Christ and Nihilism

Christ and Nihilism September 22, 2003

There’s a wonderful article in the October 2003 issue of First Things by David B. Hart, an Orthodox theology who teaches at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota (also home to William Cavanagh, one of the most interesting American theologians writing today). Hart’s article is taken from a lecture on the First Commandment, and he makes the argument that the modern world is faced with the stark choice between Christ and nihilism. I resist the urge to summarize the article, since it must be read to get the effect. It is the kind of article for which New Critics invented the phrase “heresy of paraphrase,” but I suppose I’m not guilty of that heresy if I quote (though here I resist the urge to quote the entire piece).

Here is part of Hart’s characterization of the ancient ethos into which Christianity erupted:

indeed Christianity was complicit in the death of antiquity and in the birth of modernity, not because it was an accomplice of the latter, but because it alone, in the history of the West, was a rejection of and alternative to nihilism’s despair, violence, and idolatry of power; as such, Christianity shattered the imposing and enchanting facade behind which nihilism once hid, and thereby, inadvertently, called it forth into the open.

I am speaking (impressionistically, I grant) of something pervasive in the ethos of European antiquity, which I would call a kind of glorious sadness. The great Indo-European mythos, from which Western culture sprang, was chiefly one of sacrifice: it understood the cosmos as a closed system, a finite totality, within which gods and mortals alike occupied places determined by fate. And this totality was, of necessity, an economy, a cycle of creation and destruction, oscillation between order and chaos, form and indeterminacy: a great circle of feeding, preserving life through a system of transactions with death.

Hart explicitly calls this a “tragic” mythos and ethos, and points out that tragic drama partook of this religious outlook: “The religious vision from which Attic tragedy emerged was one of the human community as a kind of besieged citadel preserving itself through the tribute it paid to the powers that both threatened and enlivened it.” Citing the conflict of familial and civic values and theologies in Sophocles’s Antigone , Hart says,

The conflict between them . . . far from involving a tension between the profane and the holy, is a conflict within the divine itself, whose only possible resolution is the death — the sacrifice — of the protagonist . . . . tragedy’s great power is simply to reconcile us to this truth, to what must be, and to the violences of the city that keep at bay the greater violence of cosmic or social disorder.

Oh, my. I’m beginning to summarize. Just a couple more choice quotations. First, this on Peter’s tears after his betrayal of Jesus:

Nowhere in the literature of pagan antiquity, I assure you, had the tears of a rustic been regarded as worthy of anything but ridicule; to treat them with reverence, as meaningful expressions of real human sorrow, would have seemed grotesque from the perspective of all the classical canons of good taste. Those wretchedly subversive tears, and the dangerous philistinism of a narrator so incorrigibly vulgar as to treat them with anything but contempt, were most definitely signs of a slave revolt in morality, if not quite the one against which Nietzsche inveighed — a revolt, moreover, that all the ancient powers proved impotent to resist.

Hart’s argument that our choice is Christ or nihilism is, if I can vulgarize it a bit, simply that Christ claimed everything, and the church spent the first 1500 years of its existence humbly handing over ever fragment of culture and life to Christ, so that trying to get away from Christ today is an effort to escape everything . There is nowhere to go but to, literally, nothing. Hart says,

The Christian God has taken up everything into Himself; all the treasures of ancient wisdom, all the splendor of creation, every good thing has been assumed into the story of the incarnate God, and every stirring towards transcendence is soon recognized by the modern mind — weary of God — as leading back towards faith. Antique pieties cannot be restored, for we moderns know that the hungers they excite can be sated only by the gospel of Christ and him crucified.

At the same time, Hart says, the Christian victory was incomplete, and therefore “set free a force that the old sacral order had at least been able to contain; and it is against this more formless and invicible enemy that we take up the standard of the [first] commandment today.”

Finally,

With Christ came judgment into the world, a light of discrimination from which there is neither a retreat nor a sanctuary. And this means that, as a quite concrete historical condition, the only choice that remains for the children of post-Christian culture is not whom to serve, but whether to serve Him whom Christ has revealed or to serve nothing — the nothing. No third way lies open for us now, because — as all of us now know, whether we acknowledge it consciously or not — all things have been made subject to Him, all the thrones and dominions of the high places have been put beneath His feet, until the very end of the world, and — simply said — there is no other god.

Which is to say, the first imperative has, historically, become a simple indicative.


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