In the Aftermath of Christianity

The only cult that can truly thrive in the aftermath of Christianity is a sordid service of the self, of the impulses of the will, of the nothingness that is all that the withdrawal of Christianity leaves behind. The only futures open to post-Christian culture are conscious nihilism, with its inevitable devotion to death, or the narcotic banality of the Last Men, which may be little better than death. Surveying the desert of modernity, we would be, I think, morally derelict not to acknowledge that Nietzsche was right in holding Christianity responsible for the catastrophe around us (even if he misunderstood why); we should confess that the failure of Christian culture to live up to its victory over the old gods has allowed the dark power that once hid behind them to step forward in propria persona. And we should certainly dread whatever rough beast it is that is being bred in our ever coarser, crueler, more inarticulate, more vacuous popular culture; because, cloaked in its anodyne insipience, lies a world increasingly devoid of merit, wit, kindness, imagination, or charity.

—David Bentley Hart, "Christ and Nothing" (2003)

Lost in the Same Maze

The interminable probing of the causes of my melancholy and my inability to cope with life was fruitless and wearying.  Still I did not feel worn out or exhausted but full of dark urges, convinced that I would yet succeed in creating something deep and good, in snatching a bit of luck from life.  But would this lucky moment ever come?  I thought with bitterness of those high-strung modern artists who drove themselves to the pitch of artistic creation with the help of artificial stimulants, whereas I allowed my resources to lie untapped within me.  I tried to analyze what kind of block or demon was constraining my soul within this vigorous body.  Too, I was possessed by the notion that I was someone unusual, someone whom life had mistreated and whose suffering was unknown to anyone, who was misunderstood.

The diabolical thing about melancholy is not that it makes you ill but that it makes you conceited and shortsighted; yes, almost arrogant.  You lapse into bad taste, thinking of yourself as Heine's Atlas, whose shoulders support all the world's puzzles and agonies, as if thousands, lost in the same maze, did not endure the same agonies.  In my state of isolation and estrangement I too failed to realize that the traits and peculiarities of character I took to be exclusively mine were in fact part of my family's heritage, my family's affliction, and proper to all Camenzinds.

--Hermann Hesse, Peter Camenzind (1953)

'the awful torrent of things and people'

Ah, it's an awful thing . . . and being young doesn't help any . . . when you notice for the first time . . . the way you lose people as you go along . . . buddies you'll never see again . . . never again . . . when you notice that they've disappeared like dreams . . . that it's all over . . . finished . . . that you too will get lost someday . . . a long way off but inevitably . . . in the awful torrent of things and people . . . of the days and shapes . . . that pass . . . that never stop . . . All these assholes, these pests . . . all these bystanders and extras strolling under the arcades, with their pince-nez, their umbrellas, and their little mutts on the leash . . . you'll never see them again . . . Already they're passing . . . they're in a dream with the others . . . they're in cahoots . . . soon they'll be gone . . . It's really sad . . . it's rotten . . . all these harmless people parading along the shop fronts . . . A wild desire took hold of me . . . I was trembling with panic . . . I wanted to jump out on them . . . to plant myself in front of them . . . and make them stop where they were . . . Grab them by their coats . . . a dumb idea . . . and make them stop . . . and not move anymore . . . stay where they were, once and for all . . . and not see them going away anymore.

—Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Death on the Installment Plan (1933) (trans. Ralph Manheim 1966)

'such helpless novices'

. . . how is it possible to live when after all the elements of this life are utterly incomprehensible to us? If we are continually inadequate in love, uncertain in decision and impotent in the face of death, how is it possible to exist? . . . I did not manage to express all of my astonishment over the fact that men have had for thousands of years to deal with life (not to mention God), and yet towards these first most immediate problems strictly speaking, these only problems (for what else have we to do, today still and for how long to come?) they remain such helpless novices, so between fright and subterfuge, so miserable. Isn't that incomprehensible?

—Rainer Maria Rilke, letter dated Nov. 8, 1915, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke: Volume 2, 1910–1926 (trans. Greene & Norton 1948)

They's Evils in People that Make Little if Any Sense...

Pip never showed.  Pat had to break the news to Stace, alone.  She sat on a love seat decorated with cigarette burns and cat hair.  She'd a muskrat mien, tear-swollen eyes and a body gouged by scabs.  She caught her breath and asked, "Why'd a person run over an innocent child?"  She paused, lost in an unfilled blank, ran her chicken-bone arm over her sunken complexion and said, "Toss them into the river just like they's a piece of trash."

Pat sat on the ratty sofa, trying to ignore the waft of unchanged cat litter, the stubbed-out smokes lining ashtrays, empty plastic cola bottles on their sides, and food-smeared dishes.  All he could muster was "They's evils in people that make little if any sense, and trying to figure them out does a person little to no good."

--Frank Bill, "Trespassing Between  Heaven and Hell," Crimes in Southern Indiana (2011)

The resistance of matter.

He didn’t have two cents’ worth of patience, his thoughts moved too fast and too far, they were too intense, too deep . . . The resistance of matter gave him an epileptic fit . . . The result was wreckage . . . He could tackle a problem in theory . . . But when it came to practice, all he could do on his own was swing dumbbells in the back room . . . or on Sunday climb into the basket and shout “Let her go” . . . and roll up in a ball to land when he was through . . . Whenever he tried to do any tinkering with his own fingers, it ended in disaster. He couldn’t move anything without dropping it or upsetting it . . . or getting it in his eye . . . You can’t be an expert at everything . . . You’ve got to resign yourself . . .

—Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Death on the Installment Plan (1933) (trans. Ralph Manheim 1966)

Thoroughly Pervaded with His Power

When the soul is drawn into the immediate presence of God and is thoroughly pervaded with His power, it becomes like fire, and in this state of glory takes on the appearance of a new higher spirit, a higher nature. When pure fire penetrates a pure metal with its heat, the metal loses its massiveness and hardness, and at the same time gives forth light and warmth, without forfeiting it own essence. In some such way the substantial fire of the divinity penetrates the soul with a heat it irradiates, owing to which the soul loses, not its own nature, but its natural lowliness and ponderousness and is drawn up to God, to receive light and warmth resembling the divine heat.

—Matthias Scheeben, Nature and Grace (1861)

A Soul that is Ruined in the Bud

And what happened was that the precocious boy experienced an unreal second childhood during this period of illness.  His sensibility, robbed of its real childhood, now fled with sudden yearning back to those already dimming years and wandered spellbound through a forest of memories whose vividness was perhaps of an almost pathological nature.  He relived these memories with no less intensity and passion than he had experienced them in reality before.  His betrayed and violated childhood erupted like a long pent-up spring.

When a tree is polled, it will sprout new shoots nearer its roots.  A soul that is ruined in the bud will frequently return to the springtime of its beginnings and its promise-filled childhood, as though it could discover new hopes there and retie the broken threads of life.  The shoots grow rapidly and eagerly, but it is only a sham life that will never be a genuine tree.

-- Hermann Hesse, Beneath the Wheel (1906)

Theology's proper concern

For theology's proper concern is with the supernatural mystery of "things divine as they are in themselves" (res divinae prout sunt in se). This is not to say that theology is able to make the supernatural mysteries of faith comprehensible, that it succeeds where philosophy fails. On the contrary, for Przywara, following Augustine, theology is precisely a reductio in mysterium, "an entry into the mystery of God in order more deeply 'to grasp his incomprehensibility as such.'"...theology is, properly speaking, a reduction to the Deus tamquam ignotus of Aquinas and to the "superluminous darkness" of the Areopagite. And so, while theology is always already positively "in" philosophy, it is always also "beyond" its grasp; hence Przywara's succinct formula "theology in-and-beyond philosophy."

—John Betz, "After Barth: A New Introduction to Erich Przywara's Analogia Entis (2011)

I Shall Look at the World Through Tears

On the way back I thought about tears.  Our culture says that men must be strong and that the strength of a man in sorrow is to be seen in his tearless face.  Tears are for women.  Tears are signs of weakness and women are permitted to be weak.  Of course it's better if they too are strong.

But why celebrate stoic tearlessness?  Why insist on never outwarding the inward when that inward is bleeding?  Does enduring while crying not require as much strength as never crying?  Must we always mask our suffering?  May we not sometimes allow people to see and enter it?  I mean, may men not do this?

And why is it so important to act strong?  I have been graced with the strength to endure.  But I have been assaulted, and in the assault wounded, grievously wounded.  Am I to pretend otherwise?  Wounds are ugly, I know.  They repel.  But must they always be swathed?

I shall look at the world through tears.  Perhaps I shall see things that dry-eyed I could not see.

--Lament for a Son, Nicholas Wolterstorff (1987)

Do people improve with age?

KOMAROVSKY

Pavel Pavlovich, my chief impression is — and I mean no offense — is that you're very young.

PASHA

M'sieur Komarovsky — I hope I don't offend you: Do people improve with age?

KOMAROVSKY

They grow a little more tolerant.

PASHA

Because they have more to tolerate in themselves. If people don't marry young, what do they bring to their marriage?

KOMAROVSKY

A little experience.

—"Doctor Zhivago," screenplay by Robert Bolt (1965)