{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat claims to be done with Eric Voegelin and with the ‘Katechon’. He is not, however, done with Nihilism; now, he is caught up in the issue of Christianity’s connection to modern nihilism. David Bentley Hart’s ‘Christ and Nothing’ seems like a good place to start.}
“Christ and Nothing” first appeared in print in 2003, but the essay is as timely as ever. David Bentley Hart may or may not have revised his opinions from twenty years ago, but his description of modern nihilism remains powerful:
As modern men and women—to the degree that we are modern—we believe in nothing. This is not to say, I hasten to add, that we do not believe in anything; I mean, rather, that we hold an unshakable, if often unconscious, faith in nothingness as such. It is this in which we place our trust, upon which we venture our souls, and onto which we project the values by which we measure the meaningfulness of our lives. Or, to phrase the matter more simply and starkly, our religion is one of very comfortable nihilism.
We live in an age whose chief moral value has been determined, by overwhelming consensus, to be the absolute liberty of personal volition, the power of each of us to choose what he or she believes, wants, needs, or must possess. Our culturally most persuasive models of human freedom are unambiguously voluntarist and, in a [certain] way, Promethean; the will, we believe, is sovereign because unpremised, free because spontaneous, and this is the highest good. We take as given the individual’s right not merely to obey or to defy the moral law, but to choose which moral standards to adopt, which values to uphold, which fashion of piety to wear and with what accessories.
To be clear, moderns generally do not accept “the individual’s right to defy the moral law,” they simply don’t think the moral law exists. It is precisely the absence of belief in such a thing as “the moral law” that leads to the emphasis on human freedom. The factors which undermined belief in “moral law” were many, and Hart does not elaborate; his point is simply that, moral law having been discredited, modernity had nothing with which to replace it:
A society that believes these things must, at least implicitly, embrace and subtly advocate a very particular moral metaphysics: the unreality of any “value” higher than choice, or of any transcendent Good ordering desire towards a higher end. And so, at the end of modernity, each of us who is true to the times stands facing not God, or the gods, or the Good beyond beings, but an abyss, over which presides the empty, inviolable authority of the individual will, whose impulses and decisions are their own moral index.
Hart delivers his verdict:
Modern culture is nothing but the wasteland 1 from which the gods have departed, and, deprived of the shelter of the sacred and the consoling myths of sacrifice, the modern person must wander or drift, vainly attempting one or another accommodation with death, never escaping anxiety or ennui, and driven as a result to a ceaseless labor of distraction, or acquisition, or willful idiocy. Our restlessness has become its own deity; and, where it works its most sublime magic, our culture of empty spectacle can so stupefy the intellect as to blind it to its own disquiet and induce a spiritual torpor more deplorable than mere despair.
It is not surprising that a Christian theologian deplores our contemporary culture, politics, and lack of moral integrity. What is surprising is that Hart accuses Christianity of having been one cause, at least, of the modern predicament—not in the sense that, for Hart, orthodox Christian belief was or is in any way mistaken, but in the sense that Christians, both individually and collectively (that is, institutionally), failed over time to hold fast to Christian truth. This failure was matched, ironically, by Christianity’s success in clearing the field of its pagan rivals, leaving the Christian God as the only transcendent option available; when Christianity lost its compelling hold, there was nothing to supplant its God aside from man himself. In the words of Karen Leslie Carr, “In the absence of something higher, something larger than themselves, some transcendent horizon, human beings make themselves God.” 2
In Hart’s view, “The wasteland from which the gods have departed” is the result of Christianity's having first triumphed and then surrendered the territory it had gained. “Surveying the desert of modernity,” Hart admits, “we would be morally derelict not to acknowledge that Nietzsche was right in holding Christianity responsible for the catastrophe around us; we should confess that the failure of Christian culture to live up to its victory over the old gods has allowed the dark power that once hid behind them to step forward undisguised.”
Does Hart’s perception that darkness and nihilism have enveloped modern culture stem from his feeling of being entirely outside that culture? He would insist, one assumes, that the evidence of modern decadence and decline is overwhelming; that claim had been made by many others (e.g., Richard Weaver, Ortega y Gassett, T.S. Eliot) long before Hart. Not all observers agree, however, and we might want to hear other perspectives before we condemn modernity as hopelessly corrupt.
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Christ and Nothing by David Bentley Hart | Articles | First Things 2003
1 “Nothing but the wasteland”: An homage, perhaps, to T.S. Eliot, author of “The Wasteland,” a modernist critique of modernity.
2 Karen Leslie Carr (from The Banalization of Nihilism), referring to the views of Karl Barth. I await an explanation of why making mankind its own god is such a bad thing. Is there a better candidate somewhere?
Nothing ventured. Nothing gained
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