It was not difficult to see that both Nazism and communism were children of the anti-Christian side of the modern era. In both, in different ways, they mixed philosophical presuppositions (Feuerbach's in one case, Nietzsche's in the other, and in both, Hegel's) and false scientific claims about materialism (dialectic) or biology (racist). And both pretended to build a new city with a culture without God in favor of a new man. But they fell back on the construction of the tower of Babel, which is also the apocalyptic Babylon, thirsty for Christian blood.
The book is composed of several articles that De Lubac wrote during World War II and the occupation of France by the Germans. Originally, they were separate articles. This is how the author tells it with his characteristic modesty in the foreword. But they had the unity of analysis: "Beneath the innumerable currents that surface on the external surface of our contemporary thought, it seems to us that there is [...] something like an immense drift: Due to the action of a considerable part of our thinking minority, Western humanity disavows its Christian origins and separates itself from God." (p. 9). And it continues: "We are not talking about a vulgar atheism, which is typical, more or less, of all times and which offers nothing significant [...]. Modern atheism becomes positive, organic, constructive.". It does not limit itself to criticize, but has the will to make the question useless and substitute the solution. "Positivist humanism, Marxist humanism, Nietzschean humanism are, more than an atheism properly speaking, an anti-theism and more specifically, an anti-Christianity, because of the negation at their base." (The drama of atheistic humanismEncuentro, Madrid 1990, pp. 9-10).
The essay is divided into three parts. In the first, it deals with Feuerbach and Nietzsche on the death of God and the dissolution of human nature, and compares Nietzsche with Kierkegaard. The second part is devoted to Comte's positivism and his substitute atheism. The third, with the expressive title Dostoyevsky prophet shows how the Russian writer, sensitive to this, had guessed the plot: "It is not true that man cannot organize the earth without God. What is true is that without God he cannot, in the end, do more than organize it against man. Exclusive humanism is an inhuman humanism." (p. 11). As it happens with the whole of De Lubac's work, this book is full of quotations and references and one can guess a serious and immense effort of reading. And a very broad culture. It should also be noted that he always treats with justice the thought of others, with great discernment and irreproachable intellectual honesty.
Feuerbach and Nietzsche
De Lubac describes that the Christian idea of the human being and his relationship with God was a great liberation in the ancient world: "Fatum is over!" (p. 20), the tyranny of fatality: behind it there is a God who loves us. "Now this Christian idea that had been received as a liberation begins to feel like a yoke.". One does not want to be subjected to anything, not even to God. The utopian socialists, from Proudhon to Marx, see in God the excuse that sanctions the unjust order of society: "by the grace of God", as it was coined on the royal coins.
Feuerbach and Nietzsche will break this order. Feuerbach will do so by postulating that the idea of God has been generated by sublimating the aspirations of human beings, who have dispossessed themselves by putting outside the fullness to which they aspire, and thus can no longer be theirs. For Feuerbach, the Christian religion is the most perfect and, therefore, the most alienating. This was like a revelation for Engels or Bakunin. And Marx will add it to his economic analysis: the original alienation is what generates the two basic classes, those who own the means of production (owners) and those who do not own them (workers), and this creates in history the social structure that ends up sanctioned by religion. But it will give it a practical and political twist: it is no longer a question of thinking, but of transforming. A more radical revolution than the French one is needed.
According to De Lubac, Nietzsche did not sympathize with Feuerbach, but was influenced by Schopenhauer and Wagner. The World as will and representationSchopenhauer, is marked by Feuerbach's thesis and enchants Wagner. The Will to powerNietzsche's "The Christian Alienation" is driven by indignation at Christian alienation and by the desire to regain full freedom: "In Christianity, this process of stripping and debasement of man goes to the extreme."he says. And this indignation is present almost from the beginning of his work. It is necessary to expel the fallacy of God. It is not a question of demonstrating that it is false, because we would never finish, it is necessary to expel it from thought as an evil, once we have unmasked it because we know how it has been formed. It is necessary to proclaim with the vigor of a crusade, the "death of God", a huge and tragic task, even frightening, as it appears in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Consequently, everything must be remade, especially the human being: it is an atheistic humanism. "He does not see," comments De Lubac, "that the One against whom he blasphemes and exorcises is precisely the one who gives him all his strength and greatness [...], he is not aware of the servility that threatens him." (p. 50). De Lubac does not fail to point out that Nietzsche can mock Christian falsehood because in modern Christianity so accommodated there is hardly a trace left of the vibrancy of the Christians who transformed the ancient world.
Kierkegaard has quite a few things in common with Nietzsche: the solitary struggle against the bourgeois, the aversion to Hegel and abstraction, the consciousness of solitary combat with great suffering. But Kierkegaard is a man of radical faith, a "herald of transcendence," of that dimension without which the human being closed in on himself can only succumb to his limits and baseness.
Comte and Christianity
The extensive Positive Philosophy Courseby Comte, was published in the same year that The essence of Christianityby Feuerbach (1842). And as a commentator of the time pointed out: "L. Feuerbach in Berlin like Auguste Comte in Paris, proposes to Europe the worship of a new God: the 'human race'" (p. 95).
De Lubac lucidly analyzes the famous "law of the three stages", which Comte formulated at the age of 24. "It constitutes the picture in which he pours all his doctrine". (p. 100). We pass from a supernatural explanation of the universe with gods and God ("theological stage"), to a philosophical explanation by abstract causes ("metaphysical stage"), and finally to a fully scientific and "natural" explanation ("positive stage"). There is no turning back. All the above is "fanaticism", an adjective then in vogue. Comte did not consider himself an atheist but an agnostic: he believed he had shown that the idea of a God had been falsely arrived at and that this question made no sense in a scientific society. But it is necessary to fill in the gap, because "what is not replaced is not destroyed". (p. 121). And he wants to organize the cult of Humanity. This will lead him to a series of rather delirious initiatives. De Lubac comments: "In practice it leads to the dictatorship of a party, or rather of a sect. It denies man all freedom, all rights." (p. 187). We are in the line of the "fanaticisms of abstraction" that V. Havel will later denounce, or of the projects of "social engineering" that the Marxists will carry out, but in this case fortunately almost innocuous.
Dostoyevsky prophet
Strikingly, the third part of the book is titled Dostoyevsky prophet. De Lubac picks up on an observation by Gide: many novels describe the relationships between the protagonists, but Dostoyevsky's novels also deal with the relationship between the protagonists. "with himself and with God." (p. 195). In this inner work, Dostoyevsky has been able to represent the changes that the option for nihilism and life without God entail in a person. Dostoyevsky is a prophet in this sense: he allows us to see what happens in souls with new ideas. He even allows us to imagine what happened in the soul of Nietzsche himself, the soul of an atheist fleeing from God.
Curiously, says De Lubac, in his last years of lucidity, Nietzsche became acquainted with the works of Dostoyevsky (Memories of the subsoil), with which he felt identified: "He's the only one who has taught me some psychology." (200), He also met The idiotwhere he glimpsed the features of Christ, but soon warned a friend that Dostoyevsky is: "completely Christian in sentiment"won by "slave morality". And will consider. "I have granted him a strange recognition, against my deepest instincts [...] it is the same with Pascal." (p. 200).
When Dostoyevsky was planning, at the end of his life, a magnum opus with an autobiographical background, he noted: "The main problem that will be raised in all parts of the work will be the one that has tortured me consciously or unconsciously throughout my life: the existence of God. The hero will be, throughout his existence, sometimes an atheist, sometimes a believer, sometimes a fanatic or heretic, and sometimes again an atheist." (p. 205). He did not write it, but in the ones he wrote, with multiple names, there is this character discovering us the different states of his believing, atheist, nihilist or revolutionary soul.
Has time passed by the book?
Yes, it has happened. The comparison between Nietzsche and Kierkegaard is still topical, even more topical. The treatment of Dostoyevsky is still moving. But other things have changed. Nazism disappeared with the war. Communism, like a miracle, fell with the 20th century (since 1989). Feuerbach or Comte sound old-fashioned, although they were taught in the Faculties of Philosophy before Foucault and Derrida (without any mention of their critics). Political ideologies have disappeared, leaving cultural wounds.
However, the positivist background as a unique faith in science survives and extends, without the eccentricities of Comte. There is no positivist cult and priesthood, although there is the quasi-pontifical Magisterium of some "oracles of science", as Mariano Artigas called them. But there is an assumed materialism, which, in reality, has little foundation, given what we know about the origin and constitution of the world. Every day it looks more and more like a huge explosion of intelligence, so that it is more implausible to defend that there is only matter and that everything has been made by itself.
Marxism fell, we were saying, but the immense ideological vacuum is being filled with the same planetary dimensions and the same propagandistic and social pressure techniques by sexual ideology, developed since 1968. And this is due, in large part, to the fact that a left, deprived of a political program (Marxist) and of a future horizon (the classless society), has turned it into a moral vindication that redeems or at least covers up the harsh past. De Lubac, like most of his contemporaries, including the entire classical left, would be perplexed. From the revolutionary left we have passed to the libertarian left (with inspiration from Nietzsche) and from there to a new ideological machinery that, upsetting the foundations of our democracy, turns its intolerance into a virtue. Since the end of the 18th century, intolerance is not Christian intolerance, but anti-Christian intolerance. And about this new humanism, the diagnosis that De Lubac finds in Dostoyevsky is valid: a world can be made without God, but it cannot be made without going against the human being. Dostoyevsky, the prophet, did not imagine this drift, but he did announce that "only beauty will save the world".
