Continuities and Discontinuities

 

“It doesn’t matter what we believe in, as long as we believe.”

-          From the diary of Joseph Goebbels

The Age of Nihilism: Christendom from the Great War to the Culture Wars, by John Strickland

In this chapter, Strickland moves from the Communism of the Soviet Union to the National Socialism of Germany (next will come a look into the Liberalism of the West).  Just as in the chapter on Communism, there is much here that will sound, unfortunately, as if it is being written about today’s western democracies.  This chapter adds another dimension: a striking mirror to Israel’s actions regarding Palestinians in Gaza.

National Socialism was the most bestial vision of the West ever concocted.  More even than Communism, it promised to replace decrepit humanism and moralistic Christianity with a totally new moral order unrestrained by reason or mercy.

I struggle with this statement.  Was National Socialism somehow worse in this regard than Communism?  It is the story we are supposed to believe: Hitler, not Stalin, has become the stand-in for Satan.  But regarding this “totally new moral order unrestrained by reason or mercy,” one could argue that National Socialism at least held some mercy toward Germans. 

This mercy toward Germans can be seen in the three nihilistic convictions that lay at the heart of National Socialism:

“…the existence of a master race, the inferiority of other races, and the need for a war of racial annihilation.”

By the way, is this not inarguably the view of Israel when it comes to their position and against the position of Palestinians? 

In any case, for whom did Communism, under Stalin, hold any mercy?  He purged those even in his inner circles, let alone Russian, Ukrainian, or Georgian commoners.  In the battle of “most bestial,” Stalin killed far more civilians before the first shot was fired in Europe in World War Two than did Hitler.

As to the first conviction, the existence of a master race, Strickland sees this as necessary within Hitler’s framework as a defense of “Christendom in general and Germany in particular.”  This is a second statement which is baffling to me. 

There is nothing in Hitler’s actions that were a defense of Christendom.  Worship was of Hitler; allegiance was sworn to Hitler.  Strickland offers many examples that counter his own assertion:

·         Mixing Wagnerian nationalism with Nietzschean worship of the will…

·         …the West was built by a master race called the Aryans.

·         …preserved Aryan supremacy through morally unflinching expansion and conquest.

·         …racist nationalism…

·         …the racial transformation of the world…

·         …evolutionary ideas about an Aryan master race…

·         …individual human beings have no innate value.

·         “A stronger generation will drive out the weaklings,” Hitler claimed.

There is no defense of Christendom here, not in any sense to understand the word.  And this points to one of the problems I have had with Strickland’s entire narrative arc (as valuable as I have found his work in many ways).  His narrative depends on hinging the problems of the West to the schism of 1054.

The Bible and Slavery

 

Slavery in the Bible: Answering Atheist Critiques, Gavin Ortlund

What follows is my comment at the video, but meaningfully expanded:

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It really is inappropriate to accuse God, through the Bible, of condoning or endorsing slavery.  God gave His standard in the opening of the Bible: man is made in the image of God. 

Genesis 1: 27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

The implications of this are easily deduced, not only regarding slavery, but regarding all human interaction.

It strikes me that the root of this critique regarding the Bible and slavery is the unwillingness to acknowledge man’s fall, the depth of that fall, and the consuming power of sin over man.

If this is acknowledged, then one can grasp the idea that God understood that achieving thousands of years of ethical, Christian, progress in one day was not possible given man’s depth in sin.  Many of the Old Testament commandments are a reflection of this: God was reigning in the corruption, trying to bring it under some control, setting standards to minimize the chaos.

Slavery, along with many other behaviors that ran counter to the truth that all men are created in God’s image, was accepted as morally just in every society.  Man first had to be brought into a condition where the corruption was minimized.  They were not at all ready for returning to the condition intended in the Garden.

We know this, if for no other reason, than Jesus’s teaching in the Sermon on the Mount.  “Ye have heard it said…But I say unto you….” In addition to the Pharisees and scribes modifying some of these commandments, they didn’t go all the way; they only dealt with action, the observable behavior.  Jesus made clear that the point was the heart, not merely superficial action.  Get the heart right, then you can understand and live properly with your fellow man who is created in God’s image – as God intended.

We also see this in the teaching of the apostle Paul regarding slavery, the relationship between husband and wife, parents and children.  In the Roman world of his time, with the accepted ethic of slavery, of a male citizen satisfying his desire to ejaculate in any orifice available to him, with the tossing of babies into the sewer, Paul’s message was infinitely more radical than anything we have seen since within the context of time.

Jesus’s teaching is not seen as merely reigning in the chaos; He is preaching an entirely new man – but not really a new man.  It was man as intended in creation, before the fall.  Which comes back to Genesis 1:27.  This was God’s intent for man in creation, and man’s fall tore him away from God’s design.

Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere, taught the intent of the law, and brought to us the next level of understanding – consistent with the law, but not as a new law to follow.  He taught a change of the heart; this was what God intended all along.

Conclusion

Knowing the depth of man’s fall, was there another way?  A way that recognized man had free will to act?  A way that would not have turned all of mankind into God’s slaves?  

I don’t see it.

Epilogue

As an aside: slavery was an improvement over what came before.  In battle, defeated enemies were slaughtered, to the last.  Someone figured out that some of the defeated might be more valuable as slaves. 

I would guess most of the conquered preferred this option to death; those that didn’t certainly had the ability to change their circumstance to that which they preferred.

Christ Pantocrator

 

About Jordan Peterson’s horrendous tweet at Netanyahu: “Give ‘em hell.  Enough is enough.”

I check [my moral compass] as follows: the only people who suffer in such situations are the common people who have or want nothing to do with such violence, who want nothing more than to raise their children, give them a good education, have a decent job, feed their families.

All of the actors – the movers and shakers?  None of them are physically at risk.  They have either put these wheels in motion or are trying to figure out how to leverage these events to their advantage – or both.

I wrote that just a few days after October 7.  We can see now, although it was obvious then, what those who were to support the state of Israel were calling for when they used words like Peterson’s.

Given what we have seen the last several months, the mea culpas should be flowing.  Very few are….

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This episode was certain to tear the left apart, as there was nothing that held the elite and the raving masses together other than hate for western civilization.  It turns out the raving masses were consistent in their application, and the elites didn’t like that:

The Left is Consuming Itself

This was a certainty – just as feminism was going to be consumed by trans athletes, support for people of color ™ was going to be embraced until it touched on the people of color living between the river and the sea ™.

It isn’t just the left that has its zanies:

Well, the so-called right isn’t doing any better, with one outdoing the other on the desire to fulfill zany end-times lunacy.

Christian Zionists for Genocide?

Speaking of zany end-times lunacy…. Can we put a knife in the horrendous blasphemy that is Scofield, once and for all?

This followed by an image of John Hagee entitled “Israel: God’s Battle-Ax.”  Well, yes on the battle-ax part.  But is it God’s? 

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How are these Scofield evangelicals going to handle the antisemitism of saying “Christ is King”?  What happens to these Scofield evangelicals when they decide they can’t withstand the social pressure of saying such words?  What happens to them when the following words are labelled antisemitic, hence cancelling Jesus?

·         A wicked and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given unto it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas. And he left them, and departed.

·         But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees come to his baptism, he said unto them, O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?

·         Then goeth he, and taketh with himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first. Even so shall it be also unto this wicked generation.

·         But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! … Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?

·         Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.

Doug Wilson points out that it is the evangelical Zionists that are the bulwark against crazy in America – given their size and voting power.  Yes, maybe.  But sooner or later this bulwark is going to have to choose: Just who, or what, is their king? 

Romans 9:5(b) Christ came, who is over all, God blessed for ever.

Christ Pantocrator: Christ, ruler of all.  That would make Him king.

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No, no trope or dog whistle here.  I have used this phrase many times in the past in posts that have nothing to do with current controversies, for example, August 2021:

In this chapter, Strickland offers descriptions of several of the icons one will find in an Eastern Orthodox church.  Christ Pantocrator at the top of the dome; Mary and the infant Jesus above the alter.  To see these icons (and dozens of others) in person is truly a moving experience, something that I believe is a loss in most, if not all, protestant churches.

Show Me the Man…

 

…and I will show you the crime.

Total warfare opened an abyss for nearly everyone.  Millions of men were slaughtered by the weapons of progress, and millions more – along with wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters – were forced to adjust to the horror.

The Age of Nihilism: Christendom from the Great War to the Culture Wars, by John Strickland

With this chapter, Strickland examines the first of three ideologies that grew out of the Enlightenment’s removal of God from man and society.  Here, he will examine communism; in subsequent chapters, he will examine nationalism (through the lens of national socialism), and then liberalism. 

…liberalism was dedicated to the individual; nationalism was dedicated to the national community; and socialism was dedicated to the working class…

In each case, the eschatology was a kingdom of posterity: transcendence through progress.  In each case, an impotent attempt at deriving meaning was attempted; impotent, because none of these offered a meaningfully transcendent possibility.

There were glimpses of the old Christendom coming through: the Christmas truce of 1914 – not a formal truce between the warring parties, but informal, on the lines, between and among French, German, and British soldiers, many of whom said enough of this: let’s play football, hold a mass, and sing Christmas songs.

But the underlying current was one of a civilization without a stable culture to support it. 

…an important difference exists between civilization and culture.  The former depends on the latter, drawing from culture the beliefs and values that sustain it.  But when culture dies out, it leaves civilization in a state of rootlessness.

The utopian culture of humanism had died out with the Great War.  Civilization was groping for a culture that could replace it; absent a culture that could sustain civilization, civilization would die as well.  It is here where Strickland offers the three secular ideologies of the Communists, National Socialists, and liberalism as man’s attempts to build culture.

But as we shall see, this therapy could not be accomplished without purgatives and amputations equal in many cases to the effects of the Great War.

Making omelets requires breaking eggs, etc.  Which brings us to a focus on the communists.  Within this post, I will intersperse some of my thoughts of how all of this from one hundred years ago is available to us today in the West – in full flower, out in the open, no longer even hidden under a superficial veneer.

The year 1927 marked the beginning of a new start for the Soviet Union, ten years after the revolution.  Vladimir Lenin had died a few years earlier.  A parade, on Revolution Day, with Joseph Stalin atop the monumental tomb dedicated to Lenin.  Stalin stood there, having staged and executed a ruthless struggle to succeed the founder.

Films were made of the founding and of Lenin.  These adapted the concept of Nietzsche’s “great man,” and Strickland offers the idea that Nietzsche as much as Marx influenced communists and communism’s ideology (or, at least, its implementation).

Lenin managed the party with an iron will that would have impressed the “self-overcoming” creator of Zarathustra.  He overwhelmed his rivals with an intellectual brilliance and violent contempt lacking any pretense of human sympathy.

It strikes me that this need not be driven by a deliberate merging of the two thinkers – Nietzsche and Marx – nor does Strickland suggest this.  It seems, more so, that such a merging of Nietzsche with any impotent ideology (including nationalism and liberalism) is inevitable when the impotence is due to a lack of a transcendent.  Someone or something has to be in charge, at the top.  Always.

Leon Trotsky was present from the beginning – 1917.  When it was announced that the revolution had to begin with a dictatorship, many revolutionaries (Mensheviks) objected, and Trotsky gave his “dustbin of history” speech. 

“You are pitiful, isolated individuals! You are bankrupts. Your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on – into the dustbin of history!”

Men Have Forgotten God

 

If modernist art and the human sciences had been dissolving the West’s cultural foundations for decades, the First World War brought the utopian structure down like an edifice demolished.

The Age of Nihilism: Christendom from the Great War to the Culture Wars, by John Strickland

The Enlightenment project hit its peak in the second half of the nineteenth century.  The last stronghold of the institutionalized inequality of man, slavery, was banished in the West.  Economic growth was accelerating – a clear vision of an improved economic standard of living for all.  Personal liberty, for most, was clearly advancing.

The achievements of utopia may have been impressive on economic and political levels, but on a cultural level things were different. … It was becoming increasingly evident that utopia was threatened by the very beliefs and values that inspired it.

In other words, liberalism does not have the means to defend and hold onto liberalism; Enlightenment values were killing the Enlightenment.  It is very easy to see this today, but there were those who saw this coming more than a century ago – men like Chesterton and Belloc.

Nietzsche and Wagner were already being venerated at the dawn of the twentieth century.  They inspired a new generation of nihilist thinkers.  Music, art, literature, science, philosophy – all developed branches from this nihilistic trunk.  The one thing all had in common, regardless of discipline: a conscious effort to destroy Christianity.  In other words, deconstruction: a rejection of what the West had once been, to be replaced with…whatever.

For its elitist membership, all values inherited from Christendom’s distant and recent past were to be abandoned in exchange for a life of sensuality and rebellion.

Franz Kafka demonstrates the inevitable future.  In Metamorphosis, the hero awakens one morning to find he has been transformed into a monstrous insect:

It is an absurd and disturbing opening, but the story amasses an ever-growing series of setbacks to demonstrate that utopian man is anything but what the humanists had once proclaimed.

But this is almost child’s play when seen against The Trial.  The hero is charged with a crime he did not commit.  In fact, the crime is never even named. 

His hero is persecuted, arrested, put on trial, and finally, in the last scene, “shot like a dog.”

Emile Durkheim would write of anomie, a condition in which the individual, cut off from traditional morality, is unable to live morally.  In other words, it isn’t that God is dead; it is that man is dead to God.

Durkheim met the end of his life wondering when, exactly, the anomy caused by secularization would be alleviated.  For his twenty-first century successors measuring suicide rates in the sociology departments of modern universities, the question is still being asked.

But of all of the branches that grew from the trunk of nihilism, perhaps the most culturally subversive human science to appear was psychology.  And the father of this branch was Sigmund Freud.  In his wake, the sexual conventions of two millennia became casualties.  And the fruit of this nihilistic tree was running full-speed toward the abyss of the Great War. 

The blow that hurled the modern world on its course of self-destruction was the Great War of 1914 – 1918. (Barzun*)

Ideological nationalism, the efficiency of the bureaucratic state, government-led propaganda, mass conscription, and the new industrial economy – all products of the new utopian civilization erected over the previous century – led to the deaths of some ten million soldiers and another ten million civilians due to hunger and disease.

Rebel With a Cause

 

The record is stunning.  To take only one microcosmic example: In the year 1866, two important works of literature had begun to appear in serial form side by side in the same literary journal. The Russian Mesenger (Russky vestnik). 

The first novel was War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy.  The second was Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

The Age of Nihilism: Christendom from the Great War to the Culture Wars, by John Strickland

Stickland is describing the boom that occurred in Russian secular culture once the West’s humanist ideals were embraced.  Here, Stickland will focus on Dostoevsky, noting that he would document, better than any of his contemporaries, the growing crisis of utopian Christendom – the version of Christendom that came to replace, in Strickland’s view, the paradisaical Christendom that existed for the first thousand years in the West, and, until more recently, in the East.

Dostoevsky, son of a brutal father who was murdered when his peasants rose up against him, was never an atheist, although he nevertheless liked to spend his time among atheists.  He would keep up with the latest streams of progressive Western thought.  Most in this camp would look at the Russian Orthodox Church with contempt.

They would also look down on the poor and impoverished.  Dostoevsky would write of these same poor and impoverished, stirring dissatisfaction with the status quo.  A lesson for our time, perhaps: when the status quo is atheist, it is the Christian who is a rebel:

John 15: 18-19 If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you.  If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you.

Dostoevsky would write, when contemplating how different he was, the torment he suffered as “a child of this century”:

“And despite all this, God sent me moments of great tranquility, moments during which I love and find I am loved by others.  … This symbol is very simple, and here is what it is: to believe that there is nothing more beautiful, more profound, than Christ…”

Yet, he would remain rebellious in temperament.  He would join a group that would meet at night, discussing books by prominent French socialists.  Having been found out, the members of the group were sentenced to execution.

As they were being marched out to receive this punishment, a rider came up with a message from the tsar: they would not be executed, but instead sent for hard labor in Siberia.  A reprieve.  In Siberia, instead of limiting himself to live within the world of the intelligentsia, he would have hardened criminals for companions: murderers, rapists, child abusers.

He was not allowed to bring any of his books with him, yet somehow a charitable society did provide copies of the New Testament for the prisoners.  Dostoevsky would keep his under his pillow in the barracks for the next four years.

What Dostoevsky would discover in his time with the criminals: even if the world was transformed into a utopia, with everyone given wealth, health, and freedom, in the end that world was still populated by men such as these.  There is nothing in such a utopia that would heal the hearts of such men.

“In the course of several years, I never saw a sign of repentance among these people…”

Just like Nietzsche, Dostoevsky saw the dark side, the nihilism.  Dostoevsky was in prison, Nietzsche in the splendor of Bayreuth.  Yet, unlike Nietzsche, Dostoevsky was a Christian – this reality gave Dostoevsky the means to transcend this broken world.

Seeing a man savagely beaten in prison, Dostoevsky’s mind raced back to a time in childhood.  Out in the family forest, he heard the cry of a wolf.  Terrified, he fled the wood and came to Marey, one of his father’s peasants.  Peasants who were so cruelly beaten by Dostoevsky’s father that they would one day rise up and murder him.

History Rhymes

 

I am working through Matthew Barrett’s book, The Reformation as Renewal: Retrieving the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, at my substack.  However, I have a thought based on one portion of the text that I think better fits at this blog.

“Stab, smite, slay.”  And if “you die in doing it, good for you!”  To do nothing was to be an accomplice.  “If he is able to punish and does not do it – even though he would have had to kill someone or shed blood – he becomes guilty of all the murder and evil that these people commit.”  Not grace, but sword, said Luther.  And if you die trying to kill one of these rebellious peasants, fear not – you are a “true martyr in the eyes of God.”

The occasion was the Peasants Revolt in 1525.  Luther called for indiscriminate killing on the part of the nobles and princes and against the peasants. 

By its conclusion, the Peasants’ War resulted in mass carnage.  Different numbers have been estimated, but something like eighty thousand may have died in battle.

Barely armed common folk were pitted against well-trained soldiers.  It was a one-sided slaughter.

Across Germany the insurrection was snuffed out, dead bodies lay everywhere, and the outcry in Germany was so agonizing it felt unbearable. 

Having called for slaughter, Luther faced the backlash.  While he had no control of the soldiers, he could not escape his call to stab, smite, and slay.

With countless corpses rotting in the hot summer sun, Luther’s commission now seemed cruel, even malicious, and his credibility was tarnished, as was the reputation of the Reformation as a whole.

The carnage was apocalyptic in proportion, and the devastation was so severe that recovery felt like an impossibility.

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Christian Zionist leaders cheer on Israel.  In the wake of October 7, they cheered on Israel.  Today, many continue to cheer on Israel.  Despite the slaughter, they cheer on Israel.  In fact, knowing the imbalance, they cheered on Israel four months ago in the face of the genocidal statements from Israeli leaders and despite what was certain to be the result of Israel’s aggression.

One of the best equipped militaries in the world against a trapped peasant army.  Tens of thousands killed, large portions of housing destroyed.  Hospitals targeted.  Food and power cut off.  Like shooting fish in a barrel, but only after not feeding the fish and pouring a little acid in the water.

I pray that the idea that Christians have to somehow support this corrupt state in order to give God the ability to carry out (their corrupt version of) His plan gets crushed.  In fact, I pray this crushes their corrupt version of God’s plan.

I pray that the reputation of these Christian Zionist leaders today is not only tarnished, but destroyed.  Unfortunately, they add to the reputational destruction of the Church.

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Despite the damage to Luther’s name, the Reformer did not regret his previous writings.  He wrote An Open Letter on the Harsh Book against the Peasants and further defended himself.

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And I bet most of today’s Christian Zionists will do the same.  The money is too good.