WITH
the appearance of the specifically modern type of humanity there suddenly comes into existence a really unique situation, as a result of the twofold work of destruction which now begins to go forward. For the first time there arises the tremendous danger of a collective annihilation of religion, both of the natural religion of the ancients and of the natural-supernatural religion of medieval Christianity. We are not in a position to appreciate quite clearly the significance of that terrible howling of the wolf-man who appears at the end of this long process of development. […] Mankind’s fall from the lofty spiritual heights of the Middle Ages must be in another category altogether from that of the ancients, for their religious level was, after all, but a natural one. The howling of the wolf that we hear today is, therefore, the distinctive cry for help uttered by the man who feels by instinct that he has lost both the classical and the Christian piety, the cry for help of a man who, as a metaphysical being, now feels himself really cheated out of the ultimate reason for his existence. It is the cry of the man, now self-dishonored and spiritually bankrupt, who may perhaps rapturously await the approach of a new revelation, but who, after the absolute revelation of Christianity, will await it in vain. In this way he may come to feel that unless he himself returns to the Christian message, the universal defeat of the human spirit will draw appreciably near. And in all this is to be found the element of metaphysical terror which is voiced in his very cry of distress. For that cry is itself a self-manifestation of the metaphysical depths which exist even in this man who is spiritually bankrupt; and the irony of it is that such a man is always incapable of interpreting this unconscious metaphysical manifestation of his own being in the one and only sense in which it is susceptible of interpretation. Here we find verified, almost literally, the profound ideas which, in 1849, in his work,
Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard propounded to the entire nineteenth century, as in a single great sermon after the manner of Savonarola. We can, indeed, truly say that the crisis of the spiritual sickness is reached when the dying man no longer recognizes himself as moribund. It is the point where the paroxysm of fever turns, as it were, into spiritual delirium.
Three distinct phases of this peculiarly modern development of humanity must now be distinguished. In the first of these the supernatural idea of God gradually grows dim, and slowly but surely the supernatural order of life fades from the field of vision. This process extends from the beginning of the Renaissance to the Deism of the eighteenth century. The second phase is the comparatively short interlude formed by the German idealism of Goethe’s day. We ourselves are in the final phase. This evolves a positivist and historicist humanism and ends with the total uprooting of man.
It should be borne carefully in mind that it is during the course of the first phase – during the development, that is, from the Renaissance to Deism – that the really decisive crises occur. That is because it is during this period that the destruction of the religious unity of the Middle Ages is accomplished. This fact is usually ignored, because at that time, in spite of the inner decadence, an astonishingly high level of culture was attained, while the fruits of decomposition did not become apparent in any way until the second, nor fully until the final phase. […]
Perhaps the feature that characterizes the first phase of the modern spirit, extending from the Renaissance to the development of Deism, is the definitive substitution for the life of faith of a life that finds its end in secular culture as such. Whereas, in the best periods of the Middle Ages and of antiquity, the cultural achievement is, so to speak, the automatic result of a life steeped in the liturgical consecration of religion – natural in antiquity, natural-supernatural in the Middle Ages – at this point the center of gravity is suddenly and fatally shifted. The cultural achievement becomes the primary consideration, the sanctity of religious fellowship and the life of faith of secondary importance. […]
However the man of the Renaissance may have pictured to himself his increased delight in secular culture as a return to antiquity, he failed to perceive that in reality he took only a connoisseur’s interest in the fragrance and bloom of the old civilization and had little understanding for that fundamental piety from which the fair fruit of human culture had sprung. […]
The final dilution of the inherited faith of antiquity and Christianity is represented by the fourth type of man, in the second phase of secularization. It is the humanism of Goethe and his age. Again there is talk of a resuscitation of antiquity. And what is actually attained is but the last remnant of the faith that still survived from that idealism of the reason, itself little better than a ghost, which had characterized the Enlightenment. It is true that at times Goethe’s work breathes something of that delicate perfume which marks the Catholicism of the Rhineland. But, when we look more closely into it, we see that it is merely a pleasing play with aesthetic categories; the tremendous, supernatural substance is lost; we are but faintly reminded of the metaphysical depth from which once sprang as a serious reality the life of an entire age. […]
Now appears before us the fifth type of humanity, the completely uprooted civilized man of the closing nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who, with his ideal of a perfectly uniform and standardized internationalism, is preparing the destruction not only of Christianity but of human culture in general. It is man living a life in puris naturalibus, from whom every remnant not only of religion but of metaphysics also has been eliminated, and who, admitting nothing but the abstract law of Things, will recognize the religious convictions of mankind merely as natural phenomena witnessing only to the laws that have produced them.
~Peter Wust, Crisis in the West
