{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat may have bitten off more than he can chew with his excursion into Christian nihilism. To be honest, he is less than convinced of his own thesis, thus the question mark in the title. In any case, he will post Part One today and Part Two next week, once he’s had time to finish digesting the sources.}
“What does it profit a man to gain the whole world but to lose his soul?” (Jesus)
David Bentley Hart believed that modern nihilism resulted from Christianity’s failure to hold the cultural ground it had seized, fifteen hundred years ago, from pagan antiquity, leaving in its stead a spiritual vacuum. Other observers, though, have asserted a much more fundamental connection between Christianity and nihilism; some have gone so far as to claim that nihilism is at the very heart of Christianity. How in the world, most of us would ask, could anyone make such an absurd claim?
Well, there’s this: “Do not love the world or the things that are in the world. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and the pride of life—is not from the Father but from the world.” And there’s also this: “Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God?” And, you know, this: “My kingdom is not of this world.”
The New Testament yields numerous such quotes that seem, at least rhetorically, to set Christians against the world and any of its purported meanings. Christian nihilism, if such it could be called, was not complete nihilism; Christians didn’t believe that nothing mattered. They only believed, or were encouraged to believe, that nothing in this life mattered; mortal existence was merely a passage to eternity (if you were lucky) and Christians were therefore taught to avoid worldly attachments. Paul used himself as an example: “For the Lord’s sake I have suffered the loss of all things, but I count them as rubbish if I gain Christ and am found in him.” He advised his followers not to have children—hostages to fortune, as they say, and distractions from the heavenly prize upon which Christians were to keep their eyes. Jesus had given similar counsel; leave family behind and let the dead bury their dead. Time was short, said Paul, and the world was on borrowed time; you could not invest your hopes in it. Moreover, this world was the realm of Satan, its acknowledged prince; for a Christian, the best counsel, as Paul (or Bob Dylan?) said, was, “Keep a clean nose and watch the plainclothes.” Neither Jesus, Paul, nor their followers needed a weatherman to know which way the wind was blowing.
Again, and in fairness, Christians were not “world-haters,” the epithet famously (and accurately) applied to ancient Gnostics. Christians believed that creation was the work of a loving God, but it had been corrupted by man’s sins; still, they believed that mortal life had value simply because it had been given to us by God. Moreover, most Christians held that the way we live determines our immortal fate; life was an ordeal that tested our faith and our spiritual strength. That notion, however, was put to theological rest in the 4th century by St. Augustine in his polemics against the Pelagian heresy. Man could not “earn” salvation, said Augustine; salvation could only be a gift of God graciously bestowed on undeserving sinners. Augustine cut the ground out from those who thought that “right” living (moral purity, loving one’s neighbor, keeping the commandments, etc.) and faith in Christ would enable believers to pass through the narrow gate to heaven; as he explained (and as Luther and Calvin reiterated), nothing a man does in this life has any effect at all on God’s judgment—no one deserves to be saved from hellfire, and God’s decisions are both mysterious and irrevocable.
Christianity’s ambiguous stance towards the world could be seen by contrasting the fanatical ascetism of the “Desert Fathers” (e.g., St. Anthony the Great), which morphed into Christian monasticism, with the worldliness of the post-Constantine Church. On the one hand, “The model of Anthony and other hermits attracted many followers, who lived alone in the desert or in small groups. They chose a life of extreme asceticism, renouncing all the pleasures of the senses, rich food, baths, rest, and anything that made them comfortable. They instead focused their energies on praying, singing psalms, fasting, giving alms to the needy, and preserving love and harmony with one another while keeping their thoughts and desires for God alone.” They may not have hated the world, but neither did they embrace it; it offered nothing but snares and delusions.
On the other hand, following Constantine's conversion to Christianity, Christian leaders gained unprecedented status and authority. Christianity became the beneficiary of the emperors’ largesse; it became, in the words of Robert Markus, “increasingly wealthy, prestigious, and privileged.” 1 Less than a century after Constantine, Christianity was made the official religion of Rome; pagan practices were outlawed. To its credit, Christianity played a crucial role in preserving the legacy of Rome, but it did so in part by taking on some of Rome’s imperial characteristics; the Church could not very well renounce a world in which it played such a prominent role.
Even with the Church triumphant, the strain of nihilism remained, preserved in New Testament texts; for centuries, it would lead periodically to sectarian outbreaks, Gnostic heresies, millennial cults, etc. Jesus’ admonition against trying to serve “two masters” (e.g., God and Mammon) made ordinary Christians wary of earthly ambition, a wariness reinforced by the fact that wealth and power were for the most part out of reach anyway. If Christianity did not deter worldly progress, neither did it encourage it, much less inspire it. In all, Christendom viewed the material world, for all practical purposes, as a crime scene—the crime of Adam, of course, reenacted in perpetuity by all his progeny. Ecclesiastical authorities shepherded their flocks through life, incessantly cautioning them, “Move along, folks; there’s nothing to see here.” For Christians, it wasn’t life's journey that mattered; it was the destination.
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Re St. Anthony and the Desert Fathers: Desert Fathers - Wikipedia
1 Robert Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity. Markus, for what it’s worth, would likely disagree with my thesis of ‘Christian nihilism’ and my claims about the ‘world-denying’ aspect of early Christianity; “From the later second century,” he wrote, “Christians had been moving fast towards an assimilation of secular culture.” The spread of Christianity could not have happened if the faith had required of believers an explicit rejection of, or distancing from, ‘ordinary’ life, customs, and habits. “Since that time,” Markus continued, “Christians had begun to penetrate every level of Roman society and had moved even further towards accepting the values and the culture of their pagan contemporaries.”
Nihilism: when you've got nihil, you've got nihil to lose.
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