Taking, Holding, Keeping - Possession and Exorcism Today. My new and free e-book!

I have released my new e-book "Taking, Holding, Keeping -possession and exorcism today" on smashwords.

It is free and is downloadable here - https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1072574

If you have any feedback to give me, whether it is to do with content or formatting, just email me at leon_fourteen@y7mail.com

The chapters....

Chapter 1
I give a general introduction along with definitions and general commentary.

Chapter 2
Here I put in relevant history which concerns the period 1920 - 1960 and the organisations which arose in that time period. They still exist as well as their descendants and breakaways.

Chapter 3
Assessing cases of possession.

Chapter 4
Continuing with possession.

Chapter 5
Dealing with exorcism scenarios and ways to identify djinn by the letters in their name.

Chapter 6
Intermission and general comment.

Chapter 7
A lesson about magic centred around the Kabbalah and the Tree of Life.

Chapter 8
The Satanic equivalent which is the Tree of Death.

Chapter 9
Concerning the Shem ha-Mephorash and its 72 angels.

Chapter 10
About the planets, the zodiac, and the calculation of hours.

Chapter 11
Concerning the Goetia and its 72 djinn.

Chapter 12
A couple of pictures.

Chapter 13
Preparation for exorcism.

Chapter 14
Exorcism rituals.

Chapter 15
To do with "pseudo-possession" and the Nuctemeron.

Chapter 16
Necromancy.

Chapter 17
Bonejacking.

Chapter 18
Epilogue.

Chapter 19
What I didn't tell you in "Creed of Assiah".

Chapter 20
Final bits and pieces.

V. Beyond Nihilism

 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 a foothold 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.

3. THE FASHIONING OF THE "NEW MAN"

 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.

2. THE MAKING OF THE "NEW EARTH"

 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.

1. THE DESTRUCTION OF THE OLD ORDER

 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]

IV. The Nihilist Program

 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.

Stages of Nihilism - 2. THE WORSHIP OF NOTHINGNESS

 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.

III. The Theology and the Spirit of Nihilism

1. REBELLION: THE WAR AGAINST GOD

Our 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.

Stages of Nihilism - 4. 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.

Stages of Nihilism - 3. 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.