End Times by Kenneth Smith   

10. Medieval Civilization VI

F. Christian Nihilism: Spirit versus Nature

Christianity likes to pride itself on its distinctive virtues and values but in spite of all this moralistic apparatus, it has been one of the major historical factories pumping nihilism into the Western worldview. Instead of training and extending itself, like Greek culture, to see the latent logic of the values that underlie nature and natural psychology. Christianity disparaged "the world" in toto and all that is human. It seized on the futility of trying to harness the forces of this world in behalf of moral or spiritual ends and sought instead to deracinate spirit from any kind of immanental position in life. Life is seen merely as the crucifixion of spirit in a torment of ephemeral desires and temptations: Christians should train themselves counterintuitively to see as torture all that, paganly considered, seems to give them pleasure. The path of spiritual growth demands defiance in abstracto and a contranatural orientation, a Platonic "dying away" from the body and its needs.

This meant on the one hand that Christianity did indeed perpetrate "a slander against life," as Nietzsche charged: it "posits God as the enemy of life" (Twilight of the Idols). But on the other hand it meant that "Spirit" virtually by definition was naturally or psychically effete and needed to be supplemented by powers of divinity to help it achieve a position of authority over its baser self. How to locate the spiritual forces ingredient in natural psychology, how to master the natural illusions and delusions through which that psychology secures its rule, and how to cultivate a well-formed characterological base of values — as opposed to a merely vapid scheme of footless ideals — seems not to concern most Christian moralists, who are preoccupied with tactics of indoctrination addressed to conscious ego and intellect alone.

But not every problem in life can be mastered simply by controlling what human beings have been conditioned to believe. The empirical no less than the practical element in human self-cultivation eludes Christian pedagogues: the natural logic of how we become what we inwardly determine ourselves to be is a priori supposed to be invalid by Christian fiat. This life and its forces are not supposed to make any intrinsic sense or have the power to hold themselves together as a way of being. Such a Logos of nature had been deposed by the novel worldview that razed ancient culture, and so it could have no authority over human soul. (Of course medieval thinkers such as Aquinas recognized the domain of "natural law," and in modern legal contexts this topic has virtually been considered proprietary to Catholic interests — simply a way of remarking that "natural law" makes no modern sense at all. But natural law is far more integral to ancient theories — Heraclitus, Aristotle, the Stoics, the Cynics — even though it is there so thoroughly taken for granted in concept as not even to be called by name: medieval thinkers know "nature" only as a divine institution, thus "natural law" is merely an oblique way for God to impose divine law on us, i.e. in a manner that will be intuitively or instinctively evident to, that is, "felt" by, any of His creatures.)

This is the incoherence in Christian pedagogy or therapy: it does not respect the subtle weave of spiritual with natural factors in human personality, and attempts to make pupils and patients whole by merely one-sidedly addressing their spirituality. Why is anyone surprised when this method yields mostly schizoids and hypocrites, who may know what they ought to do and how they ought to feel but cannot actually make themselves do or feel those things in concreto? Most Christians have been so superficialized and Apollonianized — rendered such spiritual Pollyannas — that they cannot begin to comprehend just how deep, sordid and insidious the instinctual and psychic forces are in human personality. Kierkegaard grasped, as Blake, Aquinas, Hegel, and Nietzsche did also, that spirit must express itself by transfiguring what is natural in itself; and this is a Herculean and personal labor, which spirit can carry out only by suffering through the actual forms of pathic authority nature has over us. Nature and the desires it evokes in us are also a way that God can present moral epiphanies to us, although the ambivalence of temptation/revelation requires us of course to cultivate a subtle and discriminating philosophical acuity to derive the proper sense from these epiphanies. This view is far from being typical or canonical in Christianity, where puritanism, asceticism, and self-loathing abound. These anomalous theologians understand the dilemma well: if we must take the intrinsic order of nature seriously, we must also be armed with a kind of philosophical and connoisseurial intelligence that Christianity overwhelmingly has repudiated in behalf of simplistic black-and-white reactivism or abstracted moralizing.

Christian nihilism seasoned the historical ground of Western culture for the more radical modern nihilisms of capitalism, scientism and totalitarianism. Christianity encompassed the natural goods of human life in a withering otherworldliness that made all achievable, "temporal" or "finite" accomplishments seem in principle not to be worth willing: for centuries the only purpose for art was not to delight in the formliness of the senses but to glorify divinity and horrify men of what was evil; or for literature, to proselytize for orthodoxy. Sir Kenneth Clark's classic study The Nude captured graphically the gothic shame and contempt that corrupted the human form's naturalness into an awkward "nakedness" a sense of being deprived of clothes and covering that had become more "natural" than nature itself. The human in its own right had no moral or spiritual standing; there was effectively no human world — of culture, politics, philosophy, drama — for whose architecting and sustenance man had to elicit his own subtle powers of form and wisdom. Humans lived "by every word that proceeded from the mouth of God," not by their own natural arete, sophrosyne or autarkia. Humans were precluded a priori, both theologically and metaphysically, from having healthy wills capable of making themselves do what they ought to do, and from having wise judgment fit to see their own place as finite beings within the larger infinite scheme of things: "For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do" (Romans 7:19). All humans were by the very fact of their humanity presumed to be no better than myopic slaves, desperately in need of divine paternalism. Hegel speaks with seasoned contempt for the self-anointed and subphilosophical whom he calls sardonically "God's beloved children, to whom He bequeathes His wisdom in their sleep." How is it possible for humans to be at one and the same time so pathetic and yet also so arrogant?

Here is what the Greeks understood about natural and human virtues and values: these are all inherently viscous and mercurial. Of these subtle realities too Heraclitus speaks the truth when he says All things flow, and it is sweet when they flow together and sad when they flow apart; but of such conflict is harmony made. The peculiarly enigmatic dialectical and conflictive order — the Logos — out of which nature weaves itself calls for the richest and subtlest human insight and comprehension. It is a Logos far too daunting for simplist Christian preconceptions. All that is of nature has its own intrinsic validity and does not answer to the logic of human definitions and reasoning. What is true in itself and on its own accord is not able to be pinioned in place by our verbalisms; our utmost exertions in language and ideas barely capture a glimpse of it. Between what is natural and what is conventional or artificial stands a modal incommensurability: all our conscious and articulate "translations" of the sense of nature betray the very subject they are attempting to fix, for there is never an exact match element for element between the organic system of nature and that of culture. But Christian metaphysics and theology demanded these worlds be bridged literally by a fiat, by the edict of an all-creating God. Heraclitus spoke for the highest and most complex insights of Greek aristocratism when he said our universe was never made by man or God but had its own immortal rule, by which the waxing and waning life force of Fire — the life-force as well of aristocratic ethos — advanced and retreated.

Human beings attempt to define codes, credos and systems of law to which they then bind themselves; but the ultimate principles and meanings underlying these codes shift like a kaleidoscope and make fools and liars of us, dancers on a viscous flooring. In spite of our best efforts at definition and consistency, we are liable to lapse unwittingly into equivocation: the tacit bases or presuppositions of all our judgments are not obedient to the narrow formulas in which we try (and suppose we have succeeded in) capturing them. Even values modulate like a Moebius strip into dysvalues that delude and intoxicate us: virtues can metamorphose into vices, and vices into virtues, for what is good, sane, wise, just, loving, and healthy is a matter of proportion like medicine. Dosage or measure determines what will heal and what will kill: it is no different with the principles we select to guide our thinking and judgment, or the ideas by which we conceptualize those principles or values. Indispensable to truth is right judgment understood as a sense of proportion, an intuitive but cultivated grasp of the relatedness of things and a fluent respect for all considerations and presuppositions not explicitly stated. More vital than the finite truths by which we relate to particulars is the infinite intelligence or sense for the whole in which those finite truths are nested. This subtle or rarefied domain, to which even few philosophers pay attention, sets an imperceptible ruling tone, a dominant key for a whole system of ideas or culture: a worldview.

Nature loves to hide, said Heraclitus: Like the oracle at Delphi its utterances conceal as snuck as they reveal. By its language and logic, human consciousness relates always to the skin of things. the surface sheen of phenomena in which principles play now one way, now another. Even what is right and true undergoes transformation, a Protean transfiguration. Minds that relate to what is phenomenal are characterologically doomed to be deluded. Only the elusive domain of principles bears the fruit of any sort of truth; and philosophers alone, wherever they may occur, are the aristocrats who try to hold fast to this Proteus, adapting their minds to it, not pinning it to the Procrustean beds of their intellect. Is there is a "moral truth" ingrained in nature? Yes, but rarely in our human terms: and rarely are we fit and cultured to receive it. Is this truth absolute and self-consistent? Yes, but not in terms of the logical cartography of words our minds project. The truth of the order of nature, and of humans as ingredients in that order, is not capturable in simplistic absolutes: that metamorphic truth transcends the fictions, hypotheses, postulates, and habituations of the human mind as the turning face of the great world exceeds the wayward perspectives of the finite eye. Truth demands of its human suitors personalities that will make a passion and an art of striving after the infinite, the extraordinary, disillusioning or framebursting truths that are the only ultimately true truths. The truth about the world of nature can only be storied allusively in myths, fables, and allegorical tragedies and comedies. In these forms natural truth can be synthesized, but their obscurity and viscosity can never be relieved: they cannot mean more to humans than humans have cultured insight to grasp them with.

Is it wise — is it even prudent? — to expect the moral order in the world to take an absolute form, as if it were the clear and certain dictates of divine authority? Is it not wiser to understand the profound reasons for mystery, for treachery in the very organs we trust to apprehend order and anatomize it for us? Know thyself. We must be alive to the shifting bowels of natural principles; we must be prepared to challenge all over again what we have taken to be the firmaments of logic and knowledge. Human understanding must be the fluent correlate of a living world whose very soul consists in mutation, always growing-other than what it has been. For the Greeks it is the pathos and folly of slavish personalities that they live and think in mechanical obedience, as the tools and devices of the social order; it is the doleful syndrome of their limited resources of self that they respond always to a world they must conceive as ordinary happenstance. The "ordinariness" of the world is the projection of their ordinarizing psyches; they cannot bring their banal intelligence up to the level of acuity and incandescence of creative insights into an ever-shifting reality.

Only the aristic truly see what is unique in the configuration of a situation; what draws their intelligence on is the dissonance they perceive between the dispensations of nature and the habituations of human beings. The slavish by contrast doom themselves always to a personal cultural lag, grasping no more than what their own prior conditioning induces them to see. Exact aptness, consciousness of the peculiar "thisness" or haecceitas of life and history: these are options only for the acutely honed mind for whom "ripeness is all." Virtues and values that are seized on like inert tools or weapons stupefy even more profoundly the minds that have utterly miscomprehended what these sorts of principles and factors have to be. Absolutism is a mentality fixated on its own subjectivity and so, absolutely deluded about the very character of truth. Christianity's desperate grasp for divine authoritativeness is, in spite of itself, a symptom of human self-incongruity, the narcosis of our living intelligence by our fixating intellect (thus Barzun's terms, Bergson's issues — and before them, Nietzsche and Hegel's concerns; and before them, Heraclitus' heritage). In every epoch in which philosophy tries to seize on the ultimate problems of knowledge and understanding, some rationalist — Plato, Descartes, Kant — falls prey to a naive absolutism. Christianity situates itself in such a lineage of thinking that has utterly lost its grasp on its own concrete plight; in ways too pathetic for it to comprehend, it has compulsively alienated and divorced itself from the fluent and subtle order of natural existence, the domain of becoming in which it takes all the running we can do just to stand in one place.