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But did the death of God have to lead to nihilism of the sort you so comprehensively summarise? That's a very good question. I believe that it did have to. I find Nietzsche's analysis of the situation to be spot-on, up to the point of his leap of faith in a figure of immanent transformation (of which he considered himself a prophet) that would in a sense "replace" the transcendent Godhead. But it can't. Nothing can. Take the God out of the God-Man and the whole thing collapses. This is what we're seeing playing out in the West (and bleeding out everywhere else as usual). Christ conquered the old gods metaphysically. What's left of them are now angels or devils, saints or idols, or more recently laws of physics or logics of capitalism and mass media, sexual identities, those sorts of things -- no longer "divine" in the pagan sense, merely other "mere" creatures in a material world. When Christ fades, the transcendent ground of meaning and being of creatures, is lost, and there is nothing left. Nihilism. I think calling, say, the mass media a kind of "paganism" is not quite right. The secular (in its modern sense) is not the pagan, for the secular subsists on a landscape of dessification, of sprouts springing from unwatered crumbling roots -- a post Christian nihilism. The secular is not a return of the pagan gods. It's too late for that. We retrieve only a simulacrum of pagan values, a skeptical appreciation of the value of having pagan values, without the divinity that brought reality to those values. Christianity and the Enlightenment annihilated the possibility of any other and any greater meaning respectively. So the modern/postmodern secular is not pagan, because it is both ironic and (strangely) reactionary. It fills the god-shaped gaps, but not with "gods," much less with God. With the rest of what you say I agree completely. Buttigieg! |