Life is stronger than death.
It ends. “Victory is ours through Him who loves us.”50 Take the last line away and what sense could it conceivably make? If God is dead, says Nietzsche, so is the idea that the world has meaning, or our lives a purpose. Nietzsche is clear: “What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism.”51
This prediction has proved more than a little percipient. Today Nietzsche’s influence is widespread. Paul Mason calls him the all-purpose philosopher for our time. He is thinking especially of his influence on neo-liberal economics. But just as significant is that his belief that “virtue has to be our invention,” is now a central tenet in much post-modernism where it is argued that no version of truth can claim absolute authority. There is no reality per se, and no truth that can’t be relativized. That is pure Nietzsche.
What is more it is fascinating how influential Nietzsche’s nihilism (or something that equates to it) is in popular culture. In the television comedy The Good Place, Chidi quotes Nietzsche: “God is dead. God remains dead, and we have killed him.” The cartoon Bojack Horseman is based on the premise that there are no ultimate values in life. Mr. Peanutbutter puts it like this. “The universe is a cruel, uncaring void. The key to being happy isn’t a search for meaning. It’s to just keep yourself busy with unimportant nonsense, and eventually you’ll be dead.” In Dan Harmon’s popular adult cartoon Rick and Morty, one of the central concerns of the show is grappling with the meaninglessness of our lives amid an indifferent universe. As one character says “Nobody belongs anywhere, nobody exists on purpose, everybody’s going to die. Come watch TV?” In The Sopranos Nietzsche is used to depict teenage angst. “Even if God is dead, you’re still gonna kiss his ass,” Tony tells Anthony Jr. If God is dead there is no doubt that Nietzsche isn’t.
The death of God has not meant the end of morality. Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov is wrong when he said: “If God did not exist, everything would be permitted.”52 A sense of fairness seems inbuilt in our humanity. Today there are many people committed to forms of altruism or progressive humanism, or who reverence the planet (even if the planet does not seem to return the feeling). Often it is true that this is more a product of our Christian heritage than many realize. People unknowingly draw on a Christian heritage just as they will quote phrases from the Bible or Shakespeare without necessarily knowing their origin. But moral choice is part of who we are. “It’s not fair,” “That’s not right,” the awareness that we ought to act in caring ways but often do not, are inherent in us. Asked to explain the origin of our consciences Darwin replied, “I throw up my hands. I can’t tell you how this could have evolved. What I can tell you is that any creature that became as intelligent and as sympathetic as humans would naturally have a conscience.”
Nonetheless, once a society no longer has a central belief system, and amazing stories that it shares, and a belief that this is objective moral truth, meaning is harder to maintain and justify. Once you say as Richard Dawkins does that, “The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference,”53 Nietzsche stalks. Stephen Hawkins puts it more starkly, “The human race is just a chemical scum on an average-sized planet, orbiting around a very average-sized star, in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies.”54 We are not far here from Matthew Arnold,
We are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.55
The former director of the British Museum, Neil McGregor, puts it very clearly:
We are a very unusual society. We are trying to do something that no society has really done. We are trying to live without an agreed narrative of our communal place in the cosmos and in time.56
The end of religion as a cultural center of life has not brought about happiness or freedom but a sense of loss. Modern life is shot through with uncertainty and anxiety and meaninglessness. There is a desperate and dangerous search for identity. Bojack has such a hard time because he doesn’t know or understand how to live in this way. It is his constant searches for meaning and purpose which leads to his depression. W. H. Auden describes our anxiety,
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
Lest we should see where we are . . .
Lost in a haunted wood;
Children afraid of the dark
Who have never been happy or good.57
THINGS FALL APART, THE CENTRE CANNOT HOLD?
You can see two quite opposite extreme reactions to the end of Christendom in Christian theology. In more conservative forms of theology there is often an attempt to wish the modern world away. One of the most significant is what is called “radical orthodoxy.” This was founded by John Milbank and takes its name from a collection of essays entitled Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology.58 It sets itself head-on against modernity and sees the liberalism of the 1960s as a capitulation to the modern spirit which leads inevitably to nihilism. Indeed, it goes further, claiming that, if separated from Christianity, all other belief systems lead to chaos. This is part of a wider critique of what Alasdair Macintyre calls “the Enlightenment project.” Alister McGrath, for example, hysterically alleges this is “an intellectually dubious movement which has given rise to the Nazi holocaust and Stalinist purges.”59 This is because when reason seeks to operate outside the perspective of the gospel it can only lead to a corrosive moral skepticism. Stephen Shakespeare describes the radical orthodox critique vividly: “There is reason in Christian theology, but it is not the same as the fake reason offered by the secular Enlightenment, which is western prejudice in fancy dress.”60
The problem is traced back to the very roots of modernity. “Once, there was no ‘secular.’”61 The first line of Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory expresses, in condensed form, the major presupposition of radical orthodoxy, i.e., that during the first millennia of Christianity, thought and belief was rooted in a Trinitarian religious vision. Once there was no secular, but a single community of Christendom. Around the fourteenth century, however, this unity began to erode, and a supposedly neutral space of reason and metaphysics gradually began to open. Once secular thought is let loose, we are on the inevitable road to Hitler and Bojack Horseman.
For radical orthodoxy the key is to recognize that the Christian story and it alone, is true. It is only when enlightened by God that you can think clearly. As Philip Blond puts it, “Only theology can, in the fullest sense of the word, see at all.”62 Lines are drawn between those who have the truth (us of course) and those who do not. Milbank says, “Christianity’s universalist claim that incorporation into the Church is indispensable for salvation assumes that other religions and social groupings, however-virtuous seeming, were finally on the path of damnation.”63 Any church which finds that other than repugnant deserves to be regarded as toxic.
At a more popular level modernity has been resisted by various forms of fundamentalism. The rise of Salafist Islam is but the most visible example of an increasing stridency and fundamentalism among the world faiths. Hardline nationalist Hinduism, extremist Buddhism, like the BBS in Sri Lanka, or the growth of ultraorthodox Haredi Judaism, are all evidence of a fundamentalist trend in much of the world’s religion. This trend is not confined to the global south. In the United States a 2014 Gallup poll showed 42 percent of Americans hold creationist views, though the number is dropping.64 In both Britain and America as the mainstream churches have declined fundamentalist churches have shown more resilience and grown in relative importance, contrary to the liberal expectation that increased education would make fundamentalism impossible. I am reminded of a Peanuts cartoon which showed a downbeat Charlie Brown after his baseball team had been beaten 184–0. “I don’t understand it,” Charlie Brown says. “How can we lose when we’re so sincere?!”