection he made between everything (all) and Christian wisdom. Hábl’s (2011, 2017) approach is not optimistic regarding the presence of humanity in Western education. Rhetoric and intentions are good, he concluded, but in practice the dominant focus is a performance-oriented one. From Pavel Floss, Hábl (2017) adopted the qualification ‘essentially functionalistic’: Western education brings forth efficient workers and experts for different fields of labour, but it fails in the formation of ‘the whole person’ (p. vxi). It knows how to equip pupils with the given amount of useful information and the pragmatic skills and competencies needed for successful self-assertion (usually in the marketplace), but it fails in the formation and cultivation of
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