My favorite pub (Richmond Arms) doesn’t, but some pubs will give you salty food hoping for more drink orders. Salty snacks spur thirst, thirst drinking, and in a pub, perhaps more alcohol than a man should have. Dry a man out, have him eat salt, and a pub crawler might run up a tab quenching a fierce thirst.
Atheism and materialism are salty snacks for humankind. They deny reality: ideas, numbers, God, and the mind. The denial sets up a craving in most people, those starved of beauty beyond personal taste and meaning not manufactured by men. These longings can cause people to poke into the metaphysical world looking for something, anything. This is foolish, like sating a desire for physics by blindly messing with a reactor. In physics and metaphysics, the result is more often bad than good.
Or so Arthur Machen, a father of modern horror (ask Lovecraft and Stephen King) believed. He saw the British Empire, ugly and bloated on injustice, sliding into decadence and doubt. The decadence numbed the guilt and the doubt softened the conscience. Machen was there as Oscar Wilde and a lost generation explored libertine morality. As Wilde returned to the Church, so did Machen, both too intellectually honest to confuse desire with truth.
Machen, fundamentally, hated the clockwork universe of HG Wells and the simplistic reductionist philosophy of the naturalists. He was tempted by the salty philosophy of materialism to drink too much supernaturalism, looking in every cultural rubbish bin for discarded supernaturalism. Machen found only darkness and devils and so returned to God and God’s people. He drank too much, perhaps, and never quite recovered. Like Charles Williams, he is both brilliant and a caution.
Yet Machen knew the sin of our age: the thirst for storming heaven illegitimately. We forget that “science” may be a mere body of knowledge, but the knowledge is used by men. Science applied is always a power that some men can use over other men. Science, as Machen saw, can become a denial of what ought to be in an attempt to make our desires what is.
Machen saw this as sorcery: man looking for a power to be God. This always fails, but the desire from all the salt remains. Sin for Machen was desire for the miraculous that settled for magic. His short story “The White People” suggested that the great sinners, the sorcerers, were rare, but out there. Machen knew this by personal experience, occultism by the reaction of atheism.
Machen discusses “sin” and refuses to call societal sins the great sins:
But are you a Catholic?’ said Cotgrave.
‘Yes; I am a member of the persecuted Anglican Church.’
‘Then, how about those texts which seem to reckon as sin that which you would set down as a mere trivial dereliction?’
‘Yes; but in one place the word “sorcerers” comes in the same sentence, doesn’t it? That seems to me to give the key-note. Consider: can you imagine for a moment that a false statement which saves an innocent man’s life is a sin? No; very good, then, it is not the mere liar who is excluded by those words; it is, above all, the “sorcerers” who use the material life, who use the failings incidental to material life as instruments to obtain their infinitely wicked ends. And let me tell you this: our higher senses are so blunted, we are so drenched with materialism, that we should probably fail to recognize real wickedness if we encountered it.’
Machen believed, and history has tended to confirm, that atheist culture will be blind to real wickedness. It will set up a gulag and call it progress. Yet that very materialism will breed in many people a craving for sorcery, supernaturalism on the cheap. Look at Stalinist art and you can see the saltiness that would produce occultism all over the Soviet Union. Go to China and look underground and see what Machen prophesied: kill true religion and a nation gets devilish religion. A few people will eat the pretzels and not order a drink, but most will.
The desperation to quench spiritual thirst will cause great evils to be ignored:
‘But shouldn’t we experience a certain horror—a terror such as you hinted we would experience if a rose tree sang—in the mere presence of an evil man?’
‘We should if we were natural: children and women feel this horror you speak of, even animals experience it. But with most of us convention and civilization and education have blinded and deafened and obscured the natural reason. No, sometimes we may recognize evil by its hatred of the good—one doesn’t need much penetration to guess at the influence which dictated, quite unconsciously, the “Blackwood” review of Keats—but this is purely incidental; and, as a rule, I suspect that the Hierarchs of Tophet pass quite unnoticed, or, perhaps, in certain cases, as good but mistaken men.’
For Machen materialism warps us, cutting us off from our natural reason. The simplistic materialism that dismisses anything that cannot be reduced to matter and energy in mindless motion comes with a price. Such a culture becomes blind to any infernal action. While proclaiming the death of God, who persists in not dying in any case, the materialist becomes unable to detect or block the diabolical.
God came as a man: Jesus Christ. The materialist denies this truth, but the result is not (for the most part) merely reasonable. Instead, the denial of truth makes a man thirsty for something. He denies God came in the flesh, how contrary to materialism! If we will not see God in Christ, then we must look for new visions of God. These turn out to be like a short story by HP Lovecraft: full of writing and vision that is deeply horrid.
The antichrist denies that Jesus comes in the flesh, but this antichrist spirit usually ends in rootless religiosity. Doctrines of demons inevitably fill the place of goodness, truth, and beauty. The materialist will say he worships devils “ironically,” but devils know nothing of humor or irony. They take us at our word.
We live in an age of antichrists.
Little children, it is the last time: and as ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even now are there many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last time.
‘
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The White People in The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories (Oxford World Classics) Arthur Machen (Pages 261-66).
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