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.