Politics of Nothingness

The modern world has created a machine to catechize people from birth that they exist in a nihilistic cosmos.

Earlier this year, I visited my grandmother in an assisted living community. What I saw horrified me. Not the fact that people get old, that is natural. Rather, what horrified me is the fruits of liberalism. Right here was a community of people who had no direction in life and had reached the end of life. Now, they were just sitting around, waiting to die and go into the void of nothingness that secularism promises after death.

The key principle behind secularism is that the transcendent is not real. Sure, you can privately go to church and worship however you would like, but the transcendent is fundamentally not real, at least not real enough to base politics on. The very methodology of our politics is a catechesis in nihilism.

Secularism is upheld today as a basic principle of justice: it is wrong to force one’s religious views on another. Certainly, there is truth to this, as one cannot force another to have supernatural faith. But to refuse to even catechize people that there is something transcendent that they ought to order their lives to leads to a much greater injustice, far worse than the worst abuses of medieval European kings.

We have created a machine to catechize people from birth that they exist in a nihilistic cosmos. When one is young, it is easy enough to find happiness in friends and hobbies. As one grows older, the answer lies in family. Even in bad times, one can always hope that better days are ahead. But when one’s body begins to fail and they know that there are not better days ahead, there is no happiness. There is only despair. So we cart these people off to special communities and pretend we will not face this same fate too one day.

About sixth months later, I had a very different experience: a guided tour of a nearly 900 year old Cicertians monastery. The people who lived there at its founding had the same biology as us and walked the same earth as us. Yet, the world they lived in was so different from us that it is almost unimaginable. The monastery was founded St. Leopold III, the king of Austria, so that the monks could pray for the success of his kingdom.

As we walked the halls, we saw very simplistic stained glass. The monk guiding us explained that St. Bernard (one of the early founders of the Cicertians) insisted that the monastery have plain white stained glass as a symbol of the contemplation of the incomprehensible God. Like at the assisted living home, here is a place where people have dedicated their lives in service of that which is beyond comprehension. However, it is not the incomprehensibility of nothingness, but the incomprehensibility of that which is beyond us, for it is the very source of the possibility of existence.

These monks lived in a world which was the opposite of nihilism. Every last bit of their lives was ordered towards the transcendent source of morality. This infinite reality of meaning extended beyond the walls of the monastery. The lives of everyone in this society were ordered, at least in theory, towards God. Even the king understood his mission as helping people to live their best lives here so that they could attain the infinite goodness of God in heaven.

This was a reality so full of meaning we cannot comprehend it, just as they would never be able to comprehend our nihilistic reality. In the same hallway there was a chapel full of dancing skeleton statues. The monk explained that, after he died, he too will be laid on the table in this chapel while the funeral mass is said for him. If our life is ordered towards a good beyond ourselves, then death is nothing to fear. It is a movement into a more transcendent reality.

We walked a little bit further down the hall and saw a painting of St. Bernard. Our tour guide explained that this painting depicts a real event witnesses by multiple people. St. Bernard walked into a church and saw a statue of the Virgin Mary. Humbly, St. Bernard bowed and greeted her, “Ave Maria.” In response, the statue bowed to him, “Ave Bernarde.”

I told this story to a family member of mine who does not believe, and he insisted to me that, just because many people claim they saw it does not mean it happened. But why not believe it happened? If there is fundamentally no meaning in reality and we are all just destined for non-existence, then there is nothing morally wrong with being a bit credulous. But if there is a God and there is meaning in this world, then the story may very well be true.

What is truly shocking in this story though is not that God exists or that miracles happen. Every ancient culture knew these things long before Jesus came. What is truly shocking in this story is that a man could be friends with infinite God. But each and every one of us are called to such a friendship with God. No greater happiness can be found than the infinite source of happiness itself, and no other lesser happiness can ever satisfy the human heart. Once one realizes this, how can one endorse any politics but one which does everything possible to help guide us to that end?

In light of this alternate possibility, some of the debates in American politics seem like obnoxious noise. Very few politicians are willing to even address the real spiritual crisis at the heart of the modern crisis. We cannot place our end in some other finite good, even though material goods do matter. Otherwise, we are headed for the triumph of nihilism.

What can be done though? Here I once against turn to our Cicertian tour guide. He showed us the lectern from which the abbot would read from the rule of St. Benedict. He explained that in the time of St. Benedict, the world was in political upheval. St. Benedict saw the stability of the monastery as a way to overcome the endless motion of his era. We too must seek to turn ourselves towards God. I am not here advocating for retreatism. Rather, the only thing that can save our dead society is the God who defeated death. All earthly things naturally tend towards corruption, but the infinite life of God can revive the earthly city.

Again, this is not a call for retreatism (as some have invoked the example of St. Benedict to support). We have a duty to the common good of our nation. Rather, it is a call for true political realism. Nothing is more real than the God who is the very source of reality. Someday, our nation should build churches again so that it can get the prayers it needs. But in the meantime, we can start supplying those prayers ourselves.

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Gideon Lazar recently published a volume of collected essays, I Believe in God the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth: Studies in the Theology of Creation Volume 1. You can purchase a copy here.

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