I stumbled upon a remarkable article at the contrarian website Unherd entitled The Anti-Christ now rules us all. It’s by a remarkable writer, the novelist Paul Kingsnorth, whom I will blog about tomorrow.
Marshaling a number of other writers–whom I also want to track down–Kingsnorth offers a penetrating critique of contemporary culture, in terms I hadn’t thought of before. In using the loaded word “Anti-Christ,” he is not identifying some villain of the last days, but rather arguing that the Christian influence on civilization is giving way to its opposite.
The essay defies summarizing. You need to read it all. What I am going to do is encourage you to do that by quoting some of the article’s provocative passages:
Presenting disorder as order and truth as lies — this, wrote [French mystic René] Guénon, was the way that Satan rolled. The “more or less direct agents of the Adversary”, he explained, using the Biblical name for what Europeans would later come to call the Devil, always aimed to invert reality. Right is wrong, black is white, up is down, there is no truth, do what thou wilt: this has always been the Adversary’s line, and today it is prominent in all quarters.
. . .
The twin revolutionary engines of the postwar era, [the Italian thinker Augusto Del Noce] suggested, were scientism and sex. The first usurped the role of religion and culture, reducing all life to the level of the measurable and controllable. The second, via the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the resulting “permissive society”, unleashed a radical individualism cored around sexual desire, which would lead to the fragmentation of everything from nationhood to the family — but leave capitalism and its attendant class, the bourgeoisie, intact.
Modernity, in the final accounting, took aim at all authority, all tradition, everything rooted and everything past. Del Noce’s prediction, made decades ago, was that the end result of modernity’s revolutions would be the rise of a “new totalitarianism”. This time around it would not involve jackboots and uniforms. Instead, it would be a technocracy built on scientism and implemented by managerial elites, designed to ensure that order could continue after modernity had ripped up all former sources of authority and truth. Ironically, wrote Del Noce, “the rejection of authority, understood in its metaphysical-religious foundation, leads instead to the fullness of ‘power’”.
. . .
The new totalitarianism, suggested Del Noce, would “absolutely deny traditional morality and religion”, basing its worldview instead on “scientistic dogmatism”. It would negate all “spiritual forces”, including those which, in the 1930s, had been used to resist the totalitarianisms of Hitler and Stalin: “the Christian tradition, liberalism, and humanitarian socialism”. It would be a “totalitarianism of disintegration”, even more so than Russian communism, which had presented itself to some degree as a continuation of national tradition. This time around though, “the complete negation of all tradition”, including that of “fatherlands” — nations — would lead to rule by the only large institutions still standing: global corporations.
. . .
What Anti-Christ wants is the opposite of transcendence. If the coming of Christ represents the transcendent breaking into the temporal in order to change it, then His opponent will herald a world of pure matter, uninterrupted by anything beyond human reach.
. . .
Humans cannot live for very long without a glimpse of the transcendent, or an aspiration, dimly understood, to become one with it. Denied this path, we will make our own. Denied a glimpse of heaven, we will try to build it here. This imperfect world, these imperfect people — they must be superseded, improved, remade.
Inverting reality. Scientism reducing all reality to what we can measure and control. Unleashing radical individualism built around sexual desire, fragmenting the family. Rejecting all authority and replacing it with the raw power of totalitarianism. Rejecting all traditions, including those of nations, leaving intact only global corporations. Immanence replacing transcendence, channeling it so that we try to build our own heaven and we try to remake humanity.
Strong charges, but they explain a lot. And if inverting the Christian worldview causes such catastrophes, that makes a good case for the validity of that worldview.
Tomorrow, I’ll post about how the author of these critiques, Paul Kingsnorth, came to realize that, not just intellectually, but in a personal faith in Christ.
Illustration: Anti-Christ, fresco from Osogovo Monastery, Republic of Macedonia, by Edal Anton Lefterov, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
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