Paying Attention To The Sky

Fr. De Lubac traced the origin of 19th century attempts to construct a humanism apart from God and Christianity, the beginnings of contemporary atheism which claims to have “moved beyond God.” In the 20^th and 21^st we’ve moved into a scientific materialism that parades itself as a creative individualism. There is no institutional memory for atheism that corresponds to what the Catholic Church does for its believers. This leaves most atheists I know free to deny the any and all sources. It’s a shame because if this were available in some form, it might help those not to be seduced by the latest incarnation of an old heresy. Read this, one would like to say, learn your sordid, blood-soaked past.

“The three persons Fr. De Lubac focuses on are Feuerbach, who greatly influenced Marx; Nietzsche, who represents nihilism; and Comte, who is the father of all forms of positivism. He then shows that the only one who really responded to this ideology was Dostoevsky, a kind of prophet who criticizes in his novels this attempt to have a society without God. Despite their historical and scholarly appearance, de Lubac’s work clearly refers to the present.”

When I read this I really felt that atheistic humanism still existed but the more I converse with atheists, particularly the twenty or thirty something college graduates, I realize they have no connection with the atheistic humanism that Fr. De Lubac traced here. Most are totally unaware of it. Their teachers would know of it and most of them probably subscribed to it at one point. The newer atheists are a TV/internet phenomena,  more Hollywood than literary, riding on the faux intellectualism of a scientific conceit that one sees in Richard Dawkins. Bill Maher has created more of these lost souls than we could possibly imagine.

As is my habit, reading selections follow:

Know Thyself
“Man, Know Thyself!”  Taking up, after Epicetetus,  the Socratic gnothii sauton, the Church transformed and deepened it, so that what had been chiefly a piece of moral advice became an exhortation to form a metaphysical judgment. Know yourself, said the Church, that is to say, know your nobility and your dignity, understand the greatness of your being and your vocation, of that vocation which constitutes your being. Learn how to see in yourself the spirit, which is a reflection of God, made for God. “Oh man, scorn not that which is admirable in you! Your are a poor thing in your own eyes, but I would teach you in reality you are a great thing!…Realize what you are! Consider your royal dignity! The heavens have not been made in God’s image as you have, nor the moon, nor the sun, nor anything to be seen in creation…Behold, of all that exists there is nothing that can contain your greatness.” [Gregory of Nyssa]

The Rise of Atheistic Humanism
…The time came when man was no longer moved by it [His relation to God and worth]. On the contrary, he began to think that henceforward he would forfeit his self-esteem and be unable to develop in freedom unless he broke first with the Church and then with the Transcendent Being upon whom, according to Christian tradition, he was dependent. At first assuming the aspect of a reversion to paganism, this urge to cut loose increased in scope and momentum in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries until after many phases and many vicissitudes, it came to a head in the most daring and destructive form of modern atheism: absolute humanism, which claims to be the genuine kind and inevitably regards Christian humanism as absurd.

The Essence Of Christianity/Ludwig Feuerbach
Wisdom, will, justice and love, says Feuerbach, are so many infinite attributes which constitute man’s own being and which nevertheless affect him “as if he were another being.” Thus he spontaneously projects them beyond himself and objectifies them in a fantastic form, the pure product of his imagination, to which he gives the name of God. In this way he defrauds his own self. “it is one and the same act which strips the world of its content and transfers that content to God. The poor man possesses a rich God.” or to be more accurate, he impoverishes himself by enriching his God, in filling whom he empties himself. “Religion is transformed into a vampire which feeds upon the substance of mankind, its flesh and its blood.”…The turning point of history will be he moment when man (the community of, not the individual) becomes aware that the only God of man is man himself…rightly understood, religion “ceremoniously unveils the hidden treasures of man’s nature; it is the avowal of his inmost thoughts, it is the public revelation the secrets, the mysteries of his love.” Thus, far from being unfaithful to the spirit of Christianity, which is the perfect religion, we shall at last explain its mystery…

Marx Echoes Feuerbach
Man is not an abstract being outside the real world,. Man is the world of men, the State, the society. The State and this society produce religion, a mistaken attitude to the world, because themselves constitute a false world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its popular logic, its spiritual point of honor, its inspiration, its moral sanction, its solemn completion, its general consoling and justifying reason…It is the imaginative realization the human essence, because that essence has no rue reality. The misery of religion is, on the one hand, the expression of real misery and, on the other, a protest against real misery. Religion is the sigh of the creature overwhelmed by unhappiness, the soul of a world that has no  heart, as it is the end of an era that has no mind. It is the opium of the people….Karl Marx

God Is Dead
Religion is conceived as the result of a kind of psychological duplication,. God, according to Nietzsche is nothing more than the mirror of man, who, in certain intense, exceptional states, becomes aware of the power that is in him, or of the love that exalts him. But, as these sensations take him more or less by surprise and he does not seem to be accountable for them, man, not daring to ascribe such power to himself, makes them the attributes of a superhuman being who is a stranger to him. He accordingly divides the two aspects of his own nature between two spheres, the ordinary weak and pitiable aspect appertaining to the sphere which he calls “man”, while the rare, strong and surprising aspect belongs to the sphere which he calls ”God”.

Thus by his own action, he is defrauded of what is best in him. “Religion is a matter of adulteration of the personality.” [Nietzsche, The Dawn of Day:  “There are now perhaps ten to twenty million men among the different peoples of Europe who ‘no longer believe in God’. Is it asking too much that they should get in touch with one another?”] It is a process by which man is debased.  The whole essence of the human problem will therefore consist in remounting that fatal slope so as “gradually to regain possession of those lofty proud states of the soul” of which we have wrongfully despoiled ourselves….The way to get rid of [God] is not so much to refute the proofs of his existence as to show how such an idea came to be formed and how it succeeded in establishing itself in the human mind and in “gaining weight’ there…Whatever antecedents may have been…”the death of God”… on Nietzsche’s lips…expresses a choice…”now, it is our preference that decides against Christianity — not arguments. It is an act…as definite and brutal as that of a murderer…”the death of God is not merely a terrible fact, it is something willed by him…if God is dead, it is we who have killed him….We are the assassins of God….Since there ceased to be a God, loneliness has become intolerable; the man who overtops the rest must set to work”…”How shall we console ourselves, murderers that we are…Who will cleanse us of this blood?…Shall we to have to become Gods ourselves imply to seem worthy of it…There was never a more stupendous effort…God will again find himself in man, beyond good and evil…“I am alone and would have it so”, said Zarathrusta. “Alone with a clear mind and an open sea.”

The Death Of God
“There will be wars such as the world has never yet seen”; Europe will be enveloped in darkness; we shall watch the “rising of a black tide” “Thanks to me,” Nietzsche wrote, “ a catastrophe is at hand.. It will be the coming of nihilism…Thought comes before action as lightning before thunder…The death of God…[has caused] the self-destruction of humanism. We are proving that where there is no God, there is no man either…The godhead is reflected in the slime of the earth like the image in a mirror…If, in everything that takes place in our sublunary world, the relation to eternity is destroyed, it needs no more than that to destroy , at the same time, all depth and all real content in this world. For man, God is not only a norm which is imposed upon him and, by guiding him, lifts him up again: God is the absolute upon which he rests, the Magnet which draws him, the Beyond which calls him, the Eternal which provides him with the only atmosphere in which he can breathe and, in some sort, that third dimension in which man finds his depths….Critical atheism, liberal atheism, atheism resulting from laicism [The freeing from ecclesiastical control; giving over to laypeople…The process of changing to lay status; secularization.] , all these are marks of an age that is dying…Spirit, Truth, Brotherhood, Justice: these great things which ancient paganism had half perceived and  Christianity had instituted, quickly became unreal when no longer seen as a radiation from God…They became empty forms. Kantism has clean hands only it has no hands….A new middle ages has begun for our era.

Faith
To be sitting in a boat in calm weather is not an image of faith. But when the boat has sprung a leak, to keep it afloat by enthusiastically manning the pumps, yet with no thought of returning to port — that is an image of faith…While the understanding, like a desperate passenger, stretches out its arms to terra firma but in vain, faith works with all its might in the deep waters: joyfully and triumphantly, it saves the soul…

The Spiritual Battle
It is the whole of Christianity they are setting aside — and replacing…Jesus had brought about a reversal of values, it is a reversal of values that they are undertaking in their turn. …“it is the spirit and the moral tendency that constitute the essence of a religion , and not the myths in which it is clothed” [Schopenhauer]…another exposition of Nietzschean antichristianism: the call to a powerful, heroic, creative life; the morality of strength and hardness; the accusation of “resentment” brought against the founders of Christian ethics and their precursors, the great prophets of Israel; the confronting of the baseness of the Christian slave” with the “nobility” of the Greek hero; the exaltation of Dionysus, the god of orgiastic and perpetually renascent life, in contrast to his scorn of the Crucified who, on the tree of the Cross, “the most poisonous of all trees“, is “a malediction upon life.”  Suffice it to note the seriousness the very serious nature of  the attack. It is not like others, directed against a few specialists in history or metaphysics; its action is not at first confined to intellectual circles; without needing men of science as its interpreters, it comes to shake souls. It is aimed at the spiritual elite and, when it has attained its aim, it succeeds in perverting that elite while sparing them the sensation of having fallen. Like everything else that  is of the spirit,  it is at he same time ubiquitous in its infiltration and very difficult to nail down, so that it has time to spread great havoc before the first warning is sounded. Under the cover of impeccable enunciations of faith, sometimes even screened by an apparent increase of orthodoxy, souls may already be gangrened…

Neo-Paganism
Neo-paganism is the great spiritual phenomenon of our age…(the young) Ranier Maria Rilke after enthusiastically reading the new prophet (Nietzsche): “He whom men worship as the Messiah turns the whole world into an infirmary. He calls the weak, the unfortunate, the disabled His children and His loved ones. What about the strong? How are we ourselves to climb if we lend our strength to the unfortunate and the oppressed, to idle rogues with no with an no energy. Let them fall, let them die, alone and wretched. Be hard be terrible, be pitiless! You must thrust yourselves forward, forward! A few men, but great ones, will build a world with their strong , muscular, masterful arms on the corpses of the weak, the sick and the infirm.” ….and others (Hugues Rebell, minor French author) “Nietzsche predicts the return of an ideal…To understand this ideal there will be a category of free minds, fortified by war, solitude and danger. They will know the wind, the glaciers, the alpine snows; they will be able to plumb the deepest gulfs without wavering. Endowed with a kind of sublime perversity, they will deliver us from loving our neighbors and from the desire of nothingness, that the earth may recover its purpose and men their hopes.”

Christianity Today (published in 1944)
Christianity is dying…people no longer know why our towns are still surmounted by those spires which are no longer the prayers of any of us; they don’t know what is he point of those great buildings, which are now hemmed in by railway stations and hospitals and from which the people themselves have expelled the monks; they don’t now why the graveyards display pretentious stucco crosses of execrable design.. Truth is not concerned with how many people it convinces…”[Jacque Riveier 1907]…Some of the harshest reproaches leveled against us [Christians] come both from its worst enemies and from men of good will…too many grow more inert, daily adding to their blasphemy of the Savior to whom they still pay lip service, though understanding him less and less; while pious circles, “edifying” circles so often reveal such a mediocre level of culture and spiritual life…

Rediscovering Christianity
Christianity must be given back its strength in us [Christians] which means, first and foremost, that we must discover it as it is in itself, in its purity and authenticity. In the last analysis, what is needed is not a Christianity that is more virile, more efficacious or more heroic or stronger; it is that we must should live our Christianity with more virility, more efficacy, more strength, and, if necessary, more heroism — but we must live it as it is. There is nothing that should be changed in it, nothing that should be added to (this does not mean that there is not a continual need to keep its channels from silting up), nothing that should be corrected; it is not a case of adapting it to the fashion of the day. It must come into its own again in our souls. We must give our souls back to it….But heroism will not consist of talking about heroism and raving about the virtue of strength. It will consist, above all, in resisting with courage, in face of the world and perhaps against one’s own self, the lures and seductions of the false ideal, and in proudly maintaining, in their paradoxical intransigence the Christian values which are threatened and derided. Maintaining them with humble pride. For, if Christianity can and should assume the virtues of ancient paganism, the Christian who would remain faithful is bound to reject with a categorical NO a neo-paganism which set itself up against Christ. Gentleness and goodness, considerateness toward the lowly, pity for those who suffer, rejection of perverse methods, protection for the oppressed, unostentatious self-sacrifice, resistance to lies, the courage to call evil by its proper name, love of justice, the spirit of peace and concord, open-heartedness, mindfulness of heaven: those are the things Christian  heroism will rescue…Christians have mot been promised they will remain in the majority…nor that hey will always seem the strongest and that men will never be conquered by another ideal than theirs…but Christianity will never have any real efficacy, it will never have nay real existence or make any real conquests, except by the strength of its own spirit., by the strength of charity.

The Absolute Principle of the NeoPaganism
[The reign of God] was only a regency corresponding to “the long minority of mankind”. Now that mankind is grown up, the only absolute principle that is real shines forth in all its brilliance: “everything is relative”; and this principle rules out forever all spurious problems…

A Necessary Consequence of Denial of God
If one rules out the hypothesis of a God who is master of the world… I cannot see on what reality you can base the notion of a right enabling the individual as an isolated monad, to set himself up in front of the other beings around him and to say to them: ‘There is something intangible in me which I conjure you to respect because its principle is independent of you.”…If there is no Absolute how can there be anything absolute in man? God’s cause in the human conscience and man’s cause in society are bound up with each other. …If man, in his moral being, is crushed by society, it is because in his essence, he is first crushed by the universe…

Optimistic Theology
With Ivan, Doestoevsky rebels “against all optimistic theology shorn of its tragic element with evil appearing only as a necessary note in the universal harmony, while the ways of Providence fit in only too well with philosophic reason”. Rather than a theodicy he would propose a satanodicy. And when Ivan musters the force of his argument in the thought of the little girl, ill-treated and weeping with grief and shame, Doestoevksy is thinking in the depths of his heart that, on the plane of reason, there is no answer. Christ did not  come to explain suffering or solve the problem of evil: he took evil upon his shoulders to deliver us from it.

Comparing Nietzsche And Doestoevky
There is something else, too, in Ivan…diabolical pride which will not brook the existence of a God: a yearning for irresponsibility in human conduct; the idea, too, that man would be able to do more as soon as he specter of the deity had been removed form his horizon….since Nietzsche and with Nietzsche a new question has arisen: What is man (and mankind) capable of?…Where Nietzsche hails the apogee, Doestoevky foresees bankruptcy. These two men came to a fork in the road that proceeds from man and while one yielded to the path ostensibly leading to man who has become a god — to the superman — the other took the way which leads to God who has been made man.

Doestoevky’s Characters
“I do not know whether the spirit of God controls this power. I only know that I am myself a Karamazov…I am a monk, a monk…You said just now that I was a monk.”

“Yes, I did say that.”

“Well perhaps I don’t believe in God.”

“You don’t believe? What are you saying?” Lisa murmured with constraint. But Aloysha made no reply. In those sudden words there was something mysterious, something too subjective perhaps, which he could not account for and which worried him.”

The cry that there is nothing mingles with a serene and joyful affirmation of life…Through the characters in his novels, who all have something of himself in them, he delivers himself from his temptations and by this we know that, though has not been insensible to the power of denial, that power has not conquered him.

Dostoevsky’s Profession Of Faith I
Lastly there is his own testimony. Shortly before his death, he noted in his diary, in connection with criticisms of his last novel, The Brothers Karamazov: “The dolts have ridiculed my obscurantism and the reactionary character of my faith. These fools could not even coceive of so strong a denial of God as the one to which I have given expression…the whole book is an answer to that. You might search Europe in vain for so powerful an expression of atheism. Thus it is not like a child that I believe in Christ and confess him. My hosanna has come forth from the crucible of doubt“.…Dostoevsky does not separate faith in God from faith in Christ.

Dostoevsky’s Profession Of Faith II
In the convict prison, Dostoevsky encountered Christ. That is the cardinal fact that without which his work cannot be explained. He was to be a sinner. He was to go through agonies of doubt. He knew that in advance — he did not hope to find the peace vouchsafed to simple believers. He explains this to Mme. Von Wisne in an impressive letter, the first one written after his release: “And yet god sometimes sends me moments of complete serenity. It is in such moments that I have composed in my mind a profession of faith, in which everything is clear and holy. This profession of faith is very simple. This is what it is: to believe that ther is nothing finer, deeper, more loveable, more reasonable, braver and more perfect than Christ; and not only there is nothing, but I tell myself with a jealous love, there cannot be anything. More than that: if anyone had told me that Christ is outside truth, and if it had really been established hat truth is outside Christ, I should have preferred to stay with Christ rather than with truth.

Dostoevsky’s Profession Of Faith III
Dostoevsky also says: “We continually go astray if we have not Christ and his faith to guide us”; “repudiate Christ, and the human mind can arrive at the most astounding conclusions.” “The West has lost Christ and that is why it is dying; that is the only reason.” This is the idea that underlies The Possessed. He expresses it quite clearly in the notes which served as a preparation for the book: “True, it is possible to argue, and even to assert, that Christianity will not fall to the ground if Christ is regarded as no more than a man, as a philosopher who goes about doing good, and that, moreover, Christianity is neither a necessity for mankind nor a source of living life…but that it is a science that will be able to vitalize life and set up a perfect ideal. The world is full of these discussions. But we know, as you do, that all that is utterly absurd; we know that Christ, considered as merely a man, is not the saviour and source of life; we know that no science will serve to realize the human ideal and that, for mankind, peace, the source of life and salvation and the indispensable condition for the existence of the whole world, is contained in the saying: “The word was made flesh.”, and in faith in that saying.

The great humanists — Shakespeare and Goethe, for instance — are generally pagans and there is an established prejudice that anyone who goes deep in his exploration of a man must needs be a pagan. If by any chance he happens to be a Christian, this can only be a veneer; or else he became a Christian as the result of a n acute attack of pessimism which made him renounce man and all his riches. But what kind of Christianity is that?

The Need For A Universal Ant-Hill
According to the Grand Inquisitor (character in Dostoevsky, novel of the same name) Mankind is tormented by a need for universal union and , if all welcome him with gratitude, it is because they find in him not only a master, not a depositary of their consciences, but “a being which supplies them with the means of uniting into one great ant hill” Dostoevsky knows that this is a real need in the human heart. But he also knows that the ant hill ,the great uniform ant hill, in no way satisfies that need. There is no union worthy of that name except between persons and, where there is no freedom, there are no persons; just as without god, there is no freedom. The animals forming a flock are not united. The law of the world that, rejects god is a ruthless law of partitioning and isolation, which is more marked in proportion as social links form a closer mesh. In this age the whole thing has been split up; “everyone keeps away from his fellows and keeps them away from him; instead of giving expression to their personality they fall into a complete solitude” then “men’s efforts lead to nothing but total suicide. “ This terrible isolation will certainly come to an end one day, but that day will be the one on which the sign of he son of man appears in the heavens.

Dostoevsky’s Eternal Thought
Far more than he needs happiness, man needs to know and to believe, every minute, that somewhere else is a perfect, quiet happiness for each and all…The whole of human existence consists in this: that man can at all times bow before something infinitely great. If human beings came to be deprived of this infinitely great something, they would no longer want to live and would die in despair. The incommensurable and the infinite are as necessary to man as the little planet on which he moves…God is necessary to me because He is the only being whom one can love eternally.

Dostoevsky: The Essence Of Religious Feeling Eludes All Arguments
“If God is driven away from the earth, we shall meet him under the earth! From the bowels of the earth the subterranean men will raise a tragic hymn to the God of joy!” That is always the point to which Dostoevsky returns. After having said: “If God is nothing, everything is permitted.” we have man finding that “If God is nothing, everything is a matter of indifference”, and in this terrible certainty, this taste of death, temptation vanishes. Man is a theotropic [growing towards God] being. Violently attacked on all sides, faith is indestructible in his heart. The atheists muster impeccable arguments: the true believer does not worry if he cannot answer them, for it always seems to him a case of ignoratio elenchi. …”She was quite a young woman and the child would be about six weeks old. It was smiling at its mother — for the first time in its life she said. I saw her cross herself with the utmost piety. ‘why do you do that, my dear?’, I said to her. At that time I was forever asking questions. All the joy that a mother feels when she sees her child smiling for the first time,’ she replied, ‘God feels every time He sees, from up there in heaven, a sinner praying to him from the bottom of his heart.’ Those are practically the very words which that simple woman said to me; she expressed this deep, subtle and purely religious thought in which the whole essences of Christianity is summed up, which recognizes in God a heavenly father rejoicing at the sight of man as a father at the sight of his child. It is the fundamental idea of Christ. A simple woman of the people! True she was a mother…Listen Parfen. Just now you asked me a question. This is my answer: The essence of religious feeling eludes all arguments; no misdeeds, no crime, no form of atheism can touch it. In this feeling there is and always be something that cannot be grasped, something beyond the reach of atheist reasoning.

Aspects Of Oneself
I have in me my nature, my temperament, my character, containing elements many of which I proscribe, some of which I ratify  and some of which I endure. There are characteristics which I have inherited and those which I have made for myself. There are the things I hide from myself ,and the things for which I yearn without possessing them, but which are a moulding influence because they attract me. How many simplistic, would be profound explanations there are a about it all!…One is apt to forget that the life of the conscience cannot be grasped objectively and it is assumed that complete sincerity excludes any other effort than the courage to read oneself. Moreover, these simplistic explanations, which take themselves for the last word in psychology and ethics, lead to absurd conclusions: the possibilities which swarm in us, more or less preformed, are varied, and contradictory: must we, to be sincere, put them all into practice? And will sincerity also demand that we never think, except in accordance with what we are? Or might it occasionally consist unrecognizing that hat we are is not in accordance with what we think?

Dostoevsky: The Prophet Of The Other Life
Dostoevsky is the prophet of the other life…[His truth] bears no resemblance to a positivist truth…it sets itself against any attempt on the part of man to establish an eternal life in this world; its purpose is not to leave him weighed down by a miserable lot. It is to reclaim him from a path that leads nowhere. He is the prophet of unity, which presupposes a breach to be healed; the prophet of a resurrection, which presupposes experience of death