“There are two different types of people in the world, those who want to know, and those who want to believe.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche
What is it about the modern era which lingers on to make us so feel gloomy all of the time? We can hardly move an inch before being seized by doom from the entertainment or "news" media. Politics, as usual, is no beacon of hope. Neither is Academia. Philosophical and spiritual realms of discourse traditionally provided us some rays of sunlight, but that is patently not the case anymore. Most of our intellectual and spiritual knowledge is now employed in service of finding ever-more ways to convince ourselves that the 'end is nigh'; that the "Apocalypse" is right around the corner. The few times we are offered messages of hope, those messages are couched in the context of escaping from-the-world rather than being-in-it.
These machinations of modern culture are justified to us on the grounds that they are "realistic". So what exactly is "reality"? Is it something we derive from a living participation in the world or from a detached reflection on the world as an object of our knowledge? The nihilistic view is that of the latter. It is the view which flows naturally from Rene Descartes' divide of the world into realms of 'spirit-mind' (subject) and 'matter' (object). Immanuel Kant, as discussed in Res Ipsa Loquitur: Kant vs. the World, then took Descartes' subject-object divide for granted and further divided the realm of 'spirit-mind' into what is actually real and what is merely experienced as real. The latter, according to Kant, is the world of phenomenal appearances we live in, reflect on and systematically investigate.
It does not take a huge stretch of our imaginations to see where Kant's epistemic logic has taken us; to see why his epistemology is fundamentally pessimistic-nihilistic at its core. The world of appearances is the world we live in. It is the only world we ever experience and reflect on in normal waking consciousness. What if you were to wake up one day, walk to the bathroom mirror, and see no one in the mirror's reflection. Then you would begin to experience as an individual what humanity has already begun to experience as a collective. You would feel not only confusion, but also despair in confronting what it means when the phenomenal world no longer reflects any aspect of yourself back to you.
We would then feel perfectly justified when saying things like:
"History is written by the winners"
Translation: All of our traditions, cultures, and institutions are nothing more than reflections of who happened to defeat their opponents by sheer force.
"Nature Bats Last"
Translation: Humanity has become a blight on Nature and Nature will have the 'final word' when it takes its revenge on humanity.
"Religion is an opiate for the masses"
Translation: The soul-spirit burning within you is nothing more than a mechanism imposed by culture to keep you ignorant and happy while you are exploited and pillaged.
"Contrary to what our desire cannot fail to be tempted into believing, the thing itself always escapes.”
The last one is Jacques Derrida and needs no translation. These sayings come from those who tend to be secular and in opposition to "institutional religion". But I am by no means going to let the conservative religious folk off of the hook so easily. In fact, I am even more disappointed in the Churches of the West in the modern era. Those acting within the sphere of our ancient spiritual traditions should preserve that ancient wisdom for posterity, but unfortunately they seem to have learned little more from our spiritual history than anyone else. Below we have pre-eminent theologians saying much of the same things as the skeptics but under a different cloak:
"Relying on God has to start all over everyday, as if nothing has yet been done."
― C. S. Lewis
"I’ve discovered an astonishing truth: God is attracted to weaknesses. He can’t resist those who humbly and honestly admit how desperately they need Him."
― Jim Cymbala
"The issue of faith is not so much whether we believe in God, but whether we believe the God we believe in."
— R.C. Sproul
"The true gospel is a call to self-denial. It is not a call to self-fulfillment."
― John MacArthur
Let me be as clear as I can possibly be - I am not claiming anything about the spiritual wisdom of those quoted except that they were all products of modernity like the rest of us. They came under the spell of the Cartesian and Kantian divides like everyone else in the West. There is a deeply planted seed of Truth in all of the quotes above. A humble mode of being in the world and the integration of our ego with our higher Self is of critical importance. What I am questioning, however, are the fruits of modern theology in the Western world. In that sense, it could not matter less who wrote the above or in what context, because the underlying ideas expressed are plainly evident throughout Western Christendom.
Pre-eminent Christian scholars have translated the radical cynicism of the secular "progressives" into a nihilism of the religious right. For them, it is not Nature which seeks revenge but a supernatural God who sought to impose His wrath upon us for our sins. That which oppresses and exploits us is not our cultural institutions but our personal spiritual ambitions. We therefore find in the modern Church an increasingly large gap growing between our daily experiences and those of the Divine; between our personal efforts and our future redemption; between what makes us human and what makes us spiritual.
We now adopt a naïve deferral to faith over experience and knowledge; a conceit which naturally tastes like bitter poison to the human tongue. It is as if these theologians are doing their best impressions of the earliest Christians who could not help but defer to faith. I especially take issue with the last two from Sproul and MacArthur - the first makes our purpose in life two layers removed and abstract from what we experience and know. Our "faith" is now about believing in our own beliefs about God. He is making the point that we should be serious about what we claim to believe in, but in the process he is reducing both our faith and the seriousness of our faith to a mere matter of belief over experience.
The one from MacArthur renders our purpose in life to be a denial that we even have any purposes of our own making. To be self-determined and find satisfaction in one's own purposes is now considered arrogant and prideful. To follow one's desires and ambitions is considered a rejection of God Himself. Yet what is the Gospel, i.e. the 'Good News', if not a revelation of God becoming man so that man could take responsibility for finding his way back to God, i.e. to act as Jesus of Nazareth did after his baptism? If we are to embody and emulate Christ incarnate in our lives, then how can we deny ourselves that mode of being which He so clearly modeled for us?
Our modern theologians will resent the implication that we can possibly be "saved by works". But there is no getting around the fact that "faith without works is dead". We must sink or swim; adapt or die. We must evolve, but that will not happen until we learn to stop thinking that "evolution" is the theological equivalent of a curse word among serious religious thinkers. Rather, we must recognize it as a reality that we all experience. There is not a single adult human alive today who has not evolved from an infant into a child and from a child into an adult. That is not only the evolution of our outer form but the evolution of our consciousness itself; of our inner psychic life; of our spiritual life.
That process is one we scarcely remember, much like the dreams we have every night. Yet it is undeniable that we have experienced the world in altered modes of consciousness in both our childhood and our dreams. As with any evolutionary process, the earlier forms are nested within the later forms and therefore persist with us today, lying dormant but ready to be awakened at a moment's notice. We can either deny them and pretend as if they never existed or we can embrace them as real and seek from them a spiritual remembrance. The latter is how we stop drinking the infant's milk and begin consuming solid food; how we discover that "the Kingdom of God is within [us]".
Evolution is nothing other than the adoption of an ever-growing responsibility for our own lives as individuals and as collectives. It is the blazing of our own paths in the course of our spiritual becoming. Dare I say, it is the forgiveness of our own sins.
“The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the whole moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook on life. That I feed the hungry, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ -- all these are undoubtedly great virtues. What I do unto the least of my brethren, that I do unto Christ.
But what if I should discover that the least among them all, the poorest of all the beggars, the most impudent of all the offenders, the very enemy himself -- that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness -- that I myself am the enemy who must be loved -- what then? As a rule, the Christian's attitude is then reversed; there is no longer any question of love or long-suffering; we say to the brother within us "Raca," and condemn and rage against ourselves. We hide it from the world; we refuse to admit ever having met this least among the lowly in ourselves.”
― Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
The experience of death to our egoistic being so that we may find a renewed life in the Spirit is truly at the core of the Christian faith. We are to wield the gift of such a renewed Spirit for the benefit of all beings, not only our limited ego-selves. What is not at the core of the faith, however, is the de-spiritualized and merely intellectual concept of Self-denial. It is the concept that we must experience ourselves as an ego stuck in a state of helpless dependency on external agents, whether that be our parents, our teachers, our governments, our nations, or our "Gods". Yet we cannot find this mere concept anywhere in our individual experience.
Our experience suggests we are more than helpless spiritual infants, waiting for someone else to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. Instead, we naturally observe, learn and mature in the course of our psychic development. We are always in a process of becoming more than what we were the day before. Every time we go to sleep, we wake up with more ideal content-experience than we did the day before, even though we often forget that experience until something triggers our memory of it later. That universal human experience leads us neither to a naïve optimism nor to a cynical pessimism bordering on nihilism.
"All optimism and pessimism are thereby refuted. Optimism assumes that the world is perfect, that it must be a source of the greatest satisfaction for man. But if this is to be the case, man would first have to develop - within himself - those needs through which to arrive at this satisfaction. He would have to gain from the objects what it is he demands.
Pessimism believes that the world is constituted in such a way that it leaves man eternally dissatisfied, that he can never be happy. What a pitiful creature man would be if nature offered him satisfaction from outside! All lamentations about an existence that does not satisfy us, about this hard world, must disappear before the thought that no power in the world could satisfy us if we ourselves did not first lend it that magical power by which it uplifts and gladdens us. Satisfaction must come to us out of what we make of things, out of our own creations. Only that is worthy of free beings."
-Rudolf Steiner, Goethean Science
Freedom: the lack of it is what always rests at the base of our absolute pessimism-nihilism. We cannot feel hopeful about anything we experience unless we first feel that it is we who are choosing to make sense of it. Genuine hope can only be found in spiritual freedom and the responsibilities such a freedom calls forth from us. We are not free spiritual beings because we are faithful; we are faithful beings because we are freely spiritual. It is that spiritual nature which inextricably links us to the life of the Divine. We must know the truth, in the deep Biblical sense of that word, before it can set us free. We can choose to love God only after knowing that God first chose to love us.
That is what Kant stripped from us most of all - our sense that we can freely choose to experience the world from different perspectives rather than the involuntary perspective forced upon us by Kant's categories. To be clear, I am not claiming Kant's categories of understanding, the ones structuring all of our experiences, are his own fictions. Not at all. It is the exact opposite of that - I am suggesting the categories truly reflect back to us a real living and breathing portion of the noumenal world and it is our spiritual duty to contemplate the significance of our position and role in the progressive unfolding of the Reality we experience.
We do not all live in our own personal bubbles of consciousness, passing information back and forth between our bubble-avatars in some unknown manner. Rather, we share the same space of consciousness with each other and with the Spirits who inform our existence and experience. We exited our Edenic paradise as the Spirit came to know itself through its forms. That is what makes human beings capable of true communication and empathy. It is what allows us to experience the same ideal content and perspectives of other beings. As we grow spiritually and mature, we uncover the complicated network of noumenal relations and we come to know for ourselves what we once merely took on faith alone; what we once naively believed.
"A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n"
-John Milton, Paradise Lost
