The insidious nature of nihilism, a nihilism that always claims a humanistic ultimate concern, reaches into the very pores of our lives. The trail to today's nihilism runs deeply through the history of Western culture, politics, and thought. I finished today a book by Michael Allen Gillespie, Nihilism before Nietzsche, which shows that modern nihilism orginates in an understanding of the absolute priority of will. Gillespie concludes, "It was this idea of an absolute will that gave birth to the idea of nihilism, for if the I is everything, then . . . God is nothing. Nihilism, as it was originally understood, was thus not the result of the degeneration of man and his concomitant inability to sustain a God. It was rather the consequence of the assertions of an absolute human will that renders God superfluous and thus for all intents and purposes dead" (p. 256). Nihilism emerges as an inverse of the nominalist God, "terrifying, transrational, transnatural God of will, an omnipotent God whose absolute power reduced nature to a chaos of radically individual and unconnected beings" (p. 255). Contemporary nihilism therefore arises out of "the breakdown of the scholastic synthesis of reason and revelation" (p. 255).

Of course, it was also out of this same breakdown that the church fragmented in Western culture during the sixteenth century (and even before in the papal schism). No genuinely catholic ecclesial institutional witness remained whose witness arose out of a common participation in the Way, the Truth, and the Life that could suggest that the Logos was God, that “faith presupposes natural knowledge in just the way that grace presupposes nature, and in the way that a perfection presupposes what is perfects” (Summa Theologiae q. 2. a. 2 ad 1; thanks to Kevin Timpe for the reference!). In part we must attribute the rhetorical persuasiveness of contemporary nihilism to the fragmentation of the common life of the church.

As I've reflected upon this diagnosis, if it is correct, we must undertake simultaneously two tracks of retrieval. One without the other only plays into the primacy of a nihilistic will to power within the contemporary world. First, we must undertake the hard, careful, historical, social, intellectual, philosophical, and theological work to deconstruct the primacy of nothing in contemporary culture from its expressions in the western academic production of knowledge, to its journalistic manifestations, to its embeddedness in popular culture. It is encouraging to find a new series such as "Interventions" coming to bear. My friend, congregant, and fellow blogger Eric Lee (cf. ericisrad.com) has had opportunity to work on this and another related series that is coming out from Eerdmans Press, overseen by his friend Conor Cunningham. Last week Eric sent me the description of the series, posted at www.theologyphilosophycentre.co.uk/Interventions/:

I N T E R V E N T I O N S

It’s not a question of whether one believes in God or not. Rather, it’s a question of if, in the absence of God, we can have belief, any belief..............

“If you live today”, wrote Flannery O’Connor, “you breathe in nihilism.” Whether “religious” or “secular”, it is “the very gas you breathe.” Both within and without the academy, there is an air common to both deconstruction and scientism, which both might be described as species of reductionism. The dominance of these modes of knowledge in popular and professional discourse is quite incontestable, perhaps no more so where questions of theological import are often subjugated to the margins of intellectual respectability. Yet it is often the case that it is precisely the proponents and defenders of religious belief in an age of nihilism are among those most—unwittingly or no—complicit in this very reduction. In these latter cases, one frequently spies an accommodationist impulse, whereby our concepts must be first submitted to a prior philosophical court of appeal in order for them to render any intellectual value. . . . . It is sadly the case that, despite the best intentions of such “intellectual ecumenism”, the distinctive voice of theology is the first one to succumb to aphony—either from impetuous overuse or from a deliberate silencing.

The books in this unique new series propose no such simple accommodation. They rather seek and perform tactical interventions in such debates in a manner that problematizes the accepted terms of such debates. They propose something altogether more demanding: through a kind of refusal of the disciplinary isolation now standard in modern universities, a genuinely interdisciplinary series of mediations of crucial concepts and key figures in contemporary thought. These volumes will attempt to discuss these topics as they are articulated within their own field, including their historical emergence, and cultural significance, which will provide a way into seemingly abstract discussions. At the same time, they aim to analyze what consequences such thinking may have for theology, both positive and negative, and, in light of these new perspectives, to develop an effective response—one that will better situate students of theology and professional theologians alike within the most vital debates informing Western Society, and so increase their understanding of, participation in, and contribution to these.

To a generation brought up on a diet of deconstruction, on the one hand, and scientism, on the other, Interventions offers an alternative that is otherwise than nihilistic—doing so by approaching well-worn questions and topics, as well as historical and contemporary figures from an original and interdisciplinary angle, and so avoid having to steer a course between the aforementioned ‘Scylla’ and ‘Charybdis’.

This series will also seek to navigate not just through these twin dangers, but also through the dangerous “and” which joins them. . . . Above all, they will hopefully contribute to a renewed atmosphere shared by theologians and philosophers (not to mention those in other disciplines)—an air that is not nothing…"

This programme is exciting and exceedingly important. Yet if necessary, the effort is not sufficient. We must find ways of non-identical repetition of such work not only amidst the ethereal halls of Oxford and Cambridge, but also amidst the various other levels of cultural dissemination, including the popular culture (I have always wanted to write children's musicals!).

Even such textual performances at various levels is not sufficient, because the nihilism of contemporary discourse can easily absorb textual artifacts into the dialectical conflict in the marketplace of ideas that remains within the immanent. If nihilism has its roots in late medieval nominalism, we must also re-discover, or better, allow ourselves to be pulled into a common life of the church catholic by the Spirit to provide an institutional/political witness to a unity that differs anchored in the Triune Creator, rather than an arbitrary, omnipotent divine will and its human inverse. The most profound way to out-narrate the nihilism of the contemporary culture is to re-discover the visible catholicity of the church.

Ephraim Radner in Hope among the Fragments: The Broken Church and its Engagement of Scripture (Brazos, 2004) has an astute analysis of our current situation. Radner writes:

"We can point . . . to two different realms of peace that the Christian Church now finds itself lying between. The first is the old peace, the peace of the first Church of old, the Church of the pagan empire, which grew up in contrast to the competing claims of the religious marketplace of Hellenism. In the face of the spiritually depleting struggle for allegiance that competing pagan religions and philosophies demanded, the Christian Church both pointed to and embodied a space of encompassing truth, whose very uniformity provided a stable place in which the individual might move with a surprising freedom of inquiry and discovery. . . . The Church itself, in its breadth, historical density, and embrace, was this landscape of the truth, and that very identity provided the peace in which a significant or fruitful flourishing was possible.
The second realm of peace is that which was pried loose from established Christianity, bit by bit, following the Church’s western fragmentation in the sixteenth century. This is the new peace of multiplicity, of churches in their thousands, as Adam Smith says, vying for adherents among each other and thereby neutralizing the dangers unleased by the fanaticism of internecine Christian battle. This modern realm of peace, which we call Christian pluralism, seeks to control religious passions by individualizing them and limiting them to the small choices that single men and women make, over and over again, regarding their Christian social location. Instead of being a large landscape of peace, filled with the Church’s varied objects, the new peace of pluralism is defined by a welter of objects without a land, objects that individuals themselves collect as they choose and then buy and sell to others or simply discard. And thus, although the peace is kept in this new pluralistic realm, the character of Christianity, at least as compared to its origins, has been profoundly transformed back into the spiritual uncertainties of the very market that the gospel originally overcame" (pp. 39-40).

A visible common institutional catholicity shows how localities enrich the harmony of the catholic. The loss of this catholicity gives the life of the church over to a nihilistic logic of "value" or "will" (the logic of the neo-liberal marketplace) or renders it suspect to dominance by the will of a sovereign centralized revolutionary state (cf. Chavez with his evangelical, charismatic following in Venezuela at the cost of the Roman Catholic Church there). Without such simultaneous work to retrieve the real unity of the life of the church local and catholic as the one body of Christ, the academic textual responses ring hollow, a type of jeremiad that merely provides grist for the sameness of the pluralistic will of the endless repetition of the new and improved that gets us nowhere with nothing to show for it.

The peace of pluralism is nothing but a disciplined, regulated enforcement of the logic of nihilism, a false peace that posits conflict as more natural than harmony, a tool for the continuing power of the contemporary nation-state, rather than God, as the primary guarantor of the significance of human life and all creation.