Editor's
Preface
In a basement apartment near downtown San Francisco in the
early1960's, Eugene Rose, the future Fr. Seraphim, sat at
his desk covered with stacks of books and piles of paper
folders. The room was perpetually dark, for little light
could come in from the window. Some years before Eugene had
moved there, a murder had occurred in that room, and some
said that an ominous spirit still lingered there. But
Eugene, as if in defiance of this spirit and the
ever-darkening spirit of the city around him, had one wall
covered with icons, before which a red icon-lamp always
flickered.
In this room Eugene undertook to write a monumental
chronicle of modern man's war against God: man's attempt to
destroy the Old Order and raise up a new one without Christ,
to deny the existence of the Kingdom of God and raise up his
own earthly utopia in its stead. This projected work was
entitled The Kingdom of Man and the Kingdom, of God.
Only a few years before this, Eugene himself had been
ensnared in the Kingdom of Man and had suffered in it; he
too had been at war against God. Having rejected the
Protestant Christianity of his formative years as being weak
and ineffectual, he had taken part in the Bohemian
counterculture of the 1950's, and had delved into Eastern
religions and philosophies which taught that God is
ultimately impersonal. Like the absurdist artists and
writers of his day, he had experimented with insanity,
breaking down logical thought processes as a way of
"breaking on over to the other side." He read the words of
the mad "prophet" of Nihilism, Friedrich Nietzsche, until
those words resonated in his soul with an electric, infernal
power. Through all these means, he was seeking to attain to
Truth or Reality with his mind; but they all resulted in
failure. He was reduced to such a state of despair that,
when later asked to describe it, he could only say, "I was
in Hell." He would get drunk, and would grapple with the God
Whom he had claimed was dead, pounding on the floor and
screaming at Him to leave him alone. Once while intoxicated,
he wrote, "I am sick, as all men are sick who are absent
from the love of God."
"Atheism," Eugene wrote in later years, "true 'existential'
atheism burning with hatred of a seemingly unjust or
unmerciful God, is a spiritual state; it is a real attempt
to grapple with the true God Whose ways are so inexplicable
even to the most believing of men, and it has more than once
been known to end in a blinding vision of Him Whom the real
atheist truly seeks. It is Christ Who works in these souls.
The Antichrist is not to be found primarily in the great
deniers, but in the small affirmers, whose Christ is only on
the lips. Nietzsche, in calling himself Antichrist, proved
thereby his intense hunger for Christ...."
It was in such a condition of intense hunger that Eugene
found himself in the late 1950's. And then, like a sudden
gust of wind, there entered into his life a reality that he
never could have foreseen. Towards the end of his life he
recalled this moment:
"For years in my studies I was satisfied with being 'above
all traditions' but somehow faithful to them.... When I
visited an Orthodox church, it was only in order to view
another 'tradition.' However, when I entered an Orthodox
church for the first time (a Russian church in San
Francisco) something happened to me that I had not
experienced in any Buddhist or other Eastern temple;
something in my heart said that this was 'home,' that all my
search was over. I didn't really know what this meant,
because the service was quite strange to me, and in a
foreign language. I began to attend Orthodox services more
frequently, gradually learning its language and customs....
With my exposure to Orthodoxy and to Orthodox people, a new
idea began to enter my awareness: that Truth was not just an
abstract idea, sought and known by the mind, but was
something personal--even a Person--sought and loved by the
heart. And that is how I met Christ."
While working on The Kingdom of Man and the Kingdom of
God in his basement apartment, Eugene was still coming to
grips with what he had found. He had come upon the Truth in
the Undistorted Image of Christ, as preserved in the Eastern
Orthodox Church, but he yearned to enter into what he called
the "heart of hearts" of that Church, its mystical
dimension, not its boring, worldly, organizational aspect.
He wanted God, and wanted Him passionately. His writings
from this time were a kind of catharsis for him: a means
of emerging out of untruth, out of the underground darkness
and into the light. Although they are philosophical in tone,
much more so than his later works, these early writings were
born of an intense suffering that was still very fresh in
his soul. It was only natural that he would write much more
about the Kingdom of Man, in which he had suffered all his
life, than about the Kingdom of God, of which he had as yet
only caught a glimpse. It was still through the prism of the
Kingdom of Man that he viewed the Kingdom of God.
Of all the fourteen chapters Eugene planned to write for
his magnum opus (see the outline below),
only the seventh was typed in completed form; the rest
remain in handwritten notes. This seventh chapter, which we
present here, was on the philosophy of Nihilism.
Nihilism--the belief that there is no
Absolute Truth, that all truth is relative--is, Eugene
affirmed, the basic philosophy of the 20th century: "It has
become, in our time, so widespread and pervasive, has
entered so thoroughly and so deeply into the minds and
hearts of all men living today, that there is no longer any
'front' on which it may be fought." The heart of this
philosophy, he said, was "expressed most clearly by
Nietzsche and by a character of Dostoyevsky in the phrase:
'God is dead, therefore man becomes God and everything is
possible."'
From his own experience, Eugene believed
that modern man cannot come to Christ fully until he is
first aware of how far he and his society have fallen away
from Him, that is, until he has first faced the Nihilism in
himself "The Nihilism of our age exists in all," he wrote, "
and those who do not, with the aid of God, choose to combat
it in the name of the fullness of Being of the living God,
are swallowed up in it already. We have been brought to the
edge of the abyss of nothingness and, whether we recognize
its nature or not, we will, through affinity for the
ever-present nothingness within us, be engulfed in it beyond
all hope of redemption-unless we cling in full and certain
faith (which doubting, does not doubt) to Christ, without
Whom we are truly nothing."
As a writer, Eugene felt he must call his
contemporaries back from the abyss. He wrote not only out of
his own desire for God, but out of his concern for others
who desired Him also--even those who, as he himself had once
done, rejected God or warred against Him out of their very
desire for Him.
Out of his pain of heart, out of the
darkness of his former life, Eugene speaks to contemporary
humanity which finds itself in the same pain and darkness.
Now, three decades since he wrote this work, as the powers
of Nihilism and anti-Christianity enter more deeply into the
fiber of our society, his words are more needed than ever.
Having faced and fought against the Nihilism in himself, he
is able to help prevent us from being captured by its
soul-destroying spirit, and to help us cling to Christ, the
Eternal Truth become flesh.
--Monk Damascene Christensen
I.
INTRODUCTION: The Question of Truth
What is the Nihilism in which we have
seen the root of the Revolution of the modern age? The
answer, at first thought, does not seem difficult; several
obvious examples of it spring immediately to mind. There is
Hitler's fantastic program of destruction, the Bolshevik
Revolution, the Dadaist attack on art; there is the
background from which these movements sprang, most notably
represented by several "possessed" individuals of the late
nineteenth century--poets like Rimbaud and Baudelaire,
revolutionaries like Bakunin and Nechayev, "prophets" like
Nietzsche; there is, on a humbler level among our
contemporaries, the vague unrest that leads some to flock to
magicians like Hitler, and others to find escape in drugs or
false religions, or to perpetrate those "senseless" crimes
that become ever more characteristic of these times. But
these represent no more than the spectacular surface of the
problem of Nihilism. To account even for these, once one
probes beneath the surface, is by no means an easy task; but
the task we have set for ourselves in this chapter is
broader: to understand the nature of the whole movement of
which these phenomena are but extreme examples.
To do this it will be necessary to avoid
two great pitfalls lying on either side of the path we have
chosen, into one or the other of which most commentators on
the Nihilist spirit of our age have fallen: apology, and
diatribe.
Anyone aware of the too-obvious
imperfections and evils of modern civilization that have
been the more immediate occasion and cause of the Nihilist
reaction--though we shall see that these too have been the
fruit of an incipient Nihilism--cannot but feel a measure of
sympathy with some, at least, of the men who have
participated in that reaction. Such sympathy may take the
form of pity for men who may, from one point of view, be
seen as innocent "victims" of the conditions against which
their effort has been directed; or again, it may be
expressed in the common opinion that certain types of
Nihilist phenomena have actually a "positive" significance
and have a role to play in some "new development" of history
or of man. The latter attitude, again, is itself one of the
more obvious fruits of the very Nihilism in question here;
but the former attitude, at least, is not entirely devoid of
truth or justice. For that very reason, however, we must be
all the more careful not to give it undue importance. It is
all too easy, in the atmosphere of intellectual fog that
pervades Liberal and Humanist circles today, to allow
sympathy for an unfortunate person to pass over into
receptivity to his ideas. The Nihilist, to be sure, is in
some sense "sick," and his sickness is a testimony to the
sickness of an age whose best--as well as worst--elements
turn to Nihilism; but sickness is not cured, nor even
properly diagnosed by "sympathy." In any case there is no
such thing as an entirely "innocent victim." The Nihilist is
all too obviously involved in the very sins and guilt of
mankind that have produced the evils of our age; and in
taking arms--as do all Nihilists not only against real or
imagined "abuses" and "injustices" in the social and
religious order, but also against order itself and the Truth
that underlies that order, the Nihilist takes an active part
in the work of Satan (for such it is) that can by no means
be explained away by the mythology of the "innocent victim."
No one, in the last analysis, serves Satan against his will.
But if "apology" is far from our
intention in these pages, neither is our aim mere diatribe.
It is not sufficient, for example, to condemn Nazism or
Bolshevism for their "barbarism," "gangsterism," or
"anti-intellectualism," and the artistic or literary
avant-garde for their "pessimism" or "exhibitionism"; nor is
it enough to defend the "democracies" in the name of
"civilization," "progress," or "humanism," or for their
advocacy of "private property" or "civil liberties." Such
arguments, while some of them possess a certain justice, are
really quite beside the point; the blows of Nihilism strike
too deep, its program is far too radical, to be effectively
countered by them. Nihilism has error for its root, and
error can be conquered only by Truth. Most of the criticism
of Nihilism is not directed to this root at all, and the
reason for this--as we shall see--is that Nihilism has
become, in our time, so widespread and pervasive, has
entered so thoroughly and so deeply into the minds and
hearts of all men living today, that there is no longer any
"front" on which it may be fought; and those who think they
are fighting it are most often using its own weapons, which
they in effect turn against themselves.
Some will perhaps object--once they have
seen the scope of our project--that we have set our net too
wide: that we have exaggerated the prevalence of Nihilism
or, if not, then that the phenomenon is so universal as to
defy handling at all. We must admit that our task is an
ambitious one, all the more so because of the ambiguity of
many Nihilist phenomena; and indeed, if we were to attempt a
thorough examination of the question our work would never
end.
It is possible, however, to set our net
wide and still catch the fish we are after--because it is,
after all, a single fish, and a large one. A complete
documentation of Nihilist phenomena is out of the question;
but an examination of the unique Nihilist mentality that
underlies them, and of its indisputable effects and its role
in contemporary history, is surely possible.
We shall attempt here, first, to describe
this mentality-in several, at least, of its most important
manifestations-and offer a sketch of its historical
development; and then to probe more deeply into its meaning
and historical program. But before this can be done, we must
know more clearly of what we are speaking; we must begin,
therefore, with a definition of Nihilism.
This task need not detain us long;
Nihilism has been defined, and quite succinctly, by the
fount of philosophical Nihilism, Nietzsche.
"That there is no truth; that there is no absolute state of
affairs-no 'thing-in-itself.' This alone is Nihilism, and of
the most extreme kind."[1]
"There is no truth": we have encountered
this phrase already more than once in this book, and it will
recur frequently hereafter. For the question of Nihilism is,
most profoundly, a question of truth; it is, indeed, the
question of truth.
But what is truth? The question is, first
of all, one of logic: before we discuss the content of
truth, we must examine its very possibility, and the
conditions of its postulation. And by "truth" we mean, of
course--as Nietzsche's denial of it makes explicit--absolute
truth, which we have already defined as the dimension of the
beginning and the end of things.
"Absolute truth": the phrase has, to a
generation raised on skepticism and unaccustomed to serious
thought, an antiquated ring. No one, surely--is the common
idea--no one is naive enough to believe in "absolute truth"
any more; all truth, to our enlightened age, is "relative."
The latter expression, let us note-"all truth is
relative"-is the popular translation of Nietzsche's phrase,
"there is no (absolute) truth"; the one doctrine is the
foundation of the Nihilism alike of the masses and of the
elite.
"Relative truth" is primarily
represented, for our age, by the knowledge of science, which
begins in observation, proceeds by logic, and progresses in
orderly fashion from the known to the unknown. It is always
discursive, contingent, qualified, always expressed in
"relation" to something else, never standing alone, never
categorical, never -absolute."
The unreflective scientific specialist
sees no need for any other kind of knowledge; occupied with
the demands of his specialty, he has, perhaps, neither time
nor inclination for "abstract" questions that inquire, for
example, into the basic presuppositions of that specialty.
If he is pressed, or if his mind spontaneously turns to such
questions, the most obvious explanation is usually
sufficient to satisfy his curiosity: all truth is empirical,
all truth is relative.
Either statement, of course, is a
self-contradiction. The first statement is itself not
empirical at all, but metaphysical; the second is itself an
absolute statement. The question of absolute truth is raised
first of all, for the critical observer, by such
self-contradictions; and the first logical conclusion to
which he must be led is this:, if there is any truth at all,
it cannot be merely "relative." The first principles of
modern science, as of any system of knowledge, are
themselves unchangeable and absolute; if they were not there
would be no knowledge at all, not even the most "reflective"
knowledge, for there would be no criteria by which to
classify anything as knowledge or truth.
This axiom has a corollary: the absolute
cannot be attained by means of the relative. That is to say,
the first principles of any system of knowledge cannot be
arrived at through the means of that knowledge itself, but
must be given in advance; they are the object, not of
scientific demonstration, but of faith.
We have discussed, in an earlier chapter,
the universality of faith, seeing it as underlying all human
activity and knowledge; and we have seen that faith, if it
is not to fall prey to subjective delusions, must be rooted
in truth. It is therefore a legitimate, and indeed
unavoidable question whether the first principles of the
scientific faith--for example, the coherence and uniformity
of nature, the transsubjectivity of human knowledge, the
adequacy of reason to draw conclusions from observation--are
founded in absolute truth; if they are not, they can be no
more than unverifiable probabilities. The "pragmatic"
position taken by many scientists and humanists who cannot
be troubled to think about ultimate things--the position
that these principles are no more than experimental
hypotheses which collective experience finds reliable--is
surely unsatisfactory; it may offer a psychological
explanation of the faith these principles inspire, but since
it does not establish the foundation of that faith in truth,
it leaves the whole scientific edifice on shifting sands and
provides no sure defense against the irrational winds that
periodically attack it.
In actual fact, however,--whether it be
from simple naivete or from a deeper insight which they
cannot justify by argument-most scientists and humanists
undoubtedly believe that their faith has something to do
with the truth of things. Whether this belief is justified
or not is, of course, another question; it is a metaphysical
question, and one thing that is certain is that it
is not justified by the rather primitive metaphysics of most
scientists.
Every man, as we have seen, lives by
faith; likewise every man--something less obvious but no
less certain--is a metaphysician. The claim to any knowledge
whatever--and no living man can refrain from this
claim--implies a theory and standard of knowledge, and a
notion of what is ultimately knowable and true. This
ultimate truth, whether it be conceived as the Christian God
or simply as the ultimate coherence of things, is a
metaphysical first principle, an absolute truth. But with
the acknowledgement, logically unavoidable, of such a
principle, the theory of the "relativity of truth"
collapses, it itself being revealed as a self-contradictory
absolute.
The proclamation of the "relativity of
truth" is, thus, what might be called a "negative
metaphysics"--but a metaphysics all the same. There are
several principal forms of "negative metaphysics," and since
each contradicts itself in a slightly different way, and
appeals to a slightly different mentality, it would be wise
to devote a paragraph here to the examination of each. We
may divide them into the two general categories of "realism"
and "agnosticism," each of which in turn may be subdivided
into "naive" and "critical."
"Naive realism," or "naturalism," does
not precisely deny absolute truth, but rather makes absolute
claims of its own that cannot be defended. Rejecting any
"ideal" or "spiritual" absolute, it claims the absolute
truth of "materialism" and "determinism." This philosophy is
still current in some circles--it is official Marxist
doctrine and is expounded by some unsophisticated scientific
thinkers in the West but the main current of contemporary
thought has left it behind, and it seems today the quaint
relic of a simpler, but bygone, day, the Victorian day when
many transferred to "science" the allegiance and emotions
they had once devoted to religion. It is the impossible
formulation of a "scientific" metaphysics--impossible
because science is, by its nature, knowledge of the
particular, and metaphysics is knowledge of what underlies
the particular and is presupposed by it. It is a suicidal
philosophy in that the "materialism" and "determinism" it
posits render all philosophy invalid; since it must insist
that philosophy, like everything else, is "determined," its
advocates can only claim that their philosophy, since it
exists, is "inevitable," but not at all that it is "true.'
This philosophy, in fact, if consistent, would do away with
the category of truth altogether; but its adherents,
innocent of thought that is either consistent or profound,
seem unaware of this fatal contradiction. The contradiction
may be seen, on a less abstract level, in the altruistic and
idealistic practice of, for example, the Russian Nihilists
of the last century, a practice in flagrant contradiction of
their purely materialistic and egoistic theory; Vladimir
Solovyov cleverly pointed out this discrepancy by ascribing
to them the syllogism, "Man is descended from. monkey,
consequently we shall love one another."
All philosophy presupposes, to some
degree, the autonomy o ideas; philosophical "materialism"
is, thus, a species of "idealism." It is one might say, the
self-confession of those whose ideas do not rise above the
obvious, whose thirst for truth is so easily assuaged by
science that they make it into their absolute.
"Critical realism," or "positivism," is
the straightforward denial of metaphysical truth. Proceeding
from the same scientific predisposition as the more naive
naturalism, it professes greater modesty in abandoning the
absolute altogether and restricting itself to "empirical,"
"relative" truth. We have already noted the contradiction in
this position: the denial of absolute truth is itself an
"absolute truth"; again, as with naturalism, the very
positing of the first principle of positivism is its own
refutation.
"Agnosticism," like " realism," may be
distinguished as "naive" and "critical." "Naive" or
"doctrinaire agnosticism" posits the absolute unknowability
of any absolute truth. While its claim seems more modest
even than that of positivism, it still quite dearly claims
too much: if it actually knows that the absolute is
"unknowable," then this knowledge is itself "absolute." Such
agnosticism is in fact but a variety of positivism,
attempting, with no greater success, to cover up its
contradictions.
Only in "critical" or "pure agnosticism"
do we find, at last, what seems to be a successful
renunciation of the absolute; unfortunately, such
renunciation entails the renunciation of everything else and
ends--if it is consistent--in total solipsism. Such
agnosticism is the simple statement of fact: we do not know
whether there exists an absolute truth, or what its nature
could be if it did exist; let us, then--this is the
corollary--content ourselves with the empirical, relative
truth we can know. But what is truth? What is knowledge? If
there is no absolute standard by which these are to be
measured, they cannot even be defined. The agnostic, if he
acknowledges this criticism, does not allow it to disturb
him; his position is one of "pragmatism," "
experimentalism," "instrumentalism": there is no truth, but
man can survive, can get along in the world, without it.
Such a position has been defended in high places--and in
very low places as well--in our anti-intellectualist
century; but the least one can say of it is that it is
intellectually irresponsible. It is the definitive
abandonment of truth, or rather the surrender of truth to
power, whether that power be nation, race, class, comfort,
or whatever other cause is able to absorb the energies men
once devoted to the truth.
The "pragmatist" and the "agnostic" may
be quite sincere and well-meaning; but they only deceive
themselves--and others--if they continue to use the word
"truth" to describe what they are seeking. Their existence,
in fact, is testimony to the fact that the search for truth
which has so long animated European man has come to an end.
Four centuries and more of modern thought have been, from
one point of view, an experiment in the possibilities of
knowledge open to man, assuming that there is no Revealed
Truth. The conclusion--which Hume already saw and from which
he fled into the comfort of "common sense" and conventional
life, and which the multitudes sense today without
possessing any such secure refuge--the conclusion of this
experiment is an absolute negation: if there is no Revealed
Truth, there is no truth at all; the search for truth
outside of Revelation has come to a dead end. The scientist
admits this by restricting himself to the narrowest of
specialties, content if he sees a certain coherence in a
limited aggregate of facts, without troubling himself over
the existence of any truth, large or small; the multitudes
demonstrate it by looking to the scientist, not for truth,
but for the technological applications of a knowledge which
has no more than a practical value, and by looking to other,
irrational sources for the ultimate values men once expected
to find in truth. The despotism of science over practical
life is contemporaneous with the advent of a whole series of
pseudo-religious "revelations"; the two are correlative
symptoms of the same malady: the abandonment of truth.
Logic, thus, can take us this far: denial
or doubt of absolute truth leads (if one is consistent and
honest) to the abyss of solipsism and irrationalism; the
only position that involves no logical contradictions is the
affirmation of an absolute truth which underlies and secures
all lesser truths; and this absolute truth can be attained
by no relative, human means. At this point logic fails us,
and we must enter an entirely different universe of
discourse if we are to proceed. It is one thing to state
that there is no logical barrier to the affirmation of
absolute truth; it is quite another actually to affirm it.
Such an affirmation can be based upon only one source; the
question of truth must come in the end to the question of
Revelation.
The critical mind hesitates at this
point. Must we seek from without what we cannot attain by
our own unaided power? It is a blow to pride--most of all to
that pride which passes today for scientific "humility" that
"sits down before fact as a little child" and yet refuses to
acknowledge any arbiter of fact save the proud human reason.
It is, however, a particular revelation--Divine Revelation,
the Christian Revelation--that so repels the rationalist;
other revelations he does not gainsay.
Indeed, the man who does not accept,
fully and consciously, a coherent doctrine of truth such as
the Christian Revelation provides, is forced--if he has any
pretensions to knowledge whatever--to seek such a doctrine
elsewhere; this has been the path of modern philosophy,
which has ended in obscurity and confusion because it would
never squarely face the fact that it cannot supply for
itself what can only be given from without. The blindness
and confusion of modern philosophers with regard to first
principles and the dimension of the absolute have been the
direct consequence of their own primary assumption, the
non-existence of Revelation; for this assumption in effect
blinded men to the light of the sun and rendered obscure
everything that had once been clear in its light. To one who
gropes in this darkness there is but one path, if he will
not be healed of his blindness; and that is to seek some
light amidst the darkness here below. Many run to the
flickering candle of "common sense" and conventional life
and accept--because one must get along somehow--the current
opinions of the social and intellectual circles to which
they belong. But many others, finding this light too dim,
flock to the magic lanterns that project beguiling,
multicolored views that are, if nothing else, distracting,
they become devotees of this or the other political or
religious or artistic current that the "spirit of the age"
has thrown into fashion. In fact no one lives but by the
light of some revelation, be it a true or a false one,
whether it serve to enlighten or obscure. He who will not
live by the Christian Revelation must live by a false
revelation; and all false revelations lead to the Abyss.
We began this investigation with the logical question, "what
is truth?" That question may--and must--be framed from an
entirely different point of view. The skeptic Pilate asked
the question, though not in earnest; ironically for him, he
asked it of the Truth Himself "I am the Way, the Truth, and
the Life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by Me."
[2]
"Ye shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall make you
free."
[3]
Truth in this sense, Truth that confers eternal life and
freedom, cannot be attained by any human means; it can only
be revealed from above by One Who has the power to do so.
The path to this Truth is a narrow one,
and most men--because they travel the "broad" path--miss it.
There is no man, however,--for so the God Who is Truth
created him--who does not seek this Truth. We shall examine,
in later chapters, many of the false absolutes, the false
gods men have invented and worshipped in our idolatrous age;
and we shall find that what is perhaps most striking about
them is that every one of them, far from being any "new
revelation," is a dilution, a distortion, a perversion, or a
parody of the One Truth men cannot help but point to even in
their error and blasphemy and pride. The notion of Divine
Revelation has been thoroughly discredited for those who
must obey the dictates of the "spirit of the age"; but it is
impossible to extinguish the thirst for truth which God has
implanted in man to lead them to Him, and which can only be
satisfied in the acceptance of His Revelation. Even those
who profess satisfaction with "relative" truths and consider
themselves too "sophisticated" or "honest" or even "humble"
to pursue the absolute--even they tire, eventually, of the
fare of unsatisfying tidbits to which they have arbitrarily
confined themselves, and long for more substantial fare.
The whole food of Christian Truth,
however, is accessible only to faith; and the chief obstacle
to such faith is not logic, as the facile modern view has
it, but another and opposed faith. We have seen indeed, that
logic cannot deny absolute truth without denying itself, the
logic that sets itself up against the Christian Revelation
is merely the servant of another "revelation," of a false
"absolute truth": namely Nihilism.
In the following pages we shall
characterize as "Nihilists" men of, as it seems, widely
divergent views: humanists, skeptics, revolutionaries of all
hues, artists and philosophers of various schools; but they
are united in a common task. Whether in positivist
"criticism" of Christian truths and institutions,
revolutionary violence against the Old Order, apocalyptic
visions of universal destruction and the advent of a
paradise on earth, or objective scientific labors in the
interests of a "better life" in this world--the tacit
assumption being that there is no other world--their aim is
the same: the annihilation of Divine Revelation and the
preparation of a new order in which there shall be no trace
of the "old" view of things, in which Man shall be the only
god there is.
II. The Stages of the Nihilist Dialectic
The Nihilist mentality, in the unity of
its underlying aim, is single; but this mentality manifests
itself in phenomena as diverse as the natures of the men who
share it. The single Nihilist cause is thus advanced on many
fronts simultaneously, and its enemies are confused and
deceived by this effective tactic. To the careful observer,
however, Nihilist phenomena reduce themselves to three or
four principal types, and these few types are, further,
related to each other as stages in a process which may be
called the Nihilist dialectic. One stage of Nihilism opposes
itself to another, not to combat it effectively, but to
incorporate its errors into its own program and carry
mankind one step further on the road to the Abyss that lies
at the end of all Nihilism. The arguments at each stage, to
be sure, are often effective in pointing out certain obvious
deficiencies of a preceding or succeeding stage; but no
criticism is ever radical enough to touch on the common
errors all stages share, and the partial truths which are
admittedly present in all forms of Nihilism are in the end
only tactics to seduce men to the great falsehood that
underlies them all.
The stages to be described in the
following pages are not to be understood as merely
chronological, though in the narrowest sense they are in
fact a kind of chronicle of the development of the Nihilist
mentality from the time of the failure of the Nihilist
experiment of the French Revolution to the rise and fall of
the latest and most explicitly Nihilist manifestation of the
Revolution, National Socialism. Thus the two decades before
and the two after the middle of the 19th century may be seen
as the summit of Liberal prestige and influence, and J.S.
Mill as the typical Liberal; the age of Realism occupies
perhaps the last half of the century and is exemplified on
the one hand by socialist thinkers, on the other by the
philosophers and popularizers (we should perhaps rather say
"exploiters") of science; Vitalism, in the forms of
Symbolism, occultism, artistic Expressionism, and various
evolutionary and "mystical" philosophies, is the most
significant intellectual undercurrent throughout the half
century after about 1875; and the Nihilism of Destruction,
though its intellectual roots lie deep in the preceding
century, brings, to a grand conclusion, in the public order
as well as in many private spheres, the whole century and a
quarter of Nihilist development with the concentrated era of
destruction of 1914-45.
It will be noticed that these periods
overlap, for Nihilism matures at a different rate in
different peoples and in different individuals; the
overlapping in fact is more extreme than our simple scheme
can suggest, so much so that representatives of every stage
can be found in every period, and all of them exist
contemporaneously even today. What is true of historical
periods is true also of individuals; there is no such thing
as a "pure" Nihilist at any stage, every predominantly
Nihilist temperament being a combination of at least two of
the stages.
Further, if the age since the French
Revolution is the first one in which Nihilism has played the
central role, each of its stages has been represented in
earlier centuries. Liberalism, for example, is a direct
derivative of Renaissance Humanism; Realism was an important
aspect of the Protestant Reformation as well as of the
French Enlightenment; a kind of Vitalism appeared in
Renaissance and Enlightenment occultism and again in
Romanticism; and the Nihilism of Destruction, while never so
thorough as it has been for the past century, has existed as
a temptation for certain extremist thinkers throughout the
modern age.
With these reservations, however, our
scheme may perhaps be accepted as at least an approximation
to what has been an undeniable historical and psychological
process. Let us, then, begin our investigation of the stages
of this process, the Nihilist dialectic, attempting to judge
them by the clear light of the Orthodox Christian Truth
which if we are correct--they exist to obscure and deny. In
this section we shall attempt no more than to describe these
stages, and to point out, by reference to the definition of
Nihilism we have adopted, in what respect they may be
characterized as Nihilist.
1. LIBERALISM
The Liberalism we shall describe in the
following pages is not--let us state at the outset--an overt
Nihilism; it is rather a passive Nihilism, or, better yet,
the neutral breeding-ground of the more advanced stages of
Nihilism. Those who have followed our earlier discussion
concerning the impossibility of spiritual or intellectual
"neutrality" in this world will understand immediately why
we have classified as Nihilist a point of view which, while
not directly responsible for any striking Nihilist
phenomena, has been an indispensable prerequisite for their
appearance. The incompetent defence by Liberalism of a
heritage in which it has never fully believed, has been one
of the most potent causes of oven Nihilism.
The Liberal humanist civilization which,
in Western Europe, was the last form of the Old Order that
was effectively destroyed in that Great War and the
Revolutions of the second decade of this century and which
continues to exist--though in an even more attenuated
"democratic" form--in the free world today, may be
principally characterized by its attitude to truth. This is
not an attitude of open hostility nor even of deliberate
unconcern, for its sincere apologists undeniably have a
genuine regard for what they consider to be truth; rather,
it is an attitude in which truth, despite certain
appearances, no longer occupied the center of attention. The
truth in which it professes to believe (apart of course,
from scientific fact) is, for it, no spiritual or
intellectual coinof current circulation, but idle and
unfruitful capital left over from a previous age. The
Liberal still speaks, at least on formal occasions, of
"eternal verities," of "faith," of "human dignity," of man's
"high calling" or his "unquenchable spirit," even of
"Christian civilization"; but it is quite clear that these
words no longer mean what they once meant. No Liberal takes
them with entire seriousness; they are in fact metaphors,
ornaments of language that are meant to evoke an emotional,
not an intellectual, response--a response largely
conditioned by long usage, with the attendant memory of a
time when such words actually had a positive and serious
meaning.
No one today who prides himself on his
"sophistication"--that is to say, very few in academic
institutions, in government, in science, in humanist
intellectual circles, no one who wishes or professes to be
abreast of the "times"--does or can fully believe in
absolute truth, or more particularly in Christian Truth. Yet
the name of truth has been retained, as have been the names
of those truths men once regarded as absolute, and few in
any position of authority or influence would hesitate to use
them, even when they are aware that their meanings have
changed. Truth, in a word, has been "reinterpreted"; the old
forms have been emptied and given a new, quasi-Nihilist
content. This may easily be seen by a brief examination of
several of the principal areas in which truth has been
"reinterpreted."
In the theological order the first truth
is, of course, God. Omnipotent and omnipresent Creator of
all, revealed to faith and in the experience of the faithful
(and not contradicted by the reason of those who do not deny
faith), God is the supreme end of all creation and Himself,
unlike His creation, finds His end in Himself, everything
created stands in relation to and dependence upon Him, Who
alone depends upon nothing outside Himself, He has created
the world that it might live in enjoyment of Him, and
everything in the world is oriented toward this end, which
however men may miss by a misuse of their freedom.
The modern mentality cannot tolerate such
a God. He is both too intimate--too "personal," even too
"human"--and too absolute, too uncompromising in His demands
of us; and He makes Himself known only to humble faith--a
fact bound to alienate the proud modern intelligence. A "new
god" is clearly required by modern man, a god more closely
fashioned after the pattern of such central modern concerns
as science and business; it has, in fact, been an important
intention of modern thought to provide such a god. This
intention is clear already in Descartes, it is brought to
fruition in the Deism of the Enlightenment, developed to its
end in German idealism: the new god is not a Being but an
idea, not revealed to faith and humility but constructed by
the proud mind that still feels the need for "explanation"
when it has lost its desire for salvation. This is the dead
god of philosophers who require only a "first cause" to
complete their systems, as well as of "positive thinkers"
and other religious sophists who invent a god because they
"need" him, and then think to "use" him at will. Whether
"deist," "idealist," pantheist," or "immanentist," all the
modern gods are the same mental construct, fabricated by
souls dead from the loss of faith in the true God.
The atheist arguments against such a god
are as irrefutable as they are irrelevant; for such a god
is, in fact, the same as no god at all. Uninterested in man,
powerless to act in the world (except to inspire a worldly
"optimism"), he is a god considerably weaker than the men
who invented him. On such a foundation, needless to say,
nothing secure can be built; and it is with good reason that
Liberals, while usually professing belief in this deity,
actually build their world-view upon the more obvious,
though hardly more stable, foundation of Man. Nihilist
atheism is the explicit formulation of what was already, not
merely implicit, but actually present in a confused form, in
Liberalism.
The ethical implications of belief in
such a god are precisely the same as those of atheism; this
inner agreement, however, is again disguised outwardly
behind a cloud of metaphor. In the Christian order all
activity in this life is viewed and judged in the light of
the life of the future world, the life beyond death which
will have no end. The unbeliever can have no idea of what
this life means to the believing Christian; for most people
today the future life has, like God, become a mere idea, and
it therefore costs as little pain and effort to deny as to
affirm it. For the believing Christian, the future life is
joy inconceivable, joy surpassing the joy he knows in this
life through communion with God in prayer, in the Liturgy,
in the Sacrament; because then God will be all in all and
there will be no falling away from this joy, which will
indeed be infinitely enhanced. The true believer has the
consolation of a foretaste of eternal life. The believer in
the modern god, having no such foretaste and hence no notion
of Christian joy, cannot believe in the future life in the
same way; indeed, if he were honest with himself, he would
have to admit that he cannot believe in it at all.
There are two primary forms of such
disbelief which passes for Liberal belief: the Protestant
and the humanist. The Liberal Protestant view of the future
life--shared, regrettably, by increasing numbers who profess
to be Catholic or even Orthodox--is, like its views on
everything else pertaining to the spiritual world, a minimal
profession of faith that masks an actual faith in nothing.
The future life has become a shadowy underworld in the
popular conception of it, a place to take one's "deserved
rest" after a life of toil. Nobody has a very clear idea of
this realm, for it corresponds to no reality; it is rather
an emotional projection, a consolation for those who would
rather not face the implications of their actual disbelief
Such a "heaven" is the fruit of a union
of Christian terminology with ordinary worldliness, and it
is convincing to no one who realizes that compromise in such
ultimate matters is impossible; neither the true Orthodox
Christian nor the consistent Nihilist is seduced by it. But
the compromise of humanism is, if anything, even less
convincing. Here there is scarcely even the pretense that
the idea corresponds to reality; all becomes metaphor and
rhetoric. The humanist no longer speaks of heaven at all, at
least not seriously; but he does allow himself to speak of
the "eternal," preferably in the form of a resounding figure
of speech: "eternal verities," "eternal spirit of men." One
may justly question whether the word has any meaning at all
in such phrases. In humanist stoicism the "eternal" has been
reduced to a content so thin and frail as to be virtually
indistinguishable from the materialist and determinist
Nihilism that attempts--with some justification, surely, to
destroy it.
In either case, in that of the Liberal
"Christian" or the even more Liberal humanist, the inability
to believe in eternal life is rooted in the same fact: they
believe only in this world, they have neither experience nor
knowledge of, nor faith in the other world, and most of all,
they believe in a "god" who is not powerful enough to raise
men from the dead.
Behind their rhetoric, the sophisticated
Protestant and the humanist are quite aware that there is no
room for Heaven, nor for eternity, in their universe; their
thoroughly Liberal sensibility, again, looks not to a
transcendent, but to an immanent source for its ethical
doctrine, and their agile intelligence is even capable of
turning this faute de mieux into a positive apology. It
is-in this view-both "realism" and "courage" to live without
hope of eternal joy nor fear of eternal pain; to one endowed
with the Liberal view of things, it is not necessary to
believe in Heaven or Hell to lead a "good life" in this
world. Such is the total blindness of the Liberal mentality
to the meaning of death.
If there is no immortality, the Liberal
believes, one can still lead a civilized life; "if there is
no immortality"-is the far profounder logic of Ivan
Karamazov in Dostoyevsky's novel-"all things are lawful."
Humanist stoicism is possible for certain individuals for a
certain time: until, that is, the full implications of the
denial of immortality strike home. The Liberal lives in a
fool's paradise which must collapse before the truth of
things. If death is, as the Liberal and Nihilist both
believe, the extinction of the individual, then this world
and everything in it-love, goodness, sanctity,
everything-are as nothing, nothing man may do is of any
ultimate consequence and the full horror of life is hidden
from man only by the strength of their will to deceive
themselves; and "all things are lawful," no otherworldly
hope or fear restrains men from monstrous experiments and
suicidal dreams. Nietzsche's words are the truth-and
prophecy-of the new world that results from this view:
Of all that which was formerly held to be true, not one word
is to be credited. Everything which was formerly disdained
as unholy, forbidden, contemptible, and fatal--all these
flowers now bloom on the most charming paths of truth.
[4]
The blindness of the Liberal is a direct
antecedent of Nihilist, and more specifically of Bolshevist,
morality; for the latter is only a consistent and systematic
application of Liberal unbelief It is the supreme irony of
the Liberal view that it is precisely when its deepest
intent shall have been realized in the world, and all men
shall have been "liberated" from the yoke of transcendent
standards, when even the pretense of belief in the other
world shall have vanished--it is precisely then that life as
the Liberal knows or desires it shall have become
impossible; for the "new man" that disbelief produces can
only see in Liberalism itself the last of the "illusions"
which Liberalism wished to dispel.
In the Christian order politics too was
founded upon absolute truth. We have already seen, in the
preceding chapter, that the principal providential form
government took in union with Christian Truth was the
Orthodox Christian Empire, wherein sovereignty was vested in
a Monarch, and authority proceeded from him downwards
through a hierarchical social structure. We shall see in the
next chapter, on the other hand, how a politics that rejects
Christian Truth must acknowledge "the people" as sovereign
and understand authority as proceeding from below upwards,
in a formally "egalitarian" society. It is clear that one is
the perfect inversion of the other; for they are opposed in
their conceptions both of the source and of the end of
government. Orthodox Christian Monarchy is government
divinely established, and directed, ultimately, to the other
world, government with the teaching of Christian Truth and
the salvation of souls as its profoundest purpose; Nihilist
rule--whose most fitting name, as we shall see, is
Anarchy---is government established by men, and directed
solely to this world, government which has no higher aim
than earthly happiness.
The Liberal view of government, as one
might suspect, is an attempt at compromise between these two
irreconcilable ideas. In the 19th century this compromise
took the form of "constitutional monarchies," an
attempt--again--to wed an old form to a new content; today
the chief representatives of the Liberal idea are the
"republics" and "democracies" of Western Europe and America,
most of which preserve a rather precarious balance between
the forces of authority and Revolution, while professing to
believe in both.
It is of course impossible to believe in both with equal
sincerity and fervor, and in fact no one has ever done so.
Constitutional monarchs like Louis Philippe thought to do so
by professing to rule "by the Grace of God and the will of
the people"--a formula whose two terms annul each other, a
fact as equally evident to the Anarchist
[5]
as to the Monarchist.
Now a government is secure insofar as it
has God for its foundation and His Will for its guide; but
this, surely, is not a description of Liberal government. It
is, in the Liberal view, the people who rule, and not God;
God Himself is a "constitutional monarch" Whose authority
has been totally delegated to the people, and Whose function
is entirely ceremonial. The Liberal believes in God with the
same rhetorical fervor with which he believes in Heaven. The
government erected upon such a faith is very little
different, in principle, from a government erected upon
total disbelief, and whatever its present residue of
stability, it is clearly pointed in the direction of
Anarchy.
A government must rule by the Grace of
God or by the will of the people, it must believe in
authority or in the Revolution; on these issues compromise
is possible only in semblance, and only for a time. The
Revolution, like the disbelief which has always accompanied
it, cannot be stopped halfway; it is a force that, once
awakened, will not rest until it ends in a totalitarian
Kingdom of this world. The history of the last two centuries
has proved nothing if not this. To appease the Revolution
and offer it concessions, as Liberals have always done,
thereby showing that they have no truth with which to oppose
it, is perhaps to postpone, but not to prevent, the
attainment of its end. And to oppose the radical Revolution
with a Revolution of one's own, whether it be
"conservative," " non-violent," or "spiritual," is not
merely to reveal ignorance of the full scope and nature of
the Revolution of our time, but to concede as well the first
principle of that Revolution: that the old truth is no
longer true, and a new truth must take its place. Our next
chapter will develop this point by defining more closely the
goal of the Revolution.
In the Liberal world-view, therefore--in
its theology, its ethics, its politics, and in other areas
we have not examined as well--truth has been weakened,
softened, compromised; in all realms truth that was once
absolute has become less certain, if not entirely
"relative." Now it is possible-and this in fact amounts to a
definition of the Liberal enterprise-to preserve for a time
the fruits of a system and a truth of which one is uncertain
or skeptical; but one can build nothing positive upon such
uncertainty, nor upon the attempt to make it intellectually
respectable in the various relativistic doctrines we have
already examined. There is and can be no philosophical
apology for Liberalism; its apologies, when not simply
rhetorical, are emotional and pragmatic. But the most
striking fact about the Liberal, to any relatively unbiased
observer, is not so much the inadequacy of his doctrine as
his own seeming oblivion to this inadequacy.
This fact, which is understandably
irritating to well-meaning critics of Liberalism, has only
one plausible explanation. The Liberal is undisturbed even
by fundamental deficiencies and contradictions in his own
philosophy because his primary interest is elsewhere. If he
is not concerned to found the political and social order
upon Divine Truth, if he is indifferent to the reality of
Heaven and Hell, if he conceives of God as a mere idea of a
vague impersonal power, it is because he is more immediately
interested in worldly ends, and because everything else is
vague or abstract to him. The Liberal may be interested in
culture, in learning, in business, or merely in comfort; but
in every one of his pursuits the dimension of the absolute
is simply absent. He is unable, or unwilling, to think in
terms of ends, of ultimate things. The thirst for absolute
truth has vanished; it has been swallowed up in worldliness.
In the Liberal universe, of course, truth-which is to say,
learning,--is quite compatible with worldliness; but there
is more to truth than learning. "Every one that is of the
truth heareth My voice."
[6]
No one has rightly sought the truth who has not encountered
at the end of this search-whether to accept or reject
Him-our Lord, Jesus Christ, "the Way, the Truth, and the
Life," Truth that stands against the world and is a reproach
to all worldliness. The Liberal, who thinks his universe
secure against this Truth, is the "rich man" of the parable,
overburdened by his worldly interests and ideas, unwilling
to give them up for the humility, poverty, and lowliness
that are the marks of the genuine seeker after truth.
Nietzsche has given a second definition of Nihilism, or
rather a commentary on the definition "there is no truth";
and that is, "there is no answer to the question: 'why?' "
[7]
Nihilism
thus means that the ultimate questions have no answers, that
is to say, no positive answers; and the Nihilist is he who
accepts the implicit "no" the universe supposedly gives as
its answer to these questions. But there are two ways of
accepting this answer. There is the extreme path wherein it
is made explicit and amplified in the programs of Revolution
and destruction; this is Nihilism properly so-called, active
Nihilism, for--in Nietzsche's words--"Nihilism is ... not
only the belief that everything deserves to perish; but one
actually puts one's shoulder to the plough; one destroys."
[8]
But there is also a "moderate" path, which is that of the
passive or implicit Nihilism we have been examining here,
the Nihilism of the Liberal, the humanist, the agnostic who,
agreeing that "there is no truth," no longer ask the
ultimate questions. Active Nihilism presupposes this
Nihilism of skepticism and disbelief.
The totalitarian Nihilist regimes of this
century have undertaken, as an integral part of their
programs, the ruthless "reeducation" of their peoples. Few
subjected to this process for any length of time have
entirely escaped its influence; in a landscape where A is
nightmare, one's sense of reality and truth inevitably
suffers. A subtler "re-education," quite humane in its means
but nonetheless Nihilist in its consequences, has been
practiced for some time in the free world, and nowhere more
persistently or effectively than in its intellectual center,
the academic world. Here external coercion is replaced by
internal persuasion; a deadly skepticism reigns, hidden
behind the remains of a "Christian heritage" in which few
believe, and even fewer with deep conviction. The profound
responsibility the scholar once possessed, the communication
of truth, has been reneged; and A the pretended "humility"
that seeks to conceal this fact behind sophisticated chatter
on "the limits of human knowledge," is but another mask of
the Nihilism the Liberal academician shares with the
extremists of our day. Youth that--until it is "re-educated"
in the academic environment-- still thirsts for truth, is
taught instead of truth the "history of ideas," or its
interest is diverted into "comparative" studies, and the
all-pervading relativism and skepticism inculcated in these
studies is sufficient to kill in almost all the natural
thirst for truth.
The academic world--and these words are
neither lightly nor easily spoken--has become today, in
large part, a source of corruption. It is corrupting to hear
or read the words of men who do not believe in truth. It is
yet more corrupting to receive, in place of truth, more
learning and scholarship which, if they are presented as
ends in themselves, are no more than parodies of the truth
they were meant to serve, no more than a facade behind which
there is no substance. It is, tragically, corrupting even to
be, exposed to the primary virtue still left to the academic
world, the integrity of the best of its representatives--if
this integrity serves, not the truth, but skeptical
scholarship, and so seduces men all the more effectively to
the gospel of subjectivism and unbelief this scholarship
conceals. It is corrupting, finally, simply to live and work
in an atmosphere totally permeated by a false conception of
truth, wherein Christian Truth is seen as irrelevant to the
central academic concerns, wherein even those who still
believe this Truth can only sporadically make their voices
heard above the skepticism promoted by the academic system.
The evil, of course, lies primarily in the system itself,
which is founded upon untruth, and only incidentally in the
many professors whom this system permits and encourages to
preach it.
The Liberal, the worldly man, is the man
who has lost his faith; and the loss of perfect faith is the
beginning of the end of the order erected upon that faith.
Those who seek to preserve the prestige of truth without
believing in it offer the most potent weapon to all their
enemies; a merely metaphorical faith is suicidal. The
radical attacks the Liberal doctrine at every point, and the
veil of rhetoric is no protection against the strong thrust
of his sharp blade. The Liberal, under this persistent
attack, gives way on point after point, forced to admit the
truth of the charges against him without being able to
counter this negative, critical truth with any positive
truth of his own; until, after a long and usually gradual
transition, of a sudden he awakens to discover that the Old
Order, undefended and seemingly indefensible, has been
overthrown, and that a new, more "realistic"--and more
brutal-truth has taken the field.
Liberalism is the first stage of the
Nihilist dialectic, both because its own faith is empty, and
because this emptiness calls into being a yet more Nihilist
reaction--a reaction that, ironically, proclaims even more
loudly than Liberalism its "love of truth," while carrying
mankind one step farther on the path of error. This reaction
is the second stage of the Nihilist dialectic: Realism.
2. REALISM
The Realism of which we speak--a generic
term which we understand as inclusive of the various forms
of "naturalism" and "positivism"--is in its simplest form,
the doctrine that was popularized precisely under the name
of "Nihilism" by Turgenev in Fathers and Sons. The figure of
Bazarov in that novel is the type of the "new man" of the C
sixties' in Russia, simple-minded materialists and
determinists, who seriously thought (like D. Pisarev) to
find the salvation of mankind in the dissection of the frog,
or thought they had proved the non-existence of the human
soul by failing to find it in the course of an autopsy. (One
is reminded of the Soviet Nihilists, the "new men" of our
own 'sixties,' who fail to find God in outer space.) This
"Nihilist" is the man who respects nothing, bows before no
authority, accepts (so he thinks) nothing on faith, judges
all in the light of a science taken as absolute and
exclusive truth, rejects all idealism and abstraction in
favor of the concrete and factual. He is the believer, in a
word, in the "nothing-but, in the reduction of everything
men have considered "higher," the things of the mind and
spirit, to the lower or "basic": matter, sensation, the
physical.
As opposed to Liberal vagueness, the
Realist world-view seems perfectly clear and
straightforward. In place of agnosticism or an evasive
deism, there is open atheism; in place of vague "higher
values," naked materialism and self-interest. All is clarity
in the Realist universe--except what is most important and
most requires clarity: its beginning and end. Where the
Liberal is vague about ultimate things, the Realist is
childishly naive: they simply do not exist for him; nothing
exists but what is most obvious.
Such Realism, of course, is a self-contradiction, whether it
takes the form of a "naturalism" that tries to establish an
absolute materialism and determinism, or a "positivism" that
purports to deny the absolute altogether, or the doctrinaire
"agnosticism" that so readily discourses on the
"unknowability" of ultimate reality; we have already
discussed this problem in Section I of this chapter. But
argument, of course, is purely academic in view of the fact
that Realism, a logical self-contradiction, is not properly
treated as a philosophy at all. It is the naive,
undisciplined thought of the unreflective, practical man
who, in our age of oversimplification, thinks to impose his
simple-minded standards and ideas upon the entire world; or,
on a slightly different level, the equally naive thought of
the scientist, bound to the obvious by the requirements of
his specialty, when he illegitimately attempts to extend
scientific criteria beyond their proper bounds. In the
latter sense it is, to adopt a useful distinction,
[9]
"scientism" as opposed to legitimate science; for it must be
understood that our remarks here are not directed against
science itself, but against the improper exploitation of its
standards and methods that is so common today.
Is it correct to call such a philosophy Nihilism? More
precisely, is it Nihilism in the sense in which we have
defined that term? If truth is, in the highest sense,
knowledge of the beginning and end of things, of the
dimension of the absolute; and if Nihilism is the doctrine
that there is no such truth; then it is clear that those who
take scientific knowledge for the only truth, and deny what
ties above it, are Nihilists in the exact sense of that
term. Worship of the fact is by no means the love of truth;
it is, as we have already suggested, its parody. It is the
presumption of the fragment to replace the whole; it is the
proud attempt to build a Tower of Babel, a collection of
facts, to reach to the heights of truth and wisdom from
below. But truth is only attained by bowing down and
accepting what is received from above. All the pretended
"humility" of Realist scholars and scientists, these men of
little faith, cannot conceal the pride of their collective
usurpation of the throne of God; they, in their smallness,
think their painstaking "research" of more weight than
Divine Revelation. For such men, too, "there is no truth";
and of them we may say what St. Basil the Great said of
pagan Greek scientists, "Their terrible condemnation will be
the greater for all this worldly wisdom, since, seeing so
clearly into vain sciences, they have willfully shut their
eyes to the knowledge of the truth."
[10]
Up to this point, however, we have failed
properly to distinguish the second stage of Nihilism from
its first. Most Liberals, too, accept science as exclusive
truth; wherein does the Realist differ from them? The
difference is not so much one of doctrine--Realism is in a
sense merely disillusioned and systematized Liberalism--as
one of emphasis and motivation. The Liberal is indifferent
to absolute truth, an attitude resulting from excessive
attachment to this world; with the Realist, on the other
hand, indifference to truth becomes hostility, and mere
attachment to the world becomes fanatical devotion to it.
Those extreme consequences must have a more acute cause.
The Realist himself would say that this cause is the love of
truth itself, which forbids belief in a "higher truth" that
is no more than fantasy. Nietzsche, in fact, while believing
this, saw in it a Christian quality that had turned against
Christianity. "The sense of truth, highly developed through
Christianity, ultimately revolts against the falsehood and
fictitiousness of all Christian interpretations of the world
and its history."
[11]
Understood in proper context, there is an insight--though
partial and distorted--in these words. Nietzsche, most
immediately, was rebelling against a Christianity that had
been considerably diluted by Liberal humanism, a
Christianity in which uncompromising love of and loyalty to
absolute truth were rare if not entirely absent, a
Christianity which had become no more than a moral idealism
tinged with aesthetic sentiment. The Russian "Nihilists,"
similarly, were in revolt .against the romantic idealism of
"superfluous men" who dwelled in a nebulous realm of fantasy
and escape divorced from any kind of reality, spiritual or
worldly. Christian Truth is as remote from such
pseudo-spirituality as is Nihilist realism. Both Christian
and Realist are possessed of a love of truth, a will not to
be deceived, a passion for getting to the root of things and
finding their ultimate cause; both reject as unsatisfying
any argument that does not refer to some absolute that
itself needs no justification; both are the passionate
enemies of the frivolity of a Liberalism that refuses to
take ultimate things seriously and will not see human life
as the solemn undertaking that it is. It is precisely this
love of truth that will frustrate the attempt of Liberals to
preserve ideas and institutions in which they do not fully
believe, and which have no foundation in absolute truth.
What is truth?--to the person for whom this is a vital,
burning question, the compromise of Liberalism and humanism
becomes impossible; he who once and with his whole being has
asked this question can never again be satisfied with what
the world is content to take in place of truth.
But it is not enough to ask this
question; one must find the answer, or the last state of the
seeker will be worse than the first. The Christian has found
the only answer in God and His Son; the Realist, out of
contact with Christian life and the Truth that animates it,
asks the question in a spiritual vacuum and is content to
accept the first answer he finds. Mistaking Christianity for
another form of idealism, he rejects it and becomes a
fanatical devotee of the only reality that is obvious to the
spiritually blind: this world. Now, much as it is possible
to admire the earnestness of the devoted materialist and
atheist, not even the greatest charity can induce us to
recognize in him any longer the love of truth which,
perhaps, first inspired him; he is the victim, rather, of a
love of truth that has gone astray, become a disease, and
ended in its own negation. The motives of the Realist are,
in fact, not pure: he claims to know what, by his own theory
of knowledge, cannot be known (we have seen that the denial
of absolute truth is itself an " absolute"); and if he does
so it is because he has an ulterior motive, because he
places some other worldly value above truth. The ruthless
Realist and "truth-seeker" Nietzsche, seduced by a vision of
the "Superman," ends in the evocation of the will to untruth
and the will to power; Marxist Realism, for the sake of a
revolutionary millennium, issues in a reign of lies and
deceptions such as the world has never seen. The love of
truth, frustrated of its proper object, is prostituted to an
irrational "cause" and becomes a principle of subversion and
destruction; it becomes the enemy of the truth it has failed
to attain, of every kind of order founded wholly or
partially upon the truth, and--in the end--of itself.
It becomes, in fact, a perfect parody of
the Christian love of truth. Where the Christian asks the
ultimate meaning of everything and is not content until he
sees that it is founded on God and His Will, the Realist
likewise questions everything, but only to be able to
abolish all suggestion of or aspiration to anything higher,
and to reduce and simplify it into the terms of the most
obvious and "basic" explanation. Where the Christian sees
God in everything, the Realist sees only "race" or "sex" or
the "mode of production."
If the Realist, therefore, shares in
common with the Christian a single-mindedness and
earnestness that is totally foreign to the Liberal
mentality, it is only the better to join in the Liberal's
attack on Christian Truth, and to carry out that attack to
its conclusion: the total abolition of Christian Truth. What
began half-heartedly in Liberalism has gathered momentum in
Realism and now presses to its catastrophic end. Nietzsche
foresaw in our century "the triumph of Nihilism"; Jacob
Burkhardt, that disillusioned Liberal, saw in it the advent
of an age of dictators who would be "terribles
simplificateurs." In Lenin and Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini,
with their radically "simple" solutions for the most complex
of problems, the fulfillment of this prediction in the
political realm has been well begun. More profoundly,
Nihilist "simplification" may be seen in the universal
prestige today accorded the lowest order of knowledge, the
scientific, as well as the simplistic ideas of men like
Marx, Freud, and Darwin, which underlie virtually the whole
of contemporary thought and life.
We say "life," for it is important to see that the Nihilist
history of our century has not been something imposed from
without or above, or at least has not been predominantly
this; it has rather presupposed, and drawn its nourishment
from, a Nihilist soil that has long been preparing in the
hearts of the people. It is precisely from the Nihilism of
the commonplace, from the everyday Nihilism revealed in the
life and thought and aspiration of the people, that all the
terrible events of our century have sprung. The world-view
of Hitler is very instructive in this regard, for in him the
most extreme and monstrous Nihilism rested upon the
foundation of a quite unexceptional and even typical
Realism. He shared the common faith in "science,"
"progress," and "enlightenment" (though not, of course, in
"democracy"), together with a practical materialism that
scorned all theology, metaphysics, and any thought or action
concerned with any other world than the "here and now,"
priding himself on the fact that he had "the gift of
reducing all problems to their simplest foundations."
[12]
He had a crude worship of efficiency and utility that freely
tolerated "birth control," laughed at the institution of
marriage as a mere legalization of a sexual impulse that
should be "free," welcomed sterilization of the unfit,
despised "unproductive elements" such as monks, saw nothing
in the cremation of the dead but a "practical" question and
did not even hesitate to put the ashes, or the skin and fat,
of the dead to "productive use." He possessed the
quasi-anarchist distrust of sacred and venerable
institutions, in particular the Church with its
"superstitions" and all its "outmoded" laws and ceremonies.
(We have already had occasion to note his abhorrence of the
institution of Monarchy, a determining factor in his refusal
to assume the Imperial tide.) He had a naive trust in the
"natural mom, the "healthy animal" who scorns the Christian
virtues--virginity in particular--that impede the "natural
functioning" of the body. He took a simple-minded delight in
modern conveniences and machines, and especially in the
automobile and the sense of speed and "freedom" it affords.
There is very little of this crude Weltanschauung that
is not shared, to some degree, by the multitudes today,
especially among the young, who feel themselves
"enlightened" and "liberated," very little that is not
typically "modern." And it is precisely upon the basis of a
Realism such as this, in which there is no more room for the
"complicated" Christian view of life and the supremely
important realities of the spiritual world, that the
grossest superstitions and the most blatant credulity can
thrive. Well-meaning men think to forestall the appearance
of another Hitler by an attack upon "irrationality" and a
defense of "reason," "science," and "common sense"; but
outside of the context of Christian Truth these values,
constituting a Realism of their own, are a preparation for,
and not a defense against, the advent of another "terrible
simplifier." The most effective contemporary "simplifiers"
are those who hold power in the Soviet Union, who have made
a religion of "science" and " common sense"; and anyone who
looks to those most superstitious men for the defense of any
value worth defending, is sorely deceived.
Realism unquestionably belongs to the "spirit of the age,"
and all who feel themselves to be of that "spirit" have had
to accommodate themselves to it. Thus humanism, which in a
more leisurely age had a more "idealistic" and Liberal
coloration, has itself found it necessary to . change with
the times" and adopt a more Realistic tone. The more naive
have founded a humanistic "religion" that identifies itself
with the cause of "science" and "progress" and has made into
dogmas precisely the self-contradictions we have already
examined;
[13]
it is men like this who are capable of seeing in Marxism too
a kind of "humanism." But even in the most sophisticated of
contemporary humanists, in the most urbane scholars and
statesmen, the Realist tone is unmistakable. It is revealed,
for example, in the invasion by scientific methods and
attitudes of the last strongholds of the "humanities"; no
contemporary scholar, in whatever field, feels secure unless
his work is to the fullest possible degree "scientific"
(which often means, of course, "scientistic"). Realism may
be seen, again, in the stoical, worldly-wise, and often
cynical tone of all but the most naive (or religious) of
contemporary humanists; their imagined "freedom from
illusion" has also been, in large measure, a
disillusionment; they now "know better" than to believe in
the "higher truths" that comforted their fathers.
Humanism, in short, has come to terms
with Realism--and, so it thinks, with reality; in the
passage from Liberalism to Realism the humanist sees not
only a disillusionment, but a process of "maturing." The
Orthodox Christian, of course, sees something quite
different. If the function of Liberalism was to obscure,
with the smoke of "tolerance" and agnosticism, the higher
truths concerning God and the spiritual life, the task of
the Realism we have been examining has been to annihilate
those truths. In this second stage in the progress of the
Nihilist dialectic, Heaven has been closed off from the gaze
of men, and men have resolved never again to take their eyes
off the earth, but to live henceforth in and for this world
alone. This Realist resolve is as present in a seemingly
innocent "logical positivism" and scientific humanism as it
is in the obviously Satanic phenomena of Bolshevism and
National Socialism. The consequences of this resolve are
hidden from those who make it, for they involve the very
reality to which Realism is blind: the reality both above
and below the narrow Realist universe. We shall see how the
closing off of Heaven looses unexpected forces from below
that make a nightmare of the Nihilist dream of a "new
earth," and how the " new man" of Realism will resemble less
a mythological "fully-developed" perfect humanity than a
veritable "subhumanity" such as has never before been
encountered in human experience.
We must now explore the next step in the
progress of the Nihilism that leads to these ends: Vitalism.
3. VITALISM
Liberalism and Realism have been leading
men, for a century and more, down a false path whose end, if
the path had not been deflected, would have been something
like one of those "reverse utopias" of which we have now
heard so much,--a more terrible "brave new world," perhaps,
an inhuman technological system wherein all worldly problems
would be solved at the cost of the enslavement of men's
souls. Against this utopia of rationalist planning many
protests have been raised in the name of the concrete and
personal, of the unplanned and unsystematic needs of human
nature that are at least as essential, even for a purely
worldly "happiness," as the more obvious material needs; a
protest, above all, in the name of "life," which, whatever
it may mean, would clearly be stifled in the Realist
paradise.
The chief intellectual impetus of the
Vitalist movement has been a reaction against the eclipse of
higher realities in the Realist "simplification" of the
world. This granted, we must on the other hand acknowledge
the absolute failure of Vitalism on this level. Lacking
sufficient foundation in or even awareness of Christian
Truth, those who have applied themselves to the correction
of the radical defects of Realism have generally invented
remedies for them which have not been merely powerless, but
positively harmful, remedies which are actually symptoms of
a more advanced stage of the disease they were intended to
heal.
For just as Realism, while reacting
against the vagueness of Liberalism, condemned itself to
sterility by accepting the Liberalist obscuration of higher
truths, so too did Vitalism undermine its own hopes by
accepting as an essential presupposition the critique of
absolute truth made by the Realism it was attempting to
combat. However much the Vitalist may yearn for the
"spiritual" and "mystical," he will never look to Christian
Truth for them, for that has been "outmoded" for him as
surely as for the blindest Realist. Typical of the Vitalist
attitude in this regard is the lament of W. B. Yeats in his
autobiography over "being deprived by Huxley and Tyndall,
whom I detested, of the simpleminded religion of my
childhood...." Whatever psychological justification such an
attitude may have, it has nothing whatever to do with the
truth of things; and the consequences have been nothing but
harmful. There is no form of Vitalism that is not
naturalistic, none whose entire program does not begin and
end in this world, none whose approach to any other world is
anything but a parody. The path of Nihilism, let us note
again, has been "progressive"; the errors of one of its
stages are repeated and multiplied in its next stage.
There is no question, then, of finding in
Vitalism a return to Christian--or any other--truths. There
is, however, inevitably some pretense among Vitalists to do
so. Many critics have noted the "pseudoreligious" character
even of Marxism, though that epithet is applicable only to
the misplaced fervor of its more enthusiastic devotees, and
not to its doctrine, which is too clearly anti-religious in
character. In Vitalism the question of "pseudo-religion"
becomes much more serious. Here a quite understandable
lament over the loss of spiritual values becomes father, on
the one hand to subjective fantasies and (sometimes) to
actual Satanism, which the undiscriminating take as
revelations of the "spiritual" world, and on the other hand
to a rootless eclecticism that draws ideas from every
civilization and every age and finds a totally arbitrary
connection between these misunderstood fragments and its own
debased conceptions. Pseudo-spirituality and
pseudo-traditionalism, one or both, are integral elements of
many Vitalist systems. We must be cautious, then, in
examining the claims of those who would restore a
"spiritual" meaning to life, and especially of those who
fancy themselves allies or adherents of "Christianity."
"Spiritualist" errors are far more dangerous than any mere
materialism; and we shall in fact find, in Part Three of
this work, that most of what passes for "spirituality" today
is in fact a "new spirituality," a cancer born of Nihilism
that attaches itself to healthy organisms to destroy them
from within. This tactic is the precise opposite of the bold
Realist attack upon truth and the spiritual life; but it is
no less a Nihilist tactic, and a more advanced one.
Intellectually, then, Vitalism
presupposes a rejection of Christian Truth together with a
certain pseudo-spiritual pretension. Realizing this,
however, we shall still be unprepared to understand the
Vitalist movement if we are unaware of the spiritual state
of the men who have becomes its bearers. In Liberalism and
Realism the Nihilist disease is still relatively
superficial; it is still mainly a matter of philosophy and
restricted to an intellectual elite. In Vitalism,
however,--as already in Marxism, the most extreme
manifestation of the Realist mentality-the disease not only
develops qualitatively, it also extends itself
quantitatively; for the first time the common people too
begin to show signs of the Nihilism that was formerly
restricted to the few.
This fact is, of course, in perfect accord with the internal
logic of Nihilism, which aspires, like the Christianity it
was called into existence to destroy, to universality. By
the middle of the 19th century perceptive thinkers were
expressing apprehension at the prospect of the "awakened"
multitudes, those who were to be exploited by the "terrible
simplifiers"; and by the time of Nietzsche, the most
powerful of Vitalist "prophets," the apprehension had
deepened and become a certainty. Nietzsche could see that
the "death of God" had begun "to cast its first shadows over
Europe"; and though "the event itself is far too great, too
remote, too much beyond most people's power of apprehension,
for one to suppose that so much as the report of it could
have reached them," still its advent was certain, and it was
men like Nietzsche who were "the firstlings and premature
children of the coming century"
[14]
--the century, let us remember, of the "triumph of
Nihilism."
The Christian Truth which Liberalism has
undermined. and Realism attacked is no mere philosophical
Truth, but the Truth of life and salvation; and once there
begins to gain ground, among the multitudes Who have been
nourished by that Truth, the conviction that it is no longer
credible, the result will be no mere urbane skepticism like
that with which a few Liberals console themselves, but a
spiritual catastrophe of enormous dimensions, one whose
effect will make itself felt in every area of human life and
thought. Thinkers like Nietzsche felt the presence of the
first shadows of this catastrophe, and so were able to
describe it in some detail and deduce certain of its
consequences; but not until these shadows had begun to steal
into the hearts of the multitudes could these consequences
manifest themselves on a large scale. Toward the end of the
nineteenth century increasing numbers of quite ordinary men
had begun that restless search--so much a part of our own
contemporary scenes--to find a substitute for the God Who
was dead in their hearts. This restlessness has been the
chief psychological impetus of Vitalism; it is raw material,
as it were, ready to be shaped after the pattern of the
intellectual presuppositions we have just examined, by
craftsmen inspired by the latest current of the "spirit of
the age." We tend, perhaps, to think of this restlessness
mainly in terms of its exploitation by Nihilist demagogues,
but it has been an important stimulant of Vitalist art and
religion also. And the presence of this component in most
Vitalist phenomena is the reason why they--as opposed to the
seeming "sanity" of Liberalism and Realism--present
symptoms, not merely of intellectual deviation, but of
spiritual and psychological disorientation as well.
It will be well, before passing on to a
consideration of the more formal manifestations of Vitalism
in philosophy and art, to take a closer look at some of the
common manifestations of this inarticulate restlessness that
underlies them A Is it as certain as we have implied that it
is, after all, a Nihilist characteristic? Many will object
that its significance has often been exaggerated, that it is
simply a new form of something that has always existed, and
that it is a ridiculous pretention to dignify something so
common by the exalted name of Nihilism. There is, of course,
some basis for such a judgment; nonetheless, it can hardly
be denied that the modern phenomenon differs in several
important respects from any of its predecessors. It exists
today, for the first time in history, on a scale so vast as
to be almost universal; It normal" remedies, the remedies of
common sense, seem to have no effect whatever upon it, and
if anything they seem to encourage it; and its course has
exactly parallelled that of the extension of modern
unbelief, so that if the one is not the cause of the other
they are both at least parallel manifestations of one and
the same process. These three points are so closely bound
together that we shall not separate them in the following
discussion, but examine them together.
The Fascist and National Socialist
regimes were the most skillful in exploiting popular
restlessness and utilizing it for their own purposes. But it
is the "strange" fact--"strange" to anyone who does not
understand the character of the age--that this restlessness
has not been quieted by the defeat of its principal
exploiters but has rather increased in intensity since then
and--"strangest" of all--especially in the countries most
advanced in the democratic and Liberal ideologies and most
blessed with worldly prosperity, and in "backward" countries
in direct proportion to their own progress toward these
goals. Neither war nor Liberal idealism nor prosperity can
pacify it--nor Marxist idealism either, for Soviet
prosperity has produced the same phenomenon; these remedies
are ineffective, for the disease lies deeper than they can
reach.
Perhaps the most striking manifestation
of the popular unrest has been in crime, and particularly in
juvenile crime. Crime in most previous ages had been a
localized phenomenon and had apparent and comprehensible
causes in the human passions of greed, lust, envy, jealousy,
and the like; never has there been anything more than a
faint prefiguration of the crime that has become typical of
our own century, crime for which the only name is one the
avant-garde today is fond of using in another Nihilist
context: "absurd."
A parent is murdered by a child, or a
child by a parent; a total stranger is beaten or
murdered--but not robbed--by an individual or a "gang"; such
"gangs" terrorize whole neighborhoods by their prowling or
their senseless wars with each other: and to what purpose?
It is a time of "peace" and "prosperity," the criminals are
as likely to be from the "best" as from the "worst" elements
of society, there is no "practical" reason for their conduct
and there is often complete disregard for precautions or
consequences. When questioned, those apprehended for such
crimes explain their behavior in the same way: it was an
"impulse" or an "urge" that drove them, or there was a
sadistic pleasure in committing the crime, or there was some
totally irrelevant pretext, such as boredom, confusion, or
resentment. In a word, they cannot explain their behavior at
all, there is no readily comprehensible motive for it, and
in consequence--and this is perhaps the most consistent and
striking feature of such crimes--there is no remorse.
There are, of course, other less violent
forms of the popular unrest. There is the passion for
movement and speed, expressed especially in the veritable
cult of the automobile (we have already noted this passion
in Hitter); the universal appeal of television and cinema,
whose most frequent function is to provide a few hours of
escape from reality, both by their eclectic and "exciting"
subject-matter and by the hypnotic effect of the media
themselves; the increasingly primitive and savage character
of popular music and of the perhaps more authentic
expression of the contemporary soul, "jazz", the cult of
physical prowess in sport, and the morbid worship of "youth"
of which it is a part; the prevalence of and general
permissiveness towards sexual promiscuity, condoned by many
supposedly responsible elders as indicative of the
"frankness" of contemporary youth and as being merely
another form of the "open," "experimental" attitude so much
encouraged in the arts and sciences; the disrespect for
authority fostered by a popular attitude that sees no values
but the "immediate" and "dynamic" and leads the most
"idealistic" of youth into demonstrations against
"repressive" laws and institutions.
In such phenomena "activity" is clearly
an escape--an escape from boredom, from meaninglessness, and
most profoundly from the emptiness that takes possession of
the heart that has abandoned God) Revealed Truth, and the
morality and conscience dependent upon that Truth. In the
more complex manifestations of the Vitalist impulse, to
which we now turn, the same psychology is at work. We shall
do no more than suggest the wealth of these manifestations,
for we shall examine most of them in some detail later in
their role as forms of the it new spirituality."
In politics, the most successful forms of
Vitalism have been Mussolini's cult of activism and
violence, and Hitler's darker cult of "blood and soil"; the
nature of these is too familiar to the present generation to
need further comment in this context. It is perhaps not so
obvious today, however, when the political barometer so
clearly points to the "left," just how profound was the
appeal of these movements when they appeared some forty
years ago. Quite apart from the uprooted masses, who were
the principle object of their exploitation, a not
inconsiderable section of the intellectual and cultural
avant-garde also became enthusiastic sympathizers of the
Nihilist demagogues, at least for a while. If few among the
sophisticated took either Naziism or Fascism as a "new
religion," some at least welcomed one or the other of them
as a salutary antidote to the "democracy," "science," and
"progress" (that is, the Liberalism and Realism) that seemed
to promise a future no sensitive man could envision without
apprehension; their "dynamism," "vitality," and pseudo-
traditionalism seemed deceptively "refreshing" to many who
were breathing the stifling intellectual atmosphere of the
time.
Modern art has had a similar appeal, and
its similar reaction against lifeless academic "realism" has
likewise led into strange fields. New and exotic sources and
influences have been found in the art of Africa, the Orient,
the South Seas, of prehistoric man, children, and madmen, in
spiritism and occultism. Continual "experimentation" has
been the rule, a constant search for "new" forms and
techniques; inspiration has been found above all in the
"savage," the "primitive," and the "spontaneous." Like the
Futurists in their manifesto (though Futurism itself can
hardly be taken seriously as art), the most typical modern
artists have exalted in their works "every kind of
originality, boldness, extreme violence," and they have
likewise believed that "our hands are free and pure, to
start everything afresh."
The artist, according to the Vitalist
myth, is a "creator," a "genius," he is "inspired." In his
art Realism is transformed by "vision"; it is a sign and a
prophecy of a "spiritual awakening." The artist, in short,
is a "magician" in his own realm in precisely the same way
Hitler was in politics; and in both it is not truth, but
subjective feeling, that reigns.
In religion--or, to speak more precisely,
pseudo-religion--the restless experimentation characteristic
of Vitalism has manifested itself in even more varied forms
than it has in the schools of modern art. There are, for
example, the sects whose deity is a vague, immanent "force";
these are the varieties of "new thought" and "positive
thinking," whose concern is to harness and utilize this
"force," as if it were a kind of electricity. Closely
related to these are occultism and spiritism, as well as
certain spurious forms of "Eastern wisdom," which abandon
all pretense of concern with "God" explicitly to invoke more
immediate "powers" and "presences."
Religious Vitalism appears also in the
widespread cult of "awareness" and "realization." In a
fairly restrained form this is present in the devotees of
modern art and the "creative act" and "vision" that inspire
this art. The indiscriminate quest for "enlightenment," as
in those under the influence of Zen Buddhism, is a more
extreme form of this cult; and the supposed "religious
experience" stimulated by various drugs is, perhaps, its reductio
ad absurdum.
Again, there is the attempt to fabricate
a pseudo-pagan cult of nature," and especially of its most
"primary" and "basic" elements: the earth, the body, sex.
Nietzsche's "Zarathustra" is a powerful "prophet" of this
cult, and it is the central theme of D. H. Lawrence and
other novelists and poets of this century.
And there is the attempt, in most kinds
of "existentialism" and personalism," to turn religion into
no more than a personal "encounter" with other men
and--sometimes--with a vaguely-conceived "God"; or, in
pathological, atheistic "existentialism," to make a religion
of "rebellion" and frenzied self-worship.
All of these Vitalist manifestations of
the "religious impulse" share in common a hostility to any
stable or unchanging doctrine or institution and a paramount
concern with and pursuit of the "immediate" values of
"life," "vitality," "experience," "awareness," or "ecstasy."
We have delineated the most striking
features of Vitalism and given some suggestion of its
extent; but we have yet to define the term itself and expose
its Nihilist character. Liberalism, as we have seen,
undermined truth by indifference to it, retaining however
the prestige of its name; and Realism attacked it in the
name of a lesser, partial truth. Vitalism, as opposed to
both of these, has no relation to truth whatever; it simply
devotes its whole concern to something of an entirely
different order.
"The falseness of an opinion," said Nietzsche, "is not for
us any objection to it.... The question is, how far an
opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving...."
[15]
When such pragmatism begins, Nihilism passes into the
Vitalist stage, which may be defined as the elimination of
truth as the criterion of human action, and the substitution
of a new standard: the "life-giving," the "vital"; it is the
final divorce of life from truth.
Vitalism is a more advanced kind of
Realism; sharing the latter's narrow view of reality and its
concern to reduce everything higher to the lowest possible
terms, Vitalism carries the Realist intention one step
further. Where Realism tries to reestablish an absolute
truth from below, Vitalism expresses the failure of this
project in the face of the more "realistic" awareness that
there is no absolute here below, that the only unchanging
principle in this world is change itself Realism reduces the
supernatural to the natural, the Revealed to the rational,
truth to objectivity; Vitalism goes further and reduces
everything to subjective experience and sensation. The world
that seemed so solid, the truth that seemed so secure to the
Realist, dissolve in the Vitalist view of things; the mind
has no more place to rest, everything is swallowed up in
movement and action.
The logic of unbelief leads inexorably to
the Abyss; he who will not return to the truth must follow
error to its end. So does humanism, too, after having
contracted the Realist infection, succumb to the Vitalist
germ. Of this fact there is no better indication than the
"dynamic" standards that have come to occupy an increasingly
large place in formal criticism of art and literature, and
even in discussions of religion, philosophy, and science.
There are no qualities more prized in any of these fields
today than those of being "original," "experimental," or
"exciting"; the question of truth, if it is raised at all,
is more and more forced into the background and replaced by
subjective criteria: "integrity," "authenticity,"
"individuality."
Such an approach is an open invitation to
obscurantism, not to mention charlatanry; and if the latter
may be dismissed as a temptation for the Vitalist that has
not become the rule, it is by no means possible to ignore
the increasingly blatant obscurantism which the Vitalist
temperament tolerates and even encourages. It becomes ever
more difficult in the contemporary intellectual climate to
engage in rational discussion with Vitalist apologists. If
one, for example, inquires into the meaning of a
contemporary work of art, he will be told that it has no "
meaning," that it is "pure art" and can only be "felt," and
that if the critic does not "feel" it properly he has no
right to comment on it. The attempt to introduce any
standard of criticism, even of the most elementary and
technical sort, is countered by the claim that old standards
cannot be applied to the new art, that they are "static,"
"dogmatic," or simply "out-of-date," and that art today can
be judged only in terms of its success in fulfilling its own
unique intentions. If the critic sees a morbid or inhuman
intent behind a work of art, the apology is that it is an
accurate reflection of the "spirit of the age," and it is
implied that a man is naive if he believes that art should
be more than that. The latter argument is, of course, the
favorite one of every avant-garde today, whether literary,
philosophical, or "religious." For men weary of truth it is
enough that a thing "is," and that it is "new" and
"exciting."
These are, perhaps, understandable reactions to the overly
literary and utilitarian approach of Liberalism and Realism
to realms like art and religion which use a language quite
unlike the prosaic language of science and business; to
criticize them effectively, surely, one must understand
their language and know what it is they are trying to say.
But what is equally clear is that they are trying to say
something: everything man does has a meaning, and every
serious artist and thinker is trying to communicate
something in his work. If it be proclaimed there is no
meaning, or that there is only the desire to express the
"spirit of the age," or that there is no desire to
communicate at all--why, these too are meanings, and very
ominous ones, which the competent critic will surely notice.
Unfortunately, but very significantly, the task of criticism
today has been virtually identified with that of apology;
the role of the critic is generally seen to be no more than
that of explaining, for the uninstructed multitudes, the
latest "inspiration" of the "creative genius."
[16]
Thus passive "receptivity" takes the place of active
intelligence, and "success"--the success of the "genius" in
expressing his intention, no matter what the nature of that
intention--replaces excellence. By the new standards Hitler
too was "successful," until the "spirit of the age" proved
him " wrong"; and the avant-garde and its humanist
"fellow-travellers" have no argument whatever against
Bolshevism today, unless it be that, unlike National
Socialism, which was "expressionistic" and "exciting," it is
completely prosaic and Realistic.
But perhaps most revealing of the
infection of humanism by Vitalism is the strange axiom,
romantic and skeptical at the same time, that the "love of
truth" is never-ending because it can never be fulfilled,
that the whole of life is a constant search for something
there is no hope of finding, a constant movement that never
can--nor should--know a place of rest. The sophisticated
humanist can be very eloquent in describing this, the new
first principle of scholarly and scientific research, as an
acknowledgement of the "provisional" nature of all
knowledge, as a reflection of the never-satisfied,
ever-curious human mind, or as part of the mysterious
process of "evolution" or "progress"; but the significance
of the attitude is dear. It is the last attempt of the
unbeliever to hide his abandonment of truth behind a cloud
of noble rhetoric, and, more positively, it is at the same
time the exaltation of petty curiosity to the place once
occupied by the genuine love of truth. Now it is quite true
to say that curiosity, exactly like its analogue, lust,
never ends and is never satisfied; but man was made for
something more than this. He was made to rise, above
curiosity and lust, to love, and through love to the
attainment of truth. This is an elementary truth of human
nature, and it requires, perhaps, a certain simplicity to
grasp it. The intellectual trifling of contemporary humanism
is as far from such simplicity as it is from truth.
The appeal of Vitalism is, as we have
already suggested, quite understandable psychologically.
Only the dullest and least perceptive of men can remain
satisfied for long with the dead faith of Liberalism and
Realism. Extreme elements first-artists, revolutionaries,
the uprooted multitudes--and then, one by one, the humanist
guardians of "civilization," and eventually even the most
respectable and conservative elements of society, become
possessed of an inner disquiet that leads them into the
pursuit of something "new" and "exciting," no one knows
exactly what. Nihilist prophets, at first generally scorned,
come into fashion as men come to share their unrest and
forebodings; they are gradually incorporated into the
humanist pantheon and are looked to for insights and
revelations that will take men out of the barren desert into
which Realism has led them. Beneath the trivial
sensationalism and eclecticism that characterize the
contemporary trend to "mysticism" and "spiritual values,"
lies a deep hunger for something more substantial than
Liberalism and Realism have provided or can provide, a
hunger that the varieties of Vitalism can only tease, but
never satisfy. Men have rejected the Son of God Who, even
now, desires to dwell in men and bring them salvation; and
finding intolerable the vacuum this rejection has left in
their hearts, they run to madmen and magicians, to false
prophets and religious sophists, for a word of life. But
this word, so readily given, itself turns to dust in their
mouths when they try to repeat it.
Realism, in its rage for truth, destroys
the truth; in the same way Vitalism, in its very quest for
life, smells of death. The Vitalism of the last hundred
years has been an unmistakable symptom of world-weariness,
and its prophets--even more clearly than any of the
philosophers of the dead Liberalism and Realism they
attacked--have been a manifestation of the end of Christian
Europe. Vitalism is the product, not of the "freshness" and
"life" and "immediacy" its followers so desperately seek
(precisely because they lack them), but of the corruption
and unbelief that are but the last phase of the dying
civilization they hate. One need be no partisan of the
Liberalism and Realism against which Vitalism reacted to see
that it has "over-reacted," that its antidote to an
undeniable disease is itself a more potent injection of the
same Nihilist germ that caused the disease. Beyond Vitalism
there can be only one more, definitive, stage through which
Nihilism may pass: the Nihilism of Destruction.
4. THE NIHILISM OF DESTRUCTION
Here at last we find an almost "pure"
Nihilism, a rage against creation and against civilization
that will not be appeased until it has reduced them to
absolute nothingness. The Nihilism of Destruction, if no
other form of Nihilism, is unique to the modern age. There
has been destruction on a wide scale before, and there have
been men who have gloried in destruction; but never until
our own time have there been a doctrine and a plan of
destruction, never before has the mind of man so contorted
itself as to find an apology for this most obvious work of
Satan, and to set up a program for its accomplishment.
Even among more restrained Nihilists, to be sure, there have
been strong intimations of the gospel of destruction. The
Realist Bazarov could state that "there is not a single
institution of our society that should not be destroyed."
[17]
"Who wishes to be creative," said Nietzsche, "Must first
destroy and smash accepted values." The Manifesto of the
Futurists--who were perhaps as near to pure Nihilism as to
Vitalism--glorified war and "the destroying arm of the
anarchist." The destruction of the Old Order and the
abolition of absolute truth were the admitted aims of most
Realists and Vitalists.
In the pure Nihilists, however, what to others was prologue
becomes an end in itself. Nietzsche proclaimed the basic
principle of all Nihilism, and the special apology of the
Nihilism of Destruction, in the phrase, "There is no truth,
all is permitted";
[18]
but the extreme consequences of this axiom had already been
realized before him. Max Stirner (whom we shall encounter
again in the next chapter)[19]
declared war upon every standard and every principle,
proclaiming his ego against the world and laughing
triumphantly over the "tomb of humanity"--all, as yet, in
theory. Sergei Nechayev translated this theory into practice
so perfectly that to this day he seems a creation of myth,
if not a demon from the depths of Hell itself, leading a
life of unprincipled ruthlessness and amorality, under the
pretext of total expediency in the name of the Revolution.
He was the inspiration for the character of Pyotr
Verkhovensky in The Possessed of Dostoyevsky, a novel so
brilliant in its characterization of the extreme Nihilist
mentality (the book in fact is full of representatives of
this mentality) as to be absolutely incredible to anyone who
has not, like Dostoyevsky, himself known the fascination and
temptation of Nihilism.
Michael Bakunin, who fell under the spell of Nechayev for a
while, only to discover that the consistent practice of
Nihilism was a quite different thing from its theoretical
exposition, wrote under this spell a "Revolutionary
Catechism" that provided a chilling apology for Nechayevism.
while proclaiming, "our task is terrible, total, inexorable,
and universal destruction." The sentiment is too typical of
Bakunin to be explained away by his momentary fascination.
He ended his Reaction in Germany, written before Nechayev
was born, with the famous appeal, "Let us put our trust in
the eternal spirit which destroys and annihilates only
because it is the unsearchable and eternally creative source
of all life. The passion for destruction is also a creative
passion!" Here Vitalism mingles with the will to destroy:
but it is destruction that triumphs in the end. Asked what
he would do if the new order of his dreams should come into
existence, he frankly replied, "Then I should at once begin
to pull down again everything I had made."[20]
It was in the spirit of Nechayev and the "Revolutionary
Catechism" that Nihilist assassins (they were called at the
time "anarchist," but we have adopted the more positive
meaning of that word in this book), with their "propaganda
of the deed," terrorized the ruling classes--and not only
the ruling classes--in Europe and especially in Russia
throughout the last quarter of the 19th century. It was in
the same spirit that Lenin (who greatly admired Nechayev)
assumed ruthless power and began Europe's first successful
experiment in totally unprincipled politics. The passion for
violence, divorced from the Revolution which rationalized
it, helped lead Europe into the first of its Nihilist wars
in 1914, and at the same time, in another realm, announced
in Dadaist art, "let everything be swept away," "no more of
anything, nothing, nothing, nothing. "It remained, however,
for Hitler to reveal with absolute explicitness the nature
and ends of a pure "Revolution of Nihilism," a revolution
committed to the equally Nihilist alternatives of Weltmacht
oder Niedergang: world-conquest or total ruin; a Revolution
whose Leader could exult (even before he had come to power),
even as Stirner would have exulted, that "we may be
destroyed, but if we are, we shall drag a world with us--a
world in flames."
[21]
Such phenomena, of course, are extreme,
and they must be viewed in proper perspective. Only a few
have been capable of such pure Nihilism, and it could easily
be argued that they do not belong to the main stream of
modern history, but to a side current; and less extreme
Nihilists condemn them. Their example has been, nonetheless,
a most instructive one, and it would be a mistake to dismiss
this example as mere exaggeration or parody. We shall see
that destruction is an indispensable item in the program of
Nihilism, and further that it is the most unequivocal
expression of the worship of Nothingness that lies at the
center of the Nihilist "theology." The Nihilism of
Destruction is not an exaggeration, it is rather a
fulfillment of the deepest aim of all Nihilism. In it
Nihilism has assumed its most terrible, but its truest form;
in it the face of Nothingness discards its masks and stands
revealed in all its nakedness.
Father John of Kronstadt, that holy man
of God, has likened the soul of man to an eye, diseased
through sin and thus incapable of seeing the spiritual sun.[22]
The same likeness may serve to trace the progress of the
disease of Nihilism, which is no more than an elaborate mask
of sin.
The spiritual eye in fallen human nature
is not sound, as every Orthodox Christian knows; we see in
this life only dimly and require faith and the Grace of God
to effect a healing that will enable us, in the future life,
to see clearly once more. The first stage of Nihilism, which
is Liberalism, is born of the errors of taking our diseased
eye for a sound one, of mistaking its impaired vision for a
view of the true world, and thus of discharging the
physician of the soul, the Church, whose ministrations are
not needed by a "healthy" man. In the second stage, Realism,
the disease, no longer attended by the necessary physician,
begins to grow; vision is narrowed; distant objects, already
obscure enough in the "natural" state of impaired vision,
become invisible; only the nearest objects are seen
distinctly, and the patient becomes convinced no others
exist. In the third stage, Vitalism, infection leads to
inflammation; even the nearest objects become dim and
distorted and there are hallucinations. In the fourth stage,
the Nihilism of Destruction, blindness ensues and the
disease spreads to the rest of the body, effecting agony,
convulsions, and death.
III. The Theology and the Spirit of Nihilism
1. REBELLION: THE WAR AGAINST GOD
0ur inquiry thus far has concentrated upon definition and
description; if it has been successful, it has identified
the Nihilist mentality and furnished some idea of its
origins and extent. All this, however, has been but
necessary groundwork for the task to which we must now turn:
an exploration of the deeper meaning of Nihilism. Our
earlier examination has been historical, psychological,
philosophical; but the Revolution, as we saw in the last
chapter,
[23]
has a theological and spiritual foundation, even if its
"theology" is an inverted one and its "spirituality"
Satanic. The Orthodox Christian finds in the Revolution a
formidable antagonist, and one that must be fought, fairly
and thoroughly, with the best weapons at his disposal. It is
time, then, to attack the Nihilist doctrine at its root; to
inquire into its theological sources, its spiritual roots,
its ultimate program, and its role in the Christian theology
of history.
Nihilist doctrine is not, of course,
explicit in most Nihilists; and if our analysis to this
point has had to draw out implications that were not always
obvious to, and often not intended by, Nihilists themselves,
our attempt here to extract a coherent doctrine from the
literature and phenomena of Nihilism will seem, to many, to
carry us to yet more tenuous conclusions. In this task we
are, however, greatly aided by systematic Nihilists like
Nietzsche, who express unequivocally what others only
suggest or attempt to disguise, and by acute observers of
the Nihilist mentality like Dostoyevsky, whose insights
strike to the very heart of Nihilism and strip aside its
masks.
In no one has the Nihilist "revelation"
been more clearly expressed than in Nietzsche. We have
already seen this "revelation" in its philosophical form, in
the phrase "there is no truth." Its alternative, more
explicitly theological expression in Nietzsche is the
constant theme, significantly, of the inspired "prophet,"
Zarathustra; and in its earliest occurrence in Nietzsche's
writings it is the "ecstatic" utterance of a madman: "God is
dead."[24]
The words express a certain truth: not, to be sure, a truth
of the nature of things, but a truth concerning the state of
modern man; they are an imaginative attempt to describe. a
fact no Christian, surely, will deny.
God is dead in the hearts of modern man:
this is what the "death of God" means, and it is as true of
the atheists and Satanists who rejoice in the fact, as it is
of the unsophisticated multitudes in whom the sense of the
spiritual reality has simply disappeared. Man has lost faith
in God and in the Divine Truth that once sustained him; the
apostasy to worldliness that has characterized the modern
age since its beginning becomes, in Nietzsche, conscious of
itself and finds words to express itself. "God is dead":
that is to say, "we have lost our faith in God"; "there is
no truth": that is to say, "we have become uncertain of
everything divine and absolute."
Deeper, however, than the subjective fact
the Nihilist "revelation" expresses, lie a will and a plan
that go far beyond any mere acceptance of "fact."
Zarathustra is a "prophet"; his words are clearly intended
as a counter-revolution directed against the Christian
Revelation. For those, indeed, who accept the new
"revelation"--i.e., for those who feel it to be their own
self-confession, or who live as though it were--an entirely
new spiritual universe opens up, in which God exists no
longer, in which, more significantly, men do not wish God to
exist. Nietzsche's "madman" knows that men have "murdered"
God, have killed their own faith.
It is decidedly wrong, then, to regard
the modern Nihilist, in whatever guise he may appear, as
"agnostic." The "death of God" has not simply happened to
him as a kind of cosmic catastrophe, rather he has
actively willed it--not directly, to be sure, but equally
effectively by preferring something else to the true God.
Nor is the Nihilist, let us note, really atheistic. It may
be doubted, indeed, if there exists such a thing as
"atheism," for no one denies the true God except to devote
himself to the service of a false god; the atheism that is
possible to the philosopher (though it is, of course, bad
philosophy) is not possible to the whole man. The Anarchist
Proudhon (whose doctrine we shall examine more closely in
the next chapter) saw this clearly enough, and declared
himself, not an atheist, but an "antitheist";[25]
"the Revolution is not atheistic, in the strict sense of the
word ... it does not deny the absolute, it eliminates
it...."[26]
"The first duty of man, on becoming intelligent and free, is
to continually hunt the idea of God out of his mind and
conscience. For God, if he exists, is essentially hostile to
our nature.... Every step we take in advance is a victory in
which we crush Divinity."
[27]
Humanity must be made to see that "God, if there is a God,
is its enemy."[28]
Albert Camus, in effect, teaches the same doctrine when he
raises "rebellion" (and not "unbelief") to the rank of first
principle. Bakunin, too, was not content to " refute" the
existence of God; "If God really existed," he believed, "it
would be necessary to abolish him."[29]
More effectively, the Bolshevist "atheism" of our century
has been quite obviously a war to the death against God and
all His works.
Revolutionary Nihilism stands irrevocably
and explicitly against God; but philosophical and
existentialist Nihilism--a fact not always so clear--is
equally "antitheistic" in its assumption that modern life
must henceforth continue without God. The army of the
enemies of God is recruited as much from the many who
passively accept their position in the rear guard as from
the few active enthusiasts who occupy the front ranks. More
important to observe, however, is the fact that the ranks of
antitheism are swelled not only by active and passive
"atheists," but by many who think themselves "religious" and
worship some "god." Robespierre established a cult of the
"Supreme Being," Hitler recognized the existence of a
"supreme force," a "god within men," and all forms of
Nihilist Vitalism have a "god" something like Hitler's. The
war against God is capable of a variety of stratagems, among
them the use of the name of God, and even of Christ. But
whether it is explicitly "atheist," or "agnostic," or takes
the form of a worship of some "new god," Nihilism has for
its foundation the declaration of war against the true God.
Formal atheism is the philosophy of a
fool (if we may so paraphrase the Psalmist);[30]
but antitheism is a
profounder malady. The literature of antitheism, to be sure,
is as full of inconsistencies and contradictions as is
formally atheist literature; but where the latter errs
through childishness (and the most sophisticated man in one
discipline can easily be a child in theology and the
spiritual life) and through plain insensitivity to spiritual
realities, the former owes its distortions to a deep-seated
passion that, recognizing these realities, wills to destroy
them. The petty arguments of Bertrand Russell (though even
his atheism is, of course, ultimately a kind of antitheism)
are easily explained and refuted, and they are no danger to
a secure faith; but the profound and determined attack of
Proudhon is a different matter, for it is born not of
bloodless sophistry but of great fervor.
Here we must face squarely a fact at
which we have hinted before now, but which we have not yet
fully examined: Nihilism is animated by a faith as strong,
in its own way, and as spiritual in its root, as the
Christian faith it attempts to destroy and supplant; its
success, and its exaggerations, are explicable in no other
way.
We have seen Christian faith to be the
spiritual context wherein the questions of God, Truth, and
Authority become meaningful and inspire consent. Nihilist
faith is similarly a context, a distinctive spirit which
underlies and gives meaning and power to Nihilist doctrine.
The success of Nihilism in our time has been dependent upon,
and may be measured by, the spread of this spirit; its
arguments seem persuasive not to the degree that they are
true, but to the degree that this spirit has prepared men to
accept them.
What, then, is the nature of the Nihilist faith? It is the
precise opposite of Christian faith, and so not properly
called "faith" at all. Where Christian faith is joyous,
certain, serene, loving, humble, patient, submitting in all
things to the Will of God, its Nihilist counterpart is full
of doubt, suspicion, disgust, envy, jealousy, pride,
impatience, rebelliousness, blasphemy--one or more of these
qualities predominating in any given personality. It is an
attitude of dissatisfaction with self, with the world, with
society, with God; it knows but one thing: that it will not
accept things as they are, but must devote its energies
either to changing them or fleeing from them. It was well
described by Bakunin as "the sentiment of rebellion, this
Satanic pride, which spurns subjection to any master
whatever, whether of divine or human origin."[31]
Nihilist rebellion, like Christian faith,
is an ultimate and irreducible spiritual attitude, having
its source and its strength in itself--and, of course, in
the supernatural author of rebellion. We shall be unprepared
to understand the nature or the success of Nihilism, or the
existence of systematic representatives of it like Lenin and
Hide, if we seek its source anywhere but in the primal
Satanic will to negation and rebellion. Most Nihilists, of
course, understand this will as something positive, as the
source of "independence" and "freedom"; but the very
language in which men like Bakunin find it necessary to
express themselves, betrays the deeper import of their words
to anyone prepared to take them seriously.
The Nihilist rejection of Christian faith
and institutions, then, is the result, not so much of a loss
of faith in them and in their divine origin (though, no
Nihilism being pure, this skepticism is present also), as of
rebellion against the authority they represent and the
obedience they command. The literature of 19th-century
Humanism, Socialism, and Anarchism has as its constant theme
the non serviam: God the Father, together with all His
institutions and ministers, is to be over thrown and
crushed, and triumphant Man is to ascend His throne to rule
in his own right. This literature, intellectually mediocre,
owes its power and its continuing influence to its
"righteous" indignation against the "injustices" and
"tyranny" of the Father and His earthly representatives; to
its passion, that is, and not to its truth.
This rebellion, this messianic fervor
that animates the greatest revolutionaries, being an inverse
faith, is less concerned to demolish the philosophical and
theological foundation of the Old Order (that task can be
left to less fervent souls) than to destroy the rival faith
which gave it life. Doctrines and institutions may be
"reinterpreted," emptied of their Christian content and
filled with a new, Nihilist content; but Christian faith,
the soul of these doctrines and institutions and alone
capable of discerning this "reinterpretation" and
effectively opposing it, must be completely destroyed before
it can itself be "reinterpreted." This is a practical
necessity if Nihilism is to triumph; more, it is a
psychological and even a spiritual. necessity, for Nihilist
rebellion dimly senses that the Truth resides in Christian
faith, and its jealousy and its uneasy conscience will not
be appeased until the total abolition of faith has Justified
its position and "proved" its truth. On a minor scale, this
is the psychology of the Christian apostate; on a major
scale, it is the psychology of Bolshevism.
The systematic Bolshevik campaign to
uproot Christian faith, even when it has clearly ceased to
be a danger to the stability of the atheist state, has no
rational explanation; it is rather part of a ruthless war to
the death against the only force capable of standing against
Bolshevism and of "disproving" it. Nihilism has failed as
long as true Christian faith remains in a single person; for
that person will be a living example of Truth that will
prove vain all the impressive worldly accomplishments of
which Nihilism is capable and will refute in his person all
the arguments against God and the Kingdom of Heaven. Man's
mind is supple, and it can be made to believe anything to
which his will inclines. In an atmosphere permeated with
Nihilistic fervor, such as still exists in the Soviet Union,
the soundest argument can do nothing to induce belief in
God, in immortality, in faith; but a man of faith, even in
this atmosphere, can speak to the heart of man and show, by
his example, that what is impossible to the world and to the
best of human intentions, is still possible to God and to
faith.
Nihilist rebellion is a war against God and against Truth;
but few Nihilists are fully aware of this. Explicit
theological and philosophical Nihilism is the preserve of a
few rare souls; for most, Nihilist rebellion takes the more
immediate form of a war against authority. Many whose
attitudes toward God and Truth may seem ambiguous reveal
their Nihilism most clearly in their attitude toward--in
Bakunin's words--the "cursed and fatal principle of
authority."[32]
The Nihilist "revelation" thus declares,
most immediately, the annihilation of authority. Some
apologists are fond of citing "corruptions," "abuses," and
"injustices" in the Old Order as justification for rebellion
against it; but such things--the existence of which no one
will deny--have been often the pretext, but never the cause,
of Nihilist outbursts. It is authority itself that the
Nihilist attacks. In the political and social order,
Nihilism manifests itself as a Revolution that intends, not
a mere change of government or a more or less widespread
reform of the existing order, but the establishment of an
entirely new conception of the end and means of government.
In the religious order Nihilism seeks, not a mere reform of
the Church and not even the foundation of a new "church" or
"religion," but a complete refashioning of the idea of
religion and of spiritual experience. In art and literature
the Nihilist is not concerned with the modification of old
aesthetic canons regarding subject-matter or style, nor with
the development of new genres or traditions, but with a
whole new approach to the question of artistic "creation"
and a new definition of "art."
It is the very first principles of these
disciplines, and no mere remote or faulty applications of
them, that Nihilism attacks. The disorder so apparent in
contemporary politics, religion, art, and other realms as
well, is a result of the deliberate and systematic
annihilation of the foundations of authority in them.
Unprincipled politics and morality, undisciplined artistic
expression, indiscriminate "religious experience"--all are
the direct consequence of the application to once stable
sciences and disciplines of the attitude of rebellion.
Nihilist rebellion has entered so deeply
into the fibre of our age that resistance to it is feeble
and ineffective; popular philosophy and most "serious
thought" devote their energies to apology for it. Camus, in
fact, sees in rebellion the only self-evident truth left to
the men of today, the only belief remaining to men who can
no longer believe in God. His philosophy of rebellion is a
skillful articulation of the "spirit of the age," but it is
hardly to be taken seriously as anything more than that.
Thinkers of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment were as
anxious as Camus is today to do without theology, to base A
their knowledge on "nature." But if "rebellion" is all the
"natural man" may know today, why is it that the "natural
man" of the Renaissance or the Enlightenment seemed to know
much more, and thought himself to be a much nobler being.
"They took too much for granted," is the usual answer, and
lived on Christian capital without knowing it; today we are
bankrupt, and know it." Contemporary man, in a word, is
"disillusioned." But, strictly speaking, one must be
"disillusioned" of an illusion: if men have fallen way, not
from illusion, but from truth--and this is indeed the
case--then profounder reasoning is required to explain their
present "plight." That Camus can accept the "rebel" as the
"natural man," that he can find everything "absurd" except
"rebellion," means only one thing: he has been well-trained
in the school of Nihilism, he has learned to accept the
fight against God as the "natural" state of man.
To such a state has Nihilism reduced men.
Before the modern age the life of man was largely
conditioned by the virtues of obedience, submission, and
respect: to God, to the Church, to the lawful earthly
authorities. To the modern man whom Nihilism has
"enlightened," this Old Order is but a horrible memory of
some dark past from which man has been "liberated"; modern
history has been the chronicle of the fall of every
authority. The Old Order has been overthrown, and if a
precarious stability is maintained in what is unmistakably
an age of "transition,)) a "new order" is clearly in the
making; the age of the "rebel" is at hand.
Of this age the Nihilist regimes of this
century have given a foretaste, and the widespread
rebelliousness of the present day is a further portent;
where there is no truth, the rebellious will reigns. But
"the will," said Dostoyevsky, with his customary insight
into the Nihilist mentality, "is closest to nothing; the
most assertive are closest to the most nihilistic."
[33]
He who has abandoned truth and every authority founded upon
that truth has only blind will between himself and the
Abyss; and this will, whatever its spectacular achievements
in its brief moment of power (those of Hitler and of
Bolshevism have so far been the most spectacular), is
irresistibly drawn to that Abyss as to some immense magnet
that has searched out the answering abyss within itself. In
this abyss, this nothingness of the man who lives without
truth, we come to the very heart of Nihilism.
2. THE WORSHIP OF NOTHINGNESS
Nothingness," in the sense in which
modern Nihilism understands it, is a concept unique to the
Christian tradition. The "nonbeing" of various Eastern
traditions is an entirely different, a positive, conception;
the nearest they approach to the idea of nihil is their
obscure notion of primal "chaos." God has spoken only
obscurely and indirectly to other peoples; to His chosen
people alone has He revealed the fullness of truth
concerning the beginning and the end of things.
To other peoples, indeed, and to the
unaided reason, one of the most difficult of Christian
doctrines to understand is that, of creatio ex nihilo: God's
creation of the world not out of Himself, not out of some
pre-existent matter or primal chaos, but out of nothing; in
no other doctrine is the omnipotence of God so plainly
stated. The never-dimmed marvelousness of God's creation has
its foundation precisely in this fact, that it was called
into existence from absolute non-existence.
But what relation, it may be asked, has
Nihilism to such a doctrine? It has the relation of denial.
"What," says Nietzsche in a statement whose last sentence we
have already cited in a different context "does Nihilism
mean?--That the highest values are losing their value, There
is no goal. There is no answer to the question: 'why?'"
[34]
Nihilism, in a word, owes its whole existence to a negation
of Christian Truth; it finds the world "absurd," not as a
result of dispassionate "research" into the question, but
through inability or unwillingness to believe its Christian
meaning. Only men who once thought they knew the answer to
the question "why?" could be so disillusioned to "discover"
that there was no answer after all.
Yet, if Christianity were merely one
religion or philosophy among many, its denial would not be a
matter of such great import. Joseph de Maistre--who was
astute in his criticism of the French Revolution, even if
his more positive ideas are not to be trusted--saw the point
precisely, and at a time when the effects of Nihilism were
far less obvious than they are today.
There have always been some forms of religion in the world
and wicked men who opposed them. Impiety was always a crime,
too.... But only in the bosom of the true religion can there
be real impiety.... Impiety has never produced in times past
the evils which it has brought forth in our day, for its
guilt is always directly proportional to the enlightenment
which surrounds it.... Although impious men have always
existed, there never was before the eighteenth century, and
in the heart of Christendom, an insurrection against God.
[35]
No other religion has affirmed so much
and so strongly as Christianity, because its voice is the
Voice of God, and its Truth is absolute; and no other
religion has had so radical and uncompromising an enemy as
Nihilism, for no one can oppose Christianity without doing
battle with God Himself.
To fight the very God Who has created him
out of nothingness requires, of course, a certain blindness
as well as the illusion of strength; but no Nihilist is so
blind that he fails to sense, however dimly, the ultimate
consequences of his action. The nameless "anxiety" of so
many men today testifies to their passive participation in
the program of antitheism; the more articulate speak of an
"abyss" that seems to have opened up within the heart of
man. This "anxiety" and this "abyss" are precisely the
nothingness out of which God has called each man into being,
and back to which man seems to fall when he denies God, and
in consequence, denies his own creation and his own being.
This fear of "falling out of being," as
it were, is the most pervasive kind of Nihilism today. It is
the constant theme of the arts, and the prevailing note of
"absurdist" philosophy. But it is a more conscious Nihilism,
the Nihilism of the explicit antitheist, that has been more
directly responsible for the calamities of our century. To
the man afflicted with such Nihilism, the sense of falling
into the abyss, far from ending in passive anxiety and
despair, is transformed into a frenzy of Satanic energy that
impels him to strike out at the whole of creation and bring
it, if he can, plummeting into the abyss with him. Yet in
the end a Proudhon, a Bakunin, a Lenin, a Hitler, however
great their temporary influence and success, must fail; they
must even testify, against their will, to the Truth they
would destroy. For their endeavor to Nihilize creation, and
so annul God's act of creation by returning the world to the
very nothingness from which it came, is but an inverted
parody of God's creation;
[36]
and they, like their father the Devil, are but feeble apes
of God who, in their attempt, "prove" the existence of the
God they deny, and in their failure testify to His power and
glory.
No man, we have said often enough, lives
without a god; who then--or what--is the god of the
Nihilist? It is nihil, nothingness itself-not the
nothingness of absence or non-existence, but of apostasy and
denial; it is the "corpse" of the "dead God" which so weighs
upon the Nihilist. The God hitherto so real and so present
to Christian men cannot be disposed of overnight; so
absolute a monarch can have no immediate successor. So it is
that, at the present moment of man's spiritual history--a
moment, admittedly, of crisis and transition--a dead God, a
great void, stands at the center of man's faith. The
Nihilist wills the world, which once revolved about God, to
revolve now about--nothing.
Can this be?--an order founded upon
nothing? Of course it cannot; it is self-contradiction, it
is suicide. But let us not expect coherence from modern
thinkers; this is in fact the point modern thought and its
Revolution have reached in our time. If it is a point that
can be held only for a moment, if it has been reached only
to be very quickly superseded, its reality cannot for all
that be denied. There are many signs, which we shall examine
in their place, that the world has begun to move out of the
"age of Nihilism" since the end of the last great war, and
towards some kind of "new age"; but in any case this "new
age," if it come, will not see the overcoming of Nihilism,
but its perfection. The Revolution reveals its truest face
in Nihilism; without repentance--and there has been
none--what comes after can only be a mask hiding that same
face. Whether overtly in the explicit antitheism of
Bolshevism, Fascism, Naziism, or passively in the cult of
indifference and despair, "absurdism" and "existentialism,"
modern man has clearly revealed his resolve to live
henceforth without God--that is to say, in a void, in
nothingness. Before our century, the well-meaning could
still delude themselves that "Liberalism" and "humanism,"
"science" and "progress," the Revolution itself and the
whole path of modern thought were something "positive" and
even, in some vague sense, had "God" on their side. It is
quite clear now that the Revolution and God can have nothing
to do with each other; there is no room in a consistent
modern philosophy for God at all. All further modern
thought, whatever disguises it may assume, must presuppose
this, must be built upon the void left by the "death of
God." The Revolution, in fact, cannot be completed until the
last vestige of faith in the true God is uprooted from the
hearts of men and everyone has learned to live in this void.
From faith comes coherence. The world of
faith, which was once the normal world, is a supremely
coherent world because in it everything is oriented to God
as to its beginning and end, and obtains its meaning in that
orientation. Nihilist rebellion, in destroying that world,
has inspired a new world: the world of the "absurd." This
word, very much in fashion at the present time to describe
the plight of contemporary man, has actually, if property
understood, a profound meaning. For if nothingness be the
center of the world, then the world, both in its essence and
in every detail, is incoherent, it fails to hold together,
it is absurd. No one has more clearly and succinctly
described this world than Nietzsche, its "prophet," and in
the very passage where he first proclaimed its first
principle, the "death of God."
We have killed him (God), you and I! We are all his
murderers! But how have we done it? How were we able to
drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the
whole horizon? What did we do when we loosened this earth
from its sun? Whither does it move now? Wither do we move?
Away from all suns? Do we not dash on unceasingly?
Backwards, sideways, forwards, in all directions? Is there
still an above and below? Do we not stray, as through
infinite nothingness? Does not empty space breathe upon us?
Has it not become colder? Does not night come on
continually, darker and darker?
[37]
Such is the Nihilist universe, in which there is neither up
nor down, right nor wrong, true nor false, because there is
no longer any point of orientation. Where there was once
God, there is now nothing; where there were once authority,
order, certainty, faith, there are now anarchy, confusion,
arbitrary and unprincipled action, doubt and despair. This
is the universe so vividly described by the Swiss Catholic
Max Picard, as the world of "the flight from God" and,
alternatively, as the world of "discontinuity" and
"disjointedness."
[38]
Nothingness, incoherence, antitheism,
hatred of truth: what we have been discussing in these pages
is more than mere philosophy, more even than a rebellion of
man against a God he will no longer serve. A subtle
intelligence lies behind these phenomena, and on an
intricate plan which philosopher and revolutionary alike
merely serve and do not command; we have to do with the work
of Satan.
Many Nihilists, indeed, far from
disputing this fact, glory in it. Bakunin found himself on
the side of "Satan, the eternal rebel, the first freethinker
and emancipator of worlds."
[39]
Nietzsche proclaimed himself "Antichrist." Poets, decadents,
and the avant-garde in general since the Romantic era have
been greatly fascinated by Satanism, and some have tried to
make it into a religion. Proudhon in so many words actually
invoked Satan:
Come to me, Lucifer, Satan, whoever you may be! Devil whom
the faith of my fathers contrasted with God and the Church.
I will act as spokesman for you and will demand nothing of
you.
[40]
What is the Orthodox Christian to think
of such words? Apologists and scholars of Nihilist thought,
when they regard such passages as worthy of comment at all,
usually dismiss them as imaginative exaggerations, as bold
metaphors to express a perhaps childish "rebellion." To be
sure, it must be admitted that there is a juvenile quality
in the expression of most of modern "Satanism"; those who so
easily invoke Satan and proclaim Antichrist can have very
little awareness of the full import of their words, and few
intend them to be taken with entire seriousness. This naive
bravado reveals, nonetheless, a deeper truth. The Nihilist
Revolution stands against authority and order, against
Truth, against God; and to do this is, clearly, to stand
with Satan. The Nihilist, since he usually believes in
neither God nor Satan, may think it mere cleverness to
defend, in his fight against God, the age-old enemy of God;
but while he may think he is doing no more than playing with
words, he is actually speaking the truth.
De Maistre, and later Donoso Cortes,
writing in a day when the Church of Rome was more aware of
the meaning of the Revolution than it is now, and was still
capable of taking a strong stand against it, called the
Revolution a Satanic manifestation; and historians smile at
them. Fewer, perhaps, smile today when the same phrase is
applied--though rarely with full seriousness even now--to
National Socialism or Bolshevism; and some may even begin to
suspect that there exist forces and causes that have somehow
escaped the attention of their enlightened gaze.
IV. The
Nihilist Program
War against God, issuing in the
proclamation of the reign of nothingness, which means the
triumph of incoherence and absurdity, the whole plan
presided over by Satan: this, in brief, is the theology and
the meaning of Nihilism. But man cannot live by such blatant
negation; unlike Satan, he cannot even desire it for its own
sake, but only by mistaking it for something positive and
good. And in fact no Nihilist--apart from a few moments of
frenzy and enthusiasm, or perhaps despair--has ever seen his
negation as anything but the means to a higher goal:
Nihilism furthers its Satanic ends by means of a positive
program. The most violent revolutionaries--a Nechayev or
Bakunin, a Lenin or Hitler, and even the demented
practitioners of the "propaganda of the deed"--dreamed of
the "new order" their violent destructions of the Old Order
would make possible; Dada and "anti-literature" seek not the
total destruction of art, but the path to a "new" art; the
passive Nihilist, in his " existential" apathy and despair,
sustains life only by the vague hope that he may yet find
some kind of ultimate satisfaction in a world that seems to
deny it.
The content of the Nihilist dream is,
then, a "Positive" one. But truth requires that we view it
in proper perspective: not through the rose-colored
spectacles of the Nihilist himself, but in the realistic
manner our century's intimate acquaintance with Nihilism
permits. Armed with the knowledge this acquaintance affords,
and with the Christian Truth which enables us to interpret
it aright, we shall attempt to look behind the Nihilist
phrases to see the realities they conceal. Seen in this
perspective, the very phrases which to the Nihilist seem
entirely "positive" appear to the Orthodox Christian in
another light, as items in a program quite different from
that of Nihilist apologetics.
1. THE DESTRUCTION OF THE OLD
ORDER
The first and most obvious item in the
program of Nihilism is the destruction of the Old Order. The
Old Order was the soil, nourished by Christian Truth, in
which men had their roots. Its laws and institutions, and
even its customs, were founded in that Truth and dedicated
to teaching it; its buildings were erected to the glory of
God and were a visible sign of His Order upon earth; even
the generally "primitive" (but natural) living conditions
served (unintentionally, of course) as a reminder of man's
humble place here, of his dependence upon God for even the
few earthly blessings he possessed, and of his true home
which lies beyond this "vale of tears," in the Kingdom of
Heaven. Effective war against God and His Truth requires the
destruction of every element of this Old I Order; it is here
that the peculiarly Nihilist "virtue" of violence comes into
play.
Violence is no merely incidental aspect of the Nihilist
Revolution, but a part of its essence. According to Marxist
"dogma," "force is the midwife of every old society pregnant
with a new one";
[41]
appeals to violence, and even a kind of ecstasy at the
prospect of its use, abound in revolutionary literature.
Bakunin invoked the "evil passions" and called for the
unchaining of "popular anarchy"
[42]
in the cause of "universal destruction," and his
"Revolutionary Catechism" is the primer of ruthless
violence; Marx was fervent in his advocacy of "revolutionary
terror" as the one means of hastening the advent of
Communism;
[43]
Lenin defined the "dictatorship of the proletariat" (the
stage in which the Soviet Union still finds itself) as "a
domination that is untrammeled by law and based on
violence."
[44]
Demagogic incitement of the masses and the arousing of the
basest passions for revolutionary purposes have long been
standard Nihilist practice.
The spirit of violence has been most
thoroughly incarnated, in our century, by the Nihilist
regimes of Bolshevism and National Socialism; it is to these
that there have been assigned the principal roles in the
Nihilist task of the destruction of the Old Order. The two,
whatever their psychological dissimilarities and the
historical "accidents" which placed them in opposing camps,
have been partners in their frenzied accomplishment of this
task. Bolshevism, to be sure, has had the more " positive"
role of the two, since it has been able to justify its
monstrous crimes by an appeal to a pseudo-Christian,
messianic idealism which Hitler scorned; Hitler's role in
the Nihilist program was more specialized and provincial,
but nonetheless essential.
Even in failure--in fact, precisely in
the failure of its ostensible aims--Naziism served the cause
of this program. Quite apart from the political and
ideological benefits which the Nazi interlude in European
history gave to the Communist powers (Communism, it is now
widely and erroneously believed, if evil in itself, still
cannot be as evil as Naziism), Naziism had another, more
obvious and direct, function. Goebbels explained this
function in his radio broadcasts in the last days of the
War.
The bomb-terror spares the dwellings of neither rich nor
poor; before the labor offices of total war the last class
barriers have had to go down.... Together with the monuments
of culture there crumble also the last obstacles to the
fulfillment of our revolutionary task. Now that everything
is in ruins, we are forced to rebuild Europe. In the past,
private possessions tied us to a bourgeois restraint. Now
the bombs, instead of killing all Europeans, have only
smashed the prison walls which kept them captive.... In
trying to destroy Europe's future, the enemy has only
succeeded in smashing its past; and with that, everything
old and outworn has gone.
[45]
Naziism thus, and its war, have done for
Central Europe (and less thoroughly, for Western Europe)
what Bolshevism did in its Revolution for Russia: destroyed
the Old Order, and thus cleared the way for the building of
the "new." Bolshevism then had no difficulty in taking over
where Naziism had left off, within a few years the whole of
Central Europe had passed under the "dictatorship of the
proletariat"--i.e., Bolshevist tyranny--for which Naziism
had effectively prepared the way.
The Nihilism of Hitler was too pure, too unbalanced, to have
more than a negative, preliminary role to play in the whole
Nihilist program. Its role, like the role of the purely
negative first phase of Bolshevism, is now finished, and the
next stage belongs to a power possessing a more complete
view of the whole Revolution, the Soviet power upon which
Hitler bestowed, in effect, his inheritance in the words,
"the future belongs solely to the stronger Eastern nation."
[46]
2. THE MAKING OF THE "NEW EARTH"
But we do not yet have to do with the
ultimate future, with the end of the Revolution; between the
Revolution of Destruction and the earthly paradise there
lies a stage of transition, known in Marxist doctrine as
"the dictatorship of the proletariat." In this stage we may
see a second, "constructive" function of violence. The
Nihilist Soviet power has been the most ruthless and
systematic in developing this stage, but precisely the same
work is being accomplished by the Realists of the free
world, who have been quite successful in transforming and
"simplifying" the Christian tradition into a system for the
promotion of worldly "progress." The ideal of Soviet and
Western Realists is an identical one, pursued by the former
with single-minded fervor, by the latter more spontaneously
and sporadically, not always directly by governments but
with their encouragement, relying more upon individual
initiative and ambition. Realists everywhere envisage a
totally "new order," built entirely by men "liberated" from
the yoke of God and upon the ruins of an Old Order whose
foundation was divine. The Revolution of Nihilism, willed or
unwilled, is accepted; and through the labor of workers in
all realms, on both sides of the "Iron Curtain," a new,
purely human Kingdom is arising, in which its apologists see
a "new earth" undreamed of by past ages, an earth totally
exploited, controlled, and organized for the sake of man and
against the true God.
No place is secure from the encroaching
empire of this Nihilism; everywhere men feverishly pursue
the work of "progress"--for what reason they do not know, or
only very dimly sense. In the free world it is perhaps
ahorror vacui that chiefly impels men into feverish activity
that promises forgetfulness of the spiritual emptiness that
attends all worldliness; in the Communist world a large role
is still played by hatred against real and imagined enemies,
but primarily against the God their Revolution has
dethroned, a hatred that inspires them to remake the world
against Him. In either case it is a cold, inhuman world that
men without God are fashioning, a world where there are
everywhere organization and efficiency, and nowhere love or
reverence. The sterile "purity" and "functionalism" of
contemporary architecture are a typical expression of such a
world; the same spirit is present in the disease of total
planning, for example in "birth control," in experiments
that look to the control of heredity and of the mind, in the
"welfare state." Some of the apologies for such schemes
approach perilously near a strange kind of lucid insanity,
wherein precision of detail and technique are united to an
appalling insensitivity to the inhuman end these schemes
serve.
Nihilist "organization"--the total
transformation of the earth and society by machines, modern
architecture and design, and the inhuman philosophy of
"human engineering" that accompanies them--is a consequence
of the unqualified acceptance of the industrialism and
technology which we saw in the last chapter as bearers of a
worldliness that, if unchecked, must end in tyranny. In it
we may see a practical translation of the philosophical
development we touched upon in Section I above: the
transformation of truth into power. What may seem "harmless"
in philosophical pragmatism and skepticism becomes something
else again in the "planners" of our own day. For if there is
no truth, power knows no limit save that imposed by the
medium in which it functions, or by a stronger power opposed
to it. The power of contemporary "planners" will find its
natural limit, if unopposed, only in a regime of total
organization.
Such, indeed, was the dream of Lenin; for before the
"dictatorship of the proletariat" comes to an end, "the
whole of society will have become one office and one
factory, with equal work and equal pay."
[47]
In the Nihilist "new earth" all human energy is to be
devoted to worldly concerns; the whole human environment and
every object in it are to serve the cause of "production"
and to remind men that their only happiness lies in this
world; there is to be established, in fact, the absolute
despotism of worldliness. The artificial world erected by
men who will to remove the last vestige of divine influence
in the world, and the last trace of faith in men, promises
to be so all-encompassing and so omnipresent that it will be
all but impossible for men to see, to imagine, or even to
hope for anything beyond it. This world, from the Nihilist
point of view, will be one of perfect "realism" and total
"liberation"; in actual fact it will be the vastest and most
efficient prison men have ever known, for--in the precise
words of Lenin-- "there will be no way of getting away from
it, there will be 'nowhere to go'."
[48]
The power of the world, which Nihilists
trust as Christians trust their God, can never liberate, it
can only enslave; in Christ alone, Who has "overcome the
world",
[49]
is there deliverance from that power, even when it shall
have become all but absolute.
3. THE FASHIONING OF THE "NEW
MAN"
The destruction of the Old Order,
however, and the organization of the "new earth" are not the
only items in the historical program of Nihilism; they are
not, perhaps, even its most important items. They are but
the preparation for a work more significant and more ominous
than either: the "transformation of man."
This was the dream of the pseudo-Nietzscheans,
Hitler and Mussolini, of a "higher humanity" to be forged
through a "creative" violence; "this is the mission of our
century," said Hitler's propagandist Rosenberg: "out of a
new life myth to create a new human type."
[50]
We know from Nazi practice what this "human type" was, and
the world would seem to have rejected it as brutal and
inhuman. But the "mass change in human nature" to which
Marxism looks is an end that is perhaps not very different.
Marx and Engels are unequivocal on this subject:
Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist
consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the
alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an
alteration which can only take place in a practical
movement, a revolution: this revolution is necessary,
therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be
overthrown in any other way, but also because the
class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in
ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to
found society anew.
[51]
Putting aside for the moment the question
of what kind of men are to be produced by this process, let
us note carefully the means utilized: it is again violence,
which is as necessary to the formation of the "new man" as
it is to the building of a "new earth." The two, indeed, are
intimately connected in the determinist philosophy of Marx,
for "in revolutionary activity, change of self coincides
with the change of circumstances."
[52]
The change of circumstances, and more to the point, the
process of changing them through revolutionary violence,
transform the revolutionaries themselves. Here Marx and
Engels, like their contemporary Nietzsche, and like Lenin
and Hitler after them, subscribe to the mystique of
violence, seeing a magical change to be wrought in human
nature through indulgence of the passions of anger, hatred,
resentment, and the will to dominate. In this regard we must
make note also of the two World Wars, whose violence has
helped to destroy forever the Old Order and the old
humanity, rooted in a stable and traditional society, and
has had a large role in producing the new uprooted humanity
that Marxism idealizes. The thirty years of Nihilist war and
revolution between 1914 and 1945 have been an ideal
breeding-ground for the "new human type. "
It is of course no secret to contemporary
philosophers and psychologists that man himself is
changing in our violent century, under the influence, of
course, not only of war and revolution, but also of
practically everything else that lays claim to being
"modern" and "progressive." We have already cited the most
striking forms of Nihilist Vitalism, whose cumulative effect
has been to uproot, disintegrate, and "mobilize" the
individual, to substitute for his normal stability and
rootedness a senseless quest for power and movement, and to
replace normal human feeling by a nervous excitability. The
work of Nihilist Realism, in practice as in theory, has been
parallel and complementary to that of Vitalism: a work of
standardization, specialization, simplification,
mechanization, dehumanization; its effect has been to
"reduce" the individual to the most "Primitive" and basic
level, to make him in fact the slave of his environment, the
perfect workman in Lenin's worldwide "factory."
These observations are commonplace today;
a multitude of volumes has been written about them. Many
thinkers are able to see the clear connection between the
Nihilist philosophy that reduces reality and human nature to
the simplest possible terms, and a Nihilist practice that
similarly reduces the concrete man; not a few, also, realize
the seriousness and the radicalness of this "reduction" even
to the extent of seeing in it, as does Erich Kahler, a
qualitative change in human nature.
(The) powerful trend toward the disruption and invalidation
of the individual ... manifestly present in the most diverse
currents of modem life--economic, technological, political,
scientific, educational, psychic and artistic--appears so
overwhelming that we are induced to see in it a true
mutation, a transformation of human nature.[53]
But few even of those who realize this
much have any real awareness of its profound significance
and implications (for these are theological, and so
completely outside the scope of any merely empirical
analysis), or of a possible remedy (for that must be of the
spiritual order). The author just quoted, for example, draws
hope from the prospect of a transition into "some
supraindividual form of existence, " thus revealing that he
has no higher wisdom than that of the "spirit of the age,"
which indeed--as we shall see--has thrown up the ideal of a
social "Superman."
What, more realistically, is this
"mutation," the "new man"? He is the rootless man)
discontinuous with a past that Nihilism has destroyed, the
raw material of every demagogue's dream; the "free-thinker"
and skeptic, closed only to the truth but "open" to each new
intellectual fashion because he himself has no intellectual
foundation; the "seeker" after some "new revelation," ready
to believe anything new because true faith has been
annihilated in him; the planner and experimenter,
worshipping "fact" because he has abandoned truth, seeing
the world as a vast laboratory in which he is free to
determine what is "possible"; the autonomous man, pretending
to the humility of only asking his "rights," yet full of the
pride that expects everything to be given him in a world
where nothing is authoritatively forbidden; the man of the
moment, without conscience or values and thus at the mercy
of the strongest "stimulus"; the "rebel," hating all
restraint and authority because he himself is his own and
only god; the "mass man," this new barbarian, thoroughly
"reduced and "simplified" and capable of only the most
elementary ideas, yet scornful of anyone who presumes to
point out the higher things or the real complexity of life.
These men are all one man, the man whose
fashioning has been the very purpose of Nihilism. But mere
description cannot do justice to this man; one must see his
image. And in fact such an image has quite recently been
portrayed; it is the image of contemporary painting and
sculpture, that which has arisen, for the most part, since
the end of the Second World War, as if to give form to the
reality produced by the most concentrated era of Nihilism in
human history.
The human form, it would seem, has been
"rediscovered" in this art; out of the chaos of total
abstraction, identifiable shapes emerge. The result,
supposedly, is a "new humanism," a "return to man" that is
all the more significant in that--unlike so many of the
artistic schools of the 20th century--it is not an
artificial contrivance whose substance is hidden behind a
cloud of irrationalist jargon, but a spontaneous growth that
would seem to have deep roots in the soul of contemporary
man. in the work, for example, of Alberto Giacometti, Jean
Dubuffet, Francis Bacon, Leon Golub, Jose Luis Cuevas--to
take an international sampling
[54]--there
seems to be a genuinely "contemporary" art that, without
abandoning the disorder and "freedom" of abstraction, turns
its attention away from mere escape toward a serious "human
commitment."
But what kind of "man" is it to which
this art has "returned"? It is certainly not Christian man,
man in the image of God, for no "modern" man can believe in
him; nor is it the somewhat diluted "man" of the old
humanism, whom all "advanced" thinkers regard as discredited
and outmoded. It is not even the "man" disfigured and
denatured in the earlier "Cubist" and "Expressionist" art of
this century; rather, it begins where that art leaves off,
and attempts to enter a new realm, to depict a new man.
To the Orthodox Christian observer,
concerned not with what the avant-garde finds fashionable or
sophisticated, but with truth, little reflection should be
required to penetrate to the secret of this art: there is no
question of "man" in it at all; it is an art at once
subhuman and demonic. It is not man who is the subject of
this art, but some lower creature who has emerged ("arrived"
is Giacometti's word for it) from unknown depths.
The bodies this creature assumes (and in
all its metamorphoses it is always the same creature) are
not necessarily distorted violently; twisted and dismembered
as they are, they are often more "realistic" than the
figures of man in earlier modern art. This creature, it is
clear, is not the victim of some violent attack; rather, he
was born deformed, he is a genuine "mutation." One cannot
but notice the likeness between some of these figures and
photographs of the deformed children born recently to
thousands of women who had taken the drug Thalidomide during
pregnancy; and we have doubtless not seen the last of such
monstrous "coincidences."
Even more revealing than the bodies of
these creatures are the faces. It would be too much to say
that these faces express hopelessness; that would be to
ascribe to them some trace of humanity which they most
emphatically lack. They are the faces, rather, of creatures
more or less "adjusted" to the world they know, a world not
hostile but entirely alien, not inhuman but "a-human."[55]
The anguish and rage and despair of earlier Expressionists
is here frozen, as it were, and cut off from a world to
which they had at least the relation of denial, so as to
make a world of their own. Man, in this art, is no longer
even a caricature of himself; he is no longer portrayed in
the throes of spiritual death, ravaged by the hideous
Nihilism of our century that attacks, not just the body and
soul, but the very idea and nature of man. No, all this has
passed; the crisis is over; man is dead. The new art
celebrates the birth of a new species, the creature of the
lower depths, subhumanity.
We have dealt with this art at a length
perhaps disproportionate to its intrinsic value, because it
offers concrete and unmistakable evidence--for him who has
eyes to see--of a reality which, expressed abstractly, seems
frankly incredible. It is easy to dismiss as fantasy the
"new humanity" foreseen by a Hitler or a Lenin; and even the
plans of those quite respectable Nihilists among us today
who calmly discuss the scientific breeding of a "biological
superman," or project a utopia for "new men" to be developed
by the narrowest "modern education" and a strict control of
the mind, seem remote and only faintly ominous.
But confronted with the actual image of a
"new man," an image brutal and loathsome beyond imagination,
and at the same time so unpremeditated, consistent, and
widespread in contemporary art, one is caught up short, and
the full horror of the contemporary state of man strikes one
a blow one is not likely soon to forget.
V. Beyond
Nihilism
The image of the "new man" presented in
these pages has been exclusively a negative one. Many
students of the contemporary state of man, while perhaps
admitting the truth of some of our observations, would
condemn them as a whole for being "one-sided." In all
justice, then, we must examine the other side, the
"positive" view.
And indeed it cannot be questioned that
beside the current of despair, disillusionment, and
"a-humanity" that we have described as emerging from the era
of Nihilism, there has been developing a parallel current of
optimism and idealism that has produced its own "new men."
These are the young men both idealistic and practical, ready
and anxious to cope with the difficult problems of the day,
to spread the American or the Soviet ideal (or the more
universal ideal that stands above both) to "backward"
countries; enthusiastic scientists, pushing back "frontiers"
everywhere in the undeniably "exciting" research and
experimentation being conducted today; pacifists and
non-violent idealists, crusading in the cause of peace,
brotherhood, world-unity, and the overcoming of age-old
hatreds; young writers, "angry" for the cause of justice and
equality and preaching--as best they can in this sorry
world--a new message of joy and creativity; even the artists
whose image of man we have mercilessly attacked, for it is
surely their intention to condemn the world that produced
this man and so point the way beyond him; and the great
numbers of more ordinary young people who are enthusiastic
to be alive in this "exciting" time, sincere, well-meaning,
looking with confidence and optimism to the future, to a
world that may at least know happiness instead of misery.
The older generation, itself too scarred from the era of
Nihilism it has passed through to share fully the enthusiasm
of the young, has high hopes for them; is it not just
possible that, if the "spirit of the age" is favorable,
their dreams may after all be realized?
Without as yet answering this question we
must ask another, more fundamental, question: of what nature
are the faith and hope that inspire these dreams? The answer
is evident: they are entirely a worldly faith and hope.
Artistic and scientific novelties, prosperity and comfort,
new worlds for exploration, "Peace," "brotherhood," and
"joy" as the popular mind understands them: these are the
goods of the world that pass away, and if they are pursued
with the single-minded devotion which the optimistic "new
man" of today devotes to them, they are spiritually harmful.
Man's true and eternal home is not in this world; the true
peace and love and joy of Christ, which the believer knows
even in this life, are of an entirely different dimension
from the worldly parodies of them which fill the "new man"
with vain hopes.
The existence of this "new man, whose
faith and hope are directed solely to this world, is but
another proof of the success of the Nihilist program. The
"new man" in his "positive" form is taken from the same
photograph of which the subhumanity we have described is the
negative. In the negative he is seen as defeated and
denatured by an inhuman world; the pessimism and despair of
this image--and this is their only positive
significance--are a last feeble protest against the work of
Nihilism, at the same time that they are a testimony to its
success. In the positive, the "new man" has set about to
change the world, and at the same time to change his own
attitude to one of acceptance of the modern world which,
though imperfect, is the only one he knows; in this image
there is no more conflict, for man is well on the way to
being thoroughly refashioned and reoriented, and thus
perfectly "adjusted" to the new world. The two images are
one in issuing from the death of man as he has hitherto been
known--man living on earth as a pilgrim, looking to Heaven
as his true home--and in pointing to the birth of a "new
man" solely of the earth, knowing neither hope nor despair
save over the things of this world.
Between them, the positive and negative
images of the "new man" sum up the state of contemporary
man, the man in whom worldliness has triumphed over faith.
At the same time, they are a sign of transition, a presage
of a major change in the "spirit of the age." In the
negative image the apostasy from Christian Truth which
primarily characterizes the modern age seems to have reached
its limit; God being "dead," the man created in His image
has lost his nature and fallen into subhumanity. In the
positive image, on the other hand, a new movement seems to
have begun; man has discovered his new nature, that of a
creature of the earth. The age of denial and Nihilism,
having gone as far as it could, is over; the "new man" no
longer has enough interest in Christian Truth to deny it;
his whole attention is directed to this world.
The new age, which many call a
"post-Christian" age, is at the same time the age "beyond
Nihilism"--a phrase that expresses at once a fact and a
hope. The fact this phrase expresses is that Nihilism, being
negative in essence even if positive in aspiration, owing
its whole energy to its passion to destroy Christian Truth,
comes to the end of its program in the production of a
mechanized "new earth" and a dehumanized "new man":
Christian influence over man and over society having been
effectively obliterated, Nihilism must retire and give way
to another, more "constructive" movement capable of acting
from autonomous and positive motives. This movement, which
we shall describe in the next chapter under the name of
Anarchism, takes up the Revolution at the point where
Nihilism leaves off and attempts to bring the movement which
Nihilism began to its logical conclusion.
The hope contained in the phrase, "beyond
Nihilism," is the naive one that it has a spiritual as well
as an historical reference, that the new age is to see the
overcoming of Nihilism and not merely its obsolescence. The
god of Nihilism, nothingness, is an emptiness, a vacuum
waiting to be filled; those who have lived in this vacuum
and acknowledged nothingness as their god cannot but seek a
new god and hope that he will lead them out of the age and
the power of Nihilism. It is such people who, anxious to
draw some positive significance from their situation, and
unwilling to believe that the Nihilism through which our age
has passed can be entirely unfruitful, have constructed an
apology in which Nihilism, however evil or unfortunate it
may be in itself, is seen as the necessary means to an end
beyond itself, as destruction preceding reconstruction, as
darkness preceding the dawn. If the present darkness,
uncertainty, and suffering are unpleasant--so this apology
continues--they are at the same time beneficial and
purifying; stripped bare of illusions, in the midst of a
"dark night" of doubt and despair, one can only suffer these
trials in patience and remain "open" and "receptive" to what
the omnipotential future may bring. Nihilism, it is
presumed, is the apocalyptic sign of the advent of a new and
better age.
This apology is nearly universal, and is
capable of being adapted to innumerable contemporary
viewpoints. Goebbels' view of the ultimately "positive"
meaning of National Socialism, which we cited in the
preceding section, is perhaps the most extreme of such
adaptations. Other more "spiritual" versions of it have been
common since the great crisis in thought provoked by the
French Revolution. Poets, would-be " prophets," and
occultists, as well as the more prosaic men whom these
visionaries have influenced, while agonizing over the
disorders of their times, have found comfort in the thought
that they have been a blessing in disguise. W B. Yeats may
again be cited as typical in this attitude.
Dear predatory birds, prepare for war.... Love war because
of its horror, that belief may be changed, civilization
renewed.... Belief comes from shock.... Belief is renewed
continually in the ordeal of death.[56]
More specifically, much the same attitude
underlies contemporary hopes with regard to the Soviet
Union. Being "realistic," most men accept the social,
political, and economic transformations wrought by Marxism,
while deprecating its violent means and its extremist
ideology; at the same time, being optimistic and open to a
better turn of affairs, men have welcomed the "thaw" that
set in with the death of Stalin, hoping to see in it the
first signs of a far-reaching transformation of the Marxist
ideal. From "coexistence," perhaps, one may proceed to
cooperation, and finally to harmony.
Such ideas are the result of a basic
misconception of the nature of the modern Revolution;
Nihilism is but one side of this Revolution. Violence and
negation are, to be sure, a preliminary work; but this work
is only part of a much larger plan whose end promises to be,
not something better, but something incomparably worse than
the age of Nihilism. If in our own times there are signs
that the era of violence and negation is passing, this is by
no means because Nihilism is being "overcome" or "outgrown,"
but because its work is all but completed and its usefulness
is at an end. The Revolution, perhaps, begins to move out of
its malevolent phase and into a more "benevolent" one--not
because it has changed its will or its direction, but
because it is nearing the attainment of the ultimate goal
which it has never ceased to pursue; fat with its success,
it can prepare to relax in the enjoyment of this goal.
The last hope of modern man is in fact
but another of his illusions; the hope for a new age "beyond
Nihilism" is itself an expression of the last item in the
program of the Revolution. It is by no means Marxism alone
that promotes this program. There is no major power today
whose government is not "revolutionary," no one in a
position of authority or influence whose criticism of
Marxism goes beyond the proposal of better means to an end
that is equally "revolutionary"; to disown the ideology of
the Revolution in the contemporary Cc intellectual climate"
would be, quite clearly, to condemn oneself to political
powerlessness. There is no clearer proof than this of the
anti-Christian spirit of our age--the profoundest
anti-Christianity being, of course, the pseudo-Christianity
which is the goal of the Revolution.
Nihilism itself, in coming to the end of
its own program, points to this goal that lies beyond it;
that is the real meaning of the Nihilist go apology of Yeats
and others. But again, it is perhaps in Nietzsche, that
uncanny "prophet" who knew everything about Nihilism except
its ultimate meaning, that this idea receives its most
striking expression.
Under certain circumstances, the appearance of the extremest
form of Pessimism and actual Nihilism might be the sign of a
process of incisive and most essential growth, and of
mankind's transit into completely new conditions of
existence. This is what I have understood.[57]
Beyond Nihilism there is to be a "transvaluation
of all values":
With this formula a counter-movement finds expression, in
regard to both a principle and a mission; a movement which
in some remote future will supersede this perfect Nihilism;
but which nevertheless regards it as a necessary step, both
logically and psychologically, towards its own advent, and
which positively cannot come, except on top of and out of
it.[58]
Strangely enough, the very same idea is
expressed in the totally different context of Lenin's
thought, where, after the exaltation of the Nihilist idea of
the universal "factory," he continues:
But this "factory" discipline, which the proletariat will
extend to the whole of society after the defeat of the
capitalists and the overthrow of the exploiters, is by no
means our ideal, or our final aim. It is but afoothold necessary
for the radical cleansing of society of all the hideousness
and foulness of capitalist exploitation, in order to advance
further.[59]
It is this "further" point, which
Nietzsche and Lenin are at one in describing as "completely
new conditions of existence," that is the ultimate goal of
the Revolution. This goal, since it is in a certain sense
"beyond Nihilism," and also because it is a large topic in
itself, requires a separate chapter. To conclude this
chapter and our discussion of Nihilism proper, it will be
sufficient merely to suggest its nature, and thus establish
the general framework of our exposition in the next chapter;
this goal may be viewed as a three-fold corollary of
Nihilist thought.
First, the corollary of the Nihilist
annihilation of the Old Order is the conception of a "new
age"--"new" in an absolute, and not a relative, sense. The
age about to begin is not to be merely the latest, or even
the greatest, of a series of ages, but the inauguration of a
whole new time; it is set up against all that has hitherto
been. "It may be," said Nietzsche in a letter of 1884, "that
I am the first to light upon an idea which will divide the
history of mankind in two";[60]
as the consequence of this idea, "all who are born after us
belong to a higher history than any history hitherto."[61]
Nietzsche is, of course, blinded by his pride; he made no
original "discovery" but only found words for what had been
"in the air" already for some time. Precisely the same idea,
in fact, was expressed twelve years earlier by Dostoyevsky
in the person of Kirillov, the most extreme of the
"possessed":
Everything will be new ... then they will divide history
into two parts: from the gorilla to the annihilation of God,
and from the annihilation of God to the transformation of
the earth, and of man physically.[62]
Here there is already suggested the second corollary of
Nihilist thought. The Nihilist rebellion and antitheism
responsible for the "death of God" give rise to the idea
that is to inaugurate the "new age": the transformation of
man himself into a god. "Dead are all the gods," says
Nietzsche's Zarathustra: "now do we desire the superman to
live."[63]The
"murder" of God is a deed too great to leave men unchanged:
"Shall we not ourselves have to become gods, merely to seem
worthy of it?"[64]
In Kirillov, the Superman is the "Mangod," for in his logic,
"if there is no God, then I am God."[65]
It is this idea of the "Superman" that
underlies and inspires the conception of the "transformation
of man," alike in the Realism of Marx and in the Vitalism of
numerous occultists and artists. The various conceptions of
the "new man" are, as it were, a series of preliminary
sketches of the Superman. For just as nothingness, the god
of Nihilism, is but an emptiness and expectancy looking to
fulfilment in the revelation of some "new god," so too the
"new man," whom Nihilism has deshaped, reduced, and left
without character, without faith, without orientation--this
"new man," whether viewed as "positive" or "negative," has
become "mobile" and "flexible," "open" and "receptive," he
is passive material awaiting some new discovery or
revelation or command that is to remold him finally into his
definitive shape.
Finally, the corollary of the Nihilist
annihilation of authority and order is the
conception--adumbrated in all the myths of a "new order"--of
an entirely new species of order, an order which its most
ardent defenders do not hesitate to call "Anarchy." The
Nihilist State, in the Marxist myth, is to "wither away,"
leaving a world-order that is to be unique in human history,
and which it would be no exaggeration to call the
"millennium."
A "new age" ruled by "Anarchy" and populated by "Supermen":
this is the Revolutionary dream that has stirred men into
performing the incredible drama of modern history. It is an
"apocalyptic" dream, and they are quite correct who see in
it a strange inversion of the Christian hope in the Kingdom
of Heaven. But that is no excuse for the "sympathy" so often
accorded at least the more "sincere" and "noble"
Revolutionaries and Nihilists; this is one of the pitfalls
we found it necessary to warn against at the very beginning
of this chapter. In a world thinly balanced on the edge of
chaos, where all truth and nobility seem to have vanished,
the temptation is great among the well-meaning but naive to
seek out certain of the undoubtedly striking figures who
have populated the modern intellectual landscape, and--in
ignorance of genuine standards of truth and spirituality--to
magnify them into spiritual "giants" who have spoken a word
which, though "unorthodox," is at least "challenging." But
the realities of this world and of the next are too rigorous
to permit such vagueness and liberalism. Good intentions too
easily go astray, genius and nobility are too often
perverted; and the corruption of the best produces, not the
second best, but the worst. One must grant genius and fervor,
and even a certain nobility to a Marx, a Proudhon, a
Nietzsche; but theirs is the nobility of Lucifer, the first
among the angels who, wishing to be even more than he was,
fell from that exalted position into the abyss. Their
vision, in which some would see a profounder kind of
Christianity, is the vision of the Reign of Antichrist, the
Satanic imitation and inversion of the Kingdom of God. All
Nihilists, but preeminently those of the greatest genius and
the broadest vision, are the prophets of Satan; refusing to
use their talents in the humble service of God, "They have
waged war against God with His own gifts."[66]
It can hardly be denied, and a sober look
at the transformations the world and man have undergone in
the last two centuries can only confirm the fact, that the
war of the enemies of God has been successful; its ultimate
victory, in fact, seems imminent. But what can "victory"
mean in such a war? What kind of "peace" can a humanity know
that has been learning so long the lessons of violence? In
the Christian life, we know, there is a harmony of means and
ends. Through prayer and a devout life, and through the
Sacraments of the Church, the Christian is changed, by the
Grace of God, to become more like his Lord and thus more
worthy to participate in the Kingdom He has prepared for
those who truly follow Him. Those who are His are known by
the fruits they bear: patience, humility, meekness,
obedience, peace, joy, love, kindness, forgiveness--fruits
which at one and the same time prepare for and already share
in the fullness of that Kingdom. End and means are one; what
is begun in this life is perfected in the life to come.
In the same way there is a "harmony" in
the works of Satan; the cc virtues" of his servants are
consistent with the ends they serve. Hatred, pride,
rebelliousness, discord, violence, unscrupulous use of
power: these will not magically disappear when the
Revolutionary Kingdom is finally realized on earth; they
will rather be intensified and perfected. If the
Revolutionary goal "beyond Nihilism" is described in
precisely contrary terms, and if Nihilists actually see it
as a reign of "love," peace, and "brotherhood , that is
because Satan is the ape of God and even in denial must
acknowledge the source of that denial, and--more to the
present point--because men have been so changed by the
practice of the Nihilist "virtues," and by acceptance of the
Nihilist transformation of the world, that they actually
begin to live in the Revolutionary Kingdom and to see
everything as Satan sees it, as the contrary of what it is
in the eyes of God.
What lies "beyond Nihilism" and has been
the profoundest dream of its greatest "prophets," is by no
means the overcoming of Nihilism, but its culmination. The "
new age," being largely the work of Nihilism, will be, in
substance, nothing different from the Nihilist era we know.
TO believe otherwise, to look for salvation to some new
"development," whether brought about by the inevitable
forces of "progress" or "evolution" or some romantic
"dialectic," or supplied gratuitously from the treasury of
the mysterious "future" before which modern men stand in
superstitious awe--to believe this is to be the victim of a
monstrous delusion. Nihilism is, most profoundly, a
spiritual disorder, and it can be overcome only by spiritual
means; and there has been no attempt whatever in the
contemporary world to apply such means.
The Nihilist disease is apparently to be
left to "develop" to its very end; the goal of the
Revolution, originally the hallucination of a few fevered
minds, has now become the goal of humanity itself. Men have
become weary; the Kingdom of God is too distant, the
Orthodox Christian way is too narrow and arduous. The
Revolution has captured the "spirit of the age," and to go
against this powerful current is more than modern men can
do, for it requires precisely the two things most thoroughly
annihilated by Nihilism: Truth and faith.
To end our discussion of Nihilism on such
a note as this is, surely, to lay ourselves open to the
charge that we possess a Nihilism of our own; our analysis,
it may be argued, is "pessimistic" in the extreme.
Categorically rejecting almost everything held valuable and
true by modern man, we seem to be as thorough in denial as
the most extreme of Nihilists.
And indeed the Christian is, in a certain
sense--in an ultimate sense--a "Nihilist"; for to him, in
the end, the world is nothing, and God is all. This is, of
course, the precise opposite of the Nihilism we have
examined here, where God is nothing and the world is all;
that is a Nihilism that proceeds from the Abyss, and the
Christian's is a "Nihilism" that proceeds from abundance.
The true Nihilist places his faith in things that pass away
and end in nothing; all "optimism" on this foundation is
clearly futile. The Christian, renouncing such vanity places
his faith in the one thing that will not pass away, the
Kingdom of God.
To him who lives in Christ, of course,
many of the goods of this world may be given back, and he
may enjoy them even while realizing their evanescence; but
they are not needful, they are truly nothing to him. He who
does not live in Christ, on the other hand, already lives in
the Abyss, and not all the treasures of this world can ever
fill his emptiness.
But it is a mere literary device to call
the nothingness and poverty of the Christian "Nihilism";
they are rather fullness, abundance, joy beyond imagining.
And it is only one full of such abundance who can squarely
face the Abyss to which Nihilism has conducted men. The most
extreme denier, the most disillusioned of men, can only
exist if he exempt at least one illusion from his
destructive analysis. This fact is indeed the psychological
root of that "new age" in which the most thorough Nihilist
must place all his hope; he who cannot believe in Christ
must, and will, believe in Antichrist.
But if Nihilism has its historical end in
the Reign of Antichrist, it has its ultimate and spiritual
end beyond even that final Satanic manifestation; and in
this end, which is Hell, Nihilism meets its final defeat.
The Nihilist is defeated, not merely because his dream of
paradise ends in eternal misery; for the thorough
Nihilist--unlike his opposite, the Anarchist--is too
disillusioned really to believe in that paradise, and too
full of rage and rebellion to do anything but destroy it in
its turn, if it ever came into existence. The Nihilist is
defeated, rather, because in Hell his deepest wish, the
Nihilization of God, of creation, and of himself, is proved
futile. Dostoyevsky well described, in the words of the
dying Father Zossima, this ultimate refutation of Nihilism.
There are some who remain proud and fierce even in hell, in
spite of their certain knowledge and contemplation of the
absolute truth; there are some fearful ones who have given
themselves over to Satan and his proud spirit entirely. For
such, hell is voluntary and ever consuming; they are
tortured by their own choice. For they have cursed
themselves, cursing God and life.... They cannot behold the
living God without hatred, and they cry out that the God of
life should be annihilated, that God should destroy Himself
and His own creation. And they will burn in the fire of
their own wrath for ever and yearn for death and
annihilation. But they will not attain to death.
[67]
It is the great and invincible truth of
Christianity that there is no annihilation; all Nihilism is
in vain. God may be fought: that is one of the meanings of
the modern age; but He may not be conquered, and He may not
be escaped: His Kingdom shall endure eternally, and all who
reject the call to His Kingdom must burn in the flames of
Hell forever.
It has, of course, been a primary
intention of Nihilism to abolish Hell and the fear of Hell
from men's minds, and no one can doubt their success; Hell
has become, for most people today, a folly and a
superstition, if not a "sadistic" fantasy. Even those who
still believe in the Liberal "heaven" have no room in their
universe for any kind of Hell.
Yet, strangely, modern men have an
understanding of Hell that they do have not of Heaven; the
word and the concept have a prominent place in contemporary
art and thought. No sensitive observer is unaware that men,
in the Nihilist era more than ever before, have made of
earth an image of Hell; and those who are aware of dwelling
in the Abyss do not hesitate to call their state Hell. The
torture and miseries of this life are indeed a foretaste of
Hell, even as the joys of a Christian life--joys which the
Nihilist cannot even imagine, so remote are they from his
experience-are a foretaste of Heaven.
But if the Nihilist has a dim awareness,
even here, of the meaning of Hell, he has no idea of its
full extent, which cannot be experienced in this life; even
the most extreme Nihilist, while serving the demons and even
invoking them, has not had the spiritual sight necessary to
see them as they are. The Satanic spirit, the spirit of
Hell, is always disguised in this world; its snares are set
along a broad path that may seem pleasant, or at least
exciting, to many; and Satan offers, to those who follow his
path, the consoling thought and hope of ultimate extinction.
if, despite the consolations of Satan, no follower of his is
very "happy" in this life, and if in the last days (of which
the calamities of our century are a small preview) there
"shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the
beginning of the world to this time"--still it is only in
the next life that the servants of Satan will realize the
full bitterness of hopeless misery.
The Christian believes in Hell and fears
its fire--not earthly fire, as clever unbelief would have
it, but fire infinitely more painful because, like the
bodies with which men shall rise on the Last Day, it shall
be spiritual and unending. The world reproaches the
Christian for believing in such an unpleasant reality; but
it is neither perversity nor "sadism" that leads him to do
so, but rather faith and experience. Only he, perhaps, can
fully believe in Hell who fully believes in Heaven and life
in God; for only he who has some idea of that life can have
any notion of what its absence will mean.
For most men today "life" is a small
thing, a fleeting thing of small affirmation and small
denial, veiled in comforting illusions and the hopeful
prospect of ultimate nothingness; such men will know nothing
of Hell until they live in it. But God loves even such men
too much to allow them simply to "forget" Him and "pass
away" into nothingness, out of His Presence which alone is
life to men; He offers, even to those in Hell, His Love
which is torment to those who have not prepared themselves
in this life to receive it. Many, we know, are tested and
purified in those flames and made fit by them to dwell in
the Kingdom of Heaven; but others, with the demons for whom
Hell was made, must dwell there eternally.
There is no need, even today when men
seem to have become too weak to face the truth, to soften
the realities of the next life; to those--be they Nihilists
or more moderate humanists--who presume to fathom the Will
of the Living God, and to judge Him for His "cruelty," one
may answer with an unequivocal assertion of something in
which most of them profess to believe: the dignity of man.
God has called us, not to the modern "heaven" of repose and
sleep, but to the full and deifying glory of the sons of
God; and if we, whom our God thinks worthy to receive it,
reject this call,--then better for us the flames of Hell,
the torment of that last and awful proof of man's high
calling and of God's unquenchable Love for A men, than the
nothingness to which men of small faith, and the Nihilism of
our age, aspire. Nothing less than Hell is worthy of man, if
he be not worthy of Heaven.
Notes
1. The Will
to Power, Vol. 1, in The Complete Works of Friedrich
Nietzsche, New York, The Macmillan Company, 1909, Vol. 14,
p. 6.
2. St. John
XIV, 6.
3. St. John
VIII, 32.
4. The Will
to Power, p. 377
5. See, for
example, Bakunin's remarks on Louis Napoleon in G. P.
Maximoff, ed., The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, Glencoe,
Illinois, The Free Press, 1953, p. 252.
6. St. John
XVIII, 37
7. The Will
to Power, p. 8.
8. Ibid.,
p. 22
9. A
distinction made, for example, by Arnold Lunn in The Revolt
Against Reason, New York, Sheed and Ward, 195 1, p. 5 et
passim; and by F. A. Hayek, in The Counter-Revolution of
Science, Glencoe, Illinois, The Free Press, 1952, pp. 15-16.
The former author is more concerned with theoretical, and
the latter more with practical, "scientism."
10. Hexaemeron, 1, 4
11. The
Will to Power, p. 5
12. Quoted
in Hermann Rauschning, The Voice of Destruction, New York,
G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1940, p. 6. The rest of this
description is based mainly on Hitler's Secret
Conversations, 1941-1944, New York, Farrar, Straus and
Young, 1953.
13. See,
for example, the writings of Corliss Lamont or Julian
Huxley.
14.
Friedrich Nietzche, The Joyful Wisdom, #343
15.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, #4
16. Some
cogent remarks on this and related topics, with reference to
modern literature, are to be found in Graham
Hough, Reflections on a Literary Revolution, Washington, The
Catholic University of America Press, 1960, P. 66ff.
17. Ivan S.
Turgenev, Fathers and Sons
18. Quoted
in Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche and Christianity, Henry Regnery
Company, 1961 (Gateway Edition), p. 83.)
19. The
next chapter was to be on Anarchism (see outline).
--Ed.
20. Quoted
in E. H. Carr, Michael Bakunin, p. 440.
21. Quoted
in Rauschning, op. cit., p. 5
22. My Life
in Christ, Jordanville, New York, Holy Trinity Monastery,
1957, Vol. L, P. 178.
23. The
previous chapter was to be on the Advent of the New Order
(see outline).
--Ed.
24. The
Joyful Wisdom, #125
25. See,
for example, Justice, (cf. de Lubac, Proudhon, p. 27 1).
26. Justice, 111, 179. (Quoted de Lubac, p. 270.)
27. System
of Economical Contradictions: or, The Philosophy of Misery,
Boston, 1888, Vol. I, p. 448.
28. Ibid.,
p. 468.
29. God and
the State, London, 19 10, p, 16.
30. Psalm
LII (LIII), 1: "The fool hath said in his heart, there is no
God."
31.
Maximoff, op. cit., p. 380
32. Ibid.,
p. 253.
33. Quoted
by Robert Payne in Zero, New York, The John Day Company,
1950, p. 53
34. The
Will to Power, P. 8
35. On God
and Society (Essay on the Generative Principle of Political
Constitutions and other Human Institutions), Henry Regnery
Company (Gateway Edition), 1959, pp. 84-86.
36. cf.
Josef Pieper, The End of Time, p. 58
37. The
Joyful Wisdom,#125.
38. See Max
Picard, Flight fiom God, Henry Regnery Company, 1951;
and Hitler in Our Selves, Henry Regnery Company, 1947.
39. God and
the State, p. 2
40. Idee
generale de la revolution, also Justice, III, pp. 433-434
(de Lubac, 173).
41. Karl
Marx, Capital Chicago, Charles Kerr and Company, 1906, Vol.
I, p. 824
42. See the
citations in E. H. Carr, op. cit., pp. 173, 435; cf.
Maximoff, op. cit., pp. 380-381.
43. For a
synopsis of Marx's views of violence see J. E. LeRossignol, From
Marx to Stalin, New York, Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1940,
pp. 321-322.
44. Left-Wing Communism, cited in Stalin, Foundations of
Leninism, New York, International Publishers, 1932, p. 47.
(Or: The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky,
Little Lenin Library, No. 18, p. 19.
45. Quoted
in H. R. Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler, New York,
The Macmillan Company, 1947, pp. 50-51
46. Quoted
in Ibid., p. 82
47. State
and Revolution, International Publishers, New York, 1935, p.
84
48. Loc.
cit.
49. St.
John 16:33
50. Mythus
des 20 Jahrhundens, p. 22
51. Marx
and Engels, The German Ideology, Part 1, New York,
International Publishers, 1947, p. 69.
52. Ibid.,
p. 204, n. 46.
53. Erich
Kahler, The Tower and the Abyss, New York, George Braziller,
Inc., 1957, pp. 225-226.
54.
Numerous examples of this art may be seen in two books by
apologists for it: Peter Selz, New Images of Man, New York,
The Museum of Modern Art, 1959; and Selden Rodman, The
Insiders, Louisiana State University Press, 1960.
55. The
term is Erich Kahler's, in op. cit., p. 15.
56. A
Vision, 1937, pp. 52-53.
57. The
Will to Power, p. 92.
58. Ibid.,
p. 2.
59. State
and Revolution, p. 84.
60. Quoted
in Henri de Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism, p. 24.
61. The
Joful Wisdom, #125.
62. The
Possessed, Part I, Ch. 3.
63. Thus
Spake Zarathustra)
64. The
Joyful Wisdom, #125
65. The
Possessed, Part III, Ch. 6.
66. De
Maistre, op. cit., p. 85, quoting a phrase of (Saint) Louis
IX
67. The
Brothers Karamazov, Book V1, Ch. 3.
EUGENE'S PROPOSED OUTLINE OF THE KINGDOM OF MAN AND THE
KINGDOM OF GOD
Introduction: The Contemporary Situation of the World and
the Church
Part I: The
Two Kingdoms, Their Source and Their Power
Chapter One:
The two loves, and the two faiths: the world, and God.
Chapter Two:
The power of the world, and the power of Christ.
Part II: The
Kingdom of Man in the Modem Age
Chapter
Three: An Orthodox Christian interpretation of the modern
age.
Chapter Four: The worldly idols of
the modern age.
I. Culture/Civilization, judged by Orthodox Christian
spirituality.
II. Science/Rationalism, judged by Divine Wisdom.
III. History/Progress, judged by the Orthodox Christian
theology of history.
Part
III: The Old Order and the "New Order"
Chapter
Five: The Old Order: The Orthodox Christian Empire.
Chapter Six:
The advent of the "New Order": the Revolution of the modern
age.
Chapter
Seven: The root of the Revolution: Nihilism.
Chapter
Eight: The goal of the Revolution: the Anarchist Millennium.
Part
IV: Orthodox Christian Spirituality and the "New
Spirituality"
(About four chapters.)
Part V. The
End of the Two Kingdoms
Chapter
Thirteen: The "New Christianity" and the Reign of
Antichrist.
Chapter
Fourteen: The Kingdom of Heaven.
