The Little Red Blog

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.

Wednesday with Pascal: Our Comfortable Nihilism?

{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

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

 

Another Blog About Nothing

{In ‘The Banalization of Nihilism,’ Karen Leslie Carr looks at nihilism from the standpoint of Christian theology—in particular, the neo-orthodox theology of Karl Barth which further chastened humans already chastened by the Great War and the collapse of Enlightenment dreams. Pessimism was in the air, and pessimism is a well-known gateway to nihilism.}

Karen Leslie Carr (from The Banalization of Nihilism):

As the twentieth century unfolded, it became increasingly difficult to deny that the combined legacy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was dubious at best, for it had left its heirs with, on the one hand, a conviction of the desirability, even the necessity of truth, and, on the other hand, a radical suspicion of all claims to have found truth. The existentialist response was widely criticized as pessimistic, even nihilistic. This criticism stemmed not so much from the fact that the existentialists pointed to a world of purely human origin and found its promise of meaning counterfeit, but because they seemed to welcome this void, even to cultivate it, as a necessary aspect of human existence.

God having been pronounced dead in the nineteenth century, what followed his demise was not encouraging. “Man come of age,” as Bonhoeffer was to christen him, seemed distressingly immature, if not downright infantile. The first half of the twentieth century could be considered one long tantrum by overgrown children obsessed with ideology and armed with weapons of mass destruction.

Nietzsche, among others (e.g., Dostoyevsky), had seen it coming:

Nietzsche, dubbing it ‘the uncanniest of all guests,’ believed nihilism to be ‘one of the greatest crises, a moment of the deepest self-reflection, of humanity.’ Characterizing it as a disease that was pathological in its intensity, Nietzsche nonetheless thought that nihilism had within it the possibility of redemption from an interpretation of life that was both hypocritical and debilitating. ¹

Fortunately, as Carr explains, dialectics, as put forward by Hegel and perfected by Marx, came to the rescue, effortlessly reconciling opposites, squaring circles, and turning sows’ ears into silk purses:

There is something both provocative and perverse in the often grim insistence of dialectical theologians that the dissolution of sense is the beginning of real meaning. Central to their construction of what could be called a ‘soteriology of ambiguity’ were two related beliefs: an understanding of nihilism as the loss of something deemed desirable, even necessary, for human survival, coupled with a conviction of the importance and value of truthfulness in the face of such loss. It was precisely the tension between what one wanted—in this case, a transcendental meaning or ground accessible to human inquiry—and the realization that this could never be had that provided the content for the vision of humanity such theologians proposed. The despair bred of this tension was constitutive of human existence, they argued; recognizing and accepting the basic ambiguity of all human endeavors despite one’s ineradicable need for certainty was made the basis for authenticity among existential thinkers more generally. ² To be fully human meant to affirm both the utter emptiness of a world devoid of meaning and the human need for a meaningful world. To give up either—to lose oneself in an ‘ism’ purporting to be absolute truth or to deny the fundamental drive for meaning shared by all members of the human race—was, from this point of view, to succumb either to inauthenticity, in the former case, or unthinking animality, in the latter.

The good thing about nihilism—aside from the fact that we are stuck with it—is that, by clearing the ground of traditional meaning(s), it allows us the freedom to make our own existential choices, among which the primary contenders are Karl Barth’s Old Testament God, postmodern variations of Marxism, and the pleasures of consumer capitalism. ³ So far, the first option seems out of favor, the second is little more than a red herring mostly invoked by its opponents, and the third option has the overwhelming support of ordinary people for whom shopping is more satisfying than either ideological combat or prayer. 

The pursuit of happiness takes many unexpected twists and turns, but for the most part, it's fair to say that the motto of nihilistic modernity is, we’d rather shop than fight.

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Neo-orthodoxy - Wikipedia

¹ The “pathological” nature of modernity has also been emphasized by, among others, Eric Voegelin. I would add that the diagnostic profile should include “anosognosia,” that is, the sick patient is not aware of being sick but considers their condition to be normal.

² Again, Carr is here following Voegelin, who labeled “Gnostic” the refusal to accept the tension between transcendental ideals and mundane reality, that is, life in the metaxy.

³ Of course, that sort of freedom is exactly what conservative thinkers like Eric Voegelin and Alasdair Macintyre thought was wrong with modernity.

Nihilism: Accept No Substitutes

 

Saturday Lecture: The Quest for Uncertainty

{John Dewey was a prominent educator and a proponent of the philosophy known as Pragmatism, which sought to remove Truth from the realm of metaphysical Idealism and to find it instead in worldly activity. Pragmatism has been much derided, caricatured as claiming that “Truth is what works,” and accused of lacking any fundamental moral principles. Dewey was no Marxist, but in his philosophy, it is not hard to hear echoes of Marx: ‘Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world; the point, however, is to change it.’}  

“The quest for certitude has determined our basic metaphysics.” (John Dewey)

“The problem of the relation of theory and practice is the most practical problem of life.” (John Dewey)

John Dewey (from The Quest for Certainty):

Man, who lives in a world of hazards is compelled to seek for security. He has sought to attain it in two ways: the first is by changing the world through action, and the other is by changing the self in emotion and idea. It is a commentary on the slight control man has obtained over himself by means of control over nature, that the method of action has been felt to manifest dangerous pride, even defiance of the powers which be.

Philosophers have celebrated the method of change in personal ideas, and religious teachers that of change in the affections of the heart. These conversions have been prized on their own account, and only incidentally because of any change in action which would ensue. The latter has been esteemed as evidence of the change in thought and sentiment, not as a method of transforming the scene of life. The places in which the use of the arts has effected actual objective transformation have been regarded as inferior, if not base, and the activities connected with them as menial. The disparagement attending the idea of the material has seized upon them.

The depreciation of action, of doing and making, has been cultivated by philosophers. But they did not originate it; independently of their attitude, many things conspired to the same effect. Work has been onerous, toilsome, associated with a primeval curse. It has been done under compulsion and the pressure of necessity, while intellectual activity has been associated with leisure. Because of the unpleasantness of practical activity, as much of it as possible has been put upon slaves and serfs. Thus, the social dishonor in which this class was held was extended to the work they did. There is also the age-long association of knowing and thinking with immaterial and spiritual principles, and of the arts, of all practical activity in doing and making, with matter. For work is done with the body, by means of mechanical appliances, and is directed upon material things. The disrepute which has attended the thought of material things in comparison with immaterial thought has been transferred to everything associated with practice.

The exaltation of pure intellect and its activity above practical affairs is fundamentally connected with the quest for a certainty which shall be absolute and unshakeable. The distinctive characteristic of practical activity, one which is so inherent that it cannot be eliminated, is the uncertainty which attends it. Through thought, however, it has seemed that men might escape from the perils of uncertainty.  Practical activity deals with individualized and unique situations which are never exactly duplicable and about which, accordingly, no complete assurance is possible. All activity, moreover, involves change. The intellect, however, according to the traditional doctrine, may grasp universal Being, and which is fixed and immutable. Wherever there is practical activity, all the fear, disesteem and lack of confidence which gather about the thought of ourselves, cluster also about the thought of the actions we undertake. Man’s distrust of himself has caused him to desire to get beyond and above himself; in pure knowledge he has thought he could attain this self-transcendence.

The ancient Greek philosophers brought us the idea of a higher realm of fixed reality of which alone true science is possible, and an inferior world of change with which mundane experience and practical matters are concerned. They glorified the invariant at the expense of change, it being evident that all practical activity falls within the realm of change. It bequeathed the notion, which has ruled philosophy ever since their time, that the office of knowledge is to uncover the antecedently real, rather than, as is the case with our practical judgments, to gain the kind of understanding which is necessary to deal with problems as they arise.

Perfect certainty is what man wants. It cannot be found by practical doing or making; these take effect in an uncertain future, and involve peril, the risk of misadventure, frustration, and failure. Knowledge, on the other hand, is thought to be concerned with a region of Being which is fixed, eternal, and unalterable; human knowing is not to make any difference in It.

The problem of the relation of theory and practice is the most practical problem of life. For it is the question of how intelligence may inform action, and how action may bear the fruit of increased insight into meaning: a clear view of the values that are worthwhile and of how they are to be made secure in tangible objects. The glorification of theoretical knowledge as the exclusive avenue of access to what is real is not going to give way soon nor all at once. But it can hardly endure indefinitely. 

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John Dewey - Wikipedia

Pragmatism - Wikipedia

Chicago Club, 1896:
A basket of philosophical deplorables?

 

Eric Voegelin: Clearing Up the Mess

{Eric Voegelin did not blame Modernity entirely on Enlightenment thought, on the Reformation, or on medieval Nominalism. For Voegelin, there was plenty of blame to go around, blame stretching back for centuries; but while Enlightenment didn’t start the fire, it added fuel, fanned the flames, and effectively defunded the fire department (Christianity, that is). Although Christianity itself had long since become (in Voegelin’s narrative) part of the problem, to abandon it was in no way a solution. What the solution might be, Voegelin never explained.}

“The world is too much with us; late and soon, / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.” (William Wordsworth)

It wasn’t that Eric Voegelin disliked any specific aspects of the modern world—noise, light pollution, traffic congestion, the pace of life, fast-food chains, big box stores, manipulative media, the absence of a good five-cent cigar, etc. More than any of that, he loathed the very foundations of Modernity. The question, obviously, is, why—and, for that matter, what did he consider the foundations of Modernity to be?

Enlightenment thinkers, as popularly understood, were self-proclaimed proponents of Reason who followed Kant’s injunction, “Dare to know.” Taking the physical sciences as a model, modern philosophers embarked on a search for Answers to political and social issues. For Eric Voegelin, though, Answers were barriers to thought: “Questioning,” he said, “is the flame to be kept burning by the philosopher.” In his opinion, Modernity represented an abandonment of reason and a surrender to new types of dogmatism; after all, once you find an Answer, you no longer need to search.

Voegelin distrusted ‘totalizing’ systems of thought—e.g., scientism, utopian politics, and dogmatic theologies—and the more absolute and rigid a system, the more resistant to further inquiry, the more he distrusted it. For Voegelin, ideology was the enemy; it represented the imprisonment of thought.

From Voegelin’s perspective, not only has the modern West been locked in various ideological prisons, but, worse, it has also locked itself into the all-encompassing prison of the mundane world. Modernity no longer believes in, much less strives for, transcendence; it insists that this world and this life are all that exists, and it urges us to make the most of it. In rejecting the transcendent realm, according to J. David Franks, man has become “alienated from the divine ground of reality [and] increasingly numb to what reveals itself in the primal experiences of life.” Theophanies—revelations of the divine—have been replaced by what Ellis Sandoz called “egophanies of the libidinous self.”  

Using abstruse philosophical and metaphysical language (including a plethora of neologisms), Voegelin claimed that man without God is no longer truly human; we are deformed, spiritually diseased, and without hope. That deformation has taken centuries to develop, and the course of the disease has only worsened in modern times, as Voegelin explained:

The structure of sentiments which appears in the 18th century can be characterized generally by the term ‘intramundane religiousness’. In the conflict with the Christian tradition the new religiousness expresses itself through the inversion of the direction in which the Reality of existence is to be sought; the orientation toward a summum bonum was replaced by the flight from the summum malum of death in civil war.

Voegelin viewed the “inversion of direction” as an unmitigated disaster:

The inversion of direction became established as the principal instrument for interpreting the internal order of human nature. Whether it be the materialistic, the sensualistic, or the hedonistic variants — the strata of human nature are interpreted as derivatives of a physical or biological substance at the bottom of existence. The internal structure of man is no longer ordered toward a transcendental aim but is to be explained by the operations of physical sensibility or of a pleasure-pain mechanism.

Modern man became the measure of all things, but “all things” had been stripped of their transcendent dimension. The Enlightenment managed simultaneously to elevate man in stature and to diminish him in the process: 

This inversion of direction becomes from now on the symbol of the anti-Christian anthropology in politics— whether it assumes the form of economic materialism, or of biologism, or of psychologism. It is accompanied by the perversion of the idea of order: the disorder of passions is accepted as the normal order of the human soul, and the homo politicus, the man of secular passion, as the normal type of man. The problem is realized in its full importance in the seventeenth century. To the madness of the inflated ego, Hobbes finds the practical answer of the Leviathan crushing the proud, replacing the spiritual process of contrition by submission to governmental power.

It is often difficult to tell whether Voegelin’s primary concern was spiritual or political, and whether he was more troubled by the loss of the soul or by the growth of Leviathan. He seemed to portray modernity’s various deficiencies as aspects of the same singular phenomenon, i.e., man’s loss of the transcendent dimension of existence:

The passions have lost their character as a source of disorder in the soul and have become the fundamental force on which all order in the conduct of man has to rely. The return to the ground of existence and to the experience of creaturely nothingness have lost their function in the order of the soul. ¹

Voegelin’s declinist narrative continued in the same vein. According to him, ‘Natural’ man, severed from any link to (or even belief in) the supernatural, has lost his spiritual and existential balance, has mistaken the resulting unsteadiness as ‘normal,’ and now seeks the help of ‘governmental power’ to save him from himself. As Voegelin explained:

“When the spiritual center of man, through which man is open to the transcendental Reality, is destroyed, then the disorderly aggregate of passions can be used as an instrument by the legislator. Man is no longer an entity that has its existential center within itself; he has become a mechanism of pleasure, pain, and passions which can be harnessed by another man, the “legislator,” for purposes of his own. This was a key point of the anti-Christian attack on the existence of man; man is no end in himself but merely an instrument to be used by the legislator. This is the new basic thesis for collectivism in all its variants, down to the contemporary forms of totalitarianism. ²

Once the disorder of the soul is established as the nature of man, then the growth of the soul through an internal process nourished through communication with transcendental reality is replaced by the formation of conduct through external management. Such managing and organizing interference with the soul of man is, from the position of a spiritual morality, equally reprehensible in all its variants: whether it is the propagandizing formation of conduct and opinion through such political movements as the Communist or National Socialist or an educational process which relies on the psychology of conditioned reflexes and forms patterns of social conformance without raising the question of the morality of the pattern or of the morality of conformance. ³

The modern West, then, suffering as it is from a “disorder of the soul” (which disorder Voegelin dubbed “pneumapathy”), has obscured the transcendent horizon with the ideology of material progress, has substituted abject dependence for individual responsibility, and has replaced God with the State.

To quote Voegelin: “The task of clearing up the anti-noetic mess that has accumulated over the centuries in the contemporary science of man is enormous.”

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¹ The best example of how “the passions” were recast as man’s “fundamental force” was the baptism of “self-interest” (easily conflated with “avarice” and “greed”) by modern economists, who qualified the term as “enlightened self-interest,” as if that made a difference. Voegelin never mentions this; though it would have fit his narrative, economics was too worldly a domain to attract his attention.

² Voegelin acknowledges that Immanuel Kant, surely one of the leading voices of   Enlightenment, had in fact explicitly opposed such instrumentalization: “The Kantian ethical rule was that every man must be considered an end in himself and not an instrument for ulterior purposes.” I am not sure that Enlightenment, let alone Kant, can be held responsible for its inversion.

³ Christian thinkers throughout history have said that man’s fallen nature required the oversight of human institutions—government, for one, and education, for another. Voegelin seemed to suggest that man’s soul should be free from all such interference and left on its own to communicate with the Divine, which strikes me as a recipe for disaster. Nor would the Sisters of Mercy who taught me catechism appreciate being labeled “reprehensible” for their firm tutoring, though they were certainly trying to form in us “patterns of social conformance”.

 

Wednesday with Pascal: Smarter than Most

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat eagerly leaps at the chance to expose Eric Voegelin’s haughty disdain for, well, pretty much everyone.}

“The appeal of the mass for the common man lies in the possibility of obtaining the benefits of mankind without incurring its obligations.” (Voegelin)  

Before turning to Voegelin’s critique of Enlightenment, let us consider his general view of his fellow man—or of, as he said, “the common man,” in which category he surely did not include himself. While fond of calling the ideologues he despised “elitarians” (his neologism; he meant “elitists,” but he liked coining words), Voegelin also made clear his own low opinion of the easily misled, duped, propagandized, and distracted masses; as he put it, “The idea of being a part of a ‘masse totale’ can only appeal to a man who has not much substance of his own. His personality must be sufficiently underdeveloped, that is, it must be deficient in spiritual organization and balance to such a degree, that the anxiety of existence cannot be controlled and absorbed by the normal processes of the mature, meditative life. As a consequence, he will be plagued by insecurities, frustrations, fears, aggressiveness, paranoiac obsessions, and uncontrollable hatreds.”

Voegelin was by no means misanthropic; “man” qua “man” was not the object of his diatribe, but the modern “collective man,” the member of the ‘masse totale’ who, having been deprived of his spiritual heritage, was fully committed to an “intramundane” existence and no desire for, or belief in, transcendence. Thus, modern man was at best half a man, and one afflicted with the symptoms of his “pneumapathology” (“spiritual sickness,” another Voegelin neologism).   

Given the widespread existence of such spiritually deficient individuals, they will inevitably be guided by a minority: either one with greater insight into reality, or one with greater ambition to change that reality. It was the latter to whom Voegelin objected. He believed in spiritual, intellectual, and philosophical elites; his quarrel with modern elites was that they were ideologues lacking the right qualifications, credentials, or “substance” to assume the role. Rather than being spiritually mature and steeped in tradition, they were self-promoting masters of propaganda and sophistry, self-appointed rousers of a pliable public rabble; rather than being wise contemplatives, they were “pneumapathological” activists.

A true elite, for Voegelin, should be composed of individuals who, having devoted themselves to “the mature, meditative life,” understand the nature of the human condition and the importance of accepting human limits, leading them to reject hubris, Promethean ambition, and utopian efforts to remake the world. They were the guardians, as it were, of the metaxy, the “in-between” condition of our existence. The new elitarians, on the other hand, wanting either to jettison transcendence completely or to bring it down to earth, were full of “blissful ignorance concerning the difficulties of their enterprise. They did not sense clearly that a renovation of society through a new elite would have to rest on deeper foundations than any of them were able to lay.” The modern, politically active, ideologically driven elitarian was, for Voegelin, “an intellectual parasite whose zeal to teach others is stronger than his willingness to submit to intellectual discipline, who thrives on the fallacy that truth is to be found in the solutions of problems rather than in their discovery, who believes that truth can be dispensed as a body of doctrine, who transfers the characteristics of revealed truth to the finite human search for knowledge; who consequently, through vulgarizing problematical knowledge into dogmatic results, can make the innocent believe that they enter into the truth if they accept faithfully as dogma a proposition which no conscientious thinker would accept without far-reaching qualifications, who create in their victims the belief that instruction is education, who destroy intellectual honesty through their separation of results from the critical processes which lead up to them, who build up in the masses the unshakable brutality of ignorant conviction and who, for their murderous work of destruction, want to be applauded.”

It seems that most of us just aren’t smart enough for Eric Voegelin, as his admirers are fond of pointing out:

“Voegelin’s work is rejected out of hand by most secularists and liberals, in part because of their own superficial education and lack of knowledge in comparison to Voegelin’s. During the height of the Cold War, his work was adopted simplistically by anti-communist conservatives, but they equally have a very superficial understanding of Voegelin. Voegelin is not embraced as one of their own by historians or theologians or political scientists or philosophers because they cannot encompass him within their specialized fields and must necessarily be multidisciplinary in their approach and knowledge as he was. As such, he remains an outsider—much like anyone who has developed his reflective consciousness in openness to the Divine Ground with a command of art, literature, history, political philosophy, science, and theology.” ¹

The Voegelin enthusiast Ellis Sandoz positively gushed over his hero’s world-historic philosophizing:

Eric Voegelin, by his exploration of the heights and depths of reality experienced in consciousness, secures the divine ground of being along with the In-Between of man’s participation in time-eternity, a moving present with eschatological direction. His significance philosophically lies in the unique acuteness and subtlety of the affirmation of being—in his affirming both the beyond of the beyond experienced-symbolized as the It-reality of divine appeal, as well as the process and structure of the hierarchy of reality experienced as limiting human existence symbolized as In-Between, even as man is drawn by the divine appeal toward superior reality and divine fulfillment. In other words, Voegelin reauthenticates and rearticulates the intellectual and spiritual tradition of our civilization, further differentiating it through a revolutionary philosophy of consciousness that is of a technically superior order as theory. But more than this, he validates the realm of divine presence for mankind and for history generally by reconciling reason and revelation as modes of theophany…

Be that as it may, Voegelin’s superior knowledge and wisdom led him to such inscrutable utterances as “There is no answer to the Question other than the Mystery as it becomes luminous in the acts of questioning,” and to such haughty declarations as “One cannot enter into rational discourse with a person whose disease consists in the denial of the order of the logos.” Like the Gnostics he denounced, Voegelin believed in a saving knowledge (“the order of the logos”), which, while in theory available to all, was in fact capable of being truly apprehended and appreciated only by an elect—of which Voegelin had no doubt he was a member and for which he knew he was writing.  

So, what did Voegelin find so wrong with the Enlightenment? We shall see.

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¹ The quote is from the biographical sketch offered at the Voegelin View; it is not credited to any author.

The working title for Eric Voegelin's unfinished autobiography?

Eric Voegelin: The Atrophy of Civilizational Values

{Is today a good day to discuss Eric Voegelin? Probably not. Eric Voegelin is at best an acquired taste. Still, the man who coined the phrase ‘immanentizing the eschaton’ deserves at least a cursory look, and both Pascal the existential Russian blue cat and I find Voegelin's work to be worth the trouble.}

Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, I present to you the late Eric Voegelin:

Eric Voegelin (January 3, 1901 – January 19, 1985) was a German-American political philosopher. He was born in Cologne and educated in political science at the University of Vienna, where he became an associate professor of political science in the law faculty. In 1938, he and his wife fled from the Nazi forces which had entered Vienna. They emigrated to the United States, where they became citizens in 1944. He spent most of his academic career at Louisiana State University, the University of Munich, and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. 

As for Voegelin’s academic work and repute, Wikipedia adds the following:

In his later life Voegelin worked to account for the endemic political violence of the twentieth century, in an effort variously referred to as a philosophy of politics, history, or consciousness. In Voegelin's worldview, he blamed “a flawed utopian interpretation of Christianity for spawning totalitarian movements like Nazism and Communism." Voegelin eschewed any ideological labels or categorizations that readers and followers attempted to impose on his work. Nevertheless, his work came to the forefront during the Cold War and was adopted mainly by conservatives.

Thanks, Wikipedia! I’ll take it from here.

Eric Voegelin’s appeal to American conservatives is easy to explain; in his critique of modernity and its “utopian” impulses, he focused on a basket of ideological deplorables, most of them on the political Left, including “a wide array of ideologies and movements such as Marxism, communism, National Socialism, progressivism, liberalism, and humanism.” Conservatives could scarcely conceal their glee at seeing a respected academic and widely admired deep thinker like Voegelin expose the connections between liberalism and communism; “There is no fundamental conflict,” he wrote, “between enlightened progressivism and Communism.” As a bonus, Voegelin blamed the left for Nazism as well, because the various flavors of totalitarianism have the same roots! That Voegelin later protested the politicization and oversimplification of his work made little or no difference to his acolytes, of whom there were (and are) many. *

From Enlightenment to Revolution was one of Voegelin’s latter-day works, published in 1975, though most of the material had been written in the late 1940s and early 1950s, meaning that it reflects post-WWII and Cold War concerns. Not surprisingly, Voegelin had little positive to say about either the Enlightenment itself or the modern, post-Enlightenment West; he believed that the Christian West had been falling from grace since the height of the Middle Ages, leading to the modern age wherein “the deceptive picture of a progressive civilization arose in which the advancement of science seemed to compensate amply for the atrophy of other civilizational values.” ¹

Nor was Voegelin’s distemper, even then, assuaged by conservative pushback against liberal modernity. Such pushback was too little and too late, he said, amounting to no more than standing athwart History and hollering ‘Stop!” ² In Voegelin’s own words:

When the breaking point in this process of undermining the central values of civilization has been reached, as it has in our age, the impression is widespread that entirely new ideas are in revolt against the traditions of progressive Western civilization, but in fact the wrecking operations of the present only consummate a work of destruction that has been going on for the last four centuries. It is a serious misunderstanding of historical forces to believe that a handful of men can destroy a civilization before it has committed suicide.

Taken in its entirety, Voegelin’s work would seem to have been an effort to save the West from itself and from the wrecking ball of history. It may be fairly (albeit crudely) said that, in From Enlightenment to Revolution, he tore the Enlightenment a new one. This passage is not atypical:

The thinkers of the eighteenth century mutilated the idea of man beyond recognition. The reduction of man and his life to the level of utilitarian existence was the symptom of the critical breakdown of Western civilization through the atrophy of the intellectual and spiritual substance of man. In the progressive, Positivist movement since the middle of the eighteenth century, as well as with the followers of the movement, the term man no longer designates the mature man of the humanist and Christian tradition, but only the crippled, utilitarian fragment. Man is no longer a spiritual center but a mere link in the chain of generations. The spirit which welds the plurality of men into the unity of mankind is no longer a transcendental reality to be experienced by every individual soul but has become a thread of meaning to be touched at one point by a man if he is fortunate but beyond the reach of the vast majority of mankind. And the eternal presence of the Spirit to every soul that willingly opens itself is transposed into a precarious, fleeting meaning which can be ascertained only with some difficulty by scholars who know a good deal about the problems of mathematized science. At first sight, this whole transposition looks so much like an infantile insult to the dignity of man that the mass appeal, which the idea undoubtedly has to this day, is hardly intelligible. ³

Whatever else one might say about Eric Voegelin, one cannot accuse him of having been swayed by the prospect (had it ever existed) of mass appeal. In upcoming posts, Pascal and I will consider more closely Voegelin's critique of the Enlightenment. 

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* The website Voegelin View (VoegelinView: A Review of Art, Culture, Politics, Science, and Divine Ground) is likely the best place to become better acquainted with Voegelin and his writings.

¹ Voegelin never clarified whether he was or was not a Christian. While critical of historical Christianity, he nonetheless considered the Christian revelations (from Jesus and then Paul) to be pivotal, if not quite decisive, for understanding the human condition. Resistant as he was to dogma and doctrine, Voegelin may have been best thought of as an “unchurched Christian”.

² “Standing athwart History and hollering ‘Stop!’ was, of course, William F. Buckley’s famous cri de resistance against America’s postwar liberal consensus. Given that Buckley was one of Voegelin’s admirers, it is interesting to note that Voegelin referred to “the eschatology of stopping history” as a “Satanic mirage.”

³ Ironically, the phrase “hardly intelligible” has frequently been applied, and with justification, to Voegelin’s writing.

Eric Voegelin Explains It All

{Both Pascal the existential Russian blue cat and I have been attempting for some time to grasp the complex ideas of the late Eric Voegelin. As we are both now exhausted by the effort, we have called in Professor Arguendo to see what he can make of ‘Anamnesis,’ a book in which Voegelin explored the nature of consciousness in somewhat the same manner as Augustine explored the nature of time.}

“The analysis of consciousness is a dead end.” (Eric Voegelin)

“Man’s conscious existence is an event within reality.” (Eric Voegelin)

Arguendo, it appears, from my cursory examination of 'Anamnesis,' that Eric Voegelin came to believe—after years of attempting to understand human existence through the study of history, politics, and philosophy—that he needed to focus instead on a basic theory of consciousness: what is “consciousness,” what does it mean to be “conscious,” how and why are we “conscious”?

And so Voegelin waded into the treacherous and largely unmapped terrain of human consciousness. Not unlike scholars who are said to gaze into the well of history and see their own reflection, Voegelin may have identified his consciousness, but not necessarily mine, or, for that matter, yours:

By virtue of their consciousness, human beings are aware of being parts of a comprehensive reality, of which they express their awareness by the symbols of birth and death, of a cosmic whole structured by realms of being, of a world of external objects and of the presence of divine reality in the cosmos, of mortality and immortality, of creation into the cosmic order and of salvation from its disorder, of descent into the depth of the psyche and meditative ascent toward its beyond. Within this rich field of reality-consciousness, there occur the processes of wondering, questing, and seeking, of being moved and drawn into the search by a consciousness of ignorance, which, in order to be sensed as ignorance, requires an apprehension of something worthy of being known; of an appeal to which man can lovingly respond or not so lovingly deny himself; of the joy of finding and the despair of having lost the direction; of the advance of truth from the compact to the differentiated experiences and symbols; and of the great breakthroughs of insight through visions of the prophetic, the philosophic, and the Christian-apostolic type. In brief, Man’s conscious existence is an event within reality, and Man’s consciousness is quite conscious of being constituted by the reality of which it is conscious. Intentionality is a substructure within the comprehensive consciousness of a reality that becomes luminous for its truth in the consciousness of Man.

With all due respect, count me among those who have never been aware of "divine reality in the cosmos" or of any "salvation" from the disorder of existence.

Arguendo, the problem with Voegelin’s search for a theory of consciousness is that it was undermined from the outset by his recognition that “Human consciousness is always the concrete consciousness of concrete persons,” a claim which, if true, means that each human consciousness is unique and that there can be, therefore, no such thing as a universal or generalized “human consciousness”. Voegelin certainly knew this, just as he knew (and said) that abstractions like “mankind” do not exist other than as a linguistic shorthand. Like such fanciful notions as “truth,” “justice,” and “the American way,” “human consciousness” is a concept, not an existent entity. Voegelin did what he could to resolve the seeming contradiction:

If abstract statements about the structure of consciousness were to be accepted as true, they had first to be recognized as true in the concrete. Their truth rested on the concrete experiences of reality by concrete human beings who were able to articulate their experience of reality and of their own role as participants in it, and thus engender the language of consciousness.

However, just as one can never step into the same river twice, “concrete experiences of reality” can never be identical for more than one subjective consciousness; in fact, you and I, given our different consciousnesses, cannot step into the same river at all. Moreover, the articulation of experience is not the same as the experience itself, not to mention (though Voegelin does mention it) that language itself is full of pitfalls, not the least of which is reification (mistaking words for things).

Arguendo, Voegelin wanted to have his cake and eat it too:

The truth of consciousness was both abstract and concrete. The process of verification had to penetrate, therefore, through the engendered symbols to the engendering experience; and the truth of the experience had to be ascertained by a responsive experience that could verify or falsify the engendering experience. Even worse, the process was further burdened with the impossibility of separating language and experience as independent entities. The truth of consciousness, its verification and advance, could not be identified with either the truth of statements or the truth of experience; it revealed itself through participation in reality and it was essentially historical.

Arguendo, and I may well be mistaken, Voegelin here seems to have been saying that the proof is in the pudding; experiences—let us say, theophanies, which Voegelin took very seriously—can only be verified/validated by incorporating them into the life of the recipient (Abraham, Moses, Jesus, etc.) and the life of anyone else who wishes in turn to verify for themselves their truth value. This leads Voegelin to admit that “Truth must be sought not in a theory of consciousness, but concretely in the constitution of the responding and verifying consciousness; and that concrete consciousness is always one’s own. A philosopher, then, must engage in an anamnetic exploration of his own consciousness to discover its constitution by his own experiences of reality.”

By “anamnetic exploration of consciousness,” Voegelin meant tracing one’s consciousness as far back as one could toward its origins, because each individual consciousness is shaped from birth by its experiences. Anamnetic exploration would require serious introspection:

This exploration could not stop short at more recent enrichments of one’s consciousness by learning or by the observation of events, because one’s manner of response to learning and events was precisely what needed to be clarified. The exploration had to go as far back as memory would allow, to reach the strata of reality-consciousness that had been the least overlaid by later accretions. Anamnesis had to capture the childhood experiences that let themselves be captured because they remained living forces in the present constitution of his consciousness.  

Arguendo, the child is father to the man; also, “Rosebud”. Having figured that much out, Voegelin then conducted his own “anamnetic experiments,” aka trips down memory lane:

My earliest recollection takes me back to Cologne. My mother took me along on her shopping trips. In a bakery, the saleslady expressed proper admiration for the little creature (me) who could hardly walk, and she asked about my age. My mother informed her: fourteen months. I recall a general feeling of pride about the attention paid to me and a feeling of special significance. This recollection is neither supported nor influenced by information on the part of my family. As far as I know, I first told it when I was more than twenty years old, evoking only the incredulity of my parents.

The memory, and the feelings Voegelin attached to them, is touching; but it does not seem to provide much basis for scientific investigation. Arguendo, it likely did not occur to Eric Voegelin that consciousness is the thing with feathers, or that developing a “theory of consciousness” is akin to trying to catch the wind.  

 

Wednesday with Pascal: The Scapegoat Ruse

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat has been pondering the ideas of Rene Girard: if our social orders are built on violence, and if we now decide to eschew violence, what becomes of social order? As Jesus said, 'Can't we all just get along?'}

It was the contention of the late Rene Girard, and a thesis defended by his many followers, that human beings are so innately rivalrous, so fiercely competitive, so covetous of our neighbors’ possessions that we will all kill each other unless we can agree on a surrogate, a scapegoat, to kill. Killing the scapegoat satisfies (temporarily) the community’s violent impulses; the scapegoat, as a consolation prize, is then lauded posthumously for having, by his or her death, healed the community.

Robert Hamerton-Kelly, a proponent of Girard’s views, explains what this has to do with Christianity:

The surrogate victim (the scapegoat) mechanism gives stability to a group wracked by rivalry and violence; but that stability is unstable. The mechanism’s effectiveness depends on its being hidden from view and immune from understanding; the last thing the ruse can tolerate is an unveiling of its secrets. Inasmuch as the Crucifixion [sic] of Jesus unveils the innocent victim slain from the foundation of the world, it was nothing less than the arrival of the end of time in the midst of history.

Hamerton-Kelly continues:

The cross tells the truth about the world’s origin and survival as an ever-renewed structure of sacred violence dependent on the rituals of sacrifice, the myths of origins, and the laws of prohibition and punishment. This is the world of human beings organized by the ruse of the surrogate, around the mound of the posthumously idolized victim. The foundation of this world is the moment when life was made possible by death.

As rituals and myths are normally promulgated, controlled, and interpreted by religious authorities, Girard’s theory means that religion is and always has been complicit in the mechanism of sacrifice; historical Christianity, too, has been a purveyor and enabler of “sacred violence.”¹ Hamerton-Kelly acknowledges the unintended consequence of the Christian revelation:

The effect of the preaching of the Gospel in Western culture has been to unveil the secret of society’s survival and thus to put that survival in jeopardy. The more we are aware of the scapegoat ruse, the less it works to sustain the structures of the sacred within which we secure ourselves (somewhat) from violent disorder.

It’s simple, really: if we reject the “scapegoat ruse,” how then will we live? No society could survive if its members lived by Jesus’ example, which is why only sectarian splinter groups have ever attempted to do so. Non-violence, forgiveness, and turning the other cheek constitute an agenda for surrender, at least according to the wisdom of this world—the one in which we live. *

What, then, was the point of Jesus’ self-sacrifice? As Girard’s theory seemed to suggest: Jesus, the innocent scapegoat, was posthumously made into a divine figure and the basis of a new faith which in turn became an organized and institutionalized religion, perpetuating the mechanism of sacred violence. ² 

Girard could be categorized—alongside Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and Eric Voegelin—as one of the “Four Horsemen of the Anti-Apocalypse”. Or so Hamerton-Kelly suggests: “Schmitt, Strauss, and Voegelin [also] feared the potential for chaos in Christianity’s vision and energy.” He then touches briefly on how the thought of those three resembled Girard’s, beginning with Schmitt: “While Clausewitz famously said that war is politics by other means, Carl Schmitt reversed direction and said that politics is war by other means. The distinction between friend and enemy, and the struggle for power between the two antagonists, are the essence of politics.” ³ Praising Schmitt’s redefinition as being “marvelously clarifying,” Hamerton-Kelly explains that, for Schmitt as for Girard, “The structure of sacred violence exercises the power that restrains history in its drift toward universal revolution. Like Girard’s ‘Order of the Sacred,’ Schmitt’s ‘katechon’ has the effect of holding back history and warding off chaos. ⁴ His thought,” says Hamerton-Kelly, “is a pagan version of Christianity, a [secular] adaptation of Christian theology to the service of sacred violence.”  ⁵

Strauss and Voegelin are admired by Hamerton-Kelly for “their negative attitude toward messianic or utopian expectation.” Fearful of disorder, they also defended, in their readings of the Old Testament, “the kings of Israel and Judah who struggled to manage history in their time” against “the prophets who railed at them in the name of a future judgment and a final utopia.” They agreed, too, that rather than embrace “messianic hope,” people should “find their dignity and significance in the dignified endurance of their present plight.”

Girard’s theory presumes that human beings are utterly incapable—except through violence—of curbing their desires or of controlling the rivalries which ensue from competition for limited resources. Like all theories, this has potential consequences, some of which are political; as Sam Kriss says, “For his new followers, Girard’s theory illustrates the central thesis of reactionary politics: whatever we claim to believe, and whatever fictions we build, human nature is always the same.” We have met the enemy, eons ago, and it is us.

While history provides copious evidence of the human proclivity for violence, everyday life provides overwhelming evidence that, for the most part, people usually get along quite well despite the presence of conflicts and rivalries. We quarrel, we squabble, we argue, and we bitterly contest each other’s claims, but we do not ordinarily resort to violence. We do not require either scapegoats or a Leviathan to control us; we can, and we usually do, control ourselves.

In short, and as any parent knows who has watched two siblings squabbling over a toy, mimetic desire is a reality; but, as anyone knows who has watched two siblings share, it is not the only reality.     

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René Girard - Wikipedia

Robert Hamerton-Kelly - Wikipedia  It is worth noting that Hamerton-Kelly supported  America's 2003 invasion of Iraq, saying it was an example of violence being properly deployed on the side of the angels. 

¹ The sight of Christian ministers ritually blessing nuclear submarines comes to mind.

* Eric Voegelin repeatedly emphasized this point.

² I am inclined to think that Constantine gave the game away with the whole “In this sign you will conquer” business, a blatant distortion of everything which Jesus had preached. The imperial torch was passed from pagan Rome to Christian Rome: meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

³ The “friend/enemy” dichotomy also reinforces morale: “Since opposition from the outside strengthens the centripetal forces inside a group, it is not altogether negative. The group needs its enemies for the sake of coherence.”

⁴ What "katechon" has been holding back apocalyptic violence since the end of World War II? Some would say the atomic bomb; others, I suppose, would say the United Nations. 

⁵ Girardians are inevitably ambivalent about “sacred violence”. On the one hand, Jesus unmasked it for what it truly is (scapegoating) and thereby discredited it; on the other hand, it holds the social order together (even to this day) and keeps sin “crouching at the door” (Genesis 4:7). 

We are all Girardians now...