Lecture 10.
New Religion.
Passages from Nietzsche Lecture of 1980 appear
in a different type face.
A. Introduction.
1.
Having seen the outward progress of the Revolution
of modern
times, now we turn to deeper spiritual-philosophical
causes of it
-- what happened in the human soul to make
it want Revolution
that seems to make so little sense, be so
impossible?
What is
theology of Revolution?
2.
End of 18th century is end of Old Order -- age
of stability, human
institutions and art and culture based on
at least remnant of
Christianity and Christian feeling.
Outbreak of Revolution
coincides with end of civilization.
For 200 years we have been in a
new age, a seeking for a new order.
B. Crisis of knowledge -- end of rationalism
1.
Since Middle Ages, Rationalism reduces sphere
of knowledge
as it criticizes every tradition, spiritual
realm, myth except
outward world.
2.
With Hume, reason goes as far as it can go
-- destroys all certain
knowledge even of outward world.
He said we can know only
what we experience.
Thus, against miracles; then, even natural
religion: Randall 300.
That the divinity may possibly be endowed
with attributes which we have
never seen exerted; may be governed by principles
of action, which we cannot
discover to be satisfied: all this will freely
be allowed.
But still this is mere
possibility and hypothesis.
We never can have reason to infer any attributes,
or any
principles of action in him, but so far as
we know them to have been exerted and
satisfied.
Are there any marks of a distributive justice
in the world?
If you answer
in the affirmative, I answer that, since justice
here exerts itself, it is satisfied.
If you
reply in the negative, I conclude, that you
have then no reason to ascribe justice, in
our sense of it, to the gods.
If you hold a medium between affirmation and
negation, by saying, that the justice of the
gods, at present, exerts itself in part, but
not in its full extent: I answer, that you
have no reason to give it particular extent,
but only so far as you see it at present exert
itself.
cliii
No argument for the existence of God: 301.
[Randall, p. 310] Having thus disposed of
the rational basis for faith in the
moral governance of the world, Hume went on,
in his Dialogues, to show that there
could not even be any argument for the existence
of an all-wise and all-good
Creator.
There is no necessity of the universe having
had a first cause.
It is as easy
to conceive of it as self-existent and eternal
as to assume an external cause with
those qualities.
There is no analogy between an object in the
world, like a watch,
and the entire world; we have seen watches
made, but not worlds.
Order may be as
natural as chaos, and hence harmony and universal
law need no further reason for
their existence, other than that we find them
to obtain.
From a finite world as effect
we could assume at the most only a finite
cause.
If the universe did indeed have an
author, he may have been an incompetent workman,
or he may have long since
died after completing his work, or he may
have been a male and a female god, or a
great number of gods.
He may have been entirely good, or entirely
evil, or both, or
neither -- probably the last.
cliv
Holbach went further: materialism 302.
Is it not more natural and more intelligible
to derive everything which
exists from the bosom of matter, whose existence
is demonstrated by every one of
our senses, whose effects we each instant
experience, which we see acting,
moving, communicating motion and generation
ceaselessly, than to attribute the
formation of things to an unknown force, to
a spiritual being which cannot develop
from its nature what it is not itself, and
which, by the spiritual essence attributed
to
it is incapable of doing anything and of setting
anything in motion?
clv
3.
But Hume goes further: undermine even knowledge
of facts.
Brinton paper 2-6; then p. 1 on chill.
Man has two sorts of perceptions...distinguishable
by their varying
liveliness and forcibleness; and there are
two sorts of knowledge which correspond
to them.
On the one hand there is immediate sensation,
present experience -- what
he calls impressions; from these we obtain
knowledge of matters of fact.
Then,
there are our less lively impressions -- our
ideas -- from which we come to know
the relations of ideas.
Our ideas are without exception derived from
our
impressions, and the only power of our minds
is in compounding, transposing,
augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded
us by the
senses and experience.
clvi Our ideas, then, are more feeble, decidely
secondary --
certainly not a source of knowledge in the
practical affairs of ethics, politics,
economics, which, in a secular outlook such
as that prevailing in the eighteenth
century, are the principle concerns of man.
(No more, of course, can they tell us
anything about God or any other such transcendental
object beyond the experience
of man.)
Knowledge of the relations of ideas tells
us only about those ideas, not
about the primary impressions from which they
are derived.
Knowledge here is
certain -- because it is subjective.
If we examine the way in which our mind works
we can discover how it orders and relates
the ideas presented to it; but the
subjective working of our mind has nothing
to do with that external reality which
we seek most of all to know.
Our inquiry, then, into useful knowledge,
must have to do exclusively
with our impressions,...
[Transcript text begins in middle of Fr.
Seraphim’s “Brinton paper” quote]
“...what we can know about the outer world,
...deal only with what he
called impressions, “„matters of fact.’”
“First of all,” we must acknowledge that
we cannot know what things are
“„in themselves.’”
We do not have knowledge of the “external
entities which are
presented to our senses, but only of the images
of those things.
All we can know is
what we perceive and since all external objects
must be seen through our senses,
all we can know are those objects” not as
they are in themselves, but as they are
“seen through our senses.
What we see is not a tree, but” only “the
image of a tree
as our sense of sight modifies it in taking
it up into its perception.
When we back
away from it, it is not the tree that becomes
smaller but the perception of it in our
minds.
And when we press our eyeballs in a certain
way, it is not the tree that
becomes double, but the image of it” which
“is all we can know of it.”
So “to begin with...we must realize that
even our knowledge of matters of
fact has a great deal of subjectivity in it.”
But now we must look to see if there’s
any objectivity at all in our knowledge.
“...The next question we will ask” about
these impressions “is how do we
come to know them?
Beyond the evidence of the immediate sense-testimony
and
the memory” of this sense testimony, “there
is only” one thing, one “relation,”
which is “cause and effect.
When confronted with a certain cause, we expect
a
certain effect; and much of our daily experience
is based upon the regularity of
this relationship” between causes and effects.
“But here again, if we search for
certainty we are bound to be disappointed:
there is no necessary connection
between cause and effect; we infer such a
connection through experience of
constant conjunction of two events.
Thus, whenever I put my hand into a flame,
I
experience pain; but this will not necessarily
happen each...time I do” it, because
we have no knowledge that there’s a certain
connection between these two
events.
And so he says, “„The contrary of every
matter of fact is still possible;
because it can never imply a contradiction,
and’” it “„is conceived by the mind
with the same facility and distinctness, as
if ever so conformable to reality.’clvii”
That is, it could happen as far as we know,
that I put my hand in the flame and it
will not experience pain.
“But how then do we infer this necessary
connection
between cause and effect?”
And he says that it’s only “by custom
or habit.
„All
inferences from experience[, therefore,] are
effects of custom, not of reasoning.
Custom, then, is the great guide of human
life.
It is that principle alone which
renders our experiences useful to us and makes
us expect, for the future, a similar
train of events with those which have appeared
in the past.’clviii”
“But what, then, is left” of knowledge
and “of the certain, absolute
knowledge” which the philosophers of the
eighteenth century thought they had?
The answer according to
Hume: “Nothing,” whatsoever.
“Reason is a subjective faculty which has
no
necessary relation with the „facts’ we
seek to know.
It is limited to tracing the
relations of our ideas”, which “themselves”
are already twice “removed from
„reality.’
And our senses are equally subjective, for
they can never know the
„thing in itself,’ only an image of it
which has in it no element of necessity and
certainty -- „the contrary of every matter
of fact is still possible.’”
So he says, “„Do you follow the instincts
and propensities of nature in
ascending to the veracity, the truthfulness
of sense?
But these lead you to believe
that the very perception or sensible image
is the external object.’”
Which, of
course, is not true; it is not.
It’s only an image in our mind.
“„Do you disclaim
this principle, in order to embrace a more
rational opinion that the perceptions are
only representations of something external?’”
But here you “„depart from your
natural propensities and more obvious sentiments;
and’” still you “„are not able to
satisfy your reason, which can never find
any convincing argument from
experience to prove, that these perceptions
are connected with any external
objects.’clix” And so, knowledge is dissolved.
And what, then, is the answer?
How do we live, according to Hume?
And
here’s his answer: “„The great subverter
of...the excessive principles of skepticism
is action, and employment, and the occupations
of common life.
These principles
may flourish and triumph in the schools,...
But as soon as they leave the shade, and
by the presence of the real objects, which
actuate our passions, and sentiments, are
put into opposition to the more powerful principles
of our nature, they vanish like
smoke, and leave the most determined skeptic
in the same condition as other
mortals.’clx”clxi
Well, it’s very nice for him to say because
he was a very comfortable
English gentleman.
He had his fireplace, cozy warm nook, country
house.
And in
fact wrote his history of England and was
concerned about practical things; and
this philosophy did not upset him terribly.
But the poor people who read this and
take it seriously and have a real sort of
passion to know what they can know and
they believe in reason, for them the whole
universe is destroyed.
In fact, that’s one
deep thing in our modern thinkers for the
last two hundred years, this sort of
despair at ever being able to know anything,
which sort of dissolves the fabric of
their
life....
You’re going to believe in philosophy and
sort of start reasoning things
through, you want to come to the truth, and
you get up against Hume and thinkers
like that.
[From Nietzsche 1980 lecture:]...this change
which occurred between
eighteenth century and, that is, from the
time when Hume criticized reality, that
reality is not quite as secure as we thought.
[end of addition]
And all of a sudden the whole world sort of
dissolves and the next thing
you know, you are wondering, “Do I, do I
exist?
Does the world exist?”
“What is
what?”
And you can actually kill yourself if you
start thinking like that and take it
really seriously.
And, of course, people have killed themselves
over that.
Others
have overthrown philosophy and gone up to
start burning down buildings because
that’s something real, you know, action.
He says “Action.”
For him action means
sitting around, and smoking his pipe and writing
English history.
Somebody else, that is, if they don’t have
that education, that desire, for them
action means revolution, burning things up,
killing people.
And so, with justice, one of the writers on
the philosophy of the
Enlightenment has the following thing to say
about Hume.
Carl Becker is his
name.
He wrote a book called The Heavenly City of
the EighteenthCentury
Philosophers.
And this Carl Becker describes all these philosophers
and progress
and so forth, and then he comes to Hume.
And he says when you read Hume, after
reading all the other philosophers, it’s
as though at high noon of the great age of
Enlightenment, all of a sudden there’s a
cloud, a chill, some kind of a strange thing
comes to, you begin to wonder what, I thought
everything was just fine, it’s all
sunny and warm.
“To read Hume’s Dialogues after having
read, with sympathetic
understanding, the earnest deists and optimistic
philosophers of the early century,
is to experience a slight chill, a feeling
of apprehension.
It is as if, at high noon of
the Enlightenment, at the hour of the siesta
when everything seems to be so quiet
and secure all about, one were suddenly aware
of the short, sharp slipping of the
foundations, a faint far-off tremor running
underneath the solid ground of common
sense.”clxii
All of a sudden you feel this chill.
There’s something cold and dark on the
horizon about to come up, because the ideas
of Hume destroyed reality.
No more is
it possible to believe, that is, can we simply
accept reality the way it is.
Throw God
out and we will have indefinite progress in
this world.
And Hume destroyed the
idea that the world is stable.
He said we can never know the world the way
it is
because cause and effect is only a part of
the custom.
And there’s no law in
science.
All you have is custom.
There’s nothing objective or absolute about
it.
He
himself didn’t become a prophet of any new
religion, but he has left his ideas there.
Of course, this would later produce a great
earthquake in our own times.
There’re a lot of now modern academic historians
who like eighteenth
century a lot because it’s full of optimism.
It was the time of great music, Bach and
Handel, and the philosophy was also very optimistic.
The poetry was very upbeat
and everything was very positive.
There was nothing but good to come from the
future, indefinite progress.
And so this revolutionary age of the eighteenth
century preceding the
Revolution begins with great optimism and
even the people who make the
Revolution also begin with great optimism,
not realizing that by the end of the
century, the most advanced philosophers have
just destroyed any possibility for
any real knowledge of the external world.
And it takes time for deep ideas like that
to filter down into the people, but when they
do, we’ll see it produces disastrous
effects.
Kant.
Now we’ll come to the thinker who is at
this very time, the beginning of the
revolutionary age, who stands between this
old world of rationalistic philosophy
when philosophers still thought they could
reason to certain conclusions, even
though they kept changing conclusions, and
our new age when all of knowledge
becomes uncertain.
And this thinker has a very key place because
he performed
what he called, what has been called, the
Copernican Revolution of philosophy.
And his name is Immanuel Kant, who lived 1724
to 1804.
We already saw that the very beginning of
modern philosophy with
Descartes had begun not with some kind of
outward observation or revelation; it
began already with some kind of subjectivism.
That is, when Descartes said: “I
think, therefore I am,” this is the first
clear idea and from this, he deduces
everything else -- the outward world, God
and absolutely everything because if
there is something, then the world is real.
If there’s a real world, then there must
be
a God who created it.
And he has clear, distinct ideas about all
these realities and
thinks he has a nice, tight philosophical
system.
But it all begins with his own
observation of himself, which of course shows
how far away he is from
Christianity, which starts with God Who created
the world and created us.
But
since they trust reason as the only faculty
which can give us knowledge, they
cannot start with God because you do not see
God.
And so it happens that when these rationalists,
particularly Hume, succeed
in destroying our knowledge of God, of religion,
of the spiritual world and then
even of the material world, what is left?
And the answer: what is left is the same,
some kind of self-awareness.
And so the last hope that man has that there
is some
kind of knowledge rests in his own awareness
of himself.
And this is what Kant
did.
He made a Copernican revolution by saying
that it is not the mind which
revolves around the world, in order to know
what it is; it is rather the world which
revolves around me, around the mind.
We can never know what is out there, the
thing in itself, the noumenon he calls it,
but we can only know it as it appears to us;
and such categories of reality as space and
time are not categories of outward
reality, but rather, of my mind; that is,
I must see them in terms of space and mind.
These are the categories which my mind organizes
a reality with.
And of course, if
this is true, there is some kind of knowledge
left.
Not as reality as it is in itself, but
reality as it must appear to me because I
have that kind of mind.
And so,
knowledge is possible.
And even knowledge of God is possible because
he says
that it’s based on inward feeling, subjective
feeling, which shows how much he
was under the influence of the Pietist movement
of his time which was reacting
against the Enlightenment rationalism, the
deadness of it.
But reality in itself is
absolutely unknowable.
Only what I see is knowable.
We have here observations on this by Heinrich
Heine, a German Jew, who
came to France because it was too dangerous
in Germany and wrote this book on
Religion and Philosophy in Germany in 1833
or 4, and got ahold of the feeling
behind these thinkers very nicely and communicated
what their meaning is.
He was
trying to interpret German philosophy to the
French.
And this is what he has to say
about Kant:
“I am about to speak of a man whose mere
name has the might of an
exorcism; I speak of Immanuel Kant.
“It is said that night-wandering spirits
are filled with terror at sight of the
headman’s axe.
With what mighty fear, then, must they be
stricken when there is
held up to them Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason.
This is the sword that slew Deism in Germany.
“To speak frankly, you French have been
tame and moderate compared
with us Germans.
At most you could but kill a king, and he
had already lost his
head before you guillotined him.
For accompaniment to such deeds you must
needs cause
such a drumming and shrieking and stamping
of feet that the whole universe
trembled.
To compare Maximilian Robespierre with Immanuel
Kant is to confer
too high an honor upon the former.
Maximilian Robespierre, the great citizen
of the
Rue Saint Honoré, had, it is true, his sudden
attacks of destructiveness when it was
a question of the monarchy, and his frame
was violently convulsed when the fit of
regicidal epilepsy was on; but as soon as
it came to be a question about the
Supreme Being, he wiped the white froth from
his lips, washed the blood from his
hands, donned his blue Sunday coat with silver
buttons, and stuck a nosegay into
the bosom of his broad vest.”clxiii
He went to Notre Dame to worship Reason and
God and even to burn the
image of atheism.
“The history of Immanuel Kant’s life is
difficult to portray, for he had
neither life nor history.
He led a mechanical, regular, almost abstract
bachelor
existence in a little retired street of Konigsberg,
an old town on the northeastern
frontier of Germany.
I do not believe that the great clock of the
cathedral
performed in a more passionless and methodical
manner its daily routine, than did
its townsman Immanuel Kant.
Rising in the morning, coffee-drinking, writing,
reading lectures, dining, walking, everything
had its appointed time, and the
neighbors knew that it was exactly half-past
three o’clock when Immanuel
Kant stepped forth from his house in his grey
tight-fitting coat with his Spanish
cane in his hand, and betook himself to the
little linden avenue called after him to
this day the “Philosopher’s Walk.”
Summer and winter he walked up and down it
eight times, and when the weather was dull
or heavy clouds prognosticated rain,
the townspeople beheld his servant, the old
Lampe, trudging anxiously behind him
with a big umbrella under his arm, like an
image of Providence.
“What a strange contrast did this man’s
outward life present to his
destructive world-annihilating thoughts!
In sooth, had the citizens of Konigsberg
had the least presentiment of the full significance
of his ideas, they would have felt
a far more awful dread at the presence of
this man than at the sight of an
executioner, who can but kill the body.
But the worthy folk saw in him nothing
more than a Professor of Philosophy, and as
he passed at his customary hour, they
greeted him in a friendly manner and set their
watches by him.
“But though Immanuel Kant, the arch-destroyer
in the realm of thought, far
surpassed in terrorism Maximilian Robespierre,
he had many similarities with the
latter, which induce a comparison between
the two men.
In the first place, we find
in both the same inexorable, keen, poesyless,
sober integrity.
We likewise find in
both the same talent of suspicion, only that
in the one it manifested itself in the
direction of thought and was called criticism,
whilst in the other it was directly
against mankind and was styled republican
virtue.
But both presented in the
highest degree the type of the narrow-minded
citizen.
Nature had destined them
for weighing out coffee and sugar, but fate
decided they should weigh out other
things, and into the scales of the one it
laid a king, into the scales of the other,
a
God....
And they both gave the correct weight!”clxiv
“Kant proves to us that we know nothing
about things as they are in and by
themselves, but that we have a knowledge of
them only in so far as they are
reflected in our minds....”clxv
“Not without reason, therefore, did he compare
his philosophy to the
method of Copernicus.
Formerly, when men conceived the world as
standing still
and the sun as revolving around it, astronomical
calculations failed to agree
accurately, but when Copernicus made the sun
stand still and the earth revolve
around it, behold! everything accorded admirably.
So formerly reason, like the
sun, moved round the universe of phenomena,
and sought to throw light upon it.
But Kant bade reason, the sun, stand still,
and the universe of phenomena now
turns round, and is illuminated the moment
it comes within the region of the
intellectual orb.”clxvi
“God, according to Kant, is a noumen.
As a result of his argument, this
ideal and transcendental being, hitherto called
God, is a mere fiction.
It has arisen
from a natural illusion.
Kant shows that we can know nothing regarding
this
noumen, regarding God, and that all reasonable
proof of His existence is
impossible.
The words of Dante, „Leave all hope behind!’
may be inscribed over
this portion of the Critique of Pure Reason.”clxvii
But in the end “Immanuel Kant relents and
shows that he is not merely a
great philosopher but also a good man; he
reflects, and half good-naturedly, half
ironically, he says: „Old Lampe must have
a God, otherwise the poor fellow can
never be happy.
Now, man ought to be happy in this world;
practical reason says
so; -- well, I am quite willing that practical
reason should also guarantee the
existence of God.’
As the result of this argument, Kant distinguishes
between the
theoretical reason and the practical reason,
and by means of the latter, as with a
magician’s wand, he revivifies Deism which
theoretical reason had killed.”clxviii
Well, the function of Kant is to make systematic
what Hume had done with
his criticism, that is, to do away with knowledge
of the outer world and with God
-- in fact, to do away with God entirely.
And he restores God only on the basis of
our subjective feeling.
And that is why all the religious movements
from this time
on have a new character.
Because previously the idea of God is something
which
different people think they know by various
kinds of revelations, even when they
are wrong; but it’s about some Being who
is out there.
From this time on, a new kind of subjectivism
enters into philosophy and
religious currents.
And now we begin to think about, well, later
in this century we
have new thought: positive thinking, science
of mind, mind over matter -- all these
things which are to come direct from this
philosopher, not because his philosophy
itself sort of had direct influence -- of
course, it did in many places -- but because
he was expressing what was going through the
mind of people at that time: that is,
if you accept reason, you must follow him
this far that we have no knowledge at all
of outward things, and the only knowledge
comes through some kind of
subjectivism.
And as a result of this, the nineteenth century
issues forth in a tremendous
outburst of new subjective philosophies.
We will look at just one of these which in
itself is not particularly important, but
it shows what happens when a philosopher
takes seriously what this Kant says.
Fichte.
This philosopher is Fichte who lived about
the same time as Kant, who died
a little bit later.
F-I-C-H-T-E.
This is what Heinrich Heine has to say about
him.
“The question proposed by Fichte is: What
grounds have we for assuming
that our conceptions of objects correspond
with objects external to us?
And to this
question he offers the solution: All things
have reality only in our mind.”clxix
“That idealism pursued to its ultimate consequences
should end by denying
even the reality of matter,” as Fichte did,
“seemed, to the great mass of the public,
to be carrying the joke too far.
We” Germans “grew rather merry over the
Fichtean
Ego.”
His whole philosophy is concerning the Ego
and what it, how it makes reality for
itself.
“We grew rather merry over the Fichtean
Ego, which produced by its mere
thinking the whole external world.
The laughter of our wits was increased through
a misapprehension that became too popular
to permit my passing over it in
silence.
The great mass really supposed that the Ego
of Fichte was the Ego of
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and that this individual
Ego implied a negation of all other
existences.
What an impertinence! exclaimed the worthy
folk; this fellow does not
believe that we exist, we who are much more
corpulent than himself, and who, as
burgomasters and bailiffs, are actually his
superiors!
The ladies inquired, Does he
not at least believe in the existence of his
wife?
No!
And Madame Fichte suffers
this!“The Ego of Fichte, however, is not
the individual but the universal Ego,
the world-Ego awakened to self-consciousness.
The Fichtean process of thought is
not the thinking act of an individual, of
a certain person called Johann Gottlieb
Fichte; it is rather the universal thought
manifesting itself to an individual.
As we say, „It rains,’ „It lightens,’
and so on; so Fichte ought not to say, „I
think,’
but „it thinks,’ „the universal world-thought
thinks in me.’
“In a parallel between the French Revolution
and German philosophy I
once compared, more in jest than in earnest,
Fichte to Napoleon.
But there
are, in fact, certain remarkable analogies
between them.
After the Kantists
had accomplished their work of terrorism and
destruction, Fichte appeared,
as Napoleon appeared after the Convention
had demolished the whole past
by the help of another sort of Critique of
Pure Reason.
Napoleon and Fichte
represent the great inexorable Ego for which
thought and action are one; and
the colossal structures raised by both men
testify to a colossal will.
But
through the boundlessness of this will their
structures soon fall to the
ground, and both the „Theory of Knowledge’
and the Empire crumble to
pieces and disappear as quickly as they were
reared.
“The Empire is now nothing more than matter
of history, but the
commotion cause by the emperor in the world
has not yet calmed down and from
this commotion our present Europe draws its
vitality.
It is the same with the
philosophy of Fichte; it has completely perished,
but men’s minds are still agitated
by the thoughts that found a voice in Fichte,
and the after-effect of his teaching is
incalculable.”clxx Why?
Because now this subjectivism has entered
into the
mainstream of Western thought.
Worship of Self.
From this time on, a person who wished to
remain in this mainstream of
thought, cannot think of anything, he cannot
begin with anything but himself.
And
as we’ve already seen, this is the age of
fantastic egotism in all spheres: the artists,
the poets, the philosophers, the political
people -- they come up with fantastic
claims for themselves, as though men had really
come to believe that only I exist
and everything else is uncertain.
For example, even at the end of the century
Gustave Courbet, the painter,
could say, “I have no master; my master
is myself.
There is not, and never
has been any other painter other than myself.”clxxi
And you can talk to any
modern painter and he’ll tell you very similar
things.
He’s all so
preoccupied with his own genius, with what
he can say, that he just has no,
nothing else exists for him.
It’s all bound up with his own, his own
conception of art and reality.
A lot of artists think that way now; they’re
very
proud.
And he sort of expressed it in that way; it’s
in accordance with these
ideals of Kant: he was the center of the universe.
And so you can say that
once God has been dethroned in the eighteenth
century, they look for a new
god and Kant gave the new god, the new god
is...
Student: Demonic?
Fr.
S: No, well, just myself.
Myself.
And so, in the mainstream of Western thought,
we see the beginning of the
formation of a new deity, the Self.
The world previously went around God, and
now the world begins to go around the self.
And this idea will go very deep into
Western man.
Therefore we come to this problem, if there’s
a new god, what happens to the
old God?
But if there is this new deity being
formed, what happens to the old deity, that
is, the God of Christianity, Who lived
on in some form even in Protestantism and
the sects?
“God is Dead”
And we see in the early nineteenth century
first appears this idea that “God
is dead.”
And here we come to what we can call the first
dogma of the new religion
that is being formed, the religion underlying
this revolutionary dream, and this
dogma is called “The Death of God.”
This phrase that “God is dead,” is a very
important concept; it’s used by all existentialists
nowadays.
The phrase “death of
God”clxxii appears first, as far as we can
tell, in the writings of Josef DeMaistre,
the
great conservative who was defending Catholicism
against the revolution, in the
early years of the nineteenth century.
And he used this phrase to express the idea
[the enormity of the] of the rebellion against
God in the French Revolution; and he
said that the people who are rebelling against
society, against Christianity, against
the monarchy, against God -- they are actually
based upon the philosophy that
“God is dead,” and want to make a new
god.
In other words, Christianity is dying
and the new religion is coming to birth.
No one even particularly read this phrase.
It was not a influential page of his [DeMaistre’s]
writings.
So it’s not because they
read him, but they weren’t talking about
it.
Because this idea now begins to enter
into the consciousness of European man, the
man of the apostasy.
The idea that
God they used to have is now going away.
They were being deprived of God.
And we’ll see in this same Heine who was
a sort of romantic revolutionist
how he used -- this is about 1833 -- this
very phenomenon, which he sees still as a
process going on.
“A peculiar awe, a mysterious piety,”
he writes, “forbids our
writing more today.
Our heart is full of shuddering compassion:
it is the old
Jehovah himself that is preparing for death.
We have known Him so well from His
cradle in Egypt, where He was reared among
the divine calves and crocodiles, the
sacred onions, ibises and cats.
We have seen Him bid farewell to these companions
of his childhood and to the obelisks and sphinxes
of his native Nile, to become in
Palestine a little god-king amidst a poor
shepherd people, and to inhabit a templepalace
of his own.
We have seen him later coming into contact
with AssyrianBabylonian civilization, renouncing
his all-too-human passions, no longer giving
vent to fierce wrath and vengeance, at least
no longer thundering at every trifle.
We
have seen him migrate to Rome, the capital,
where he abjures all national
prejudices and proclaims the celestial equality
of all nations, and with such fine
phrases establishes an opposition to the old
Jupiter, and intrigues ceaselessly till he
attains supreme authority, and from the Capitol
rules the city and the world, urban
et orbam.
We have seen how, growing still more spiritualized,
he becomes a loving
father, a universal friend of man, a benefactor
of the world, a philanthropist; but all
this could avail him nothing!
“Hear ye not the bells resounding?
Kneel down.
They are bringing the
sacraments to a dying god!”clxxiii
Of course, this is the idea that enters now
into these advanced minds who
sense very quickly the spirit of the times.
What they mean to say is Christianity is
dying; a new religion is being born; and,
to symbolize a new religion, of course, a
new god is being born.
But the old God now must die; that is, Christianity,
the
whole idea of Christianity, centering around
the God of Christianity, is now dying
off.
Nietzsche.
Later in the century this very idea attained
its most powerful [maximum]
expression in a very important thinker for
us whose name is Friedrich Nietzsche.
N-I-E-T-Z-S-C-H-E, who lived 18, I think,
54 to1900.
The last ten years of his life
he was insane, [and] finally was found in
the streets of Naples, I believe, crying,
“I am Antichrist.”clxxiv And they finally
had to put him away.
His sister and his
mother took care of him.
Nietzsche [had] a very romantic temperament
very open to all kinds of
higher ideas, struggle, sentimental.
In his youth he was a Protestant seminary
student and came to hate Christianity because
he saw in it the principle of
weakness which, of course, was true because
Luther had taken out of Christianity
the idea of struggle and left it something
very weak which does not satisfy either
the mind or the heart, something which could
be totally dry and rational on the one
hand, or totally sentimental on the other
hand.
Nietzsche could see no one who was
struggling, no great ascetics, no heroes of
Christianity; and from that he concluded
that the whole of Christianity was a monstrous
farce, a deception practiced upon
humanity that does not satisfy the reason
which wants Truth; and this is full of
superstition because he is full of the idea
you can only know what is rational and
therefore he rejects everything above the
rational; on the other hand, it says
nothing to the heart because it becomes so
watered down that it is feeble.
And he
saw it was simply a way of keeping people
quiet and satisfied with their lot and he
said that was for the herds.
And out of his rejection of Christianity he
developed the idea that there are
going to be strong people who are going to
be ruthless and barbarous and who are
going to take over whole countries and rule
the world.
Of course, Hitler
deliberately said, “I am the Superman.”clxxv
[H]e brought out the sister of
Nietzsche, who was still alive 1933, and even
got [her] to pose with him and to
say, “Yes, you are the Superman my brother
was talking about.”
And Hitler made
her one of the honored members of his realm
because he was the Superman that
Nietzsche prophesied.
Of course, Nietzsche would have admired his
ruthlessness, but would have
considered him also part of this same herd
mentality because he was looking for
some real, tremendous figure, some world leader
who was completely ruthless,
completely strong, totally removed from all
superstitions but a very noble person,
because Nietzsche himself was filled with
the highest natural instincts for nobility
and struggle.
He was a great student of Greek literature
and one of his first books
talks about the Dionysian element in Greece
-- because until his time people
regarded Greece as the home of the classical
tradition of the Apollo -- and he said
no, that Greece was also filled with this
striving, this romantic feeling which he
symbolized by Dionysius.
And that was what he wanted, to be like Dionysius,
constantly striving, struggling for something
higher.
Here he mentions the changing human institutions,
the rise of capitalism,
different ideas in morality, enforce the faith
you have in evolution.
“The concept
that an organism reacting to and acting upon
a complex environment evolves is
now basic.
All ideas and institutions are today thought
to be primarily social
products functioning in social groups and
spring from some necessity of effecting
some kind of adaptation between human nature
and its environment.
All the fields
of human interest have undergone this general
sociologizing and psychologizing
tendency.
The example of religion and theology will
be a sufficient illustration.
Whereas the eighteenth century thought of
religion and theology as a deductive
and demonstrable set of propositions, men
now consider religion as primarily a
social product, a way of life springing from
a social organization of men’s religious
experiences, and theology as a rationalization
of certain fundamental feelings and
experiences of human nature.
We no longer prove the existence of God.
We talk
rather of the meaning of God in human experience.
We no longer demonstrate the
future life, we investigate the effect of
the belief in immortality upon human
conduct.”clxxvi
We see here very clearly that this is the
next stage beyond Hume who
destroyed all these things; you can no longer
believe in those old ideas and this is
the next stage which has nothing to do with
scientific discovery -- this is simply
what is in the air.
Once reason continues its march, it will end
at its own suicide.
But his [Nietzsche’s] ideas are extremely
powerful because he caught the
spirit of the times and proclaimed a new gospel
which he puts in various forms but
most powerfully in his book called Thus Spake
Zarathustra.
It was after Zoroaster,
that is, a pagan and all this religion of
fire-worship, based upon the teaching of
Zoroaster, who’s the eighth century B.C
or so.
He uses this just as a literary device
to express a new prophet, who is speaking
to the new mankind.
He wrote a book
called Thus Spake Zarathustra which is, Zarathustra,
he takes this ancient pagan,
actually he was a man who lived and became
like a god with this religion,
Zoroasterism.
And he used him like a “prophet” for this
new religion of his.
And
he was the one who took up this phrase that
DeMaistre earlier had used that “God
is dead.”clxxvii
He says in this book, Nietzsche, N-I-E-T-Z-S-C-H-E,
in his book Thus
Spake Zarathustra, this prophet, so-called
“prophet” says, “There is no truth.
There is no absolute state of affairs, no
thing
in itself.”clxxviii And this is what he
calls Nihilism.
Here we see quite clearly this idea, “God
is dead.”clxxix He expressed this in
two ways: one by saying, “God is dead,”
and one by saying, “There is no truth.”
These are two aspects of the same thing.
And we see Hume and Kant destroyed
both God and the very idea of truth.
Now there must be a new god, a new idea of
truth.
He even says in one place, “You talk always
about truth, but what if there is
no truth?
Then what sweet forbidden flowers grow beside
the highway of life.”clxxx
Which, of course, in our time we’ve tasted
those sweet flowers.
If there is no God,
there’s no death, and it is no immortality,
this is what happens.
As
Nietzsche says, “There is no truth.
There is no absolute state of affairs, no
thing
in itself.
This alone is nihilism and of most extreme
kind.”clxxxi
Again he says, (asks the question) “What
does Nihilism mean?
-- That the
highest values are losing their value.
There is no goal.
There is no answer to the
question „Why?’”clxxxii All the questions
which the human mind asks, “Why am I
here?”, “Where does it all come from?”,
“What’s this life about?”, “What does
it
end in?”, “Is there life after death?”
And he says there’s no answer.
There’s nothing
out there.
There’s no absolute.
There’s no God.
There’s no answer to your
questions.
Nihilism is this very spirit which animates
the revolutionaries: turn
everything to nothing.
Destroy; let nothing be left.
Wipe it all out.
And Nietzsche
is the philosopher of this.
He expresses quite poetically this phenomenon
of the “death of God.”
Kant was
very a rationalist, abstract and simply expressed
what was in the minds of people
at that time, what you must think like if
you are to be in the main tradition of
Europe.
Remember what Kant said?
The thing in itself, we can’t know what
it is, that
reality out there.
And he says there simply is no thing in itself.
There is no truth.
There is no absolute.
In other words, he’s totally influenced
by Hume.
And he
[Nietzsche] sees that Kant does not solve
the problem.
But Nietzsche was a poet.
In fact, he wrote some very lovely poems;
these are on the dark side of life, deep
mittern, midnight, and this loneliness, and
so forth.
And he expressed very
poetically this new reality in human life,
in the life of the people of this apostasy.
He says, “The „death of God’ had begun
„to cast its first shadows over
Europe’; and though „the event itself
is far too great, too remote, too much beyond
most people’s power of apprehension, for
one to suppose it so much as the report
of it could have reached them, still’”clxxxiii
it is coming.
And Nietzsche called
himself “the firstlings,” that is, he
and others like him, “the firstlings and
premature children of the coming century,”clxxxiv
which as he said was to be the
century of the
triumph of nihilism.clxxxv
He says, in another place -- because then
most people were living ordinary
lives, they’re going to work in factories,
and literature was flourishing and art and
music -- he said but this idea what he is
describing, the “death of God,” when it
filters down to the common people, there will
be an upheaval in the world such as
was never seen from the beginning until now,
because the whole of society will
be overthrown.clxxxvi
He puts in the mouth of one of his characters,
a mad man, this idea of the
universe becoming upside down.
The madman proclaims to the people in The
Joyful Wisdom, “ Nihilism, p. 72n: The Joyful
Wisdom, #125] We have killed him
(God), you and I.
We are all His murderers!
But how have we done it?
How were
we able to drink up the sea?
Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole
horizon?
What did we do when we loosened this earth
from its sun?
Whither does
it now move?
Whither do we move?
Away from all suns?
Do we not dash on
unceasingly?
Backwards, sideways, forwards, in all directions?
Is there still an
above and below?
Do we not stray as through infinite nothingness?
Does not
empty space breathe upon us?
Has it not become colder?
Does not night come on
continually, darker and darker?”clxxxvii
[The rest is from the Nietzsche lecture and
the Question and Answer lecture ]
The thought was, he said, that the earth up
until now has revolved around
the sun and all of a sudden it’s got loose
and it begins to go out into outer space.
And people look around and they see that things
begin to get darker and darker,
and begin to wonder where is up and where
is down, what’s right and what’s
wrong.
They begin to lose their moorings, and begin
to get all mixed up.
Then you
see that everything begins to get darker,
as though the world is going out.
That’s
the concept.
Henceforth if there’s no more God, then
life becomes entirely
different.
And frightful possibilities open up.
This is the world of today’s mankind, that
is, the ones who are still trying
to retain the main tradition of European history
and thought.
Kafka.
This can be very well seen in much of contemporary
art.
[Franz] Kafka’s an interesting person.
There’ve been movies of his stories, but
his
stories are very powerful because they’re
understated, and they’re such very clear,
very nice German -- I started to read it in
German -- very simple, straightforward
presented.
No complicated language, in very clear language
to present a fact which
is absolutely horrible.
This Kafka’s a very interesting writer because
he writes all
these things in a very matter-of-fact way.
It’s not as though it’s something unusual.
For example, in Kafka’s The Trial, someone
is brought up for trial for a
crime he doesn’t know what it is; He’s
not guilty, he doesn’t know whether he is
guilty or innocent.
He’s announced to be, “You go on trial
tomorrow at 10
o’clock.”
“On trial?
What did I do?”
“We don’t know.
Just show up.”
And he goes
and he finds these very shadowy figures.
It’s all very mysterious.
He doesn’t know
who his judges are.
He doesn’t know what his crime is, who his
witnesses against
him are, what he did.
And this is presented in such a matter of
fact way that it is as
though he is living in a nightmare.
And it turns out that apparently just for
existing
he’s guilty.
He doesn’t know quite how to answer it and
they kill him off
someplace.
And it’s just this idea that there’s no
sense any more, no logic, just that,
because there’s no more God, you’re in
a state of being hounded.
Or again, his story called “Metamorphosis,”
it’s a autobiography of this
young man lives [who] with his mother, and
he wakes up one morning and
discovers that he is a big brown bug, you
know -- six foot high, a big beetle.
His
mother comes in and sees him and says, “Oh,
my, can’t let you outside in that
shape.”
And this story is about how he is suffering
because he
has become a beetle, and he’s not bitter
about it -- that’s just the way it is: he’s
become a beetle, and it’s very difficult
to get along with his family.
And his mother, his family’s sort of just
hushing up the matter.
“Shhh.
Don’t
tell anybody.”
“Where’s your son?”
“Oh, he’s resting today.
Don’t disturb him.”
And so they’re all so embarrassed as they
come and discover he’s turned into a
beetle.
And I think he finally ends up crawling and
dying on the floor or
something.
And it’s presented in such a matter-of-fact
way that, and it’s so
horrible, this whole idea.
And you say, what’s the point?
The point is that, just like Nietzsche says,
reality became different now; now we don’t
know whether, are we human, are we
not human?
Start teaching we come from apes and you begin
to say that we have
ape-like nature in us; if we have an ape-like
nature, we might have beetle-like
nature too.
Before anything this lower animal thing begins
to enter into our human
nature.
If there’s no more God, then our whole outlook
on life becomes free.
You
can be a beetle, you can be a man going to
the stars.
You can have advanced
civilization.
There’s all kinds of new possibilities open
up.
This is what the more
recent writers, in the last twenty years or
so, call the “art of the absurd.”
We also see someone like Eugene Ionesco, the
Romanian playwright who
lived in Paris, who writes about people turning
into rhinoceroses and this whole
surrealistic atmosphere.
It’s all laid, like parodies, sort of allegories
expressing how silly the human
situation becomes because there’s no more
God -- that life is ridiculous.
Or Beckett even: the whole play takes place
in a garbage pail and they’re
“Waiting for Godot,” and they’re waiting
for some kind of new revelation, and sit
there talking about how God is gone and so
forth.
Also Camus who talks about
rebellion as the only thing in (dawn?, doing?)
leads to the reality of life and the
most logical thing for a man to do is to commit
suicide.clxxxviii And he finally dies by
running his car into a tree.
And this whole world of contemporary art which
is full of loneliness,
absurdity, we do not even know what’s up,
what’s down, what Nietzsche says, we
become very cold and lonely.
One man can be lost in an infinite universe.
We don’t
know what’s going on, because the sun has
gone out.
God is gone.
And of course,
if you don’t believe in God, the world becomes
a very miserable place.
Indeed, you
don’t know where you’re going, what you’re
doing, because God gives meaning to
everything else in life.
“Everything is Permitted”.
This first dogma introduced from the new religion
-- it’s actually preparing
for the new religion, that is, the “death
of God,” there is no God, there is no truth
--
has several consequences, corollaries.
The first consequence is, as Nietzsche says:
“There is no God: therefore everything is
permitted.”
The same thing is said by
Ivan Karamazov in Dostoevsky’s novel, “If
there is no immortality, everything is
permitted.”clxxxix In fact we’ll see that
Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky were thinking
exactly on the same wave-length, had exactly
the same ideas because they were
very, they were both in tune with the spirit
of the times.
But Dostoyevsky
approached it from the point of view of someone
who knows Orthodoxy, and
Nietzsche approached it as the prophet of
this new teaching, because he did not
know Christianity.
And he considered Christianity to be a doctrine
of weakness,
the herd mentality.
So, this is all bound up by: if God is gone,
there is no truth, there is no
eternal life, all that Christian civilization
lived on is now gone.
It’s only a matter of
time until it’s, because if faith is gone,
everything built from that faith will
disappear.
And therefore the revolution becomes logical.
So the first consequence is: everything is
permitted, that is, revolution, any
kind of experiment in morality, government,
art.
In fact, we’ll see in a later
[lecture] how the very concept of art suddenly
starts to crumble.
What is art
becomes filled with these very revolutionary,
nihilistic ideas.
A New Age.
The second consequence of the death of God
is that there begins to be a
new age.
Nietzsche says in 1884, “It may be that
I am the first to light upon an
idea which will divide the history of mankind
in two.”
As a result, “all who are
born after us belong to a higher history than
any history hitherto.”cxc Of course,
this is the age when God was still meaningful,
when Christianity was still alive to
some degree.
There’s some remnant of Christianity.
And the “new age” when God
is removed as the center, when Christianity
is no longer accepted, that is the age of
normal humanity and the age of revolution.
But as a matter of fact he wasn’t so original
as he thought because twelve
years before this Dostoyevsky already expressed
exactly the same idea in the
thought of this Kirillov in The Possessed
who said in one of his prophetic
moments:
“Everything will be new... 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.”cxci
This is the idea of a new
paradise coming up.
This is Kirillov, the one who thought he had
to become god
in The Possessed..
Superman.
And finally we come to this third consequence
of this idea “God is dead,”
that is, there shall be annihilation of God,
shall be the total transformation of the
earth and man physically.
Which means Superman, the coming of the Superman.
Man is only something which is temporary and
has to be superseded because he’s
too weak.
He’s going to become a Superman.
And what he means by Superman is someone who
does not care about
Christian morality.
If you feel like killing someone, you kill.
If you feel like doing
anything you please, you do it.
If want to [go] conquering the world, you
conquer
the world, blow people up, however you please,
because there’s now a new
morality.
Of course, Communists did it even moreso.
And you can say, “That’s anti-Christian,”
but they say we’re beyond
Christians: we have new morality, we have
the morality of Nietzsche, that
everything in the past belongs to past history.
Now there’s a new transformation in
human nature and we are the ones who are first-fruits
of this new transformation.
Therefore we can do whatever we want to.
In order to challenge that, if they have
the power, they will squash it.
If you want to challenge it, you have to convert
them to Christianity, and then they will see
their mistake, repent, and a whole new
history begins.
And this is how Nietzsche expresses it: “Shall
we not ourselves have to
become gods merely to seem worthy of it (the
death of God)?”cxcii That is, the
fact that man has killed God.
...[I]f the old God is [dead, the] idea is
that there must be a new God.
Again
Zarathustra says, in Nietzsche’s book, “Dead
are all the gods.
Now do we desire
the Superman to live.”cxciii And Kirillov
in The Possessed says: “If there is no God,
then I am God.”cxciv And Dostoyevsky distinguishes
between the God-man Jesus
Christ and the man-god, the new being who
is coming up from the earth to become
god.
Zarathustra says again:
“-I bring you a goal; I preach to you the
Superman.
Man is something to be
overcome.
What have you done to overcome him?
All things before you have
produced something beyond themselves, and
would you be the ebb of this great
flood?
Would you rather go back to the animal than
transcend man?
What is the
ape to man?
A jest or a bitter shame.
And just that shall man be to the Superman,
a
jest or a bitter shame.
You have traveled the way from worm to man,
and much in
you is still worm....
Lo, I preach to you the Superman.
The Superman is the
meaning of the earth.”cxcv
At first this seems a fantastic idea.
What does it mean,
“Superman”?
You probably recall what Marx had to say about
mankind being
changed by means of violence, that is, man
himself will be changed to [be] made
fit for the new kingdom of Communism.
Contemporary writers such as Erich Kahler
-talk about all the changes of
modern society, both physically and in ideas,
are producing what he calls a
mutation, some kind of new man.
And if, on top of that, we bear in mind the
socalled “scientific” idea of evolution
which in fact Nietzsche already believed in,
we
see that this idea of the coming of a new
kind of man, of Superman, is not at all
some kind of fantasy.
It is a real idea which has been arrived at
naturally, logically,
by Western man in his falling away from God
and trying to find the new
religion.cxcvi
And the next generation comes along and because
these ideas are not in a
vacuum, someone hears them they begin to act
according to them.
And of course
the answer to all these questions can be found
in one writer, which is Dostoyevsky.
He was thinking about the exactly the same
things as Nietzsche, at the same time
but a little ahead of him, and he had already
the answer.
Therefore, if you want to
understand these problems very deeply, you
read his books.
First one is Crime and
Punishment which describes how someone thought
he was going to become
Superman by killing off these two useless
old ladies, or rather killing off one, and
taking money and making himself into a person
who’s preparing for the future.
And he discovers that he has a conscience,
that it’s not so easy to do something
like that.
But this is all a fantasy, it’s a fantasy
world he’s living in.
The same thing
was done in 1920 or so, the famous case where
two students....[Leopold and Loeb]
...[no?]velty and they began to live by it.
And if you look at the kinds of
crimes which are being performed now, you
will see that in the last twenty years
especially there’s been a great increase
in crimes which don’t make any sense.
That is, people usually in the old days, they
could solve murders, almost all
murders were solved in the old days because
either there was a jealousy a man
killing his wife or vice-versa or a lover,
or anger, or a fit or a fight in a bar.
And
now the murders make no sense.
There’s a few of the old kind, but now there’s
a new kind of murder, and people
are just killing because for the fun of it.
And that is very difficult to trace them
down.
Now most murders are unsolved.
They can’t find who did it because there’s
no connection, there’s no logical connection.
It’s not a family member, it’s not
somebody who got mad at you, just somebody
who felt like killing.
And this kind
of crime is shockingly increasing, it shows
society’s in a very bad shape.
And
some make a point of killing a whole set of
people, twenty people or more.
So this is the new morality, Beyond Good and
Evil.
That’s one of Nietzsche’s works.
There’re several ideas here, one is beyond
good
and evil because there’s no more morality.
The other one is the Superman.
Since
there’s no God, there must be a new man,
a new god which is man.
And
Dostoyevsky wrote about these questions also
in his book called The Possessed or
The Demons in which he describes the mentality
of people who were preparing to
make the Revolution in Russia.
And some of them have very profound ideas.
He
comes up with the idea that to make mankind
happy, you must kill most people,
because there’s too many people to make
everybody happy.
Therefore he
calculated in Russia, to make Russia a happy
country you have to kill a hundred
million people.
Solzhenitsyn figured out that that was exactly
the number of
people that were killed because the Revolution
lasts 65 years.
That’s what was happening in Cambodia when
they
killed off right away in the first six months,
they killed off two million people
because there’re too many people, too many
smart people.
Therefore everybody
who had been past highschool had to be killed.
Therefore all doctors, lawyers,
advanced people like that were all killed,
except a few who escaped.
Student: Then once these ideas get in the
air, it’s, it’s like a poison.
Fr.
S: That’s right.
That’s right.
You can see from this Raskolnikov.
It’s very
realistic description Dostoyevsky makes in
Crime and Punishment.
This person is
possessed by these ideas.
And he doesn’t have any, any -- he’s not
his own man.
He’s pushed from one idea
to the next, and every times he comes across,
all of a sudden he has a good impulse
to give somebody some money -- it’s just
out of what’s ever left of Christianity
in
him, because he had a pious mother and pious
sister, some kind of Christianity in
his background.
And he gives some money to somebody and later
on he says, “Oh,
you fool, you could have used that money to
help your project and kill that old
lady” or something, get an axe to kill the
old lady.
He’s always reproaching
himself because he has some good impulses.
He’s possessed by these ideas, and
has no rest until he finally goes and performs
the murder.
And that’s [what happens] when we get someone
like Raskolnikov from Crime
and Punishment who reads all these ideas,
someone like Nietzsche says the
Superman is to come.
We have to be overcoming mankind, mankind
is too weak.
Actually if you compare -- today’s the day
of St. Anthony the Great [1980]--
the answer to Nietzsche is Anthony the Great
because Anthony the Great did
overcome mankind, his own human nature.
He was like an angel on earth, and
these people, thinkers totally lost contact,
because they lost Christianity, they lost
contact with these saints.
And therefore they didn’t realize that there
is a whole
family of people who are in this process of
overcoming human nature with the
grace of God.
Not knowing that, he saw that men, human nature
by itself is so
small and weak, that it’s not worth fighting
for.
Therefore it has to overcome but by
some other, some kind of external thing.
And they jumped upon this idea of evolution
because that shows you man
was once a ape-like creature who is going
to become something else.
He’s going
to come to something higher.
And therefore the present stage is only intermediary
stage, nothing particularly
important.
Therefore if you kill a hundred million people,
there’s no particular
thing wrong with that.
Or in Cambodia when the Communists took over,
they
killed one third of the population.
Nothing particularly wrong, it’s just an
experiment.
And we’re heading for some higher state,
therefore it’s justified.
And
the only measuring stick is Christianity.
And with the doctrine of evolution, there
is found what seems to be a
scientific foundation.
This very complex question of evolution, which
has many
aspects: scientific, philosophical, religious,
and is one of the key ideas of our times,
which requires a great deal of concentration
to get all the aspects of it straightened
out.
We’ll have to examine precisely this doctrine
of evolution to see what it gives
to modern man and give enough to criticize
it quite thoroughly so as to see what
part it might place in the philosophy of the
apostasy?
Because this idea is, as it
were, a key to understanding the whole revolution,
the whole idea of a new age
which is coming about through the chiliastic
expectations of all these writers we’ve
been talking about.
[In our next lecture] we’ll talk about it
in general terms and
also we’ll talk about more specifically
the one great prophet of evolutionism of our
times: who is Teilhard de Chardin, who is
most symptomatic of all these chiliastic
currents which are going out in the world
now.
