The Little Red Blog

Saturday Lecture: The Good-Enough Society

R.R. Reno, from “American Nihilism” (August 2020)

Modern nihilism means the rejection of “modern civilization,” which Leo Strauss defined as the priority of reason over irrationality, peace over war, well-being over suffering. Modern civilization is liberal; in this view, civic life needs to “go small,” emphasizing prosperity over honor, and weak, often instrumental bonds over strong ones. Modern civilization gives priority to the world of commerce where self-interest is allowed and can be harmonized, rather than the warm unity of organic community.

World War I and Weimar shattered confidence in this fusion. Many young German intellectuals felt trapped by the spiritual emptiness of modern commercial life. They derided the formal legalism of liberal democracy. Marxism coopted dialectical reason, promising utopia of material plenty and individual fulfillment—an end-of-history cessation of consequential activity and meaningful struggle that filled them with dread. In this context, unable to muster religious fervor, young Germans drew strength from negation—an act of the will that has the courage and conviction to destroy the mediocrity of modern civilization. Better nothing than such a future.

We do not live in Weimar, and we do not feel failures of German idealism as harbingers of cultural doom. But there are parallels.

Those marching in protests today reject the mediocrity of American society. ¹ Our system of justice is not perfect, and this galls. Racial relations are vastly better than they were two generations ago, but they remain fraught. Our society is extraordinarily wealthy, yet some remain mired in poverty. Young people have many opportunities. To a degree unimaginable to their grandparents who went to work at 18 or 21, today’s young can live an extended adolescence well into their twenties and even thirties—and yet disappointments still pile up. ²

I could go on. My point is that America is a very good place to live, as millions of immigrants demonstrate by choosing to come here. But our country is far from perfect. Over the last generation, our educational system has tutored many, perhaps most, to identify what is wrong, while ignoring the relatively good aspects of America. ³ This further irritates the wounds of dissatisfaction.

The overwhelming priority of “no” is the essence of nihilism. It destroys, not with an eye toward a new future, however dimly seen, but rather for the sake of liberation from the galling limitations and failures of the past.

I cringe when conservatives blame the ideological fevers of the present on the Frankfurt School, Nietzsche, or some other foreign invasion. (Alan Bloom trafficked in this trope.) Nihilism has a role in the American tradition. To some degree, Ralph Waldo Emerson pioneered statue toppling when he insisted that the true American always erases the past. ⁴

It is the fate of finite mortals to live in a good-enough society, and such a society is, by definition, not entirely good. For someone with a sober view of the alternatives, a good-enough society ought to inspire a large measure of gratitude. For the ambitious, a good-enough society provides occasion for reform and improvement, which is always welcome.

But there are times when a perverse spiritual condition overtakes society. In such moments, a good-enough society becomes an occasion for anger, outrage, and even despair. Instead of seeking improvement, emotions press toward destruction. Critique and denunciation, when it becomes dominant, is a moralizing form of nihilism that has taken hold American society.

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American Nihilism - American Compass

R. R. Reno - Wikipedia

¹ Reno was writing in the summer of 2020, which was the time of the “Black Lives Matter” protests.

² It is beyond me why Reno thought that an extended adolescence was an “opportunity” for which young Americans should be grateful.

³ Assumes facts not in evidence.

⁴ European Americans certainly did their best to erase the past (and the future) of indigenous tribes.

Saturday Lecture: Experiments in Living

Matthew McManus:

From the beginning opponents have criticized liberalism for being amoral at best, and nihilistic at worst. Typically, there are two prongs to this attack, one metaphysical and the other moral or aesthetic, though the two are often combined and blended in curious ways.

The first prong holds that liberalism is committed to a materialist and individualistic metaphysics which lacks any account of transcendent or “higher” values. An emblematic account can be found in the writings of arch-Catholic reactionary Joseph de Maistre. He famously denounced liberal thought (“what is ignorantly called philosophy”) as “fundamentally a destructive force. This is because its skeptical and critical disposition, wherein liberals seek to question everything, undermine the sublime quality of authority.” For de Maistre, one of the virtues of antiquarian and Medieval thinking was their insistence that the metaphysical order of the universe was inherently just, and consequently that the socio-political order which had emerged on Earth was both natural and theologically vindicated. 

By contrast liberalism’s Luciferian pride in assuming that the existent order can and should be questioned stripped that order of its allure, compelling political authorities to justify themselves to those they sought to govern. For de Maistre this generated the intractable conditions for endless debate and disorder, as each person came to see themselves as an independent legislator who advanced their independent interests without any concern for a shared (and hierarchical) moral order where all knew and understood their place. This led to a kind of cultural nihilism, as there could be no shared consensus on anything.

Many critics argue that liberalism’s morality and politics are prima facie empty. Sometimes the objection to this is moral, sometimes aesthetic. The moral objection often made by religious authors (like Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue) is that by allowing all individuals to concern themselves merely with the means to pursue their self-selected ends, liberalism has gutted our capacity to consider what ends are actually right and virtuous to pursue. Over a long enough period of time, the grandiose rhetoric of liberal authors leads to mere emotivism: the bizarre belief that our choice about moral ends is a mere matter of preference, much like one’s taste in ice cream flavors. From an allegedly “neutral” liberal standpoint, there is no sense in trying to arbitrate whether an addict who happened to reach a ripe old age led a less intrinsically good life than Martin Luther King, Jr. At best we could assess who gained more utilitarian pleasure from their pursuits and make a calculation that way. 

The aesthetic argument is more common to authors such as Nietzsche, Allan Bloom, or Roger Scruton. Here the fundamental problem with the levelling impulse of egalitarian liberalism is its destruction of standards of excellence and beauty in our culture. The conviction that beauty is merely in the eye of the beholder leaves it up to the mass of individuals to decide what the highest aesthetic values should be. The weight of their numbers, coupled with resentment at their mediocrity, means that the truly great and inspired are either silenced or compelled to cater to the masses in order to make a living. This leads to a deadened and weak culture where people are neither exposed to sublimated aesthetic values nor have the will to produce them. What we get instead is the pleasant, the unchallenging, and, ultimately, the life-denying. 

Most contemporary arguments about liberalism’s nihilism have become notably more superficial and even shrill. Ironically a lot of them reflect the kind of superficiality they read into liberal society. We get post-liberals who assert that because they feel liberalism’s morality is bad so too must be its metaphysics, without making any effort to actually make metaphysical arguments. Or we get an endless series of essays on how our society must be failing if liberal morality has flourished so thoroughly, with scarcely any moral analysis. Many of these seem like caricatures of what they profess to attack, merely asserting loudly and often that they disdain liberalism.

In the pre-Modern era, teleological and theological conceptions of matter defined reality in terms of the high ends to which it aspired. Often linked to this were deep value judgments about the intrinsic worth of existence which could be gleaned through an analysis of the physical world, which revealed the deeper teleological or divine order beneath mere matter in motion. The world of physical time became the mere moving image of eternity.

The emerging Scientific Revolution became increasingly critical of this outlook, holding that by interpreting matter in terms of ends we were effectively ascribing moral and aesthetic values to our metaphysical descriptions of the natural world. Instead, matter should be understood deterministically, driven by laws which were comprehensible to reason, but whose ultimate source and purpose were forever concealed to us. Immanuel Kant made a compelling case that any telos or beauty that we apprehended in the natural world or in the nature of human existence was put there by us. Human reason ascribed teleological ends and beauty to the natural world, but we had no way of knowing for sure whether there was any intrinsic telos or beauty in the play of existence.

The broad contours of Kant’s argument remain plausible. As Hamlet would say, “There is nothing good or evil, but thinking makes it so.” Yet the lingering doubt remains that even if this is true, where does it leave us in terms of comprehending the good life? Don’t these kinds of arguments, if anything, lead exactly to the belief that mere opinion is all that props up the conceit that life has value and can be affirmed? 

The answer to this is that liberals needn’t deny that there may well be some intrinsic value to human life that pre-exists human thought, but we are incapable of knowing what that is for certain. Given the limitations of reason this is precluded to us. But this doesn’t mean we can’t take steps toward deciding what the best kinds of human life are. John Stuart Mill suggested that, absent the possibility of any kind of certainty on the matter, the best solution is an experimental one. We give individuals as much liberty as possible to engage in different “experiments in living” and then individually and collectively draw on the reservoir of experiences to ascertain what is conducive to human flourishing and what is not. 

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Nihilism and the Liberal Vision of the Good (liberalcurrents.com) (2021)

“Matt McManus is the author of ‘The Rise of Postmodern Conservatism’ amongst other books and a Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Michigan.”

John Stuart Mill: Still Experimenting After All These Years

Saturday Lecture: Pragmatism, Nihilism, Death

“In fact, we are absolute nihilists.” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer)

“I’m bored with it all.” (attributed to Winston Churchill shortly before his death)

Harry Ausmus, from The Pragmatic God (1990):

Every formal expression of nihilism arises out of the moral claim that the world is not as it ought to be. In this sense, nihilism has been and still is the most pervasive perspective on the world throughout human history. Every major religion constructed by the human imagination begins with this basic and most fundamental premise, that, from the outset, something is wrong with the world and with the humans who occupy it. The center of the cosmos does not hold, and mere anarchy lurks behind the very ontological structures of existence. Oriental religions view the world as a ‘veil of maya,’ while Occidental religions talk of the sinful nature of man and the effects of this sinfulness throughout the universe. 

Nihilism, despite the relatively recent discovery of the word, has permeated the entire history of humankind. In the Western world, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, and Nietzsche, all figures of the nineteenth century, may have been the first to use the word ‘nihilism’ and to philosophize upon it, but the perspective of nihilism can be found much earlier: ‘Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.’

Referring to nihilism as ‘the ultimate logical conclusion’ of the history of the Western world, Nietzsche believed that Christian ‘honesty’ was the source of nihilism. In this respect, the rise of nihilism should be viewed in the same perspective as the rise of atheism and agnosticism, as well as socialism, positivism, and existentialism, all of which are merely varying forms of Christianity, ‘residues of Christian value judgments.’ They all have erected some imaginary vision of the future, some fictitious ‘beyond’. If there is no essence in the present, then, it is hoped, the essence will be achieved in the future. In the meantime, prior to the fulfillment of this imaginary future, everything is in the process of becoming. But, as Nietzsche said, “Becoming aims at nothing and achieves nothing.”

The history of the world demonstrates that people have tried persistently to find meaning for their suffering, and the meaning they have derived offers only a fictitious world. The logic is irrefutable; humans have described how meaning can be achieved, and, therefore, they conclude that their description is meaningful. Nihilism is not excluded from this charge. “Nothingness” is no less a figment of the human imagination than the God of the Bible, and it is no less an attempt to overcome the problem of human suffering. The most fundamental metaphysical question is, ‘Why do we suffer?’ If there were no suffering, the question of meaning would never be raised.

The metaphysical quality of human existence has not been drastically altered by the invention of systems of society, or of the airplane, or of satellite communications, or of vaccines to kill any virus. If one raises the question as to the meaning of life, and the response is that we have to ‘get on’ with the practical task of everyday living, then that view is to acquiesce to the notion that the meaning of life is the will-to-power. Herein is the nihilism of pragmatism. The phrase ‘It works for me’ involves the tacit assumption that all opinions are of equal value; this is a denial of the search for truth. Even worse, it is a form of self-imposed delusion. Seeking pragmatic solutions to questions that are fundamentally metaphysical represents the futility of human existence. Life is too serious to be reduced to that which is ‘workable’.  And the presumed pragmatic solutions to such metaphysical questions constitute the ‘metaphysical lie’ that has disguised the fundamental problem that confronts us all—why is there suffering? Moral, theological, political, philosophical, or historical ‘approximations’ do not overcome the pain of death and suffering.  

To paraphrase Augustine, this life of ours, if life it be, is a hell on earth from which there is no escape except through the grace of death. A person leads a life of unchosen sins, for which the reward is often a prolonged, agonizing, exceedingly excruciating death. Here is where metaphysics and theology ought to begin: with the final end and ultimate demise of every single individual person, remembering that death plays no favorites but makes fools of us all.

 

Wednesday with Pascal: Christian Nihilism? (Part Three)

{The Little Red Blog has instructed Pascal the existential Russian blue cat to cease and desist his assaults on Christianity—that is, after this one last parting shot. His next target will be Capitalism, an equally culpable source of Nihilism and an equally inviting target.}

“The history of modernity can be pinned on Paul.” (Jacob Taubes)

Jacob Taubes was a twentieth-century sociologist of religion, a philosopher, and a scholar of Judaism; according to Jerry Z. Muller, Taubes existed “on the border between Judaism and Christianity, between skepticism and belief, between scholarly distance and religious fervor. His self-appointed role was that of a gnostic, apocalypticist, or revolutionist—a man who fed on crisis, constantly on the lookout for signs of the impending destruction and transformation of a world perceived as evil or corrupted.” Described as having been both “charismatic and puzzling,” Taubes may have been the ideal person to assess the apostle Paul (whom he admired) and the Christianity Paul birthed (which he did not admire).

Taubes believed that Paul had been widely misunderstood, both by Christians and by Jews. Given Taubes’ temperament, what attracted him to Paul may well have been the nihilism that was, so to speak, the worm in the apple of Christianity. Commenting on Paul’s letter to the Romans, Taubes notes, “Here we have a nihilistic view of the world. The concept of nihilism is the guiding thread in Corinthians and Romans. The world decays, the form of this world has passed. This is politics as nihilism; behind Paul’s thought there is a profound nihilism at work toward the destruction of the Roman Empire.” Paul counseled obedience to worldly authorities only because their authority was coming to an end and their judgment day was at hand. Why worry about the tax collector when the Grim Reaper was around the corner?

“For Paul,” Taubes wrote, “the days of the Messiah had already begun with the resurrection of Jesus Christ. He considered the old eon gone; ‘Time is short,’ Paul wrote, ‘it remains that those who have wives be as though they had none, and they that weep as though they wept not, and they that rejoice as though they rejoiced not, and they that buy as though they possessed not.’” The eschaton would annihilate this world; believers in Christ, however, would be able to watch from on high, untouched by the cataclysm and rejoicing in their own blessedness.

“I would have you be free from care,” Paul wrote to the Corinthians. Commented Taubes, “You can speak and write this way only if you are convinced that ‘the fashion of this world passes away.’” But when the world from which you were told to detach yourself stubbornly persists, what then? “Is it possible,” asked Taubes, “two thousand years after Paul, to practice Christian indifference to the world and its history with the same good conscience and naivete as did the primitive Christians who lived in daily expectation of the Second Coming?”

Not likely, Taubes declared: “Between Paul and Karl Barth, almost two millennia have passed. If one today were to have a wife ‘as though’ one had none, weep ‘as though’ one wept not, rejoice ‘as though’ one rejoiced not, buy ‘as though’ one possessed not, use this world ‘as though’ it were not—if one were really to act this way, one could fairly be taxed with displaying an outrageously cynical or at least an ambiguous attitude toward the world.” One might even be accused of practicing a kind of Christian nihilism; “This world is not my home, I am a pilgrim and a stranger, my citizenship is in heaven.” Karl Barth did his best to get that message across, to remind believers that the world was neither God’s home nor their own.

In Taubes’ analysis, “Barth’s theology of crisis unwittingly revealed the crisis of Christian theology in a world that does not pass away. Since Paul, Christianity has accepted all authorities of the state as ordained by God; such an attitude, born in the hot chiliastic climate of the early Christian community, can hardly be perpetuated. In the last millennium, the Christian church itself became a part of the powers and principalities that rule the world. Such an ambiguous state becomes intolerable in a time of crisis. Karl Barth was one of the few who saw the writing on the wall. He wanted to force the Christian community ‘out of this world,’ to break the ties with a culture that had spuriously assumed Christian attributes for itself. Therefore, he believed, the capitalist West may present to the Christian community a greater temptation than the non-Christian East.”

What Taubes called “the apolitical premise of all Christian theology” is an inheritance from Paul; call it “Christian nihilism”. The gospels are clear: government does not matter; property does not matter; wealth does not matter; success does not matter; social prestige or respectability does not matter; even family does not matter. Nothing matters except heaven, and the road to heaven is paved entirely with God’s mysterious intentions; everything else is only a speed bump, a detour, or a roadblock.

Nihilism is a difficult gospel to preach. Telling believers that they exist in a meaningless world, that all worldly values are snares and delusions, and that their salvation is entirely out of their hands and in the hands of an unreachable, unapproachable God: that message is not remotely “good news,” which is why Christian apologists over the centuries have learned to discreetly pretend otherwise.

Regarding Barth's neo-orthodox nihilism, Jacob Taubes recalled “the tragi-comical fate of Augustine’s work on the heavenly and earthly city, The City of God, which became a classic in a Christian civilization whose basic premises it vigorously denied. Augustine contested the legitimacy of the Roman Empire, but the authorities of the Middle Ages who quoted Augustine on every page defended precisely the ‘Holy Roman Empire,’ an amalgam of Church and State, of the earthly and the heavenly city, which would have horrified Augustine. Is it too bold,” Taubes wondered, “to imagine that Barth’s theologico-political tracts might have a similar destiny, finding their place on the shelf of ‘Great Books’ of a Western civilization built precisely on foundations that Barth constantly rejected?”

If that should be the fate of Barth’s writings, they would be in good company, shelved not only with Augustine’s books but with the gospels themselves, purveyors of a world-denying nihilism by which almost no one even pretends to live. Christianity has always considered itself to be a religion of hope, but its original hope, as articulated repeatedly in the New Testament, was for the abolition of this world and the advent of a new one. “Thy kingdom come” is a plea for the apocalypse; we should be grateful that the God to whom it is addressed seems not to be listening.    

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Jacob Taubes - Wikipedia

Jacob Taubes quotes are taken from his 1954 review of Karl Barth’s Against the Stream: Against the Stream, by Karl Barth – Commentary Magazine

Sunday Sermon: "Moving Furniture Around"

{This song may best be described as poignant nihilism, delivered in the deadest of deadpan tones.}

Moving Furniture Around (by the Handsome Family)

Took a walk down the alley today
I'm getting used to the smells and the sounds
Don't look out of my windows no more
What's the point? Everything's brown

Sometimes I want to move to the other part of town
But to keep from going out of my mind
I move the furniture around
Moving furniture around

No place to park in my neighborhood
So there's hundred dollar tickets all over the ground
All the cops keep writing us up
And we keep throwing them down

Sometimes I want to move to the other side of town
There's a street over there where the landlords are fair
And a parking space can always be found
But I move my furniture around

Whenever I feel I'm on my way down
I get up and move the furniture around

Guy next door play Dylan until four
I bang on the wall but he won't turn it down
I can't tell by the noise what's going on upstairs
Moving furniture around?

Everybody moved out of my building last week
They threw the stuff they didn't want on the ground
Took a look, I couldn't believe all the wonderful things I found
More furniture to move around

Moving furniture around
Moving furniture around
Moving furniture around

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Source: LyricFind

Songwriters: Brett Sparks

Moving Furniture Around lyrics © Music Of Virtual

Moving Furniture Around (youtube.com)

Saturday Lecture: Superiority Lost

{Friedrich Gogarten, a German theologian and contemporary of Karl Barth, pointed out that Gnosticism and early Christianity both considered man fundamentally alien to the world. For Gnosticism, the alienation derived from the bungling and malevolence of the demiurge, the false creator god; for Pauline Christianity, man’s sin had caused his own, and the world’s, alienation.}   

“It is the orderly world, anchored in the law, from which Christian faith frees us.”

Friedrich Gogarten (from Despair and Hope for Our Time):

The apostle Paul, proclaiming freedom from the law as freedom from the legalistic powers of the world, could not be more explicit. These powers possess divine and all-permeating force. However, since they belong to the created world, they are not gods at all but creatures—which should not overshadow the fact that they are of prime significance in the world. Because they are powers of the law, they preserve the world as world; that is, these powers keep the world in its worldly order without which it would not be the world, would not be an ordered entity. ¹ They accomplish this by attempting to enclose the world, so that the world seeks its basis and its meaning in itself. On the one hand, the powers fulfill their task as creatures; on the other hand, they become, in effect if not intent, hostile to God. Inasmuch as the world becomes self-enclosed, it shuts itself up against its creator and against its own creatureliness.

These powers pervade the world and close it off from God, but they are not, as Paul understands them, in essence hostile to God. Their seeming hostility must be understood as man’s doing. According to Paul, man is not caught in some cosmic fate but in his own guilt. Man’s sin has enabled the powers to engulf the world; sin, for Paul, means that man has decided in favor of the world against God.

When Paul attacks “the ungodliness and wickedness of men,” he attacks a false piety in which man worships the powers as a divine reality. For such a piety, Paul’s argument is bound to appear as a horrible blasphemy; it elevates man above the divine power of the world, which, in the view of pagan thought, entails an intolerable profaning of the world and of the powers which pervade it. When this happens, pagans argue, nothing can be divine anymore for man; his life falls prey to an inevitable arbitrariness and becomes totally meaningless. ²

For Paul, the evil which befell man and the world is the result of man’s guilt and not of a cosmic mishap. Man’s sin, in which he serves and worships the creature instead of the creator, causes the unfortunate transformation of the cosmos. God’s creation—in which everything created by God is good and nothing is to be rejected—has been corrupted, through man’s, sin into this fallen world which is in the power of the evil one. Sin affects God and the world, it perverts the fundamental order of all existence, the relation between the creation and the creator; therefore, it becomes a fate which man cannot reverse.

The Christian faith and Gnosticism are similar in maintaining man’s superiority over the world. In this, both are in sharp opposition to previous ancient thought; in both, therefore, the world is overturned. In opposition to all previous thought, both Gnosticism and the Christian faith understand man as a being who is not from the world, who owes his existence not to the fact that it is enclosed by the world and embedded in its order but to its not-being-from-the-world.

Gnosticism represents the breakthrough of the insight into the basic foreignness of everything worldly to everything human, causing a “tremendous insecurity, a world anxiety, fear of the world and of oneself.” This insight and this anxiety are the driving forces of Gnosticism: they define its attitude toward the world and hence to everything else. Therefore, it can content itself with negative statements concerning man who stands in opposition to the world, and concerning the god in whom man finds his salvation. Gnosticism expresses the ontological foreignness of human existence over against the world and hence man’s superiority, although this only means that human existence is not worldly, not “of’ the world. In this way, Gnosticism is the pioneer in discovering man’s selfhood, a true consciousness over against everything worldly, one which is no longer enclosed by the world.

Gnosticism’s view of man, however, has only the negative meaning of “non-worldly and anti-worldly.” The superiority of man over the world as it is revealed by the Christian faith is of a very different sort. Admittedly it, too, has a negative meaning:  Christians are admonished to return to their senses and escape from the trap of the devil who had caught them and made them obey his will, to rise from sleep and to be awake because they belong to the day and not to the night. As in Gnosticism, which uses the same expressions, this means that they are being called out of the world. Here, too, the world is called evil and hostile to God; it is the realm of the lord of this eon, and its wisdom is folly in God’s sight. What Gnosticism says of the law which belongs to the world is true here as well: It does not bring life, as man is wont to believe in his worldly captivity; on the contrary, it brings death.

But all these statements have a fundamentally different meaning for the Christian faith. For while Paul says that the law brings death to man, he also says that this law has been given to bring life. For “the law is holy . . . and just and good.” The reason for the fact that it causes death for man who deals with it and seeks life in it, is not the law itself but man’s sin. It is not the law which has become death for him, but sin which through the law caused death; hence, it is man who has caused this evil. Through him this world has become—and this is emphatically stated in the New Testament—“this world,” the world of sin and hostility toward God.

Man’s superiority as discovered by the Christian faith is of a fundamentally different kind from that of Gnosticism. Christianity understands man’s superiority over the world as having been forfeited, along with his salvation, by sin. Man must now be addressed as a sinner who has lost his superiority over the world.

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Friedrich Gogarten - Wikipedia

¹ Gogarten here pictures the world’s “powers” as a katechonic force for law and order. Carl Schmitt would later promote the same idea.

² This “pagan” argument is more or less the argument made by David Bentley Hart in his essay, “Christ and Nothing”.

Wednesday with Pascal: Christian Nihilism? (Part Two)

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat is aware that Christians, on the rare occasion they give thought to such matters, do not think of themselves as nihilists. He apologizes for disturbing them and promises to move on from this topic as soon as possible.} 

 “Our life is illusion; the indisputable reality is the invisibility of God.” (Karl Barth)

“The gospel is not a truth among other truths. Rather, it sets a question mark against all truths.” (Karl Barth)

Despite Christianity’s openly declared contempt for the world, Christians found themselves stuck with living in it. Having been catapulted to power and respectability by Constantine, Church authorities made the best bargains they could with what Paul had described as the world’s “powers and principalities,” becoming, in relatively short order, one of those very powers. The Church’s worldly triumph required reinterpretation of certain scriptural passages, but Christian apologists were up to the task. The nihilism at the heart of Jesus’ and Paul’s gospel was discretely ignored, though it never went away.    

To make a long story short, Christendom lasted until it didn’t. Whatever claims to the contrary had been made by Christian authorities—or, for that matter, by Jesus himself—Christianity could not forever resist the currents of History. In the nineteenth century, challenged by the Enlightenment, Protestant theologians began rethinking their Weltanschauung, while Catholics dug in their heels against the modern tide. The former eventually arrived at “liberal” theology, which mixed the social gospel with a humanized Jesus while hoping to immanentize the eschaton; the latter (Catholics) thumbed their nose at Enlightenment and conceded the pope infallibility. Then came the Great War, the Bolshevik Revolution, and what might be called the Disillusionment of the West.    

Toward the end of the war, the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, following the lead of Soren Kierkegaard, scandalized and provoked his Christian brethren by reminding them of the nihilism concealed beneath the cover of their respectable bourgeois religion. According to J. Gresham Machen, Barth insisted that “God is not another name for the totality of this world; and he is not to be found in any experience of man. He is, with respect to this world, the "completely Other," the One who is incommensurate with anything that can possibly enter into the life of man. Such is the stupendous dualism between the world and God that is at the root of the thinking of Karl Barth.” Nothing in this world connects us to Barth’s God; God may deign to reach out to us or to reveal his will—or he may not, and if he chooses not to do so, there is nothing we can do about it.

In Barth’s view, not even Christianity could bridge the gap between human and divine. Walter Lowrie, following Barth, put it this way: in our religious rituals and language, “We are thinking not of God but of man; as Barth says, while we thought we were speaking about God, we were merely ‘saying Man with a loud voice.’” Ludwig Feuerbach had made the same point in the nineteenth century, but on behalf of atheism; Barth, on the other hand, wanted to force Christians to confront the emptiness of their earthly existence, including their faith. As Karen Leslie Carr puts it, “For Barth, ‘Faith is no possession, rather it is a void; God is nowhere present in history, rather the truth points us only to his total absence; Jesus’ message lay not in his superior knowledge of God but in his cry, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ In short, for Barth, ‘Religion possesses no solution to the problem of life; what it does is to disclose the truth that the problem cannot be solved.’” People long for security, foundation, and assurance, but none of that is to be had in this life. People crave God but God is not in the world: “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here.”

Carr continues: “For Barth the issue was, how do we even make sense of the inchoate mess that is our existence? How can we claim to know anything about God at all, when ‘the indisputable reality is the invisibility of God?’ God is so far removed from our experience that one is driven to question his very existence. Barth wrote, ‘Our world is formless and tumultuous chaos, a chaos of the forces of nature and of the human soul. Our life is illusion: this is the situation in which we find ourselves.’”

Was Barth a nihilist? Only in the sense that he pinned all earthly hopes on a God who cannot be known unless he chooses to reveal himself; mortal existence, in Barth's theology, has no value in and of itself. That is a hard gospel to preach, and a harder gospel to accept.

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Karen Leslie Carr quotes from The Banalization of Nihilism.

God is forever out of reach, and yet we keep reaching...

Wednesday with Pascal: Christian Nihilism? (Part One)

{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 4^th 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.

Saturday Lecture: Beyond Nihilism?

{In Michael Polanyi’s opinion, modern nihilism emerged from a common-law marriage between secularism/rationalism and the millenarian passions of Christianity recast as Romanticism. In ‘Beyond Nihilism,’ Polanyi briefly outlined the trajectory of modernity and its unintended consequences. He ended his essay on a note of cautious optimism, urging readers to learn from the past, to embrace civility and moderation, and to eschew radicalism; since his essay was written in 1960, we must conclude that it failed to have its desired effect.}  

Michael Polanyi, from Beyond Nihilism (1960):

Jean-Jacques Rousseau anticipated in three respects the inherent instability of the rationalist ideal of a secular society. He saw that it implied an unrestrained individualism, demanding absolute freedom and equality far beyond the limits imposed by any existing society. Next, he saw that such absolute sovereignty of individual citizens was conceivable within society only under a popular government exercising absolute power. Thirdly, he anticipated the rise of an amoral individualism, asserting the rights of a unique creative personality against the morality of a discredited society. These implications were the logical consequences of their antecedents: that is, of a skeptical rationalism combined with the secularized fervor of Christianity.

By his argument and rhetoric, Rousseau poured into the channels of rationalism a fierce passion for humanity. His thought so widened the channels that they could be fraught eventually with all the supreme hopes of Christianity, the hopes which rationalism had released from their dogmatic framework. The legacy of Christ blighted the hopes of complacent rationalists; it had other tasks in store for humanity. The rationalist philosophes not only failed to establish an era of quiet enjoyment, but induced instead a violent tide of secular dynamism, which degenerated in many places into a fanaticism fiercer than the religious furies which their teachings had appeased. Even before the principles of scientific rationalism had been fully formulated, Rousseau had conjured up the extrapolation of these principles to the kind of secular fanaticism which ultimately resulted.

The predominant opinion of Enlightenment thinkers opposed both the premises and the conclusions of Rousseau, and they continued confidently to pursue the prospect of free and reasonable men in search of individual happiness, under a government to which they would grant only enough power to protect citizens from encroachments by their fellow citizens or by foreign enemies—disregarding the question as to who would arbitrate between the government and the citizens.

Little did the great rationalists realize the transformation they were engendering. They did not suspect that the spirit of fanaticism would enter the teachings of the philosophers and set the world ablaze with their arguments, or that rationalism, so inflamed, would transform the emotional personality of man. Yet this is what followed. Man’s consciousness of himself as a sovereign individual evoked that comprehensive movement of thought and feeling now known as Romanticism.

In 1789, France led the world towards a revolutionary consummation of the contradiction inherent in a post-Christian rationalism. The ideology of total revolution is a variant of the derivation of absolutism from absolute individualism. Its argument is simple and has yet to be answered. ¹ If society is not a divine institution, it is made by man, and man is free to do with society what he likes. There is then no excuse for having a bad society, and we must make a good one without delay.

In the 19^th century, a new scientific sociology claimed to have proved three things: (1) that the total destruction of the existing society was the only method for achieving any essential improvement of society; (2) that nothing beyond this act of violence was required, or even to be considered, since it was unscientific to make any plans for the new society; and (3) that no moral restraints were to be observed in this revolutionary seizure of power. The revolutionary process was historically inevitable and so beyond human control; morality, truth, etc. were merely epiphenomena of class interests. Revolutionary action would embody all morality, veracity, and justice, in the scientific sense.

People often speak of Communism and Nazism as secular religions, but not all fanaticism is religious. The passions of the total revolutions and total wars which have devastated our age were not religious but moral. Their morality became immanent in brute force because a naturalistic view of man forced them into this manifestation. Once they are immanent, moral motives no longer speak in their own voice and are no longer accessible to moral arguments; such is the structure of modern nihilistic fanaticism.

This is my diagnosis of the pathological morality of our time. What chance is there of remedying this condition? The Enlightenment, having secularized Christian hopes, destroyed itself by its moral inversion, which proved disastrous in its turn; but we cannot simply return to older ideas which had proven unstable. The rule of some dogmatic authority is no more acceptable today that it was in the age of Voltaire. We shall not abandon the scientific revolution which has secularized extensive domains of knowledge. We shall not go back on the hopes of Christianity and become as calmly indifferent to social wrongs as secularized antiquity was.

We have arrived beyond nihilism today, even though the place at which we have arrived resembles that where we stood before; we cannot foresee the creative possibilities by which we may discover an avenue that does not lead back to nihilism. May we not, however, learn from the disasters of the 20^th century to establish civic partnerships, united in their resolve on continuous reforms—our reforming dynamism restrained by the knowledge that radicalism will throw us back into disaster the moment we try to act out its principles literally?

It may happen, but we cannot limit ourselves to speculation. From here onward, thought must take on the form of action. ²

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Michael Polanyi - Wikipedia

¹ With all due respect, Polanyi was simply wrong on this point. The arguments for “total revolution” and “absolute individualism” have been repeatedly and decisively answered, and had been long before Polanyi. That, of course, has not ended the debate. Fanaticism has a mind of its own; it tends to be impervious to reason.

² “From here onward, thought must take on the form of action” strikes me as being not unlike Karl Marx’s “Hitherto, philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” I do not know if Polanyi noticed the similarity between his formulation and that of Marx.

Nihilism,
as portrayed by an AI program

 

Wednesday with Pascal: More Ado about Nothing

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat finds that the topic of nihilism has an uncanny appeal, both to those who welcome it and to those who stand athwart it, hollering “Stop!” For instance, the philosopher/musician Billy Preston shared his discovery that “Nothing from nothing leaves nothing,” an insight which earned him the Nobel Prize for Philosophical Funk. On the other hand, the sainted Augustine claimed that evil, from a metaphysical standpoint, does not exist; it is, quite literally, Nothing. This world then, with its abundant evils, may be considered Nothingness Incarnate, or Nothingness Inc. The point is, it is never difficult to say something about nothing; Pascal, for one, does it all the time.}  

The world is a theophany, an epiphany of things themselves unseen. (A.K. Coomaraswamy)

Is it necessary that we be deceived regarding the nature of our reality? (Philip K. Dick)

All the new thinking is about nihilism, of which there are many forms, ranging from (roughly) “nothing matters” to (roughly) “nothing is real” to (roughly) “nothing exists”. The latter view is often associated with Buddhism, although no true Buddhist (as the saying goes) would accept that association. In any case, to quote Bob Dylan, “Too much of nothing can make a man feel ill at ease,” and the same holds true for discussions of nihilism, which is why the subject is avoided at dinner parties and family gatherings.   

The late Ananda Coomaraswamy was a metaphysician, a historian, and a transmitter and interpreter of the culture and art of ancient India. Born in what is now Sri Lanka, Coomaraswamy lived and was educated in Britain; he later moved to the United States. He is generally associated with Rene Guenon and Frithjof Schuon as one of the iconic figures of what is called Traditionalism (or Perennialism).  

The ‘Tradition,’ as its adherents see it, is a repository of ancient universal wisdom, traces of which are said to be detected in all religious traditions. Traditionalists reject Modernity, with its emphasis on instrumental reason, science, and other repugnant practices; they believe that higher knowledge is to be found through spirituality and through esoteric practices like alchemy and magic. While they cannot deny the success of modern science, they claim that it distracts us from a deeper Reality, one not accessible either to empiricism or to discursive reason, much less to technological machinations. For a variety of reasons not relevant here, Traditionalism has appealed to, and has been associated with, postwar neo-Fascist thinkers like Julius Evola, Alexander Dugin, Viktor Orban, and Steve Bannon. Political implications aside, Traditionalism’s claims have been appropriated by New Age cults (and charlatans) of all kinds; the movement’s distaste for empiricism serves it well, as its assertions can neither be proven nor disproven in the lowly material realm in which we are trapped.  

Traditionalism teaches that there are three basic sources of genuine wisdom: intuition, contemplation, and revelation. This excerpt from an essay (“In the Wake of the Fall”) by Frithjof Schuon helps to illustrate the Traditionalists’ worldview:

It is not surprising that a science arising out of the fall ¹ and out of an illusory rediscovery of the sensory world should also be a science of nothing but the sensory and that it should deny everything which surpasses that domain, thereby denying God, the next world, and the soul. This also presupposes a denial of the pure Intellect, which alone is capable of knowing everything that modern science rejects.

Science, in its arrogance, does not stop with denying the pure Intellect, but also denies “Revelation, which alone rebuilds the bridge broken by the fall.” Schuon offers an example of science’s folly:

According to the observations of experimental science, the blue sky which stretches above us is not a world of bliss, but an optical illusion due to the refraction of light by the atmosphere. From this point of view, it is obviously right to maintain that the home of the blessed does not lie up there. But it would be a great mistake to assert that the association of ideas between the visible heavens and celestial Paradise does not arise from the nature of things but from ignorance mixed with imagination and sentimentality. The blue sky is a direct and adequate symbol of the higher, supra-sensory degrees of Existence, indeed, a distant reverberation of those degrees. It is truly a symbol, consecrated by the sacred Scriptures and by the unanimous intuition of peoples.

In case further explanation is needed, Schuon is happy to oblige:

A symbol is intrinsically so concrete and so efficacious that celestial manifestations, when they occur in our sensory world, ‘descend’ to earth and ‘ascend’ to heaven; a symbolism accessible to the senses takes on the function of the supra-sensible reality which it reflects. Light-years and the relativity of the space-time relationship have absolutely nothing to do with the perfectly ‘exact’ and ‘positive’ symbolism of appearances and its connection (at once analogical and ontological) with the celestial or angelic orders. The fact that the symbol itself may be no more than an optical illusion in no way impairs its precision or its efficacy, for all appearances, including those of space and the galaxies, are strictly speaking only illusions created by relativity.

Once you have dismissed sensory reality as composed of nothing but “illusions,” you have thoroughly deconstructed, well, everything; your work is done, and you can return to contemplating the Reality behind (and symbolized by) the illusions. ² Of course, you will still have to eat, sleep, get dressed, find shelter, and perform all the other quotidian rites of mundane lower-case reality; however, you will do those things secure in your knowledge that they are ultimately meaningless, which should help you sleep at night.

That, at least, is better than nothing—isn’t it?

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Frithjof Schuon quotations are from “In the Wake of the Fall,” included in the anthology Science and the Myth of Progress. The quote from Coomaraswamy was the epigraph for that volume. Information on Traditionalism and on significant Traditionalists can be found at (where else?) Wikipedia:

Ananda Coomaraswamy - Wikipedia

Frithjof Schuon - Wikipedia

Traditionalist School (perennialism) - Wikipedia

¹ The “fall” to which Schuon refers was man’s fall from his original connection to the divine and into the abyss of the human ego. No fruit was involved, nor a serpent or even a God.

² You will know when you are in touch with Reality because it will be capitalized. Should you reach that State, please tell the pure Intellect I said hello.

Nothing to See Here