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EMBED for wordpress. With the rejection of old conceptions of 'divine' order, fate, destiny or purpose, the focus of our existence has largely become centred on the material, the tangible and the finiteness of our existence. With this comes an emphasis on the visceral fulfilment of worldly desires, as opposed to striving towards a higher expectation of working towards some form of better place in an afterlife.
The artificial world erected by men who will remove the last vestige of divine influence in the world, and the last trace of faith in men, promises to be so all- encompassing and so omnipresent that it will be all but impossible for men to see, to imagine, or even to hope for anything beyond it.
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'. Seraphim sees the two major 'prophets' of this observed Nihilism which has shaped our age as Nietzsche and Lenin. The former he attributes as encapsulating Man's rejection of faith in God via his proclamation of "God is dead".
The image which I found most striking from this text, is the author's metaphorical continuation of Nietzsche's metaphor to describe modern man as struggling under the weight of carrying the divine corpse, and inevitably a subconscious remorse being at work in the psyche of the reformer who seeks to replace the dead ideology with a fresh one.
We have already seen this 'revelation' in its philosophical form, in the phrase 'there is no truth'. The words express a certain truth: not, to be sure, a truth of the nature of things, but a truth concerning the state of modern man; they are an imaginative attempt to describe a fact no Christian, surely, will deny.
God is dead in the hearts of modern Man: this is what the 'death of God' means, and it is true of Atheists and Satanists who rejoice in the fact, as it is of the unsophisticated multitudes in whom the sense of the spiritual reality has simply disappeared. Man has lost faith in God and the Divine Truth that once sustained him; the apostasy to worldliness that has characterized the modern age since its beginning becomes, in Nietzsche, conscious of itself and finds words to express itself.
Deeper, however, than the subjective fact the Nihilist 'revelation' expresses, lie a will and a plan that go far beyond any mere acceptance of 'fact'.
I would chalk this up with the phrase 'mistaking the map for the territory', as in the modern age we are still striving for a new objective 'truth' to define our reality in the absence of a unifying belief system.
In Science, this is mistaken for 'consensus', but as our rejection of 'consensus' belief, in the form of a 'God', has cynically shown us, this is just another manifestation the psychology of going along with the crowd. This is the modern illusion of objective truth by agreement, a modern form of faith.
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'. This word, very much in fashion at the present time to describe the plight of contemporary man, has actually, if properly understood, a profound meaning. For 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.
Seraphim's essay, the heart of the issue lies in a conflict between the subjective and the objective. Our existence still, in a sense, remains just as mysterious as it did under God.
In the second chapter, the author analyses this progression of societal inversion via four stages: "Father John of Kronstadt, that holy man of God, has likened the soul of man to an eye, diseased through sin and thus incapable of seeing the spiritual sun. The same likeness may serve to trace the progress of the disease of Nihilism, which is no more than an elaborate mask of sin. The spiritual eye in fallen human nature is not sound, as every Orthodox Christian knows; we see in this life only dimly and require faith and the Grace of God to effect a healing that will enable us, in the future life, to see clearly once more.
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, an 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. From this viewpoint, Western 'cultural' revolutions, reaching their zenith in the current, ill-informed and in my opinion self-absorbed , 'Social Justice Warrior', paradigm, must appear ridiculous. Contemporary 'revolution' in the West appears to be 'revolution' for 'revolution's sake'. Seraphim points out, every indignant 'appeal to authority', to right whatever the perceived wrong of the hour may be, only further boxes us in.
Modernity and the theologico-political problem in the thought of Joseph de Maistre and Fyodor Dostoyevsky: A comprehensive comparison By Alexandru Racu.
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