THE
PHILOSOPHY OF THE ABSURD
EDITOR’S NOTE: While working
on The Kingdom of Man and the Kingdom of God, Eugene Rose wrote the
following as a separate essay. We present this essay here not only
because it was written at about the same time as his chapter on
Nihilism, but also because its theme ties in so closely with that of
the present book. It offers profound insights into the absurdist
philosophy that continues to grip the minds of many — minds already
shaped by the nihilistic undercurrent of our times.
The present age is, in
a profound sense, an age of absurdity. Poets and dramatists, painters
and sculptors proclaim and depict the world as a disjointed chaos, and
man as a dehumanized fragment of that chaos. Politics, whether of the
right, the left, or the center, can no longer be viewed as anything but
an expedient whereby universal disorder is given, for the moment, a
faint semblance of order; pacifists and militant crusaders are united
in an absurd faith in the feeble powers of man to remedy an intolerable
situation by means which can only make it worse. Philosophers and other
supposedly responsible men in governmental, academic, and
ecclesiastical circles, when they do not retreat behind the impersonal
and irresponsible facade of specialization or bureaucracy, usually do
no more than rationalize the incoherent state of contemporary man and
his world, and counsel a futile “commitment” to a discredited humanist
optimism, to a hopeless stoicism, to blind experimentation and
irrationalism, or to “commitment” itself, a suicidal faith in “faith.”
But art, politics, and
philosophy today are only reflections of life, and if they have become
absurd it is because, in large measure, life has become so. The most
striking example of absurdity in life in recent times was, of course,
Hitler’s “new order,” wherein a supposedly normal, civilized man could
be at one and the same time an accomplished and moving interpreter of
Bach (as was Himmler) and a skilled murderer of millions, or who might
arrange a tour of an extermination camp to coincide with a concert
series or an exhibition of art. Hitler himself, indeed, was the absurd
man par excellence, passing from nothingness to world rule and back to
nothingness in the space of a dozen years, leaving as his monument
nothing but a shattered world, owing his meaningless success to the
fact that he, the emptiest of men, personified the emptiness of the men
of his time.
Hitler’s surrealist world is
now a thing of the past; but the world has by no means passed out of
the age of absurdity, but rather into a more advanced — though
temporarily quieter — stage of the same disease. Men have invented a
weapon to express, better than Hitler’s gospel of destruction, their
own incoherence and nihilism; and in its shadow men stand paralyzed,
between the extremes of an external power and an internal powerlessness
equally without precedent. At the same time, the poor and
“underprivileged” of the world have awakened to conscious life, and
seek abundance and privilege; those who already possess them waste
their lives in the pursuit of vain things, or become disillusioned and
die of boredom and despair, or commit senseless crimes. The whole
world, it almost seems, is divided into those who lead meaningless,
futile lives without being aware of it, and those who, being aware of
it, are driven to madness and suicide.
It is unnecessary to multiply
examples of a phenomenon of which everyone is aware. Suffice it to say
that these examples are typical, and even the most extreme of them are
but advanced forms of the disorder which surrounds every one of us
today and which, if we know not how to combat it, takes up residence in
our hearts. Ours is an age of absurdity, in which the totally
irreconcilable exists side by side, even in the same soul; where
nothing seems to any purpose; where things fall apart because they have
no center to hold them together. It is true, of course, that the
business of daily life seems to proceed as usual — though at a
suspiciously feverish pace — men manage to “get along,” to live from
day to day. But that is because they do not, or will not think; and one
can hardly blame them for that, for the realities of the present day
are not pleasant ones. Still, it is only the person who does think, who
does ask what, beneath the distractions of daily life, is really
happening in the world — it is only such a person who can feel even
remotely “at home” in the strange world we live in today, or can feel
that this age is, after all, “normal.”
It is not a “normal”
age in which we live; whatever their exaggerations and errors, however
false their explanations, however contrived their world-view, the
“advanced” poets, artists, and thinkers of the age are at least right
in one respect: there is something frightfully wrong with the
contemporary world. This is the first lesson we may learn from
absurdism.
For absurdism is a profound symptom
of the spiritual state of contemporary man, and if we know how to read
it correctly we may learn much of that state. But this brings us to the
most important of the initial difficulties to be disposed of before we
can speak of the absurd. Can it be understood at all? The absurd is, by
its very nature, a subject that lends itself to careless or sophistical
treatment; and such treatment has indeed been given it, not only by the
artists who are carried away by it, but by the supposedly serious
thinkers and critics who attempt to explain or justify it. In most of
the works on contemporary “existentialism,” and in the apologies for
modern art and drama, it would seem that intelligence has been totally
abandoned, and critical standards are replaced by a vague “sympathy” or
“involvement,” and by extra-logical if not illogical arguments that
cite the “spirit of the age” or some vague “creative” impulse or an
indeterminate “awareness”; but these are not arguments, they are at
best rationalizations, at worst mere jargon. If we follow that path we
may end with a greater “appreciation” of absurdist art, but hardly with
any profounder understanding of it. Absurdism, indeed, may not be
understood at all in its own terms; for understanding is coherence, and
that is the very opposite of absurdity. If we are to understand the
absurd at all, it must be from a standpoint outside absurdity, a
standpoint from which a word like “understanding” has a meaning; only
thus may we cut through the intellectual fog within which absurdism
conceals itself, discouraging coherent and rational attack by its own
assault on reason and coherence. We must, in short, take a stand within
a faith opposed to the absurdist faith and attack it in the name of a
truth of which it denies the existence. In the end we shall find that
absurdism, quite against its will, offers its own testimony to this
faith and this truth which are — let us state at the outset — Christian.
The philosophy of the absurd is,
indeed, nothing original in itself; it is entirely negation, and its
character is determined, absolutely and entirely, by that which it
attempts to negate. The absurd could not even be conceived except in
relation to something considered not to be absurd; the fact that the
world fails to make sense could occur only to men who have once
believed, and have good reason to believe, that it does not make sense.
Absurdism cannot be understood apart from its Christian origins.
Christianity is, supremely,
coherence, for the Christian God has ordered everything in the
universe, both with regard to everything else and with regard to
Himself, Who is the beginning and end of all creation; and the
Christian whose faith is genuine finds this divine coherence in every
aspect of his life and thought. For the absurdist, everything falls
apart, including his own philosophy, which can only be a short-lived
phenomenon; for the Christian, everything holds together and is
coherent, including those things which in themselves are incoherent.
The incoherence of the absurd is, in the end, part of a larger
coherence; if it were not, there would be little point in speaking of
it at all.
The second of the initial
difficulties in approaching the absurd concerns the precise manner of
approach. It will not do — if we wish to understand it — to dismiss
absurdism as mere error and self-contradiction; it is these, to be
sure, but it is also much more. No competent thinker, surely, can be
tempted to take seriously any absurdist claim to truth; no matter from
which side one approaches it, absurdist philosophy is nothing but
self-contradiction. To proclaim ultimate meaninglessness, one must
believe that this phrase has a meaning, and thus one denies it in
affirming it; to assert that “there is no truth,” one must believe in
the truth of this statement, and so again affirm what one denies.
Absurdist philosophy, it is clear, is not to be taken seriously as
philosophy; all its objective statements must be reinterpreted
imaginatively, and often subjectively. Absurdism, in fact — as we shall
see — is not a product of the intellect at all, but of the will.
The philosophy of the absurd, while
implicit in a large number of contemporary works of art, is fortunately
quite explicit — if we know how to interpret it — in the writings of
Nietzsche; for his nihilism is precisely the root from which the tree
of absurdity has grown. In Nietzsche we may read the philosophy of the
absurd; in his older contemporary Dostoevsky we may see described the
sinister implications which Nietzsche, blind to the Christian truth
which is the only remedy for the absurd view of life, failed to see. In
these two writers, living at the dividing point between two worlds,
when the world of coherence based on Christian truth was being
shattered and the world of the absurd based on its denial was coming
into being, we may find almost everything there is of importance to
know about the absurd.
The absurdist revelation, after a
long period of underground germination, bursts into the open in the two
striking phrases of Nietzsche so often quoted: “God is dead” means
simply, that faith in God is dead in the hearts of modern men; and
“there is no truth” means that men have abandoned the truth revealed by
God upon which all European thought and institutions once were based.
They have abandoned it because they no longer find it credible. Both
statements are indeed true of what has, since Nietzsche’s time, become
the vast majority of those who were once Christian. It is true of the
atheists and satanists who profess to be content or ecstatic at their
own lack of faith and rejection of truth; it is equally true of the
less pretentious multitudes in whom the sense of spiritual reality has
simply evaporated, whether this event be expressed in indifference to
spiritual reality, in that spiritual confusion and unrest so widespread
today, or in any of the many forms of pseudo-religion that are but
masks for indifference and confusion. And even over that
ever-decreasing minority who still believe, inwardly as well as
outwardly, for whom the other world is more real than this world — even
over these the shadow of the “death of God” has fallen and made the
world a different and a strange place.
Nietzsche, in the Will to Power,
comments very succinctly on the meaning of nihilism:
What does nihilism mean? — That the
highest values are losing their value. There is no goal. There is no
answer to the question: “Why?”
Everything, in short, has become
questionable. The magnificent certainty we see in the Fathers and
Saints of the Church, and in all true believers, that refers
everything, whether in thought or life, back to God, seeing everything
as beginning and ending in Him, everything as His will — this certainty
and faith that once held society and the world and man himself
together, are now gone, and the questions for which men once had
learned to find the answers in God, now have — for most men — no
answers.
There have been, of course, other
forms of coherence than Christianity, and forms of incoherence other
than modern nihilism and absurdity. In them human life makes sense, or
fails to make sense, but only to a limited degree. Men who believe and
follow, for example, the traditional Hindu or Chinese view of things,
possess a measure of truth and of the peace that comes from truth — but
not absolute truth, and not the “peace that passes all understanding”
that proceeds only from absolute truth; and those who fall away from
this relative truth and peace have lost something real, but they have
not lost everything, as has the apostate Christian. Never has such
disorder reigned in the heart of man and in the world today; but this
is precisely because man has fallen away from a truth and a coherence
that have been revealed in their fullness only in Christ. Only the
Christian God is at the same time all power and all love; only the
Christian God, through His love has promised men immortality and,
through His power to fulfill that promise, has prepared a Kingdom in
which men will live in God as gods, having been raised from the dead.
This is a God and His promise so incredible to the ordinary human
understanding that, once having believed it, men who reject it can
never believe anything else to be of any great value. A world from
which such a God has been removed, a man in whom such a hope has been
extinguished — are, indeed, in the eyes of those who have undergone
such disillusionment, “absurd.”
“God is dead,” “there is no truth”:
the two phrases have precisely the same meaning; they are alike a
revelation of the absolute absurdity of a world whose center is no
longer God, but — nothing. But just here at the very heart of
absurdism, its dependence upon the Christianity it rejects is most
apparent. One of the most difficult of Christian doctrines for the
non-Christian and anti-Christian to understand and accept is that of
the creatio ex nihilo: God’s creation of the world not out of Himself,
not out of some pre-existent matter, but out of nothing. Yet, without
understanding it, the absurdist testifies to its reality by inverting
and parodying it, by attempting in effect, a nihilization of creation,
a return of the world to that very nothingness out of which God first
called it. This may be seen in the absurdist affirmation of a void at
the center of things, and in the implication present in all absurdists
to a greater or lesser degree, that it would be better if man and his
world did not exist at all. But this attempt at nihilization, this
affirmation of the Abyss, that lies at the very heart of absurdism,
takes its most concrete form in the atmosphere that pervades absurdist
works of art. In the art of those whom one might call commonplace
atheists — men like Hemmingway, Camus, and the vast numbers of artists
whose insight does not go beyond the futility of the human situation as
men imagine it today, and whose aspiration does not look beyond a kind
of stoicism, a facing of the inevitable — in the art of such men the
atmosphere of the void is communicated by boredom, by a despair that is
yet tolerable, and in general by the feeling that “nothing ever
happens.” But there is a second, and more revealing, kind of absurdist
art, which unites to the mood of futility an element of the unknown, a
kind of eerie expectancy, the feeling that in an absurd world, where,
generally, “nothing ever happens,” it is also true that “anything is
possible.” In this art, reality becomes a nightmare and the world
becomes an alien planet wherein men wander not so much in hopelessness
as in perplexity, uncertain of where they are, of what they may find,
of their own identity — of everything except the absence of God. This
is the strange world of Kafka, of the plays of Ionesco and — less
strikingly — of Beckett, of a few avant-garde films like “Last Year at
Marienbad,” of electronic and other “experimental” music, of surrealism
in all the arts, and of the most recent painting and sculpture — and
particularly that with a supposedly “religious” content — in which man
is depicted as a subhuman or demonic creature emerging from some
unknown depths. It was the world, too, of Hitler, whose reign was the
most perfect political incarnation we have yet seen of the philosophy
of the absurd.
This strange atmosphere is the
“death of God” made tangible. It is significant that Nietzsche, in the
very passage (in the Joyful Wisdom) where he first proclaims the “death
of God” — a message he puts in the mouth of a madman — describes the
very atmosphere of this absurdist art.
We have killed him (God), you and
I! We are all his murderers! But how have we done it? How were we able
to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole
horizon? What did we do when we loosened this earth from its sun?
Whither does it now move? Whither do we move? Away from all suns? Do we
not dash on unceasingly? Backwards, sideways, forwards, in all
directions? Is there still an above and below? Do we not stray, as
through infinite nothingness? Does not empty space breathe upon us? Has
it not become colder? Does not night come on continually, darker and
darker?
Such, in fact, is the landscape of
the absurd, a landscape in which there is neither up nor down, right
nor wrong, true nor false, because there is no longer any commonly
accepted point of orientation.
Another, more immediately personal,
expression of the absurdist revelation is contained in the despairing
cry of Ivan Karamazov: “If there is no immortality, everything is
permitted.” This, to some, may sound like a cry of liberation; but
anyone who has thought deeply about death, or who has encountered, in
his own experience, a concrete awareness of his own impending death,
knows better that that. The absurdist, though he denies human
immortality, at least recognizes that the question is a central one —
something most humanists, with their endless evasions and
rationalizations, fail to do. It is possible to be indifferent to this
question only if one has no love for truth, or if one’s love for truth
has been obscured by more deceptive and immediate things, whether
pleasure, business, culture, worldly knowledge, or any of the other
things the world is content to accept in place of truth. The whole
meaning of human life depends on the truth — or falsity — of the
doctrine of human immortality.
To the absurdist, the doctrine is
false. And that is one the reasons why his universe is so strange:
there is no hope in it, death is its highest god. Apologists for the
absurd, like apologists for humanist stoicism, see nothing but
“courage” in this view, the “courage” of men willing to live without
the ultimate “consolation” of eternal life; and they look down on those
who require the “reward” of Heaven to justify their conduct on earth.
It is not necessary, so they think, to believe in Heaven and Hell in
order to lead a “good life” in this world. And their argument is a
persuasive one even to many who call themselves Christians and are yet
quite ready to renounce eternal life for an “existential” view that
believes only in the present moment.
Such an argument is the worst of
self-deceptions, it is but another of the myriad masks behind which men
hide the face of death; for if death were truly the end of men, no man
could face the full terror of it. Dostoevsky was quite right in giving
to human immortality such central importance in his own Christian
world-view. If man is after all to end in nothingness, then in the
deepest sense it does not matter what he does in this life, for then
nothing he may do is of any ultimate consequence, and all talk of
“living this life to the full” is empty and vain. It is absolutely true
that if “there is no immortality”, the world is absurd and “everything
is permitted” — which is to say, nothing is worth doing, the dust of
death smothers every joy and prevents even tears, which would be
futile; it would indeed be better if such a world did not exist.
Nothing in the world — not love, not goodness, not sanctity — is of any
value, or indeed even has any meaning, if man does not survive death.
He who thinks to lead a “good life” that ends in death does not know
the meaning of his words, they but caricature Christian goodness, which
finds its fulfillment in eternity. Only if man is immortal, and only if
the next world is as God has revealed it to His chosen people,
Christians, is there any value or meaning to what man does in this
life; for then every act of man is a seed of good or evil that sprouts,
to be sure, in this life, but which is not reaped until the future
life. Men who, on the other hand, believe that virtue begins and ends
in this life are but one step from those who believe that there is no
virtue at all; and this step—a fact of which our century bears eloquent
witness — is all too easily taken, for it is, after all, a logical step.
Disillusionment, in a sense, is
preferable to self-deception. It may, if taken as an end in itself,
lead to suicide or madness; but it may also lead to an awakening.
Europe for five centuries and more has been deceiving itself, trying to
establish a reign of humanism, liberalism, and supposedly Christian
values on the basis of an increasingly sceptical attitude toward
Christian truth. Absurdism is the end of that road; it is the logical
conclusion of the humanist attempt to soften and compromise Christian
truth so as to accommodate new, modern, that is to say, worldly,
values. Absurdism is the last proof that Christian truth is absolute
and uncompromising, or else it is the same as no truth at all; and if
there is no truth, if Christian truth is not to be understood literally
and absolutely, if God is dead, if there is no immortality — then this
world is all there is, and this world is absurd, this world is Hell.
The absurd view of life, then, does
express a partial insight: it draws the conclusions of humanist and
liberal thought to which well-meaning humanists themselves have been
blind. Absurdism is no merely arbitrary irrationalism, but a part of
the harvest European man has been sowing for centuries, by his
compromise and betrayal of Christian truth.
It would be unwise, however, to
exaggerate in this direction, as apologists for the absurd, and to see
in absurdism and its parent nihilism signs of a turn or a return to
hitherto neglected truths or to a more profound world-view. The
absurdist, to be sure, is more realistic about the negative and evil
side of life, as manifest both in the world and in man’s nature; but
this is after all very little truth in comparison with the great errors
absurdism shares with humanism. Both are equally far from the God in
Whom alone the world makes sense; neither consequently has any notion
of spiritual life or experience, which are nourished by God alone; both
therefore are totally ignorant of the full dimensions of reality and of
human experience; and both have thus a radically oversimplified view of
the world and especially of human nature. Humanism and absurdism, in
fact, are not as far apart as one might have supposed; absurdism, in
the end, is simply disillusioned but unrepentant humanism. It is, one
might say, the last stage in the dialectical procession of humanism
away from Christian truth, the stage in which humanism, merely by
following its internal logic and drawing out the full implications of
its original betrayal of Christian truth, arrives at its own negation
and ends in a kind of humanist nightmare, a sub-humanism. The subhuman
world of the absurdist, though it may at times seem eerie and
bewildering, is after all the same one-dimensional world the humanist
knows, only rendered “mysterious” by various tricks and
self-deceptions; it is a parody of the true world, the world the
Christian knows, the world that is truly mysterious because it contains
heights and depths of which no absurdist, and surely no humanist, even
dreams.
If, intellectually, humanism and
absurdism are distinguished as principle and consequence, they are
united in a deeper sense, for they share a single will, and that will
is the annihilation of the Christian God and the order He has
established in the world. These words will seem strange to anyone
disposed to take a sympathetic view of the “plight” of contemporary
man, and especially to those who listen to the arguments of absurdist
apologetics which cite supposed scientific “discoveries” and the
all-too-natural disillusionment that has come out of our century of war
and revolution: arguments, in short, that rely on the “spirit of the
age,” which seem to make any but a philosophy of absurdity next to
impossible. The universe, so this apology runs, has become meaningless,
God has died, one knows not quite how or why, and all we can do now is
to accept the fact and resign ourselves to it. But the more perceptive
absurdists themselves know better. God has not merely died, said
Nietzsche, rather men have murdered Him; and Ionesco, in an essay on
Kafka, recognizes that “if man no longer has a guiding thread (i.e., in
the labyrinth of life), it is because he no longer wanted to have one.
Hence his feeling of guilt, of anxiety, of the absurdity of history.” A
vague feeling of guilt is indeed, in many cases, the only remaining
sign of man’s involvement in bringing about the condition in which he
now finds himself. But man is involved, and all fatalism is only
rationalization. Modern science is quite innocent in this respect, for
in itself it must be, not merely neutral, but actively hostile to any
idea of ultimate absurdity, and those who exploit it for irrationalist
ends are not thinking clearly. And as to the fatalism of those who
believe that man must be a slave to the “spirit of the age,” it is
disproved by the experience of every Christian worthy of the name — for
the Christian life is nothing if it is not a struggle against the
spirit of every age for the sake of eternity. Absurdist fatalism is in
the end the product, not of knowledge nor of any necessity, but of
blind faith. The absurdist, of course, would rather not face too
squarely the fact that his disillusionment is an act of faith, for
faith is a factor that testifies against determinism. But there is
something even deeper than faith which the absurdist has even more
reason to avoid, and that is the will; for the direction of a man’s
will is what chiefly determines his faith and the whole personal
world-view built upon that faith. The Christian, who possesses a
coherent doctrine of the nature of man and should have thereby a deep
insight into human motives, can see the ultimate responsibility the
absurdist prefers to deny in his disillusioned view of the world. The
absurdist is not the passive “victim” of his age or its thought, but
rather an active — though often confused — collaborator in the great
undertaking of the enemies of God. Absurdism is not primarily a
phenomenon of the intellect, not simple atheism nor mere recognition of
the fact of an absent God — these are its disguises and
rationalizations; it is rather something of the will, an anti-theism (a
term applied by Proudhon to his own program, and seen by de Lubac, in
The Drama of Atheist Humanism, as a key to understanding other
revolutionaries), a fight against God and the Divine order of things.
No absurdist, to be sure, can be fully aware of this; he cannot and
will not think clearly, he lives on self-delusion. No one (unless it be
Satan himself, the first absurdist) can deny God and refuse his own
truest happiness in full consciousness of the fact; but somewhere deep
within every absurdist, far deeper than he himself usually wishes to
look, lies the primordial refusal of God which has been responsible for
all the phenomena of absurdism as well as for the incoherence that
indeed lies at the very heart of this age.
If it is impossible not to
sympathize with some at least of the artists of the absurd, seeing in
them an agonized awareness and sincere depiction of a world that is
trying to live without God, let us not for all that forget how
thoroughly at one these artists are with the world they depict;
let us not lose sight of the fact that their art is so successful in
striking a responsive chord in many precisely because they share the
errors, the blindness and ignorance, and the perverted will of the age
whose emptiness they depict. To transcend the absurdity of the
contemporary world requires, unfortunately, a great deal more than even
the best intentions, the most agonized suffering, and the greatest
artistic “genius”. The way beyond the absurd lies in truth alone; and
this is precisely what is lacking as much in the contemporary artist as
in his world, it is what is actively rejected as definitely by the
self-conscious absurdist as it is by those who live the absurd life
without being aware of it. To sum up, then, our diagnosis of absurdism:
it is the life lived, and the view of live expressed, by those who can
or will no longer see God as the beginning and end, and the ultimate
meaning, of life; those who therefore do not believe His Revelation of
Himself in Jesus Christ and do not accept the eternal Kingdom He has
prepared for those who do believe and who live this faith; those who,
ultimately, can hold no one responsible for their unbelief but
themselves. But what is the cause of this disease? What, beyond all
historical and psychological causes — which can never be more than
relative and contributory — what is its real motivation, its spiritual
cause? If absurdism is indeed a great evil, as we believe it to be, it
cannot be chosen for its own sake; for evil has no positive existence,
and it can only be chosen in the guise of a seeming good. If up to this
point we have described the negative side of the philosophy of the
absurd, its description of the disordered, disoriented world in which
men find themselves today, it is time to turn to its positive side and
discover in what it is that absurdists place their faith and hope.
For it is quite clear that
absurdists are not happy about the absurdity of the universe; they
believe in it, but they cannot reconcile themselves to it, and their
art and thought are attempts, after all, to transcend it. As Ionesco
has said (and here he speaks, probably, for all absurdists): “To attack
absurdity is a way of stating the possibility of non-absurdity,” and he
sees himself as engaged in “the constant search for an opening, a
revelation.” Thus we return to the sense of expectancy we have already
noted in certain absurdist works of art; it is but a reflection of the
situation of our times, wherein men, disillusioned and desolate, yet
hope in something unknown, uncertain, yet to be revealed, which will
somehow restore meaning and pupose to life. Men cannot live without
hope, even in the midst of despair, even when all cause for hope has
been, supposedly, “disproved.”
But this is only to say that
nothingness, the apparent center of the absurdist universe, is not the
real heart of the disease, but only its most striking symptom. The real
faith of absurdism is in something hoped for but not yet fully
manifest, a “Godot” that is the always implicit but not yet defined
subject of absurdist art, a mysterious something that, if understood,
would give life some kind of meaning once more.
All this, if it seems vague in
contemporary absurdist art, is quite clear in the works of the original
“prophets” of the age of absurdity, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. In them
the revelation of absurdity has a corollary. “Dead are all the gods,”
says Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: “Now do we desire the Superman to live.”
And Nietzsche’s madman says, of the murder of God: “Is not the
magnitude of this deed too great for us? Shall we not ourselves have to
become gods, merely to seem worthy of it?” Kirillov, in Dostoevsky’s
Possessed, knows that, “If there is no God, then I am God.”
Man’s first sin, and the ultimate
cause of the miserable condition of man in all ages, was in following
the temptation of the serpent in Paradise: “Ye shall be as gods.” What
Nietzsche calls the Superman, and Dostoevsky the man-god, is in fact
the same god of self with which the Devil then, and always, has tempted
man; it is the only god, once the true God has been rejected, whom men
can worship. Man’s freedom has been given him to choose between the
true God and himself, between the true path to deification whereon the
self is humbled and crucified in this life to be resurrected and
exalted in God in eternity, and the false path of self-deification
which promises exaltation in this life but ends in the Abyss. These are
the only two choices, ultimately, open to the freedom of man; and upon
them have been founded the two Kingdoms, the Kingdom of God and the
Kingdom of Man, which may be discriminated only by the eye of faith in
this life, but which shall be separated in the future life as Heaven
and Hell. It is clear to which of them modern civilization belongs,
with its Promethean effort to build a Kingdom of earth in defiance of
God; but what should be clear enough in earlier modern thinkers becomes
absolutely explicit in Nietzsche. The old commandment of “Thou shalt,”
says Zarathustra, has become outmoded; the new commandment is “I will”.
And in Kirillov’s satanic logic, “The attribute of my godhead is
self-will.” The new religion, the religion not yet fully revealed that
will succeed the old religion of Christianity to which modern man
thinks by now to have delivered the final blow — is supremely the
religion of self-worship.
This is what absurdism — and all
the vain experimentation of our day — is seeking. Absurdism is the
stage at which the modern Promethean effort hesitates, entertains
doubts, and has a faint foretaste of the satanic incoherence in which
it cannot but end. But if the absurdist is less confident and more
fearful than the humanist, he nonetheless shares the humanist faith
that the modern path is the right path, and in spite of his doubt be
retains the humanist hope — hope not in God and His Kingdom, but in
man’s own Tower of Babel.
The modern attempt to establish a
kingdom of self-worship reached one extreme in Hitler, who believed in
a racial Superman; it reaches another extreme in Communism, whose
Superman is the collectivity and whose self-love is disguised as
altruism. But both Naziism and Communism are extreme forms — their
phenomenal success proves it — of what everyone else today actually
believes: everyone, that is, who does not stand explicitly and
absolutely with Christ and His Truth. For what is the meaning of the
gigantic effort in which all nations have today joined to transform the
face of the earth and conquer the universe, to bring about an entirely
new order of things wherein man’s condition since his creation will be
radically transformed and this earth, which since man’s fall has been
and can be nothing but a place of sorrow and tears, is to become,
supposedly, a place of happiness and joy, a veritable heaven on earth
with the advent of a “new age”? What does this mean but that man, freed
of the burden of a God in Whom he does not believe even when he
professes Him with his lips, imagines himself to be God, master of his
own destiny and creator of a “new earth,” expressing his faith in a
“new religion” of his own devising wherein humility gives way to pride,
prayer to worldly knowledge, mastery of the passions to mastery of the
world, fasting to abundance and satiety, tears of repentance to worldly
joy.
To this religion of the self
absurdism points the way. This is not, to be sure, always its explicit
intention, but it is its distinct implication. Absurdist art depicts a
man imprisoned in his own self, unable to communicate with his fellow
man or enter into any relationship with him that is not inhuman; there
is no love in absurdist art, there is only hatred, violence, terror,
and boredom — because in cutting himself off from God, absurdist man
has cut himself off from his own humanity, the image of God. If such a
man is awaiting a revelation that will put an end to absurdity, it is
surely not the revelation that the Christians know; if there is one
point on which all absurdists would agree, it is the absolute rejection
of the Christian answer. Any revelation the absurdist, as absurdist,
can accept must be “new.” About Godot, in Beckett’s play, one character
says, “I’m anxious to hear what he has to offer. Then we’ll take it or
leave it.” In the Christian life everything is referred to Christ, the
old self with its constant “I will” must be done away with and a new
self, centered in Christ and His will, be born; but in the spiritual
universe of “Godot,” everything revolves precisely about the old self,
and even a new god must present himself as a kind of spiritual
merchandise to be accepted or rejected by a self that will tolerate
nothing that is not oriented to itself. Men today “wait for Godot” —
who is, perhaps on one level, Antichrist — in the hope that he will
bring appeasement of conscience and restore meaning and joy to
self-worship, in the hope that is, that he will permit what God has
forbidden and provide the ultimate apology for it. Nietzsche’s Superman
is absurdist, modern man with his sense of guilt obliterated in a
frenzy of enthusiasm generated by a false mysticism of the earth, a
worship of this world.
Where will it all end? Nietzsche
and the optimists of our day see the dawn of a new age, the beginning
of “a higher history than any history hitherto.” Communist doctrine
affirms this; but the Communist reorganization of the world will, in
the end, prove to be no more than the systematized absurdity of a
perfectly efficient machine that has no ultimate purpose.
Dostoevsky, who knew the true God, was more realistic. Kirillov, the
maniacal counterpart of Zarathustra, had to kill himself to prove that
he was God; Ivan Karamazov, who was tormented by the same ideas, ended
in madness, as did Nietzsche himself; Shigalev (in The Possessed), who
devised the first perfect social organization of mankind, found it
necessary to deliver nine-tenths of mankind to absolute slavery so that
one-tenth might enjoy absolute liberty — a plan that Nazi and Communist
Supermen have put into practice. Madness, suicide, slavery, murder, and
destruction are the ends of the presumptuous philosophy of the death of
God and the advent of the Superman; and these are, indeed, prominent
themes of absurdist art.
Many feel — with Ionesco — that
only out of thorough exploration of the absurd condition in which man
now finds himself, and of the new possibilities this has opened up for
him, may a way be found beyond absurdity and nihilism into some new
realm of coherence: this is the hope of absurdism and humanism, and it
will become the hope of Communism when (and if) it enters its period of
disillusionment. It is a false hope, but it is a hope that may, for all
that, be fulfilled. For Satan is the ape of God, and once divine
coherence has been shattered and men no longer hope for the absolute
coherence God alone can give to human life, the counterfeit coherence
that Satan is able to fabricate may come to seem quite attractive. It
is no accident that in our own day serious attention is being given
once more by responsible and sober Christians dissatisfied alike with
facile optimism and facile pessimism, to a doctrine that, in Western
Europe at least, was almost forgotten for centuries under the influence
of the philosophy of enlightenment and progress. (Cf. Josef Pieper, The
End of Time; Heinrich Schlier, Principalities and Powers in the New
Testament; and before them, Cardinal Newman.) This is the doctrine,
universally held by the Churches of the East and West, of Antichrist,
that strange figure who appears at the end of time as a humanitarian
world-ruler and seems to turn creation upside-down by making darkness
seem light, evil good, slavery freedom, chaos order; he is the ultimate
protagonist of the philosophy of the absurd, and the perfect embodiment
of the man-god: for he will worship only himself, and will call himself
God. This is no place, however, to do more than point out the existence
of that doctrine, and to note its intimate connection with the Satanic
incoherence of the philosophy of the absurd.
But more important even than the
historical culmination of absurdism, whether it be the actual reign of
Antichrist or merely another of his predecessors, is its
supra-historical end: and that is Hell. For absurdism is, most
profoundly, an erruption of Hell into our world; it is thus a warning
of a reality men are all too anxious to avoid. But those who avoid it
only find themselves the closer to it; our age, the first in Christian
times to disbelieve entirely in Hell, itself more thoroughly than any
other embodies the spirit of Hell.
Why do men disbelieve in Hell? It
is because they do not believe in Heaven, i.e., because they do not
believe in life, and in the God of life, because they find God’s
creation absurd and wish that it did not exist. The Starets Zossima, in
The Brothers Karamazov, speaks of one kind of such men.
There are some who remain proud and
fierce even in hell... They have cursed themselves, cursing God and
life... They cannot behold the living God without hatred, and they cry
out that the God of life should be annihilated, that God should destroy
Himself and His own creation. And they will burn in the fire of their
own wrath for ever and yearn for death and annihilation. But they will
not attain to death...
Such men, of course, are extreme
nihilists, but they differ in degree only, and not in kind, from those
less violent souls who faintly curse this life and find it to be
absurd, and even from those who call themselves Christians and do not
desire the Kingdom of Heaven with all their hearts, but picture Heaven,
if at all, as a shadowy realm of repose or sleep. Hell is the answer
and the end of all who believe in death rather than life, in this world
rather than in the next world, in themselves rather than in God: all
those, in short, who in their deepest heart accept the philosophy of
the absurd. For it is the great truth of Christianity — which
Dostoevsky saw and Nietzsche did not see — that there is no
annihilation, and there is no incoherence, all nihilism and absurdism
are in vain. The flames of Hell are the last and awful proof of this:
every creature testifies, with or against his will, to the ultimate
coherence of things. For this coherence is the love of God, and this
love is found even in the flames of Hell; it is in fact the love of God
itself which torments those who refuse it.
So it is too with absurdism; it is
the negative side of a positive reality. There is, of course, an
element of incoherence in our world, for in his fall from Paradise man
brought the world with him; the philosophy of the absurd is not,
therefore, founded upon a total lie, but upon a deceptive half-truth.
But when Camus defines absurdity as the confrontation of man’s need for
reason with the irrationality of the world, when he believes that man
is an innocent victim and the world the guilty party, he, like all
absurdists, has magnified a very partial insight into a totally
distorted view of things, and in his blindness has arrived at the exact
inversion of the truth. Absurdism, in the end, is an internal and not
an external question; it is not the world that is irrational and
incoherent, but man.
If, however, the absurdist is
responsible for not seeing things as they are, and not even wishing to
see things as they are, the Christian is yet more responsible for
failing to give the example of a fully coherent life, a life in Christ.
Christian compromise in thought and word and negligence in deed have
opened the way to the triumph of the forces of the absurd, of Satan, of
Antichrist. The present age of absurdity is the just reward of
Christians who have failed to be Christians.
And the only remedy for absurdism
lies at this, its source: we must again be Christians. Camus was quite
right when he said, “We must choose between miracles and the absurd.”
For in this respect Christianity and absurdism are equally opposed to
Enlightenment rationalism and humanism, to the view that reality can be
reduced to purely rational and human terms. We must indeed choose
between the miraculous, the Christian view of things, whose center is
God and whose end is the eternal Kingdom of Heaven, and the absurd, the
Satanic view of things, whose center is the fallen self and whose end
is Hell, in this life and in the life to come.
We must again be Christians. It is
futile, in fact it is precisely absurd, to speak of reforming society,
of changing the path of history, of emerging into an age beyond
absurdity, if we have not Christ in our hearts; and if we do have
Christ in our hearts, nothing else matters.
It is of course possible that there
may be an age beyond absurdity; it is more likely, perhaps — and
Christians must always be prepared for this eventuality — that there
will not be, and that the age of absurdity is indeed the last age. It
may be that the final testimony Christians may be able to give in this
age will be the ultimate testimony, the blood of their martyrdom.
But this is cause for rejoicing and
not for despair. For the hope of Christians is not in this world or in
any of its kingdoms — that hope, indeed, is the ultimate absurdity; the
hope of Christians is in the Kingdom of God which is not of this world.