Dead Faith: On Nietzschean-inspired pseudo-religion
The moustachioed "dichotomy-breaker" defines much of contemporary traditionalism. But his views on religion are profoundly modern, and the rise of neopaganism does not fix that.
Beyond The Moustache
Almost everybody knows of Friedrich Nietzsche’s phrase “God is dead”. The amount of people who know the context which led up to that phrase and what words followed it are minuscule. Dawkinite New Atheists, in their perpetual autofellatio, think it was a victory cry - Nietzsche was an atheist, after all - but it was a cry for help.
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”
I’m partial to a theory of history which amounts to saying “the history of humanity is the Tower of Babel narrative on repeat”. Nietzsche, it seems, saw the Tower-collapse of modernity (which we are still living through) as final, with no humility to be learnt by the humans left amongst the rubble, which normally kickstarts the building of a virtuous society in it’s place that leads back to God. I’m sure every time the Tower has collapsed, many have thought the same. Nietzsche clearly shows how having a pre-enlightenment mindset without hope in the resurrection of Jesus Christ leaves a modern man empty, full of despair and, whether they admit it or not, a nihilist.
A new wave of Nietzscheans influenced (though they’d hate to admit it) by Jordan Peterson have emerged since the late 2010s, typified by the book ‘Bronze Age Mindset’, centered around ideas of untamed masculinity, will to power, a clinical aversion to seed oils, and sometimes just tanning their testicles. Don’t think I’m poking fun, though; there is merit and virtue to be found in there when you scratch the surface. Prevalent among this group however is a revival of European polytheistic paganism as a substitute for hope in Christ. This is a mixture of Nietzsche’s worn-out criticisms of Christian “slave morality” (whenever somebody cites it they must be forgetting the 1000+ years of European Christian kings and knights with their masculinity and will to power) paired with the Nietzschean-Jungian-Petersonian universalist interpretation of religious narratives - the entire premise of Peterson’s book ‘Maps of Meaning’.
This methodology takes a transcendental psychological approach to understanding religious narratives. For those not anti-Christian, they look at the story of Jesus as put forth in the Gospels, and think it is a tale of a great man that one should seek to emulate for his unmoving bravery in the face of the clamouring mob (rather than for being God incarnate, which is who Jesus said he was). A man who was going to force his will on the world or die trying, and die trying he courageously did. There are plenty of parallels here with how Christians themselves view Jesus’ earthly life, we certainly think that imitation of him is our greatest task.
And you can supposedly do the same with pretty much any religion - this is the universalist component. Buddha, Odin, Poseidon, Vishnu, Osiris, Serapis - name any deity you want and there are elements of truth in their mythos and the values that they represent. But emulation only gets you so far. If you can’t authoritatively answer “yes” to the question “do they exist?” then you are nowhere near close to approaching the spiritual fruits of true religion: namely, hope. If Jesus and Ganesh are to you mere symbols of how you should behave in life, your death appears just as meaningless as if you had never even heard of them. This is not speculation - Nietzsche greatly revered the narratives of Hindu mythology, but nothing more than that. And he died hopeless, secluded, and alone. Yes, his legacy lives on, but he does not.
1 John 5:11-13:
“And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life. I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life.”
Christ’s gift to the world was an end to death and the rewards of eternal life, in the perpetual and perfect glory of the beatific vision. Our human nature made perfect by God’s salvific grace, completely reconciled and in communion with the actus purus for eternity, never even getting bored because it is the very summit of your teleology: the totality of why you exist. Viewing Christ’s gift as simply a lived template of how to behave while on Earth is not even a shadow of this.
The average reader of Nietzsche would be greatly benefitted by reading the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes before continuing this article to put what I’ve said so far into perspective. This life is fleeting, the material world is one of decay, there is nothing new under the sun. Nihilism is correct for recognising this, but completely incorrect in stopping there.
Back to the current day, I ask the BAPist neo-pagans, what hope do you have? Do you honestly believe Valhalla or Elysium are real? In my experience, most do not. But if so, what metaphysical justification do you have for their existence, even that of your pantheons? Perhaps you do still view it all as a set of types to venerate, but if you do, I repeat the question: what hope do you have? If you have no hope, you have no religion.
If you do not have hope beyond this world - as Nietzsche, Jung and Peterson do not - how have you succeeded where they fell into despair? If you have hope without reason, then why do you have hope? How can you give a reason for not having reasons? Are you operating on the methodology of a child? I should hope you’ve given more metaphysical scrutiny than that when dealing with the foundation of reality and the eternal consequences of your conclusions. If you give these things serious thought then you may just come to realise what your ancestors - who you rightly love - did hundreds of years ago. That the Summa Theologica and the Bible are the greatest culmination of reason and faith - true cause for hope.
That is true religion. Getting a fuzzy feeling inside when listening to Wardruna or sitting alone at a campfire is not. That is the exact same modernism and subjectivism which you hate, no different to girls with astrology and crystals. “I feel something” is the fallback reason in either case. Religion is not a feeling, feeling is a by-product of religion. The main product is truth and fulfilment. The more correctly ordered your religion, with the philosophical and doctrinal teachings of the Catholic Church demonstrably being the most correct ordering, the more powerful any possible feeling and connection with the immaterial foundation of reality will be. That is why we have hope, not templates. We have true religion, not pseudo-religion.
The Critical Flaw
Underlying so much of Nietzsche himself and his neopagan descendants is the acidic taint of subjectivism - a key characteristic of modernism, which they claim to despise. With the death of God there are no absolute rules, so you might aswell transcend ‘petty’ ideas of morality and enact your own personal values on the world in a very Machiavellian way. How would we know that’s true? The rampaging Übermensch does not stop to think about that. The Übermensch is the next stage of human evolution - why, then, does he go morally backwards? Moral relativism is not new, it was known to the Greeks two and a half thousand years ago, and given the polemic title of sophism. How a person who cares solely about this world and nothing greater is supposed to be a step forward for humanity and not a primitivistic regress, I don’t think I’ll ever understand.
And why is morality subject to the changing forces of evolution? You could only claim this if you also claim that the way in which it was previously conceived never truly existed and was always a fantasy - and that God always was. How could you claim that without tackling the natural moral law of St. Thomas Aquinas as the summit of the Aristotelian tradition? You can’t. You have to face it head-on. I’ve yet to see it done in a way that is better than Sam Harris, and that is saying something. At least Harris tries to claim that a materialist objective morality exists, which is still found to be laughable. That would still represent a regression, as God is the fullest embodiment of truth, goodness, and being. Any move away from God is only a move backwards towards falsity, superstition, and evil. Any move away from a concern with aspects higher than matter is very obviously a move towards lower concerns.
Maybe you just don’t care. Maybe you think it is better to be less than a caveman and not be concerned with the existence of the supernatural, rather than even attempt to argue that it doesn’t exist. How you think you could do that and be a machine for human progress belies a thoroughly anti-reason approach to existence, which is necessarily anti-human, as man is a rational animal, no matter how much you might wish that were not so.
Also, the concern for progress coupled with moral relativism means I have to ask - how are you not just another flavour of enlightenment progressivism? What tradition do you think you’re preserving? Some claim that Christianity caused modern progressivism (curious why it would take a whole 1600 years from Constantine’s victory at Milvian Bridge for this “inevitable” cause to be realised) without realising how much of the foundational tenets of modern progressivism that they agree with. Great, you like hierarchy and think masculinity is good, that’s the very bare minimum to be considered some sort of right-winger.
Here’s a more important test: Does truth exist? Ought we care about truth? If truth is not material, where is it? If it is immaterial, why should we not care about the supernatural? If we should care about the supernatural, what can our reason tell us about it?
Maybe if you answer correctly you’ll see why tradition lies in Christianity; and the reason why your pagan ancestors converted is not because they were duped, but that their conversion was from the recognition of how Christianity is the fulfilment of tradition and all other religious truth. Paganism contains ‘truth’, insofar as the elements of it which are true, are true because they are a dull shard of what Christianity has to offer. The tradition of myth and fables as artforms that truly lie between fiction and non-fiction is wonderful, and represents a great many Biblical narratives. The parts which aren’t found in Christianity are the parts which aren’t true.
I hope you care for truth. I doubt you’d even open this article if you didn’t. If you care for truth I hope you will give Christianity - the religion of your ancestors for up to two thousand years, the builder and height of western civilisation, the culmination of faith and reason - some extremely thorough consideration; not just shrugging it off because Jesus told you be to meek. Meek is not weak, it is humble. You cannot be humble unless you are strong first, just as you cannot give charitably unless you actually have money to give. Jesus wants you to be strong, to be masculine, to make the world a better place or die trying, but he wants you to do it whilst recognising that your greatness is nothing compared to God almighty - to whom you owe all things and are nothing without. If you truly think you are better than the pure act of being & existence sustaining itself, you do deserve to knocked down by many pegs.