Just as there are Fathers of the Church, there are also what we might call Fathers of the modern world, revered and studied by the intelligentsia, who hope to combine them in a sort of grand synopsis of atheism. We may never have read Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzche or Freud, but our outlook, the spirit of the age, is formed by their ideas.
The Marxist theory of social alienation and the reification of humanity the creator in the ‘master-slave’ dialectic, leaves us with a God who is nothing but the essence of human alienation (nothing but being the characteristic formula of reductionism). Nietzche’s philosophy of the will for power, health, status, creative amusement, reduces God to the product of a ‘Platonism’ for the people’, a world of illusions, a refuge for our weakness and a weapon to arm our resentment. Then there are the great advances in psychoanalysis. Freud’s discovery of the super-ego, nourished by obsessive guilt, makes God the projection of the sadistic father. Jung demonstrated that a would-be Christian is often so only at the level of clear self-awareness; at this level we tend to identify evil and impurity with the dark, womblike and teeming depths of our own nature. Lucifer, however, was an angel of light!
Human understanding, acute but autonomous according to the great reductionists, must become for us an ascetic understanding. It must help us to see how the encumbrances of history, class consciousness, resentment, the tragedy of sex and the awareness of death, are constantly tarnishing the image of God in us, and constantly raising up masks and idols which distort the mystery. Thus we shall progress, as even Nietzche sometimes desired, from the ‘moral God’ to the ‘divine God’.
It is no accident that the great reductionists formulated their critique at a time when Christianity had degenerated into morality. And morality itself had degenerated into infantile repression by the super-ego, a castrating anxiety about purity, or its sublimation into a kind of angelism bordering on dissociation, almost to the point of schizophrenia, between the orderly ideal and intractable real life. At bottom, is it not true that the notion of salvation had become a matter of paying a price through suffering; that the sins (in the plural) with which we were obsessed were seen as breakings of rules; that our salvation through Christ’s death on the cross, was seen as an exaction of divine vengeance, forgetting that the cross of death is also the cross of glory, that the Disfigured is also the Transfigured?
In their frantic search for liberty – or to be more accurate, license – in every sphere of modern life, people think they are breaking free from the obsessive concerns of morality, the life denying other-worldliness, the pharisaical preoccupation with purity, in order to recover a more spontaneous and innocent attitude to existence. They hope to recapture, in the face of what they regard as Christian taboos and hypocritical moral prohibitions, a ‘Dionysiac’ freedom, ‘a world where there is no such thing as sin’, as the publicity for the Satyricon said. They entertain the desperate hope that the Fall itself might be the way back to the innocence of paradise, the means by which the self can break free from its limitations.
But if the self is not exposed, by a personal faith, to the absolute Source of life, it will be in danger of disintegration in the impersonal force of nature. The ‘revolution’ of popular mythology has been a welcome excuse. The self is torn between orgasmic frenzy on the one hand and nostalgic world-weariness on the other.
~Olivier Clement, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology
