On our need for sanctity, weirdness, and wild gratuity

Deep nihilism and deceptive scientism

Our culture is nihilistic. This is a fundamental premise that guides almost everything I write about.

The deep nihilism of modernity is the air that we breathe—our deep worldview of what constitutes the really real—and yet the Church continues to act as if all we need is better catechesis within the status quo of conventional Catholicism. This implies the problem is one of simple ignorance of doctrinal facts rather than a deep alienation of the soul from the Church’s account of the really real. We need to acknowledge that most young Catholics, in particular, are devotees of a different worldview from that of the Church and this worldview is toxic to the faith. Which is why they treat confirmation, not as the completing sacrament of initiation, but as the final sacrament of emancipation from this religion that seems so out of tune with the culture they have embraced.

This worldview is animated by what has come to be known as “scientism —the philosophy that only empirical science gives us access to the really real—and it is the de facto religion of the modern West. The Italian philosopher Augusto del Noce identified it as such, observing in The Crisis of Modernity that the anti-supernaturalist elements within its framework, when combined with modern purely immanentist philosophies, constituted for our cultural elites a “point of no return” such that “today it is no longer possible” to believe in “X religious doctrine” or “Y mythology” specifically, but also nothing of a transcendent nature generally.

Del Noce also notes that this confluence of philosophy and scientism created the mythology of the periodization of human thought wherein, to its practitioners, there is a clear progression in human history that imitates the stages of human life. That progression moves from the infantile stage of myth through the adolescent phase of religion and then into the young adult phase of modern philosophy, finally culminating in the maturing of the human race in empirical science as the sole arbiter of truth.

This is the classic progressive narration of human history and it is our culture’s governing myth of origin.

Furthermore, this periodization schema is used in order to legitimate the idea that there is indeed no going back to notions of God. The linear/conceptual progress is both formal and material and one can no more go back to an earlier stage of human development than one can return to being a child again. And even if, in the name of enlightened toleration, one “permits” a space within the social fabric for religious people to persist in their benighted ways, they are to be treated increasingly as mere antiquarian oddities on the fringes of sanity who must never be allowed into the halls of governance ever again or even, increasingly, in the public square as serious interlocutors at all.

This is the essence and the origin of the so-called cancel culture. And it is what gives all of it a totalitarian impulse. The constant talk in our chattering classes about the “curve of history” and the need to combat “disinformation” on social media is precisely about making sure there are no anti-revolutionary rear-guard actions from the snaggle-toothed deplorables who did not get the memo about the end of history.

As del Noce drives home, the apotheosis of this bizarre essentialized thing called “modern science” plays a determinative role in this totalitarian co-optation of culture by politics (such co-optation being the very definition of totalitarianism according to del Noce). Science alone, being the teleological zenith of history in this narrative, now plays the role of high priest. And a strange high priest it is, since the purpose of science is to mediate between us and metaphysical meaninglessness/nothingness. It is quite literally an oblation that oblates everything for the sake of nothing. It is precisely metaphysical meaning that is destroyed in the name of liberation from all the ties that bind because of an endless liquid fluidity in which the face of God is never again allowed to move over “the face of the waters”.

Meaninglessness and the loss of morality

For example, one such high priest, the Nobel Laureate physicist Steven Weinberg, toward the end of The First Three Minutes, famously opined, “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” He goes on to explain the universe seems to be a vast expanse of purposelessness with no inherent meaning or significance of any kind. Inevitably, he had recourse to the shopworn escape tactic of saying that even if existence is a pointless dump of randomness, there is no reason why we can’t still give the events of our lives some measure of meaning by simply imputing meaning to things where none exists. What this amounts to is the creation of noble lies for the sake of some kind of emotional comfort, even as we know all the while that the entirety of it is an ersatz invention of our own imaginations.

He also made the standard appeals to love and art and science as motivating factors in our ongoing efforts at constructing something of value, but it all remains utterly unconvincing since he offers no compelling reason why we should take anything seriously at all beyond the emotional satisfactions of the moment.

But perhaps more importantly, such a vision of existence offers us no binding address on a psychological level, leaving us adrift as rootless existential nomads. Put more starkly, his vision offers nothing that binds us morally to anything, or indeed that there really is any such thing as a moral norm at all. In fact, his worldview demands that there can be no such thing as moral norms or even any grounding notion of justice beyond the ever-shifting moods of the social contract.

Left unexamined, as is usual in our culture, is the deep connection between the moral good and metaphysical meaning. And that the annihilation of the latter entails the destruction of the former as well. Certainly, we can still go on in liberal democracies to merely stipulate moral norms in the form of “civil rights”, but the nature of these rights is largely parasitical on the very moral traditions, grounded in Christianity, that the entire liberal enterprise is designed to ignore, if not undermine. Their purely stipulative nature betrays their inner vacuity and complete openness to malleable translation into whatever mold we wish to pour it.

What becomes of such “rights” in a post-Christian cultural matrix? What becomes of them when our culture is not only post-Christian but also post-liberal? And in a milieu of utterly fanciful and concocted “meanings” in Weinberg’s pointless universe of no meaning, what does a post-Christian and post-liberal culture look like concretely? How do we redefine the political categories of “Left” and “Right” to reflect the culture of a purely stipulative, free-floating voluntarist concept of rights? In short, what do morality and politics look like in a pointless and post-everything culture? The theologian David Deane has warned us that the post-Christian and post-liberal Right may just be scarier than the Left. I think he might be correct.

Similarly, the astronomer Carl Sagan, the grand popularizer of modern science for baby boomers, always made it a point of emphasis in all of his media appearances to accentuate just how big the universe is and just how infinitesimally tiny we are in comparison to this bigness. Sagan’s “bigly” universe always played the role of the great destroyer of human significance in his narration of things as he would intone his trademark mantra that there are “billions upon billions” of stars and galaxies in order to drive home his point about how minuscule we are by comparison. We are, he loved to say, insignificant creatures on an insignificant planet orbiting an ordinary and insignificant star in an ordinary insignificant galaxy. How then could we claim any kind of specialness in the midst of this tsunami of aggregate insignificances? How can we be so arrogant? He then went on, predictably, to say that if our “myths and religions” cannot deal with this destruction of human specialness then so much the worse for our myths and religions.

However, left unsaid by Sagan is the fact that in his scheme there is no way to avoid the conclusion, given the biglyness of things on a bigly scale, that every creature and every planet and every star and every galaxy when compared to this vast whole, is insignificant. It is not just us humans here on tiny little unimportant earth. It is insignificant across the board and all the way down. Therefore, what Sagan was essentially saying was the same thing as Weinberg; everything is purposeless, meaningless and insignificant. And nothing, absolutely nothing, has any inherent meaning or value within it beyond what we merely stipulate is in it.

The age of de facto nihilism 

This is nihilism straight up. And it is the worldview that governs the deep structures of our culture. It is the worldview that has captured our institutions.

But ironically, nihilistic scientism turns out to be utterly unscientific. For example, Sagan never bothers to explain why bigness equals significance and smallness equals insignificance, nor does he bother to explain what scientific empirical experiment he used to reach this conclusion “scientifically” or even, at a minimum, what rational syllogistic logic he used to come to this conclusion about the relative meanings to be ascribed to physical bigness versus smallness. In the absence of such arguments or evidences, one is left with the legitimate conclusion that Sagan’s arguments are not really arguments at all, but subjective and emotive expressions of a certain nihilistic aesthetic in his soul that has no more rational warrant for its truthfulness than anyone else’s.

In short, Sagan’s universe is a childish universe of projected pointlessness grounded in his own jejune, and largely adolescent, psychology. He is perpetually the 17-year-old boy who has read some snippets of Nietzsche for the first time and who then becomes the enfant terrible of his English class. Well, at least until lunch, at which point he reverts to being boring and bourgeois because, after all, even an übermensch has to eat now and then.

One last example of the high priests of scientistic nihilism is the British biologist Richard Dawkins. Dawkins has stated that when we look at the universe what we see is a reality that looks exactly as we would expect it to look if there is in fact no God. Which is probably the greatest act of question-begging in the entire history of question-begging. Be that as it may, what it shows, once again, is that in modern nihilistic frameworks there is a conflating of randomness with pointlessness and then, finally, with meaninglessness.

It is a shame that in our culture the Catholic voice is suppressed or, as in the case of our bishops, merely schmeezed through the Play-Doh fun factory of utterly boring synodal shapes; a pastoral council moon here, a curial restructuring star there, and fun is had by all. But ignored in all of it is the crisis of our times and the extent to which this de facto nihilism has infected the Church as well. There is no sense of urgency, no sense of the crushing boredom of our anodyne bureaucratic responses to everything, and no sense of the metasticization of meaninglessness into the ecclesial organism.

Because there is no sense of crisis, there is also no real response to the modern claim that the really real world of our universe is a world of pointlessness. We present our ex opere operato sacraments as almost magical talismans in the vain hope of warding off the demons of pointlessness but do not bother to ground those sacraments within a true reform of ecclesial life that involves a genuine revival of a counter-witness of a robust and vigorous sanctity.

The line between the pointless and the gratuitous

This is all the more sad because a prophetic Catholic would be able to see immediately that there is a fine line between the pointless and the gratuitous. And that a gift that is utterly gratuitous is by definition going to appear as “having no point or meaning or significance” beyond the fact of its sheer gratuity. A prophetic eye would easily see, with connatural alacrity, that what modern atheists call “random pointlessness” is in reality the very warp and woof of the idiosyncratic wildness of life. That true beauty resides in the untamed realms just beyond the bony and sinewy fingers of grasping secular reason. And that a universe devoid of the randomness of contingency would be a drab and boring affair of raw efficiency and utterly flat pragmatic teleologies.

Iain McGilchrist, in his wonderful book The Master and His Emissary gives a detailed account of how our culture came to be dominated by “left brain rationality” at the expense of “right brain” forms of reason. Indeed, so complete is the revolution that the more aesthetic and symbolic forms of reason from the right brain are not even viewed as forms of reason at all.

If we want a concrete pastoral proposal for “what kind of sanctity we need today,” I submit that what we need are wild and weird saints whose entire lives become witness to untamed forms of creativity that are taxonomically cross-dressing in their destruction of our normal categories of thought. This is the true “Trans”: the tran-sapientia of right-brained Catholic rebellion against what Simone Weil called “the apparatus”. Which is to say, the apparatus of modern techno-nihilism. Hans Urs von Balthasar called it “the system”; Paul Kingsnorth calls it “the Machine”.

My point is a simple one. All ecclesial attempts to construct a modus vivendi with this apparatus will fail and have failed. Only the untamed regions of sanctity can point us toward the one and only true “pointlessness”: the apparent “reasonlessness” of God’s profligate gratuity. The anti-apparatus of the Paschal mystery and our immersion in it.