Keeping Alive the Rumor of God. Martin Camroux

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СКАЧАТЬ “Most Britons under the age of 60 (that is, those who were not taught its basic ideas at school or Sunday school) have almost no knowledge of Christianity”48 he may be making the point a little strongly but essentially, he is correct.

      IF GOD IS DEAD, IS EVERTHING ELSE THE SAME?

The implications for our culture of this loss of belief are profound. To a lot of people, it seemed that if there was no God you could just take that out of our systems of belief and everything else would still hold up. Some like George Eliot have felt that much of Christian morality could remain after theism was abandoned: “God, Immortality, Duty . . . how inconceivable the first, how unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third.” Marx looked to an inevitable victory of the proletariat which is in essence a secularized version of Christian eschatology. The belief in progress is essentially the same. It was Nietzsche, who most strongly questioned this. If God is dead, he says, so is the idea that the world has meaning, or our lives a purpose. In Twilight of the Idols he writes: “When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident . . . Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole.”49 If you want meaning in life, says Nietzsche, you will have to make it for yourself. “A virtue has to be our invention.”

      You may resist this conclusion, but it is inherently logical. Take Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Inspiring as this may sound one has to ask in what sense it is true? Under any circumstances it is very dubious if the universe itself is moral. The often-brutal reality of life does not obviously appear to have any moral purpose. “For the everlasting right, the silent stars are strong” says the hymn. No they are not, they are just silent. The only way this could possibly make sense would be if there is a cosmic reality with a commitment to justice. Or take Desmond Tutu’s stirring words:

      Goodness is stronger than evil;

      Love is stronger than hate;

      Light is stronger than darkness;

      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 СКАЧАТЬ