"God is dead", or so said Nietzsche. Contrary to popular opinion - and mine before reading this book - Nietzsche was not declaring God dead in a personal fit of rage against God, but describing modern society's disregard for God and taking it to its logical conclusion. In this respect, Nietzsche may be regarded as courageous. If God is dead, then there is no Truth, and life is meaningless and absurd.
In "Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age", Seraphim Rose has chronicled the roots, progression, and ultimate consequences of what he regards as the dominant, if unspoken, doctrine of the modern age. Nihilism is simply the belief that there is no Truth (and I use a capital 'T' quite purposefully). Facts can be 'true', but only relative to a greater Truth which holds all things together. Ultimately, this 'holder' is He which 'upholds all things by the word of His power' and He in whom 'all things consist', the Lord Jesus Christ. A world without Christ is a world without Truth, and a world without Truth is a world without meaning. A world without meaning is a world of absurdity. And even if this fact goes unspoken or ununderstood by most, it slithers and stews under the surface of modern life. As Rose says near the end of the book "if Christian truth is not to be understood literally and absolutely, if God is dead, if there is no immortality - then this world is all there is, and this world is absurd, this world is Hell" (pg. 111).
Rose sees a four stage progression of Nihilism, which he doesn't tie to any specific time periods, but says they can overlap, and be seen in both societies and individuals. The four stages are Liberalism, Realism, Vitalism, and finally Nihilist destruction.
In Liberalism - Christian Truth is merely removed as the center of attention from the society. Leaders may still use words like "faith" and "truth", but they do not fully believe in the underlying realities of the Christian faith. Today we have many who want Christian civilization without Christ. They want truth, goodness, and beauty without the God who alone is True, Good, and Beautiful. The example Rose quite rightly gives is the Deism of the Enlightenment. Once Christ is removed, and replaced with an impersonal Nature, as in the American founding documents, the foundation has been destroyed, and the edifice of civilization will slowly, but surely, begin to crumble.
From Liberalism proceeds Realism, or materialism. It is the worship of science, or fact. A realist disposes of the veneer of Deism, rightly taking the impersonal, powerless God to be of little use to man. He is an open atheist. Because God cannot be observed, he is not real. In this philosophy are the seeds of its own destruction. As Rose points out, to deny God is to at the same time affirm Truth. Whether one says that "All truth is empirical" or "all truth is relative", he is making a Truth claim - which rises above both the empirical and the relative to the absolute, to the metaphysical. Scientific knowledge depends up laws and presuppositions that regard the world to be orderly, and empiricism itself cannot explain that phenomenon. Even if one declares the absolute unknowability of Truth, and the unknowability of nature - attempting to be as agnostic as possible - he has merely surrendered the fight to be human. As Rose says "It is the definitive abandonment of truth, or rather the surrender of truth to power". And this surrender of truth to power brings us to the final two stages.
After Realism comes Vitalism. Vitalism is a reaction against Realism, but it looks for the spiritual only in the world. It is therefore, concerned with spiritual experience of any kind but the true. Today, this manifests itself in drug use, meditation, and other forms of paganism. It is a manifestation of the restlessness in the modern age. Rose gives several examples of pathologies that are the result of this restlessness, which include crime, thrill seeking, escapism through modern media, sexual promiscuity, primitive popular music, and the worship of physical prowess. Writing in the 1960s, these observations are especially prescient. Rose also connects this Vitalism with something he calls "pseudo-traditionalism" and "dynamism". This is the thirst for a powerful civilization in contrast to the perceived weakness of modernity. This is characteristic of a subset of right wing of politics today which in some cases calls for Monarchy and rebuilding classical architecture. While not all deny Christian Truth, some do, and are therefore a mere expression of Vitalism, at the same time a thirst for Truth and the surrender of truth to power. Another modern example is the "Burning Man" and "Tomorrowland" festivals. These music festivals and pagan celebrations are expressions of the restlessness, lack of truth, and thirst for spiritual experience that binds the lost man. When one realizes the emptiness of this Vitalism, that worldly pleasure cannot satisfy man's spiritual longing, where is one to go?
This leads to the fourth stage, which is Nihilist Destruction. This is the unmistakably tendency of those with nothing to live for to want to "burn it all down". Human life without God, without meaning, and empty despite worldly experiences manifests in depression, anger, and sadness. Rose is careful to point out that even in this stage, as at all previous ones, man still understand that there is a Truth, but has been in denial of it. Man's nature cannot deny Truth completely, only in word. Thus Nihilist Destruction is ultimately a war against God, and a war against the Old Order of Christian civilization. Rose attributes this destruction as motivating both Hitler and the Soviets, but also doesn't let the modern liberal democracies off the hook. With no God to worship, one is left only to worship themselves. Rose quotes Dostoevsky's Kirillov in The Possessed, "If there is no God, then I am God". With that in mind - liberal democracies that are trying to build a utopian world without God at the alter of the individual. As Deneen outlined in "Why Liberalism Failed", modern liberalism's highest good is the "freedom" of the individual at the expense of morality. Meanwhile, Communism worship the self, or man, as a collective and Hitler's Fascism worshiped the "superman". Their utopian dream is nevertheless man-centered - and likewise rests on the destruction of the Old Order. Most predominantly today, we can see this tendency toward destruction in rapid decline of morals, and a denial of truth, in gender standards and sexual practice - both of which are pushed openly in mass media.
So what is the lost man left with after this destruction? Rose quotes Nietzsche, Lenin, and others who dream of a utopian future built on the ashes of the Old world, and quite correctly sees this as a counterfeit Millennium, yet another spiritual desire twisted to be selfish and man-centered. This world could only be the kingdom of the Antichrist, who will promise man, by worship of the Beast, all the meaning and spiritual fulfillment he left behind when he lift the true God. These utopian dreams take many forms today in the Western world. Some dream of a technocratic dictatorship, some want to transcend mortality by transhumanism, and some want to erase all national borders in a repeat of the Tower of Babel. Whatever the utopian vision of a golden age, it is wrong on two counts. First, utopianism is a denial of the fallen human nature; and second, it expresses hope only in this world. Our utopia, our golden age, is that day when we "shall ever be with the Lord".
Rose ends the book, and I will end this review, with a call for authentic Christianity. The path to Nihilism is ugly, but should be understood as it is; a spiritual reality of man's emptiness without God, and the consequences of his denial of faith. When man chooses to put faith in himself, rather than God, he makes the cardinal sin of all mankind. As Proverbs tells us, "There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death". The world has always been against God, and it is up to Christians, the church, to shine the light of Truth in the midst of a "crooked and perverse nation" that the "god of this world" has blinded. As Rose says "the Christian life is nothing if it is not a struggle against the spirit of [the] age for the sake of eternity" (pg 112). Let us struggle against this age, with the weapon of hope of eternal life in Jesus Christ, not from our own strength, but from the power of God, which works in us mightily.
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