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A Postcard, A Retreat, and Nietzsche's Man

I am back now from my all-too brief retreat at Holy Cross Abbey. Brief, but not without great benefit: Sacrament of Reconciliation, the Holy Eucharist on Saturday with Lauds, thirty minutes of Adoration before the Tabernacle (a plenary indulgence), and lots of silence, walking, and reading.

A book I am finding truly insightful for our times of tumult is Lucy Bennett's A Postcard from the Volcano – A Novel of Pre-War Germany. Historical fiction, yes, but historical fiction that shines a bright light on themes and structures of our own tectonic cultural fractures and violence.

Here is a choice tidbit from the protagonist's, Max's, grandfather: "It is good to be young, and capable of understanding that it's the hopes that need changing" (emphases added). Yeah, right.

An intuition from the Abbey Guesthouse: Nietzsche gave the West a double-barrel dose of his ennervating madness: (a) he described and affirmed a kind of man who accepted the 'eternal return' of the Dionysiac - vain, shame-based, vengeful, proud, bestial - while rejecting the Crucified One's way of forgiveness, mercy, long-suffering, and charity; and (b) that man whom he told Europe to imitate has strode menacingly and violently in the flesh onto Europe's stage in the flesh and in great numbers: the Scimitar's exemplar.

Our hero, Nietzsche's man! How can we, liberal, progressive, multi-culturalist, enlightened peoples, not accept him with arms outspread?

Europe and the West in agreeing with Nietzsche, yet possessed by the unacknowledged Spirit of Christ's concern for the victim and non-violence, quail before this swarthy, proud, "natural man." Would Nietzsche be pleased, I wonder?

The only - the only - hope for Europe and the West is not some finely nuanced revivification of sacramentality (that may come later on); rather, it is a sweeping and wholehearted return to belief God and in Jesus Christ as the true Son of God, the Word made flesh (Jn 1,14), rejection of Dionysus, and metanoiac affirmation of Our Lord's Church here on earth.

Anyone willing to give me odds on that likelihood?

Reality Check - Postman to Girard

Most important tip to Athos HERE and Daniel Mitsui HERE

I have been highly influenced by Neil Postman – particularly studying his early works Teaching As a Subversive Activity and The Disappearance of Childhood. It was in his works as well as the work of A.S. Neill that I started to realize the violence (at an institutional level) that we inflict on our children under our particular guise of education or catechizing as well as how that violence is slapped right back into our faces. I eventually fell away from his work shortly after discovering the work of Réne Girard yet Postman reappears here for me again.

All his points on the effect of technology on religious faith are intriguing yet I would like to pick up something from his point #4:

“That is also why we must be suspicious of capitalists. Capitalists are by definition not only personal risk takers but, more to the point, cultural risk takers. The most creative and daring of them hope to exploit new technologies to the fullest, and do not much care what traditions are overthrown in the process or whether or not a culture is prepared to function without such traditions. Capitalists are, in a word, radicals....

“I trust you understand that in saying all this, I am making no argument for socialism. I say only that capitalists need to be carefully watched and disciplined. To be sure, they talk of family, marriage, piety, and honor but if allowed to exploit new technology to its fullest economic potential, they may undo the institutions that make such ideas possible.”

Being a small business entrepreneur AND having studied violence, including the violence at the institutional and structural level, I am in tune with the dark side of Capitalism and I agree with Athos that with a statement like the above Postman opens the door for us to hopefully explore Distributism on a much deeper level.

On a different level I wanted to challenge us: Today we all make harangues (legitimate as they may be) against the encroachment of Islam into the West yet we remain veiled to how we ourselves usher Islam in by how we have allowed our very own culture to divide and conquer us – having us live lives in compartments separating our Christian faith and values from all the other aspects of our daily life. This cultural and psychological delusion of a separation of and from faith propels us into a ‘hell’ of its own needing no help from others of different religions. The implosion - a “failed transmission” of our faith - that the West is headed toward is in large part due to a fatherlessness that results in each later generation bearing hearts of greater indifference or defiance – neither condition able to pass on the viable and passionate faith of Abraham, Jesus and Paul. (Download Jan09 mp3 file of a talk given by Gil Bailie from his Emmaus Road Initiative)

If there is a growing awareness tugging at your heart calling you out of our violence to start the process of blending your separateness into wholeness may we suggest that you not only get fully active at your parish but that you pick up a work of Réne Girard, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture. Gil Bailie and his Emmaus Road Initiative is another great way toward integrating the legions of separation within and finding yourself kneeing in the Real Presence.

Lastly, let me change a word or two in Neil Postman's point #5 to make my final thought.

Our enthusiasm for the West (as we have created it to be today) can turn into a form of idolatry and our belief in its beneficence can be a false absolute. The best way to view the West is as a strange intruder, to remember that it is not part of God's plan but a product of human creativity and hubris, and that its capacity for good or evil rests entirely on human awareness of what it does for us and to us.

The heart of this awareness is a transformed education and catechizing that Gil so aptly talks about HERE:

Precisely because the content of the Christian revelation is the mystery of unimpeded giving and receiving of love within the Trinity, its transmission necessarily depends on a relationship of unguarded trust on the part of the recipient – which, of course, places a special onus on the transmitter, for if the recipient is docile to the transmission and the transmitter betrays the heightened responsibilities that this docility requires, he or she stands under the judgment of Jesus’ words: “If any of you put a stumbling-block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the depth of the sea.” (Matt. 18:6)

If individually and most importantly as we come to realize that it is only through helping others – so also collectively are to find our way back to the narrow path we must be aware that it is only through Him and that all other roads will lead, sooner or later, to a catharsis of blood-letting, nihilism and violence – the culture of death.

Nice guys beware of becoming fodder for the work of Satan

I write this remembering how often we read, "I can't believe it, he was such a nice person..."

"When an evil spirit comes out of a man, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. Then it says, 'I will return to the house I left.' When it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean and put in order. Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that man is worse than the first. That is how it will be with this wicked generation." Matthew 12:43-45

During my time immersed in a study of intimate partner violence, out of which came my conversion, I learned early on that you cannot rid an evil spirit from within by just sweeping your 'self' empty but only by replacing it with the stronger and invincible Spirit of Christ. As we understand through Rene Girard, the recidivism rate of the evil spirit cannot be reduced by a purely human effort, the power of this mimetic contagion can only be transformed by a source from outside the human condition, only by the Mighty Power of the Trinitarian God.

I found much to praise in the article by Jeffery Imm in Athos' Fifth Column Nihilism post and I hope you will take the time to read these posts.

But I must disagree with Imm's diagnosis of nihilism:
"Nihilism is not a belief structure – it is an anti-belief structure. Nihilism does not believe in anything, or respect any value in humanity. "

Though he brings up religious concepts here in his next statement:
"Nihilism is nothing less than an assassination of the soul, of human worth, and of human hope."

Imm falls into the vortex that the promoters of nihilism want him to fall into demonstrated by what he writes: "The promoters of nihilism view it as the ultimate "secularism," claiming that – by believing that humanity has no value, no meaning, no purpose – it equally rejects all religions and all value systems. But what nihilism truly does is reject all hope in the purpose and the value of humanity itself."

We have posted Fr. Seraphim (Rose)'s NIHILISM The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age in a couple other posts and I refer again to it:

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.

To take up the fight against nihilism in strictly a secularist manner without the Truth of the Cross of Christ as Imm does is to buy in on the distorted claim of "secularism" by the nihilists and to fall into the double-bind that automatically provides the nihilists the upper hand in his quest to destroy all truth, goodness and beauty.

To avoid committing a crime against humanity in our contemporary world of political correctness we only charge the nihilists as espousing just another "secular" ideology, thus not getting at the root of evil. Even we professed Catholics have been so often distracted and focused on intra-church affairs (see Fr Barron here) that we have not been fully awake to the rapid spread of the disease of nihilism in our culture; our youth and our very 'beings'. Are you still confused?

Imm and so many others (I think here of the psychologists who "treated" my son while he was in high school) attempt to weed out nihilism as a "secular" ideology by yanking on the weed only to break off the stem but leaving the root to spread ever so darker and faster throughout the body.

Why can Imm and all the rest of us miss this point? Had we grown lazy and lackadaisical to the reservoir of Truth that we were born into? Read how Fr. Seraphim (Rose) describes our current condition:

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."

Excerpts from Fr Seraphim (Rose)

It is not sufficient, for example, to condemn Nazism or Bolshevism for their "barbarism," "gangsterism," or "anti-intellectualism," and the artistic or literary avant-garde for their "pessimism" or "exhibitionism"; nor is it enough to defend the "democracies" in the name of "civilization," "progress," or "humanism," or for their advocacy of "private property" or "civil liberties." Such arguments, while some of them possess a certain justice, are really quite beside the point; the blows of Nihilism strike too deep, its program is far too radical, to be effectively countered by them. Nihilism has error for its root, and error can be conquered only by Truth. Most of the criticism of Nihilism is not directed to this root at all, and the reason for this--as we shall see--is that Nihilism has become, in our time, so widespread and pervasive, has entered so thoroughly and so deeply into the minds and hearts of all men living today, that there is no longer any "front" on which it may be fought; and those who think they are fighting it are most often using its own weapons, which they in effect turn against themselves.

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."

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.

Fr. Seraphim (Rose)'s NIHILISM The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age HERE

Fifth Column - Nihilism

Following up on brother Aramis's excellent post, Nihilism as
'Being' in Nothingness - Are You Still Confused? I want to share a few excerpts from an important essay at Family Security Matters by Jeffrey Imm.

Nihilism (which comes from the Latin word "nihil" meaning "nothing") is promoted to our public and to our children that humanity has no innate value, no purpose, no meaning. Nihilism rejects all values and morality, offering instead a dark vision of hopelessness and defeatism that the human existence itself in pointless and meaningless. The anti-values ideology of nihilism finds a symmetry with the anti-government ideology of anarchism.

Anarchism argues against organized government. In the 19th century, anarchists created a "nihilist movement" to use violence with a shared belief that terrorist violence against its political enemies represented a "propaganda of the deed." Anarchist terrorism remains a continuing problem for the United States and the world, especially in Europe. In December 2008, an anarchist group bombed an international press organization. Anarchist terrorism has a long and bloody history in America stretching from the anarchist assassination of President McKinley to continuing anarchist terror bombings and threats today.

Increasingly, such dark ideologies of nihilism and anarchism are being promoted by mass media organizations with global influence over the thinking of their viewers. In our struggle to defend the inalienable human rights of equality and liberty, we must also confront those defeatist mass media organizations that seek to undermine our citizens, our youth, and our values.

[ ... ]

In 2008, Warner Brothers reached out to a British inspiration for fiction, this time taking an iconic American heroic character "The Batman," and leveraging that character's long history of positive messages with our youth to promote a film about moral ambiguity with a major character that glamorizes nihilism. In the vision of British director Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, the message sent to our youth is that there is just a thin line between good and evil. "The Dark Knight" portrays its antagonist, "the Joker," not as a multilayered or a camp character, but as a psychopathic nihilist that advocates anarchy, stating "I am an agent of chaos," and who wants to see "the world burn." This stabbing, bombing, psychopathic character becomes the central character of the Warner Brothers film, which was merely rated PG-13, and is virtually glamorized in the film and the subsequent mass-merchandising campaign. Shouldn't it be disturbing to parents to see a psychopathic character glamorized by a mass-merchandising campaign of posters, t-shirts, masks, costumes, "action figures"? Did parents line up to by their children "action figures" of this knife-wielding psychopathic character? Our children, our youth deserve better attention than this. This film, glamorizing a psychopathic nihilist, has received a number of Academy Award nominations.

A grim postscript to this was reported in Belgium on January 23, 2009, where a young man (Kim De Gelder) reportedly with makeup and a wig to resemble The Dark Knight's character the Joker broke into a nursery and repeatedly stabbed helpless babies, killing two and maiming several. Thousands marched in Belgium in protest of this atrocity on Sunday, January 25, 2009.

Read all of Jeffrey Imm's Nihilism and the Assassination of the Soul.

Nihilism as 'Being' in Nothingness - Are You Still Confused?

Tips all the way round. First to Athos' post Nihil who tips to Daniel Mitsui's post A Creature of the Depths

NIHILISM The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age by Eugene (Fr. Seraphim) Rose

Read it HERE

I have pulled out a few excerpts to hopefully wet your apetite to read this article.

Nihilism has error for its root, and error can be conquered only by Truth. Most of the criticism of Nihilism is not directed to this root at all, and the reason for this--as we shall see--is that Nihilism has become, in our time, so widespread and pervasive, has entered so thoroughly and so deeply into the minds and hearts of all men living today, that there is no longer any "front" on which it may be fought; and those who think they are fighting it are most often using its own weapons, which they in effect turn against themselves.

The whole food of Christian Truth, however, is accessible only to faith; and the chief obstacle to such faith is not logic, as the facile modern view has it, but another and opposed faith. We have seen indeed, that logic cannot deny absolute truth without denying itself, the logic that sets itself up against the Christian Revelation is merely the servant of another "revelation," of a false "absolute truth": namely Nihilism.

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.

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, as of rebellion against the authority they represent and the obedience they command.

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."

If you need a visual aid to help make sense out of this "nihilism" then check this out:



And here is an opinion which I think is more prevalent than what we would like to admit.

I'm a Christian and Nihilist and I say why must we be oppressed to accept what is unacceptable: and I have the answer for once just as Nihilism and Christianity does: We live in a world, where false beliefs become radical realities, and what is considered unsafe we make safe. Oppression is omission of freedom, we will not be dumbed down, fuck the political system now and then, they run our futures if we have any futures left due to their political incense.

Dismantling nihilism in our age where it is so rampant will take more than prayer - not to say that prayer is not a good place to start. I can't help but think that we need more help in maturing and understanding our faith through knowledge and reason supported by reasonable and responsible accountability in and through the Church as well as public life.