Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

I was reading R. R. Reno’s article on Nietzsche’s On The Geneology of Morals in First Things the other day. Reno provides an insightful commentary as he summarizes Nietzsche’s work. He ends with the following conclusion:

Nietzsche’s almost unwilling final affirmation of the ascetic impulse echoes St. Augustine’s basic insight into the human condition. Our hearts are restless. The human animal wishes to give itself to something higher. It is a need more basic than our instinctual urges. It is a nature more fundamental than everything our age wishes us to affirm as natural.

Our restless hearts suggest that the real dangers of the present age are not to be found in an open-ended, nihilistic nonjudgmentalism that encourages us to imagine our world devoid of compelling truths. Such possibilities are abroad, but, as anyone who has been exposed to our educational establishment knows, it requires the constant infusion of disciplinary energy to keep young people from actually believing something.

Instead, if Nietzsche is right, the danger we face may be idolatry. Deprived of a God worth worshipping, we will find substitutes, even to the point of ­prostrating ourselves before birds or animals or reptiles that our modern minds have transformed from graven images into shrill moral imperatives and brittle political causes.

The last century’s graveyards testify to the reality of this danger. Turned away from something truly greater than ourselves, we do not come to rest in a modest ­loyalty to humanity. Instead, as Nietzsche’s and Augustine’s insights into the human condition warn us, we fall into a devotion to subhuman primal powers that reward our service with debasement.

What comes to mind in reading this conclusion is the way in which so many in from those in politics, to the new media, to the entertainment field have piled on to the man-made global warming bandwagon. The way that these folks have embraced the theory that man-made emissions are driving the climate into a sustained and dangerous warming trend borders on religious adherence. Despite the fact that man made global warming is an unproven theory, a scientific theory based upon heuristic computer models and which requires much more evidence to either confirm or deny, the response to those who point this out ranges from being ignored to attacked as a “denier.“

Reno points out how Nietzsche reluctantly admits that there is an inherent human impulse to asceticism in the human soul. There is an innate desire in man to master his inclinations in order to subordinate them to the greater good. Reno indicates that Nietzsche has discovered man’s inclination toward the transcendent; toward the infinite. Man is naturally religious because, as St. Augustine pointed out, he has an inbuilt restlessness until he rests in God.

Neo-modern culture has bought into the European model of secularism in which God is excluded from public life and reasoned discussion. I’ll do another post on the evolution of modern thought that contributed to this later, but for now it is enough to note this presents secularists with a problem. They are trying to have culture without cult and they cannot have it. This type of secularism represses the human person and so it is rebuffed by the masses. I suspect that even the rabid secularists sense an interior dissatisfaction with their “faith.” This leaves them in desperate need of a religion, but it needs to be a godless one. Thus, we are presented with the global warming faith. I suspect that the fideistic reaction that we are seeing from this mass of secularists reveals that Al Gore has handed them the religion that they were seeking.

It is not coincidental that this “religion” is one that requires self-sacrifice for a purpose which transcends themselves. Sacrifice is at the root of religion for the reasons to which Reno’s article alludes. Thus, we see this unreasoned, “religious” rush to a self-transcending faith and an attendant “fundamentalist” reaction to those who would deny the truth of this new found faith.

The problem that these secularists will find with this faith is that it will ultimately collapse because it will be unsatisfying. One can see this in that the high priest and a good number of its prophets (see here, here, and here) want others to do the sacrificing. This is not surprising for the reason at root for the uncritical rejection of Christian faith by so many of these Western secularists is its moral demands. Whether human caused global warming will be debunked by science before it is abandoned by its religious adherents is anyone’s guess. However, any religion without self sacrifice is doomed to fail.