Modern Views¶
What is the modern view -- the spirit of our time -- how do we as modern people make sense of the world?
If you ask around you'll get many different answers. There is secularism, rationalism, humanism, cultural "progress" and various political narratives. Some will profess faith in God, while others view God as a delusion, a fantasy leftover from a bygone superstitious era. There will be talk of revolutions, or maybe reactionary views to counter whichever revolution has gone too far. And most will talk of despair, that something is clearly wrong with the modern world.
Yet despite the apparent aimless grasping for meaning, we are all witness to the same spirit: that we are at the verge of something new. From transhumanism to the sovereign individual thesis, or even the age of Aquarius, there is apparently a coming revolution, an awakening, an emergence, a new age. Many Christians are talking about rapture. We are nearing a pivotal moment in history -- if not the pivotal moment in history, perhaps redefining what it means to have a history. We are apparently witnessing the destruction of the old order, which is necessary for the "new" age to come.
This destructive revolution is the modern view.
The irony of course is that this modern "revolution" is not new. We've been at the dawning of a new age, the destruction of the old order, for quite some time now. The new age never seems to fully manifest, and to the degree it does it quickly becomes the old and all attention switches to the truly "new", the real revolution. It's always promised to be happening soon if not now.
In truth, this is the failure of every generation, the echoes of man's original sin reverberating through the ages, and with a uniquely anti-Christian aim. But let's investigate this modern view, this destructive revolutionary view, and see if we can find where it began.
Where did this start?¶
Conventional wisdom suggests that our moden view started in the 1960s, in the counterculture revolution, the start of the culture war. And there seems to be something to this, especially in the United States, as there was a seismic shift in western culture, a rejection of past social norms, the start of the civil rights movement, Roe v Wade, Woodstock -- certainly it seems as if the culture prior to the famed hippy generation was distinctly different from everything that came afterwards.
Culture War¶
Hindsight being 20/20, the fruits of the 1960s counterculture are known. There was an Altamont to every Woodstock, reactions to every revolution. The 1960s counterculture gave way to the decadence and degeneracy that marked every decade since. And despite the abysmal failures, what we can see clearly is that the 1960s were the start of a parasitism in institutions starting with academia and then into political and corporate institutions, all pushing to degrade and weaken families, undermining the foundations of civilization. We now see the normalization of relativism, an assault on truth itself. In fact, since the 1960s this parasitism has spread globally, and has noticeably accelerated.
"Be on the right side of history", we tell ourselves. We imagine we are making the world a better place; that this is a "pivotal" moment in history. Whether it's a pending climate catastrophe, a population bomb, or fear of a nuclear war -- it is always an existential crisis and the old world must die. And yet the consequences of our actions prove the opposite effect even by our own naive moral standards.
From where did these now global countercultural ideas of the 1960s emerge? Let's consider the second world war; concentration camps and genocide. Without a doubt this completely reshaped the world and was a definitive end of the old world, the beginning of the new. The twentieth century witnessed hundreds of millions of victims, more death than ever before seen on earth. An atomic bomb, the beginning of a nuclear arms race.
World Wars¶
The entirety of the 1960s counterculture seems rather insignificant compared to the second world war. Perhaps this is the better starting point of our modern view, a post war view.
And yet, Stalin and Hitler did not happen in a vacuum. The bloodshed of the 20th century was clearly the consequence of socialist revolutions, from national socialism to communism. Marxism precisely articulates the destructive revolutionary view, albeit in socio-economic terms. Even at the end of the short-lived Nazi regime, Goebbels himself viewed this in Marxist language, a destructive revolution,
Together with the monuments of culture there crumble also the last obstacles to the fulfillment of our revolutionary task. Now that everything is in ruins, we are forced to rebuild Europe. In the past, private possessions tied us to a bourgeous restraint. Now the bombs, instead of killing all Europeans have only smashed the prison walls which kept them captive. In trying to destroy Europe’s future, the enemy has only succeeded in smashing its past; and with that, everything old and outworn has gone.
19th Century¶
Marxism is but one of the many outbursts of the modern view, the spirit of our time. As such we can trace this back further; into the soil from which the socialist experiments grew; and it is here we find the mad prophet Nietzsche, who in 1884 said,
It may be that I am the first to light upon an idea which will divide the history of mankind in two.
all who are born after us belong to a higher history than any history hitherto.
You'll be hard pressed to find a better articulation of the modern view than from Nietzsche. And yet Dostoyevsky manages it beautifully, and prior to Nietzsche.
In The Possessed by Dostoyevsky, written in 1872, the character Krillov says,
Everything will be new... then they will divide history into two parts: from the gorilla to the annihilation of God, and from the annihilation of God to the transformation of the earth, and of man physically.
Very clearly, we can trace the origin of the modern view back to the late 1800s, to the prescience of Dostoyevsky in the east and Nietzsche in the west.
In a frightfully prophetic view, Nietzsche (in Will to Power) writes,
What I am describing here is the history of the twentieth century, the triumph of Nihilism, because when the masses get the ideas which I am now proclaiming, there will be a revolution such as the world has never seen.
And in The Gay Science he writes,
Shall we not ourselves have to become gods merely to seem worthy of it (the death of God)?
And in Thus Spake Zarathustra,
I bring you a goal; I preach to you the Superman. Man is something to be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? All things before you have produced something beyond themselves, and would you be the ebb of this great flood? Would you rather go back to the animal than transcend man? What is the ape to man? A jest or a bitter shame. And just that shall man be to the Superman, a jest or a bitter shame. You have traveled the way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm.... Lo, I preach to you the Superman. The Superman is the meaning of the earth.
Hitler believed himself to be so, that he was aiming his people towards Nietzsche's superman (ubermensch).
And as Kirillov in The Possessed says:
If there is no God, then I am God.
Dostoyevsky, with a profound insight from orthodox Christianity, "distinguishes between the God-man Jesus Christ and the man-god, the new being who is coming up from the earth to become god" (Orthodox Survival Course by Fr. Seraphim Rose).
And even earlier than Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky, we find other prophetic voices such as Heinrich Heine. In his 1834 book, Religion and Philosophy in Germany, he writes,
Robespierre was merely the hand of Jean Jacques Rousseau, the bloody hand that drew from the womb of time the body whose soul Rousseau had created.
... There will be played in Germany a drama compared to which the French Revolution will seem but an innocent idyll.
... And the hour will come. As on the steps of an amphitheatre, the nations will group themselves around Germany to witness the terrible combat.
Clearly the modern view traces back even further, into the reign of terror of the French Revolution. In fact, one cannot talk of a destructive revolution without mention of the French Revolution.
Old Regime¶
As Father Seraphim Rose writes,
The period before 1789 was called the “Old Regime,” and the period after that is the “Revolutionary Age” which is the same now as it was in the 1790’s.
There is a clear lineage from the time of Robespierre and the atrocities of the French revolution, all the way to Hitler and the atrocities of the second world war, and then continuing forward to the present day, to our nihilistic meaning crisis -- where there is now a destructive revolution in each generation.
Was the "Old Regime" prior to 1789 free of destructive revolutionary views? Turns out no. We can further trace the modern view back before the enlightenment, through the Copernican revolution and further back into the age of scholasticism, all the way to the great schism which divided Christianity east and west.
Century after century in the west, each generation has been trying to destroy the old and usher in a revolution, a final revolution -- a decided pivot in history. We see this same destructive revolutionary view in the early scholastic period, articulated through millenarianism that grew especially popular in that era.
For example the Joachimites in the 13th century imagined three ages (based on the trinity: Father, Son, Holy Spirit), and that they were entering the 3rd and final age. Joachim believed that the end of the Christian era would be in the year 1260, which would see the coming of the Antichrist, followed by a thousand year utopia (the age defined by the Holy Spirit). These views were (perhaps unconsciously) reflected in Nazism, that the 3rd Reich will rule for a thousand years.
As Fr. Seraphim Rose notes,
revolutionary conclusions were drawn later by men of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, by the Franciscan Spirituals, who recognized in Joachim the new John the Baptist, heralding St. Francis as the novus dux of the last dispensation, even as the "new Christ".
Any such view of a "new Christ" was anathema to orthodox Christianity, yet this corruption in western Christianity was one of many that led inevitably to the Protestant Reformation, itself another outburst of the destructive revolutionary spirit. Our conventional wisdom tells us that protestantism was merely a consequence of the printing press -- which would be true if not for the glaring counterexample of eastern Christianity not having an equivalent protestant reformation despite the prevalence of printing presses.
Was it always like this?¶
The short answer: no, not at all. A continuous destructive revolution was unheard of outside of western Europe and it's cultural influence. This was not the view of eastern Europe nor of eastern Christianity nor of any other major religion. This was not the view of the Byzantine Empire. This was not the view in the Ottoman empire. This was not the view in any of the historic dynasties of China. This was not the view of any native American culture prior to the arrival of western Europeans (where we find Peyote Cults and other destructive revolutionary views). None of the ancient views resembled this nihilistic path of destructive revolution and relativism. This is a unique worldview born of western Christianity post schism, with notably anti-Christian themes (as it emerged as an antithesis to Christianity). And yet today this destructive revolutionary view has been exported globally and has become the defacto modern globalist view (stripped of any Christian veneer and articulated in postmodern Marxist language).
Outside of the western European cultural sphere, we can find only hints of this view sprinkled throughout history. But to the degree it emerged in early Christianity it was also condemned and anathematized. It only actualized into a continuous (albeit parasitic) ethos after the great schism, emerging from the early scholastic movement and coming into fruition by the enlightenment era and into our present day.
Christian Antithesis¶
In a perverse and deceitful twist, the modern view audaciously claims credit for every scientific breakthrough, distancing itself from its own bad fruits -- the destructive revolutions never seem accountable for their own genocides and famines -- all of which are the clear and inevitable consequences of these modern "revolutionary" views. Always we blame the former revolution, because it is the old that must be perpetually destroyed, creating a disastrous and malevolent cycle.
The honest truth-seeking Christian praises God for all that is good, yet the spirit of the times gives credit to man and perversely blames God for the evil done by man. God is love to the honest Christian, but a tyrant to the modern view. The modern view depicts man as heroically overcoming a tyrant creator, making himself into god. If you want to best understand the modern view, it is an inversion of orthodox Christianity at every level.
In the final analysis, we can trace this anti-Christian view all the way back to the serpent in the garden, to Genesis 3:4-5,
And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:
For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
Contrast this with Nietzsche's nihilistic reflections,
Shall we not ourselves have to become gods merely to seem worthy of it?
For all his genius, Nietzsche's entire philosophical journey takes us back to that same serpent in the garden. Zarathustra's superman, der Ubermensch, is nothing but the echo of that snake whispering to Eve,
ye shall be as gods
If we had to name the spirit of our times -- our modern view -- it is clearly the spirit of antichrist, a deceitful and malevolent spirit of death, attacking Christ, the spirit of truth that overcame death for our salvation.
Proverbs 11:6
The righteousness of the upright will deliver them,
But the unfaithful will be caught by their lust.