Nietzsche and Godless Post-Modernity

“All of this culminated in the works of Nietzsche, who rejected the ontological and moral truths of monotheism, while retaining their stress on individualism.”

Introduction

Many religious figures are very critical of post-modern culture, and with good reason. However, these analysts often are very selective in their treatment of how the movement emerged. The typical narrative is that there was a period of genuine faith and devotion from which we have radically deviated, with serious consequences for our moral and personal outlooks. Sohrab Ahmari’s apocalyptic dramas are very representative. Unlike more robust analysts, very few of these (usually conservative) religious criticisms of post-modernity look at how monotheism and faith may have actually contributed in profound ways to the culture they now criticize. In this short article, I want to reflect on Christian monotheism, in particular, and how it helped to frame the emergence of a culture many conservative Christians claim to detest. This may provide insight into understanding our contemporary climate.

Godless Neoliberal Post-modernism

Unlike some religious commentators, I argue that the potential for secularization was latent in many monotheistic faiths to begin with. Few figures display this more dramatically than St. Augustine, the tremendous Christian philosopher who revolutionized theology in the 4th and 5th centuries as the Western Roman Empire fell. Augustine’s tremendous innovation was his movement away from seeing human relationships to the divine as discoverable in nature. Instead, in The Confessions, the Church father turns to his own life and thoughts as the mana through which God will reveal himself. Christianity became one of the first great world religions to stress what Søren Kierkegaard would later define as “inwardness”—or, as he put it in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments, the idea that “truth was subjectivity.” This did not mean that everything was simply relative or a matter of opinion. What it signified from St. Augustine through to the present was that monotheism was going to move from finding meaning in the external world of facts and nature towards discovering it in the internal world of our thoughts and feelings. This helped to lay the seeds for the emergence of our contemporary epoch of radical individualism, self-expression, and a distrust of finding meaning outside of ourselves.

Saying that, it is important not to overstate this point. The potentially destabilizing tendency of monotheistic individualism was compensated for by a theological ontology that situated human beings in a “great chain of being,” which ultimately was vindicated by God. Nevertheless, the drive towards inwardness became powerful enough that it helped to launch the Reformation, as well as centuries of religious conflict in Europe. Martin Luther famously criticized the Catholic Church for remaining too tied to the idea of institutions allowing for an objective relationship with God. Luther instead stressed the need for personal faith and interpretation of the Bible. This, in turn, led to the first major political step on the road to secularism: the treaty of Westphalia in 1648, as well as the insistence that state politics would now be oriented by interests rather than religious values. It was now considered impermissible for Churches to demand acquiescence from individuals, who would increasingly have to sort out the meaning of their lives for themselves. This was given theoretical expression over the next century-and-a-half as the scientific revolutions and philosophy of the Enlightenment accepted Christian individuality but embraced an even more nominalistic approach to nature. This ultimately contributed to revolutionary agitation against religious figures who attempted to naturalize various forms of authority antithetical to the liberal spirit of the age.