Armoise (Septidi), 7 Thermidor, CCXXXIII
VI: The Christian Revolution
In perhaps his most famously histrionic—though perhaps, for that reason, most cooly rational—pronouncement upon the ‘death of God’, Nietzsche asked through the voice of his Zarathustra whether humanity was capable of grasping the significance of its own rebellion against the transcendent, and how long it would be before we could acknowledge to ourselves what we had done in thus ‘sponging away the horizon’. Were we strong enough to look into the terrifying void we had exposed, or heroic enough to wrest a higher future out of the ruins of our illusions? Or were we rather destined for some time yet to be like those who continue to adore the shadow of the Buddha on a cave’s wall long after the Buddha’s departure, all the while descending inexorably toward the state of the ‘last men’? For myself, one part of the answer seems clear. Whatever Übermensch we might imagine arriving in the aftermath of God’s demise, the future is much more likely to bring only a decline of the human toward a state of vacuity. To have slain everything ‘high and holy’, as Nietzsche proclaimed we had done, was to have destroyed the theatre of meaning in which anything truly ‘superhuman’ could possibly stand forth. Whatever or whoever might emerge under a heaven evacuated of the divine, in a world from which spiritual longing and charity have been driven out by the Will to Power or ‘self-overcoming’, would in the end be allzumenschlich. But the more interesting question that Nietzsche asks is how we learned to rebel in the first place. Where did this revolution come from? And his answer, albeit in a sense that he did not fully intend, was essentially correct: from Christianity. Rather like Marx and Engels speaking with mingled awe at and distaste for capitalism’s power of dissolving all the apparently solid certitudes of the premodern order, Nietzsche recognized in Christianity a singular force of disruption, one that, on being loosed into history, had had the power to overturn the world and to smash the tables of the laws. He may have inveighed against the ethos of resentment, and against slavish spite toward healthy souls, but he also grasped that the Christian ‘transvaluation of all values’ had succeeded on a formerly unimaginable scale, and had been a unique and uniquely Western event. To his mind, its natural terminus was nihilism, and the death of God merely the coup de grâce at the end of its battle against the gods. It was an ungovernable rebellion and so one that, once released, would ultimately turn upon itself—for, in the end, the spitefulness and petty resentment were its highest goods.
This is all at once both true and nonsensical. The truth lies in the recognition that revolution, and specifically a revolution against ‘sacred order’, was always at the heart of the Christian movement. The nonsense lies in the assertion that this revolution, for want of any new worlds to conquer, merely conquered itself. The truth of the matter is that, while Christianity over two millennia may have subverted itself as a cultural consensus, this was not the result simply of resentment seeking an outlet against all higher values so much as a persisting campaign against the particular scale of values it had never wholly overthrown, and with which instead it had struck a strategic alliance. However one frames the matter, though, the sequel of the story remains the same: a lost horizon of transcendence and a struggle to replace it with one or another idolatrous alternative, conjured up out of a combination of anxious despair and aggressive willfulness. And I say this as someone who hesitates to use the word ‘idolatry’ in any very expansive polemical sense, since I am not sure that such a thing ever really existed before the modern age. We may conceive of ‘Abrahamic’ monotheism in terms of the romance of the desert, of the God without visage, of the bare confrontation of the finite soul with the infinite; but that is a posterior construction, amplifying what was originally a very specific aniconic prohibition regarding depictions of the God of Israel into an abstraction. It had nothing much to do with a distinction between the one God whom it is licit to adore and others who were merely products of human fancy. But now, in the wake of Christendom’s disintegration, it is worth asking whether we have at last succeeded in inventing idolatry. Perhaps its perennial negation in absentia summoned it into being over the epochs. Now we really do seem to desire an immanent God; we have discovered ideology.
