“Nihilism, thought in its essence, is, rather, the fundamental movement of the history of the West…. Nihilism is the world historical movement of the peoples of the earth who have been drawn in to the power realm of the modern age.” Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, And Other Essays.

The question of Christianity on the right is, if not the essential question, derivative thereof. Scions of the avant garde right like Bronze Age Pervert frequently find themselves in skirmishes with self-proclaimed Christian (frequently Roman Catholic) traditionalists. As recently as January 17th, BAP himself was bemoaning the “religion affectation in conservative circles” and hoping for it to pass. This dispute is all the more acute given Trump’s return to power. With the left at least temporarily on its back leg, it is imperative for the American right to put its intellectual house in order. This demands a rigorous accounting of the question of Christianity.

 

The Vapors of Christianity

Regardless of denominational affiliation, Christianity (nominally) demands the whole man; body, spirit, soul. Christianity and Christianity’s appropriation of Greek philosophy was the scaffolding upon which the Western world built itself, and Christianity requires our thoroughgoing engagement, regardless of what one ultimately does with it. And yet, time and again Christianity receives an intellectually shallow, polemicized treatment. Its self-proclaimed “traditionalist” defenders are as guilty as its detractors in presenting a one-dimensional vision of the religion, ultimately refusing to follow the organic development of the religion where it has led—into modernity. By refusing to follow the religion through, they are, in a very real sense, denying its Spirit. With both sides claiming to uphold the mantle of Western civilization, one would think that the religion could garner a more thoughtful analysis.  

To understand modern Christianity, we should (as much as this short essay allows) examine its origins. This provides a twofold benefit in that the beginnings of Christianity show us not only the situation of its first practitioners but likewise gives us greater clarity towards what Christianity is through contrast with what it replaced. Now, Christianity is suffering a similar fate to what it subjected classical religion to. This painful experience is termed nihilism, described by

Nietzsche as the situation where “the highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; ‘why?’ finds no answer.”

It is my contention that in this process we can see the same nameless, vaporous force at work that has for centuries driven Christian development. This force drives man behind his conscious concerns and what his ego considers his best interests. For an early Christian it might drive him into martyrdom in the Colosseum. For a modern man it drives him into the confrontation with meaninglessness and nihilism. Christianity calls this the Holy Spirit and this term is applied (some might say co-opted) in philosophy, most notably by Hegel. For this reason we shall use this term in Hegel’s sense though with a degree of intentional, perhaps inevitable ambiguity.

Jung was not blind to the similarities between the end of ancient religion and what is now happening with Christianity, stating that Nietzsche’s claim that God is dead “has, for some ears, the same eerie sound as that ancient cry which came echoing over the sea to mark the end of the nature gods: ‘Great Pan is dead.'”

When ancient man in his physical, naturalistic religion felt that his gods had withdrawn from the world, Christianity offered a chance to transcend this, providing a Kingdom “not of this world” and a focus upon an intangible relation to God. More properly conceived, the withdrawal of the old nature gods and the arrival of the Christian god correspond, both reflecting the same underlying change in how man stood in relation to his world.

This change came at a cost, however, as Christianity’s spiritualization of the more physical, concrete faith of the ancient world demanded more from man. As the cry went up that “great Pan is dead” and gone from the terrestrial world, Christianity found a new God in the celestial realm. With this, man’s moral and intellectual responsibility in the physical world grew exponentially. Man ruled this world at God’s behest, as Genesis explicitly states. In Christianity, this responsibility is taken to the extreme, such that each and every man is now directly accountable to the Creator of the Universe, held to a requirement to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.” No small ask!

Christianity lays claim to the entirety of man’s being and aims to color every interaction he has with the world on a spiritual-moral level. Every action is subject to the scouring of conscience.

This is not to say that the first Christian converts had a conscious choice between the new religion and “paganism,” just as modern individuals do not feel that they have a choice in face of the anxiety and meaninglessness that calls forth from modernity. These first converts were “called”. Denote the agent behind this calling however you like: Man is driven beyond his petty, everyday ego concerns towards a fundamental development and evolution of his relation to the world. As Jung says, “the experience of the self is always a defeat for the ego.”

Christianity persists two millenia later, continuing to develop and take on new shapes. Raw Egg Nationalist is entirely correct in his estimation that Christianity touches everything, even in the modern world, even when he goes so far as to say that “[t]he air we breathe and the very earth we walk on are Christian.” Indeed, the fact that we walk upon the bare earth, dirt and nothing but dirt, and not Gaia, full of archetypal and cultic significance, is representative of our monotheistic, spiritualized, Christian disposition. The radical dis-enchantment of the natural world brought about by the abstract, non-corporeal Christian God permits man to perform the great blasphemy of dissecting Mother Gaia’s cold, dead body. The mechanistic “rape of the earth” is a phenomenon of the Industrial Age, coterminous with the Enlightenment and European man coming of age after his millenia of Christian formation.

Not only has our monotheistic religion “spilt,” where its “moral system or its vision of human nature or even its path to salvation, spill over from the vessel they were once contained in,” as Raw Egg Nationalist says, but that vessel has shattered. Christianity, as religion of the Spirit, is rather like a gas than a liquid. It has burst the container, filled the room, spread a film over everything we see, even seeped into the closet under the door. There is no position that does not at least build upon the Christian edifice. In negating Christianity one treads fundamentally Christian grounds. One man rejects Christianity because of its extra-empirical claims, thereby taking Christianity’s primacy of logically ordered thought (Logos!) and disenchantment of the world to its natural conclusion. Another man rejects Christianity because it posits pacifism and he thereby takes up the moral mantle and individual accountability that the Christian God demands of him.

Our current disposition is the result of two millennia of Christianity, and no priest can exorcise this ghost. Even the great prophet Nietzsche himself could only sigh in frustration at the blank looks that greet the Madman in the marketplace, contenting himself with the oracular and poetic saying of Zarathustra for an age yet to find fulfillment far in the future.

 

Christianity As Nihilism

Above, Heidegger frames nihilism as the “fundamental movement of the history of the West”.  If Christianity is likewise foundational for the West, this shows Christianity and nihilism to be in fundamental relation. I posit that the latter necessarily grows out of the former. The sooner one accepts this the sooner one can genuinely engage with both Christianity and nihilism.

Heidegger goes on state that “So long as we understand the word ‘God is dead’ only as a formula of unbelief, we are thinking it theologically in the manner of apologetics, and we are renouncing all claims to what matters to Nietzsche, i.e., to reflection that ponders what has already happened regarding the truth of the suprasensory world and regarding its relation to man’s essence.”

Viewing Christianity as the mother of nihilism is not meant as an attack upon the Christian God or a polemic against the churches, woke though they may now be. Rather, it is a call to an honest accounting of what the Spirit, the Spirit once contained in the Church/es, the Spirit which has moved Occidental history for millenia now, proclaims to the world today.

 

Enter Modernity

The vitalist critique of Christianity is correct in blaming the religion for modernity’s woes. However militant and particularist Medieval Christianity may have been, the foundational assumptions of modernity and “liberalism” grew directly out of Christianity’s soil.

Christianity represents the ever increasing abstraction of God. Indeed, early Christians were frequently accused of atheism by their “pagan” interlocutors because of the comparative demythologization of the world their religion represented. In the same way that modern empirical consciousness and scientism has stripped the Christian God out of man’s daily experience of the world, Christianity stripped the forest of Silvanus, the sea of her Nereids, the home of the Penates, and political life of its High Jupiter. Christianity has no ability, indeed no right, to draw the line in the sand before its own extra-rational claims. In Christianity, God drinks from his own chalice.

Christianity asked more of man. Christianity asked man to think. To borrow the point from post-Jungian analyst Wolfgang Giegerich, Christianity demanded much more intellectually from man than paganism did. Caesar or Alexander could be a god without a second thought. For pagan man the archetypal manifestation was left as it was and needed no further elaboration. But Christ’s claim to Divinity required thought, properly. Centuries of hair-splitting theological debate engaging with the most cutting edge philosophical ideas of the time were necessary to precisely lay out and satisfy the soul’s understanding of Christ’s claim. The fact that the best pre-Christian philosophical minds of the day had already embraced an implicitly monotheistic neoplatonism is proof precisely of the spiritual truth of Christianity for the late ancient world.

This increasing abstraction of the notion of God is inherent in Christianity. It should be no surprise that it has been carried to its logical completion in modernity, where, in Hegel’s sense of Absolute Spirit, God becomes entirely negativized and is no longer an object, no longer a thing.

Eli Eli Lama Sabachthani (“My God, My God, why have you abandoned me?”). If one has eyes to see, one can trace such movement throughout Christian history, with, for example, the increasing individualization and personalization of the sacramental system heading into the late Medieval period. This culminates, ultimately, in the Reformation where modern subjectivity truly breaks its bonds and rears its head. Catholic polemics against Luther are correct in that he unleashed the forces of a godless modernity. They are incorrect to think he was not led on by the same Spirit that the church had always sought to serve.

The movement of Spirit after the Reformation is not, as many (mis)understand it to be, matters of faith being shunted out of the world and tucked away into the church. Rather, all of life was increasingly the provenance of man’s religious duty. Man “matured”, and traded a medieval world full of Christian images but short on individual ethical obligations for a (pre) modern world increasingly emptied of Christian images but full of individual, particular Christian duties. No doubt many medieval people acted ethically out of a sense of Christian obligation, but the universal deontic call instilled from childhood on to consecrate one’s labor and daily life in service of God is a particularly early-modern Protestant invention.

The Chesterton crowd laments the demystification of the world, yet they miss that this precisely corresponds with the intensification of the Christian life. In man’s psychological maturation he trades the weeping statues and apparitions of the medieval world for the direct, personal accountability to God and sense of agency in one’s life. The history of Christianity is one of God’s movement ever deeper into man, ever more remote from the natural world. Again, this is implicit in the religion’s foundation. As Augustine says, intimior intimo meo et superior summo meo.

This is all to say that nothing fundamentally changed in the 19th or 20th centuries. The pace of development may have accelerated, but Christianity’s basic course has been the same for millenia.

This observation does not mean that the logical end of either Christianity or modernity is the dissolution of all borders and all distinctions. Rather, we must take more seriously where we are and how we got here. Only then can we truly understand where the Spirit might lead.

The “Spirit” is not an individual product, not a project of conscious ideation, not something one can will to be different. Rather, this Spirit is akin to the collective soul. Something like the Catholic Sacraments is a work of the soul. No man sat down and “invented” the Real Presence of Christ in the consecrated host, for instance. Rather, men, or Man, over centuries “discovered” such an idea in the depths of their being and explicated it. This is the work of generations.

And yet, many on the right wish to do away with Christianity. What the self-proclaimed

“traditionalist” cohort wishes to do with Christianity is perhaps even worse than what

Christianity’s detractors aim to accomplish. By attempting to force Christianity to provide modern consciousness’ listful and romanticized image of what is missing in modern life, the traditionalist would kill what remains of genuine Christianity for modern man. The Spirit will not be a captive bride for one’s aestheticized political scheming.

Man cannot “retvrn” to tradition. Modern consciousness is fundamentally different from pagan or medieval consciousness due to centuries of the (Christian) soul’s work. We do not experience the world as a medieval peasant. One can only return as in a movie, purely on the level of the ego. One can “consume” the Latin mass, as one consumes a movie or any other entertainment product, but one cannot live the Latin Mass as Thomas Aquinas did. To pretend to do so is to blaspheme against the Spirit.

 

What the Spirit demands

The Spirit demands more from us, perhaps more than it ever has. Previous generations could live inside religion, inside an enchanting universe of beautiful images and divine forces at play, where meaning is inherent and the question “why” never arises. Modern man has been “born” out of this, as Giegerich says. Modern man’s Spirit has nothing but itself for object. God came down to earth and dwelt among us, after which He departed and sent his Spirit. Now we live with his Spirit which is indeed our Spirit. To pretend as though we can do otherwise would be to sin against the Spirit.

The Christian God is Spirit, abstraction. He therefore is identified as values. God is good. God is love. God is mercy. God is justice. This very innovation that Christianity introduces over the old religions then sets the stage for nihilism, properly understood. Nietzsche arguably uses the term in various ways throughout his writing. Nietzsche’s polemical use of the term against Christianity, identifying the religion as the embodiment of the great denial of all the values of higher life, while interesting, is less useful than his more systematic use of the term. In this use, nihilism encompasses the dual movement where “the highest values devalue themselves” and man is called upon to will his own meaning through the positing of new values. A man sufficient unto himself, able to provide his own answer for the why that finds no answer from above.

Christianity, then, provides the ingredients and mixes the cocktail that is its own downfall^[1]. Through Christianity, man is subjected to (1) ever greater intellectual rigor and development; (2) an absolute, individual moral burden; (3) a God that is ultimately the positing of value(s) in itself and will towards its actualization; and (4) the disenchantment of the natural world. Within a few thousand years, it is not surprising that a man like Nietzsche emerges, ready to consciously take up this burden. If Barbarossa was the first European, Nietzsche is the first Christian.

The “spilt religion” discussed earlier by Raw Egg Nationalist is the first of many abortive thrusts of this Christian nihilism. With the withdrawal of the Christian God, man is left with the husk of

Christian values. He is not yet ready to consciously posit new values. Heidegger states that “[t]he flight from the world into the suprasensory is replaced by historical progress. The otherworldly goal of everlasting bliss is transformed into the earthly happiness of the greatest number…. Accordingly, that which must take the place of the suprasensory world will be variations on the Christian-eccelsiastical and theological interpretation of the world.” He explains that Nietzsche understands this as “incomplete nihilism”, where essentially Christian concerns rule over the world from the not-yet-fully-abolished suprasensory realm. This has driven Western politics, left and right, for centuries. From “civilizing the world” through empire to ending hunger in Africa, this half-nihilism has ruled the day.

Our contemporary political questions are downstream of this. While Christian nations have of course historically maintained their borders, to take the most obvious example, this would perhaps be the first time in the Chrisian era that the Spirit turns against ever expanding universalism and the demolition of all distinctions between men. This would be more than a simple return to an obviously sane policy. There is more at work here than the tweaking of a few numbers in the spreadsheet of the economy.

In the West’s increasing rejection of open borders we see possibly the positing of new values, notably distinct from the reigning Christian universalism. Or, perhaps we might say that this universalism need not be expressed in such a literal way as open borders. Perhaps this represents a deepening, a sublation, of what the last five or so decades have literalized. This full throated rejection has been very explicitly stated by the new administration. Consider Marco Rubio’s confirmation hearing, where he stated that it was a “dangerous delusion” for Americans to believe “that all mankind was destined to abandon national sovereignty and national identity” to “instead become… citizens of the world.”

This positing of new values can be seen on the international stage as well. Trump’s focus on territorial expansion, whether serious or not, reflects of course a rejection of that “postwar global order” that Rubio acknowledges is “not just obsolete—it is now a weapon being used against us.” The high water mark of this global ordering is perhaps the high-minded international liberalism embodied in the rule of “United Nations” committees, as envisioned by figures like Woodrow Wilson. This of course implicitly leads to an ever more centralized and rationalized ordering of the world and is perhaps the Platonic Ideal of post-Christian half-nihilism. Nothing embodies it more perfectly. All the noble universalism and scientism of the Christian Spirit with none of the religious framework. The Church sublated into the world-state. Regardless of how disingenuous and dysfunctional these organizations have acted, this is the highest to which post-Christian ethics could reach. If Rubio’s and Trump’s rhetoric is any indication, it is now shattered. Rejected entirely.

Nations in the position to exert their will upon the world will be called on to define just what that will is. Rather than a mere return to the Hobbesian state of nature on the international scale (though this too may happen), dropping the pretense of international humanism will force America to determine what values she is truly willing to use force to accomplish.

Other examples of this abound. The death of DEI and preferential hiring for minority groups is another obvious result of this. We must keep in mind the prime movement and not confuse the phenomena for their common cause. The right has not won on these political issues as individual issues. Trump did not point by point convince the electorate of his vision. Rather, he recognized (consciously or otherwise) that the Spirit had moved on from the conception underlying these positions. They were groundless. Everything is happening at once. The old order is rejected wholesale—DEI and unfettered immigration and climate hysteria and the international humanitarian mission of the West and the administrative “deep state” (a clericalism if ever there was one) and global free trade and on and on– it all dies the same death because the same ground that held all of it up is now gone. This is why the right can win more battles in the courts as well, even beyond the number of judicial nominations. Trump has made and will make. The judiciary is not immune to the ground shifting out from under the old idols.

This turning of the wheel will be most apparent in America, the land of European civilization in extremis. Is man finally ready to grow beyond his half-nihilism? As desirable as the policy shifts brought on by the new administration may be, this fundamental question remains to be answered. This will be decades if not centuries in the making. BAP is unlikely to receive the explicit disavowal he desires from the supposedly Christian right for many years. The average man is not up to anything that explicit. He may never be. What remains is to stay attuned to the implicit, unconscious shifts that these years will bring. The full range of possibilities is only just beginning to unveil itself.