Nihilism

When in the mid-19th century Horace Mann began promoting the concept of a tax-supported public school system,  Dr. Charles Hodge of Princeton commented,  “Such a system would become the greatest engine for the propagation of nihilism the world has ever seen.”   And eventually, that prediction has been shown to be true.

Many years later I remembered that prediction when I decided the circumstances were right to return to school to earn a degree and although I had held a number of responsible jobs, I felt lack of a degree was holding me back. 

At the time I lived in Orange County, California, where I was ideally placed to attend a local college, so enrolled in the first conveniently scheduled required class.  This was a class, I was told, in which the instructor was the “most popular teacher” in O.C., so I had no trepidation about attending.  At least not until I actually attended the first class, held in an auditorium to accommodate the a large attendance. 

Wow! I thought as I listened to him expounding his philosophy of the nothingness of everything.  “I’m sure glad I’m not 19,” I thought as I sat through what was really a very boring session.  There was no reality, just because you can touch and feel something doesn’t really mean it exists, whatever that may mean, I thought as I exited, killing all thoughts of future attendance.

Yet I could see the fascination his expositions would have on young people who were troubled and confused, with no stable of firm beliefs to rely upon. 

In an exposition of Nihilism, over three decades ago,  Eugene Rose, wrote: “The academic world—and these words are neither lightly nor easily spoken—has become today, in large part, a source of corruption.  It is corrupting to hear or read the words of men who do not believe in truth. It is yet more corrupting to receive, in place of truth, more learning and scholarship which, if they are presented as ends in themselves, are no more than parodies of the truth they were meant to serve, no more than a facade behind which there is no substance.  It is, tragically, corrupting even to be exposed to the primary virtue still left to the academic world, the integrity of the best of its representatives—if this integrity serves, not the truth, but skeptical scholarship, and so seduces men all the more effectively to the gospel of subjectivism and unbelief this scholarship conceals.  It is corrupting, finally, simply to live and work in an atmosphere totally permeated by a false conception of truth, wherein Christian Truth is seen as irrelevant to the central academic concerns, wherein even those who still believe this Truth can only sporadically make their voices heard above the skepticism promoted by the academic system.  The evil, of course, lies primarily in the system itself, which is founded upon untruth, and only incidentally in the many professors whom this system permits and encourages to preach it.”

The author of “Nihilism, The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age,” Eugene Rose, (eventually became Father Seraphim) encapsulated the chaos and confusion in which this once stable society now finds itself:

“Nihilist rebellion is a war against God and against Truth; but few Nihilists are fully aware of this….Nihilist rebellion takes the more immediate form of a war against authority…….Nihilism has been defined, and quite succinctly, by the fount of philosophical Nihilism, Nietzsche:  ‘That there is no truth, that there is no absolute state of affairs—no ‘thing-in-itself.” This alone is Nihilism, and of the most extreme kind.’”  (orig. emphasis)

It was easy to realize while reading Rose’s lengthy explanation, the effects such teaching has had upon sensitive and vulnerable young people which was why I had concluded  in listening to Prof. Drum, how glad I was not to be 19: “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.  ..In the political and social order, Nihilism manifests itself as a Revolution that intends, not a mere change of 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.’”

Thus we see the art ‘experts’ bowing before such crudities as the work of Mapplethorpe and others of his ilk, going back to the absurdities of Picasso and his genre.  Not to mention the decline of modern music – back to the African veldt!

Rose followed his analysis up, saying, “The disorder so apparent in contemporary politics, religion, art and other realism as well, is the result of the deliberate and systematic annihilation of 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.”

Rose had already announced: “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……..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.”

Rose quotes a critic of the French Revolution, Joseph de Maistre, who saw clearly the then and now:  “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…(orig. emphasis), Impiety has never produced in times past the evils which it has brought forth in our day….Although impious men have always existed, there never was before the eighteenth century, and in the heart of Christendom, an insurrection against God.”

Rose pointed out that: “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.’……..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….

“….Where there was once God, there is now nothing; where there once authority, order, certainty, faith, there are now anarchy, confusion, arbitrary and unprincipled action, doubt and despair.  This is the universe…the world of ‘the flight from God’ ……Nothingness, incoherence, antitheism, hatred of truth:  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…..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….Proudhon ..actually invoked Satan: Come to me, Lucifer, Satan, whoever you may be!…I will act as spokesman for you and will demand nothing of you!’

………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 is doing no more than playing with words, he is actually speaking the truth….  

…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……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…..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…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.’.

'”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.’ is there deliverance from that power, even when it shall have become all but absolute?”