Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age by Fr. Seraphim

Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age

by Eugene (Fr. Seraphim) Rose

This will not be a typical book review.  Were it a normal review, I’d tell you what the book was about, I’d select a few quotations from it, and then recommend that you purchase it for yourself.  This will be far more extensive than that; in fact, what you’re about to read are my edited notes on the work.  Were I to write this way about a self-help book, I could justly be accused of plagiarism – of giving away all their core ideas.  But in the case of Fr. Seraphim I found a kindred soul who had seen the same things I have come to see in the world, forty years prior to me, and working off of different sources.  Much of what follows are words I’ve already spoken, but set to a different tempo.

This is a long essay, but shorter than the book.  It follows the structure and focuses on the data points that Fr. Seraphim noted – but it is liberally sprinkled with my own observations, as well as updated examples from the past fifteen years – examples which affirm his predictions.  It is a blending of both, and I hope you will attribute any wisdom you find to Fr. Seraphim, and any foolishness to me.

I heartily recommend the book, which was gifted to me by my friend and fellow writer Blair Naso who knew that I would find a kindred spirit within it.  But ideas are more important than people, and I’m certain that the late Fr. Seraphim would rather your read this truncated riff off of his ideas, than read nothing at all.

Introduction

This book is about the dominant religion of our world: nihilism.  It is about the fall of man away from God, first to the worship of ideals – and then machines – and then himself – and finally nothingness.  It is about the inevitable consequences of abandoning God – the physical, the moral, the political, and the spiritual consequences – as well as an explanation of why these occur.

The nihilistic plan for this earth has been in official operation since the French Revolution (though its roots are more ancient than that – some of the roots are eternal), and it’s important to remember that all of us have been raised in a society in full grip of nihilism.  We’ve been inoculated against God, and the emptiness of our times feels normal.  It’s important, therefore, to reach out in as many ways possible, to rekindle that spark which God put inside of us.  I am of an intellectual bent; so was Fr. Seraphim.  So this call to your heart is through your mind.  It explores the metaphysical, theological, political factors that have led to the current state of affairs.

The book is broken down into five chapters.  The first is an ontological discussion of what truth is, and what nihilism is.  The second describes the stages of nihilistic dialectic, how it progresses in the human spirit, and in society.  The third describes the theological beliefs which arise from nihilism.  The fourth explains the program which is being executed.  And the final chapter discusses the ultimate teleology of nihilism.

I. The Question of Truth

This essay must start off with two warnings.  There is a temptation to feel admiration for the nihilist – to see them as inflamed with virtuous forward momentum as they fight against the calcification of the old.  Both Fight Club and Nietzsche fall into this category, they both have a heroic appeal to them.  But to do so misses nihilism’s intent.  Nihilism works through cycles – it manifests in the Hegelian dialectic – and to mistake the current phase for a victory against the last phase is folly.

Sympathy, too, must be cautioned against.  While nihilists are certainly a victim of circumstances, they are not innocent victims; and furthermore they propagate the illness which they suffer.  Some sympathy is due, but this should not spill over into acceptance of their ideas.

“Those who think they are fighting it are most often using its own weapons.” This is a great error that so many fall into.  Attacking the products of nihilism (communism, avante garde art, social justice) fails to strike at the root; defending against the products of nihilism is insufficient, and too often ignores that even the ‘right’ is infected with nihilism as well.  We must understand what we are fighting, and attack the root, not the branch.

The core falsehood of nihilism is the question of truth. “All truth is empirical; all truth is relative.”  The first statement is not empirical, and the second is not relative.  From this, all errors grow.  True systems of reasoning are all based upon axioms; upon statements of faith.  Without an absolute premise, no coherent system can grow.  All knowledge systems are premised upon an axiomatic core.  For any man to claim knowledge of any sort, is to make him a man of faith, and to make him a metaphysician – however modern man is on very shaky grounds when it comes to these matters; few have the metaphysical basis to justify their faith in the absolute.

The metaphysical systems which deny absolute truth (whilst still affirming it by said denial) can be broadly grouped into four categories: naïve and critical realism, and naïve and critical agnosticism.

Naïve Realism (aka Naturalism): this rejects the ‘spiritual’ absolute while affirming the ‘materialist/determinist’ absolute.  This is the official stance of Marxism, and the stance popular with science lovers and ‘skeptics’ – modern-day Atheistkult.  It affirms that absolute truth exists so that it can uphold objective truth, but denies that anything higher than objective truth can exist.  By its very nature, it renders all philosophy invalid – and so, its beliefs can no longer be stated as true or false – merely that they exist, and they were mechanically inevitable. “The chemicals in your brain tell you they are chemicals!” This is the sort of foolishness you hear from people like Neil deGrasse Tyson: that studying philosophy is a waste of time that makes you crazy.

Critical Realism (aka Positivism): this stance outright rejects absolute truth, concerning itself only with the empirical; as noted above, this is a contradiction, since the rejection of absolute truth is an absolute statement in and of itself.  These tend to be the ardent mechanist – those who use scientific knowledge to achieve more scientific knowledge, without ever questioning whether they should be building an atomic bomb.  They’ll acknowledge the axiomatic basis of all truth, but remain utterly blind to the implications of this.

Naïve Agnosticism (the Hippy): it claims that absolute truths are unknowable, and ergo not worth investigating.  They are making an absolute statement here, but largely ignores what any of this might imply. “You do you, man!”

Critical/Pure Agnosticism (the Pragmatist): finally we find a stance which is consistent… and useless.  It makes the correct observation that we cannot know any absolute truth absolutely; that all axioms must be taken as prior assumptions; that the logic system which follows is incapable of investigating the axioms which form it.  So the pure agnostic only concerns himself which what can be practically known or achieved – scientific/objective truths, and relative truths.  But this way lies solipsism, and the surrender of truth to power.  When heuristics are arbitrary, why not choose the heuristic that empowers your desires (relative truth) even at the cost of reason (objective truth)?  After all, since there’s no absolute truth (at least none that is knowable), who’s to say that our new scientific ‘objectivity’ isn’t the real objectivity all along?  Maybe mathematics really is just a product of evil, White men, and they’re using their institutional power to force this cultural assumption onto the poor natives of third-world countries.  If absolute truth is unknowable this is as possibly true as anything else!

Throughout European history our ancestors have been seeking after the truth, and these men have abandoned it.  They are the ultimate men; the final men; the men who no longer search, and so they live for nothing.

Either there is Revealed Truth… or there isn’t, and the nihilists are right.  This is precisely what’s demonstrated by Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem.  If no system can know itself, then either God knows it, and His Will makes it so – or there are no systems, only opinions.

The only logical system that doesn’t contain logical contradictions is that which that which affirms absolute truth.

Ever since the abandonment of Christian Revelation, modern philosophers have been groping for an affirmation of some sort, for the past 400 years.  They occasionally grasp on to some sort of flickering candle – common sense, or the spirit of the age, the progress of history – man must live by some sort of revelation – but all of these false revelations lead to the abyss.

There is no man who doesn’t seek truth, even in spite of himself, for this is how He made us.  If this were truly the mechanistic, deterministic, gear-ridden universe of the atheist, this wouldn’t be the case.  We’d be dull-witted golems, wandering about causally, but without motive beyond the next chemical impulse in our brain.  I could imagine evolution existing in such a universe – even some form of algorithmic ‘intelligence’ – but not the willful activity which we do, in fact, see within ourselves, and demonstrably in the actions others take (no p-zombies here – or at least, not many).  Us meat machines so clearly have a divine spark in us – a ghost in the machine – a magic black box which pushes the rest of the gears in a direction which is unnatural to the merely algorithmic.

The rare golem we do meet – the dead eyed, resentful, and cannibalistic man – is he who has given himself over to demonic control.

But how do we know that Christian revelation is the truth, when there are so many other contenders?  Put simply – and to be delineated in later chapters – all other axioms are nothing more than different forms of nihilism, each of them set up to annihilate Divine Revelation. “If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first.” The consisted hatred of Christianity is one of the clues that its revelation is the Revelation.

II. The Stages of Nihilistic Dialectic

The nihilistic aim is singular: the destruction of Divine Revelation.  But its manifestations are many (“The hydra has many heads”).  While these manifestations are numerous, they can be boiled down to four distinct types, which are related to one another as dialectical stages.  The stages are, thus, opposed to one another (the hydra’s heads snap at one another), but this ‘snapping’ is nothing more than ‘correcting’ the errors in the previous stage with a new form of error, never truth.  They shouldn’t be thought of as strictly chronological, as each form exists in every era to a certain degree; and multiple forms will exist in any particular individual; but they do form a pattern, and it can be useful to think of them as such for the sake of understanding.

Additionally – Fr. Seraphim’s delineation fits perfectly with Rob Fedders’ theory of Absolute Truth > Obejctive Truth > Subjective Truth.  His taxonomy will be used to help illustrate the four stages.

Stage 1: Liberalism

We start with the French Revolution.  This is the passive form of nihilism; the prerequisite form.  Because nihilism cannot actually sustain itself, it needs a backdrop to grow off of; in this case, it was the imperfect defense of a heritage in which the defenders did not truly believe.  The last forms of the Old Order, and the first form of the New Order, which would come roaring into existence with the guns of the Great War.

The Liberal still believes in truth, but this truth no longer holds a centre place in his philosophical life.  He speaks glowingly of “The Human Spirit”, “Christendom”, of our “higher calling”, and the importance of “human dignity” – but where once God and His Son were at the centre, we are now provided with watered down wine.  It’s all ornamental language, which evokes emotions rather than thought.    What this boils down to is replacing the Absolute Truth of Revelation with a man-made Absolute Truth – something more comforting, and suited to our vanity; what C.S. Lewis described as the “Cosmic Force” god, which works throughout history – but doesn’t notice if you happen to behave rather shabbily.

Descartes embodies this god with his deism, and the Germans with their idealism; it’s not a being, but an idea.  An invented god for us to use at our whim.  The atheism which follows is merely the explicit (and redundant) statement of what the Liberal implicitly believes.

This liberal disbelief comes in two forms: the Protestant and the humanist.  The Protestant view (which many Catholics and Orthodox sadly embrace) is a “Heaven” of gentle repose (with no worries of Hell), which unites Christian terminology with ordinary worldliness.  It’s a compromise which might comfort those who already believe in it, but it convinces no-one.

The humanist compromise is even worse: he speaks of the ‘eternal’ without believing in it.  He begs for valuation, while dismissing the source from which value actually comes.

Neither are looking for transcendence; that would distract them from this world.  They seek ethical systems merely to support a cheerful stoicism – but not a stoicism strong enough to suffer the potential evils which exist in this life.  And furthermore, this cheerfulness blinds them to the inevitable result of their beliefs – that the full application of a man-made god leads inexorably to Bolshevism.  By abandoning True God for man’s god, Liberalism creates the new man who only worships himself, and who then turns on the Liberalism which created him.

While a Christian worldview leads to a hierarchical monarchy, this Liberal worldview leads to the ‘people’ being sovereign, so that power rises up from below.  The one is an inversion of the other; one is focused upon the next world, striving upwards – the other is focussed entirely upon this world, reaching down for validation.  Republics and constitutional monarchies are attempts to bridge these irreconcilable ideas, balancing authority and revolution.

Is God a constitutional monarch, who rules absolutely thanks to the will of the people?  The demons might wish it so.

The force from below is revolutionary; so the Liberal invites revolution to his doorstep.  He can, perhaps, appease them for a while – but he cannot point to a higher truth to which they are rebelling in error.  His is a losing struggle.  Why doesn’t he notice this glaring contradiction?  Perhaps – it is because he isn’t truly interested in what he says he’s interested in.  Perhaps his interests are more immediate, worldly ends.  He is unable to think of ultimate ends; only in what he sees immediately before him.

The weakest thing about the Liberal – the modern Cuckservative – is his blindness to how weak, how doomed to failure his system is!

Liberalism hides behind a Christian façade, while subtly indoctrinating its members into nihilism. ‘Ideas as outfits’ wouldn’t occur if there was a genuine seeking of God’s truth in modern academics – instead, the boundless skepticism, and the accrual of knowledge for knowledge’s sake has led to cynicism and fads. “Those who seek to preserve the prestige of truth without believing in it offer the most potent weapon to all their enemies; a merely metaphorical faith is suicidal.” They concede ground to the rebel, every step of the way, until the Liberal order is dead.

Stage 2: Realism

With Liberalism we see the replacement of God’s Absolute Truth, with man’s Absolute Truth; in this stage, the absolute is abandoned for Objective Truth.  This is the stage of open atheism; of belief in science.  Instead of higher values, naked materialism and self-interest.  Nothing exists but that which is most obvious.

Three philosophical definitions worth repeating:

• Naturalism: the attempt to establish an absolute materialistic determinism.
• Positivism: the outright denial of absolutes.
• Agnosticism: the statement that absolute truth is unknowable and irrelevant.

But Realism isn’t a philosophical system at all; it’s the naïve thoughts of a man who fails to reflect upon the higher. (Interesting note – Vox Day wasn’t the first to coin the term “Scientism”, Fr. Seraphim uses it here.) Worship of the fact, rather than love of the higher.

Where Liberalism is indifferent to the absolute, the Realist is hostile.  Where the Liberal is excessively attached to the world, the Realist is fanatically devoted to it.  This creates an interesting mirror between Realism and Christian thought.  Both are passionate opposed to Liberalism; to the airy-headed ‘beliefs’ of the Protestant theologian; both are passionate about discovering the truth – but they move in opposite directions.  This – I suspect – is why movies such as Fight Club have been so inspirational in this generation.  It is fundamentally a nihilist film – but like us seekers, its main enemy is the Liberal/Capitalist dream world, where shopping at Ikea is supposed to provide meaning.

The Realist dismisses the Liberal’s naïve idealism – mistaking Christianity for such a thing, partially because he’s only been exposed to Liberal Christianity – and so he blinds himself spiritually.  And how is a blind man supposed to quest for truth?  Of course, he is not simply a victim of circumstance; the atheist desire for truth is a secondary desire, something deeper and more primordial: Nietzsche’s Will to Power.  Point deer, make horse.  His motive for seeking truth wasn’t to find it – but to be able to create untruth!  “The love of truth, frustrated from its true object, is prostituted to an irrational cause.”

It thus becomes a parody of Christian truth.  Instead of seeing God in everything, it sees only ‘Modes of Production’, ‘Sexual Dynamics’, ‘New Markets’ – and power.  It becomes the mechanistic truth of Bolshevism and Nazism.

Your typical modern shares more in common with both of those odious groups than with the Liberals of the 19^th Century.  Their love of material – of progress – of sexual licentiousness – of practicality – of abortion – of economic manipulation – and their hatred of monarchs – all of these traits are present within both the Nazi and the Communist, and are far more defining of their characters than whatever emotional rhetoric they turned into creeds (after all, emotions are just another ‘object’ to be manipulated objectively).  Both Hitler and Stalin – “terrible simplifiers”.

The only significant difference between the modern man and those that lived with Nazism and Bolshevism, is the maturation of Humanism: previously part of Liberalism, Humanism has adopted a modern, progressive, scientific tone.  Humanism is now about loans from the World Bank, economic incentives, and ‘studies’ on all varieties of subjects.  It is but another form of scientism – of power and manipulation serving hidden motives.  Where the Liberal Humanist sought to obscure God in vagaries, the New Humanist wants to eliminate Him from thought.

Stage 3: Vitalism

This third stage reacts against the last; it reacts against the oversimplification and outright horrors brought by the Realist establishment.  It protests that, for all the pleasures that scientism derives, it’s choking out Life.  It’s an attempt to rediscover the higher truths which men thirst for – and its attempt has been an abject failure.  Just as Realism accepted Liberalism’s obfuscations of higher truths, Vitalism accepts Realism’s progressive abandonment of higher truth.  The Vitalist seeks the supernatural, but presupposes Christian truth to be outmoded.  Its mysticism is just as founded in the material as is the atheism of the Realist (this, perhaps, explains the odd phenomenon of people worshipping UFO aliens – ostensibly ‘scientific’ beings – in the way that pagans worshipped their gods).

The great danger of Vitalism is how its ‘new spiritualism’ can attach itself to healthy bodies, and drain them, distract them; the exact opposite of the Realist tactic.  Where Realism sought to separate the masses from God, under the control of the few, Vitalism seeks to inspire the masses, and use their own volition to drive themselves further from God.

Nietzsche felt the first shadows of this – the ‘death of God’ as Liberals abandoned him.  His writings fueled the Realist, hard-nosed atheists and evolutionists.  But at his core, he was a Vitalist – seeking to resurrect spirituality sans Christianity.

Vialism is the hippy movement.  It’s a grab-bag of traditions and beliefs from all cultures and places, with no coherency or discipline to them – part of its rejection of the quasi-logical thought of the Realist.  Spiritual beliefs are chosen by the individual for their convenience, and false-ecumenism is pretended between the heretics: two individuals, planning to manipulate the other for selfish ends, espouse contradictory beliefs, but claim that there is no contradiction – because both are therefore spiritual, non-Realist, and are emotionally accommodated in whatever behavior they’re about to pursue.  They’ve achieved Christian spiritualism without Christian reason.

Vitalism is also the absurdity of the rebel without a cause; the criminal who fights for nothing (neither lust nor greed).  The sportsball fanatic and fanboy of geek culture.  The fitness nut and the diet guru.  They can’t explain their purpose, and they cannot feel remorse.

Even Hitler’s Realist regime had a Vitalist element: the cult of Blood and Soil.

All of them share in common a hatred of institutions, and of unchanging doctrine, in favour of the immediate and the convenient.  This is the descent into relative truth.  It is ultimate pragmatism.

Realism was seeking an absolute truth from below (scientism); Vitalism has no interest in finding such a truth, openly stating that it doesn’t exist.  Humanism follows – and now we must have dynamic standards for how we judge art and literature, for how we judge other human beings.  Experimental music – obscurantist art.  Who ever said that art was supposed to be beautiful and inspiring?  Who says that it has to mean anything at all?  Audience receptivity replaces intelligence, and artistic success replaces excellence.

Vitalism endlessly seeks, but never finds – “It’s the journey, not the destination!” – the last attempt of the unbeliever to hide his unbelief behind a cloud of noble rhetoric.

Stage 4: The Nihilism of Destruction

Let’s reiterate: Stage 1, Liberalism, was replacing God’s Absolute Truth with man’s Absolute Truth.  This inevitably crumbles into Stage 2, Realism, which is abandoning Absolute Truth for Objective Truth (science and worldly power).  This crumbles into Stage 3, Vitalism; the failure of Objective Truth leads to a celebration of Relative Truth (which enables emotional power over others).  This, too, fails, leading to Stage 4: an abandonment of truth all together – an endless scream into the void. “A rage against creation and against civilization that will not be appeased until it has reduced them to absolute nothingness.

The widespread nature of this – the doctrine and the plan – is unique to our modern age.  For the earlier forms of nihilism, destruction of the Old Order was but a prologue to their imagined utopia; with Stage 4, destruction is the entire story. “There is no truth, all is permitted,” this is a quote from Nietzsche, but it is popping up in heterogeneous places as of late. “Nothing is true; everything is permitted,” is the creed of the ‘good guys’ in Assassin’s Creed.  I’ve heard this quoted by women I’ve dated.  I’m sure I’ve heard it other places as well, and I’d appreciate any readers who could provide examples.

Fr. Seraphim references The Possessed by Dostoyevsky, and mentions historical personages – Max Stirner, Sergei Nechayev – who embodied this destruction on an individual level.  Should they be considered outliers?  After all, their fellows denounce them.  No: for Nihilism’s theology is founded upon Nothingness, its prime axiom a contradiction, and therefore destruction becomes an indispensable part of its program.  In fact, it is a fulfilment of its deepest aim.

III. The Theology and Spirit of Nihilism

1. Rebellion: The War against God

The first two chapters of Fr. Seraphim’s book were focused on definitions; first, of what nihilism (and truth) are, and second, how nihilism progresses; the different types of nihilists.  This is the groundwork necessary to explore the deeper meaning, the spiritual roots, and the ultimate program of Nihilism.

Nihilism is never explicit (evil can’t manifest in this world without a created good to pervert); thus it has been necessary to examine the hidden implications of what a nihilist represents.  In examining nihilism writ large, the apparently ‘tenuous’ nature of the conclusions may draw criticism, as nihilists wrap their nothingness in the cloak of purpose; however, nihilistic philosophers such as Nietzsche have laid out this program for us. “God is dead,” screams the heart of modern man.  Our age is characterized by the apostasy from God, towards worldliness.

Zarathustra – Nietzsche’s prophet – didn’t stop there however.  This is no mere agnosticism; no mere abandonment.  Modern man murdered God – they killed him because they did not wish for Him to exist.  Nor are they merely atheistic (acknowledging that the atheism of the philosopher is not possible for the whole man; atheism is nothing more than the worship of false, lesser gods, when the man is studied as a whole); they are actively anti-theistic.  Proudhon: “The revolution… does not deny the absolute, it eliminates it… Every step we take in advance is a victory in which we crush Divinity.  …if there is a God, [He is the] enemy.” Albert Camus raises rebellion (not unbelief) to the first principle.  As for Bolshevism – does anything need to be said?

Revolutionary Nihilism stands explicitly against God; and so does philosophical Nihilism, in its assumptions that modern life must continue without Him.  Often, many of such rebellious groups adopt a form of ‘religion’ – they believe in some sort of ‘Supreme Being’, ‘Source’, or say that ‘Thou Art God’. Each of these gods of man is explicitly opposed to, and willing the destruction, of Christianity (some even using the name of Christ to do so).

Atheism is the creed of the fool, but anti-theism is a far worse sickness.  The former errs through childishness and stupidity; the latter, from a passion to destroy God’s reality.  The petty arguments of Bertrand Russel are easily defeated; Proudhon’s zeal is another matter.

Here Fr. Seraphim states that which I said in response to Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem: the theorem demands a leap of faith – to God, or to nothing.  And Nihilism is animated by a faith that is just as strong as ours.  In the Christian spiritual context, “God, Truth, and Authority become meaningful and inspire consent.” With nihilism, the exact opposite is true: Nothingness, Falsehood, and Rebellion become meaningful and inspire destruction.  The Nihilistic attitude is one of “dissatisfaction with self, with the world, with society, with God; it knows but one thing: that it will not accept things as they are, but must devote its energies either to changing them or fleeing from them.” The successes of nihilism can’t be understood but through its primal Satanic will to negation and destruction. ‘Independence’ – ‘Freedom’ – ‘Righteous’ indignation at the ‘injustices’ and ‘tyranny’ demanded by the Father and His institutions?  These are the passions of the nihilist.  A love of truth is not amongst them.

Demolishing the doctrines and institutions isn’t necessary; they can be reinterpreted, once the faith of the Christian has been drained out of them.  Notre Dame is a tourist attraction – who am I to judge?  It is not the symbols or the bureaucracy which he hates, but the spirit which animates it.  Only by destroying these foundations can the nihilist ease his jealousy and guilty conscience, only by destroying the faith can he ‘prove’ that his belief is true.  Bolsheviks warred against Christians, not because they posed a political threat to the atheist state – but because they had the potential of disproving the Bolshevik faith. “Nihilism has failed so long as a true Christian faith remains in a single person.” Their existence proves the vanity of all the impressive worldly accomplishments which nihilism is capable of.  In a society steeped in nihilism, sound argumentation can do nothing; but a man of faith, by his mere presence and example, speaks to the heart.

Nihilism is a war against God and truth, but few nihilists are aware of this; the explicit theologians and philosophers are rare.  Most of its adherents mistake it for a rebellion against authority.  Corruption, abuses, and injustices are the pretext – but the ultimate aim (and the secret cause) is the desire to destroy authority itself. “Unprincipled politics and morality, undisciplined artistic expression, indiscriminate ‘religious experience’” – they are the direct consequences, the true goals, of applied nihilism.

The thinkers of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment were just as eager as modern philosophers to abandon theology, to base all knowledge and ethics off of the Book of Nature – but their ideas were so much grander than modern thinkers like Camus, for whom all is absurd except for eternal rebellion.  Have we been ‘disillusioned’ from the Christian context of the past?  Or have we fallen away from knowledge of the truth, so now all appears as a meaningless joke to our modern eyes?

The man who abandons truth, has nothing between himself and the abyss aside from his will.  This force of will accomplishes amazing feats in the physical world – and yet despite their accomplishments, they seem inexorably drawn into the abyss all the same.  The great feats of nihilists always turn towards self-destruction.

2. The Worship of Nothingness

The nothingness which the nihilist worships is entirely unlike the nirvana of Buddhism, or the balance of Zen – or of the ‘primordial chaos’ which is understood as the firmament in Eastern religions and our own pagan traditions (God has shown himself to all people, but only to his chosen in fullness).  The nihilist’s Nothingness is a fundamentally Christian concept.

Creatio ex nihilo – here is the great and unique claim of Christianity, that God made the world – not out of himself, not out of something pre-existing, not out of a slain giant – but out of nothing.  Nihilism fundamentally rejects this concept – and thus, it sees the created world as absurd.  Only a post-Christian – who once knew the answer to the question “Why?” – could be so disillusioned, now that he wills himself to disbelieve.  Impiety has always been a crime, in all places and all times; but the offence is proportional to the truth to which it is impious.  Impiety towards other religions brought nothing good – but in Christianity, having the whole of the truth, impiety brings absolute destruction.

This is the source of the nameless anxiety that infests so many men these days; that they sense their participation in a rebellion against the God who made them out of nothing.  The abyss is that nothingness from which God summoned us – and to which we return should we reject Him.

But not all feel anxiety and despair; some are filled with a Satanic energy, a desire to drag all of creation down into the abyss with them.  Thus, their great accomplishments all lead to their own destruction – and through this, they testify to the existence of the truth which they so vehemently deny.

The incredibly faith of our ancestors cannot disappear overnight; God was everywhere, and society was built to honour him – the corpse of this faith still remains, and so the nihilistic attacks it with vehemence.  But who is to be the successor of God?  Instead of living in God, we will live in the void – in nothing.  After all that’s been happening over recent centuries we can no longer pretend that God is on the side of the revolution – the modern nihilist must full embrace the conviction that God does not belong in our new world.

The absurd is the new truth: if nothingness is at the center of the world, then the world becomes incoherent.  Without God, there is no point of orientation – no up or down, right or wrong, true or false.  It is a world of discontinuity and jointlessness.  This is the world willed by Satan; the vast intellect behind this operation.

IV. The Nihilist Program

“War against God, issuing in the proclamation of the reign of nothingness, which means the triumph of incoherence and absurdity, the whole plan presided over by Satan: this, in brief, is the theology and the meaning of Nihilism.” Of course, no mortal being can embrace the full nothingness of a creature from the pit; this is why it’s always couched in bringing forth some ‘New Order’.  We must look behind these claims to see what their plans truly are.

1. The Destruction of the Old Order

Traditionalism is connected to the earth, to truth, it erects monuments to God’s glory, and places limits on man’s freedom, and reminds him of where he came from.  This must be destroyed before nihilism can progress, lest we be reminded of who we once were; thus the nihilist’s ‘virtue’ of violence.  Numerous quotes from leading communists calling violence a core principle of their politics are listed by Fr. Seraphim, and I can think of several others.

Nazism and Communism were the chief incarnations of this violence; the former all the more so by its failure.  “Communism can’t be as bad as Nazism,” the churl thinks; when in fact both systems were dedicated to destroying the ‘bourgeois’ values which ‘chained’ Europeans (this statement is a paraphrase of Goebbels, as well as Marx).  The wreckage which was left in Germany after WWII – first because of the bombs, second because of the cultural destruction wrought by war guilt – is the manifest result of nihilist violence.  Not just in Germany, either, but in all of Western Europe.  But this phase is done; even at the time of his writing in the late 1970s, the Bolsheviks had calmed down.  With the past destroyed, the nihilists can move to their next target.

2. The Making of the New Earth

What comes in between the Revolution of Destruction and the promised Utopia?  In the East they called it the Dictatorship of the Proletariat; here, they call it Democracy and Consumerism.

Fr. Seraphim is incredibly insightful here – he calls out the degenerate systems in the West which have only started to become obvious to even a minority of us today.  He describes it as ‘simplification’, and I’m reminded of 1984’s New Speak – a language intentionally dumbed down, to prevent crimethink.  Or of Brave New World’s rigid caste system, and entertainment (distraction) venues.  To put it another way, both the East and the West are looking for the lowest common denominator; the one-size-fits-all tunic.  Soylent and Marvel Movies; the ‘Chinese audience phenomenon, where entertainment has to be bleached of all unique cultural referents so that it can be sold on the overseas market.  In being ‘liberated’ from God, we are reduced to nothing but Human Resources.

In the West, a frantic pursuit of progress; in the East, a hatred of imagined enemies.  In both, a spiritual emptiness which lingers inside, and must be distracted from with drugs, entertainment, and party slogans – each of which blends into the others, with no clear demarcation in between.  In both, latent resentment of the God we dethroned; dissatisfaction with life, that we then blame on the ‘oppressiveness’ of a church and patriarchy which haven’t held power in decades.  Birth control – architecture – sterility – functionality – the welfare state: “Some of the apologies for such schemes approach perilously near a strange kind of lucid insanity, wherein precision of detail and technique are united to an appalling insensitivity to the inhuman end these schemes serve.”

Lenin describes the goal of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat: “the whole of society will have become one office and one factory, with equal work and equal pay.” One suspects that these are the goals of most present day Silicon Valley CEOs as well.

The ultimate point of all of this: to constantly remind men that their only task is production, and their only refuge is in worldly goods.  A despotism of worldliness.

3. Fashioning of the New Man

The above isn’t the ultimate goal, however; it’s simply the preparation: the structures put in place to create the New Man; the Soviet Man; the Corporate Man; the Übermensch.

Note the tool used to fashion these new men: violence.  The hard violence of the gulag; the soft violence of diversity seminars.  The same tool used to create the New Earth.  The medium is the message.  The new man is rootless, and full of nervous excitability; the grown-up version of an abused child.  The raw material of a demagogue’s dreams.  He is a skeptic, who will believe in anything but the truth; a seeker, endlessly jumping onto new fads; a man of rights, who expects nothing to be denied of him; the rebel, who listens to no-one, but demands that his opinions be respected.  In the present year this phenomenon is accelerating; that which used to be unthinkable has now become mandatory (gay marriage, trans kids, blasphemy, pornography), and even supposed conservatives lack a stable foundation; I’ve watched many of them shift with the cultural breeze over the past two decades.

“These men are all one man, the man whose fashioning has been the very purpose of Nihilism.”

V. Beyond Nihilism

The previous depiction of the New Man was fundamentally negative – and justifiably so.  But what about the other side of the coin?  Alongside the broken visages of the depraved, there are those who are full of new hope; who wish to spread the gospel of humanism, of peace, of libertarianism to the world.  What of them?

Let us first describe the nature of the faith and hope which animates them:

• The righting of the political order,
• To enable human freedom and industry,
• The exploration of space in a techno-utopia,
• Conquering the economy through e-commerce,
• Mastering the ins and outs of the dating market,
• Uncovering the illuminati conspiracy which underlies the prison planet, and;
• Fame and popularity on social media.

All of these are wordly faiths and hopes.  They are the goods of the world which inevitably pass away, and when pursued with single-minded devotion are actively harmful to the soul.  Their optimistic pursuit of the material is yet further evidence of nihilism’s success.  Inevitably, their visions are forced to accept the previous victories of nihilism; to include homosexuals on Star Trek, and to make sure their YouTube channel is diverse and inclusive.  They might champion old values such Libertarianism, while embracing a wide swath of modern values that their Libertarian idols of yesteryear would have found repugnant.  Bring this up, and a disinterested shrug of the shoulders is all you’ll get.

The New Man has passed the stage of rejecting God’s Truth.  He has neither the Realist’s vehemence, nor the Vitalist’s scorn.  He is so consumed with the world that he’s grown disinterested in anything else.

But the god of nihilism is emptiness; nothingness.  It is not a god that can be worshipped, but a place where man hopes a new god will manifest.  And so – man will make of himself a god.  Those who through luck or guile manage to reach the pinnacles of society will try and become that which speaks order into being – and in the process, they’ll realize just how corruptible and petty the human will can be.  The ‘solution’ to nihilism is not something better – but something incomparably worse.  They believe it will be a transit into a new existence; Nietzsche’s “transvaluation of all values.” As Dostoyevsky described with his character Kirillow: “…then they will divide history into two parts: from the gorilla to the annihilation of God, and from the annihilation of God to the transformation of the earth, and of man physically.” Nietzsche again: “The “murder” of God is a deed too great to leave men unchanged: Shall we not ourselves have to become gods, merely to seem worthy of it?” Kirillov: “…if there is no God, then I am God.” It is an apocalyptic, millenialist movement, which dreams of some indescribable human perfection, once the apparatus of the dollar and the proletariat have withered away.

In a world balanced on the edge of chaos, it is tempting to view the optimists as heroes; Fr. Seraphim warned of this at the beginning of the book.  But absent the rock of faith, they too will go astray; and when the best go astray, they don’t become second-best – they become the worst.  Marx, Proudhon, and Nietzsche are full of great genius and fervour… but it is the nobility of Lucifer.  Their future is the reign of the Antichrist: a worldly version of Heaven; the Satanic inversion and imitation of the Kingdom of God.

It is clear, to Fr. Seraphim, and to many of us today, that the past 200 years have been a very successful war for the forces of Satan; that they are close to victory.  But what can victory look like, given the tools which they use to wage it?  Just as there is harmony in living the Godly life, there is an inverted sort of harmony in the Satanic.  On the one hand, you have patience, humility, meekness, obedience, peace, joy, love, kindness, and forgiveness; on the other you have hatred, pride, rebelliousness, discord, violence, and unscrupulous use of power.  For nihilism to win is to eradicate the former, for the sake of the latter.  It will not be the overcoming of nihilism which follows… but its culmination.

So what, then, are we to do?

Nihilism is primarily a spiritual disorder; and so, it can only be overcome through spiritual means.

It is ironic that, to the modern nihilist, Christianity can seem nihilistic; for the world is nothing to the Christian, God is all; the inverse of the nihilist worldview, where the God is nothing and the world is all.  He places his faith in things which pass away, so no matter how fervent his optimism, it will eventually fail.  His dream ends as entropic dust.  Even if presented with Heaven, he would rage and seek to destroy it – and so he finds his ultimate end through the Antichrist, and in Hell.

God may be fought, but he cannot be conquered; existence cannot be escaped.  Those who reject him shall eternally endure in that rejection.  The Liberal thinks this a sadistic fantasy – a ploy to opiate the masses.  But what more fitting end for the Nihilist, who places his will above his creator?  Why have they made the earth an image of Hell, if they do not want to live there?  His love is torment in this life – and in the next.

“Nothing less than Hell is worthy of man, if he be not worthy of Heaven.”

Final Thoughts

Fr. Seraphim echoes many of our ‘new’ schools of thought which have grown over the past ten years – he points out the exact same problems, and makes the exact same predictions.  But more than this, he demonstrates the ontological error underlying it all; the abandonment of Christian Truth and God.

But more than that, he points towards the solution: “Nihilism has failed so long as a true Christian faith remains in a single person.” Should every man embrace nihilism, this world would become Hell; if not metaphysically, at the very least it would be indistinguishable.  When all men degrade into solipsistic, relative truth – when every conversation is an attempt to gain power over the other, and inflict pain for pain’s sake – when none can humble themselves to things grander than themselves – at that point the experiment is over, and the human race won’t have long for the planet.

And yet – Logos is Rising.  By merely affirming what is True, living humbly, and showing kindness, the true Christian causes paroxysms of agony in demon and nihilist alike.  Holding to the light of truth humiliates them and their shoddy works.  Where once Fr. Seraphim was restricted to a small audience of philosophers and theologians, the ground is now fertile; I’m sure that many of you have had similar thoughts to his already.

By holding to the Absolute – by proclaiming God’s Glory – we act as tethers for this reality, we prevent it from slipping into the abyss, and the Devil cannot overcome.  The nihilists have chosen Hell; let us embrace God’s graces so that we might find ourselves in Heaven.