..Essayist Gregory Hood claims that “Christianity burns through ties of kinship and blood. It is the essential religious step in paving the way for decadent modernity and its toxic creeds.” A major work of alt-right history concludes: “The introduction of Christianity has to count as the single greatest ideological catastrophe to ever strike Europe.”
Matthew Rose, A World after Liberalism, 2018
After reading Ezra Klein's column about Matthew Rose's A World after Liberalism, I read the book, which profiles five anti-Christian thinkers who have been influential on the far Right over the last one hundred years--Oswald Spengler, Julius Evola, Francis Parker Yockey, Alain de Benoist, and Samuel Francis. I've also been reading (but not yet finished) Timothy Snyder's The Road to Unfreedom, which profiles Ivan Ilyin, a Christian fascist who lived through the Russian Revolution who has been very influential in shaping Putin's understanding of Russia's historical mission and his role in it after the fall of the Soviet Union.
While the thinkers that Rose profiles are anti-Christian atheists or neo-pagans, Ilyin's idea of Christianity has almost nothing to do with Christianity except as it reflects the worldview of the Grand Inquisitor, the main character in a "poem" that Ivan Karamazov presents to his brother Alyosha in Dostoyevski's great novel written in 1880. Snyder doesn't mention the Grand Inquisitor in his book--at least not in the parts I've read so far--but it struck me while reading his book how much explanatory power Ivan's story has in explaining Putin/Ilyin's imagination of what Russia is or should be, and how this keys around the idea of innocence and an idea of national identity that is shaped by it, and then by extension how explains why totalitarianism is so attractive for so many.
I think revisiting the story is worthy of a little of your time. Go to the link above for the whole thing--it's not that long--but in what follows I focus on key passages to develop my theme:
The Grand Inquisitor is a man of the Church who is an admitted servant of the "tempter" whom Jesus confronted during his forty days in the desert. In Ivan's story, Jesus returns to earth in Spain during the Inquisition, and the Inquisitor recognizes him and immediately arrests him as a threat to the social order. The Inquisitor's argument when confronting Jesus is that he, the Inquisitor, is the more compassionate because he wants to allay human suffering while Jesus's project to liberate humans leads only to unhappiness. Ivan's Inquisitor says to Jesus--
Oh, we shall persuade them that they will only become free when they renounce their freedom to us and submit to us. And shall we be right or shall we be lying? They will be convinced that we are right, for they will remember the horrors of slavery and confusion to which Thy freedom brought them. Freedom, free thought, and science will lead them into such straits and will bring them face to face with such marvels and insoluble mysteries, that some of them, the fierce and rebellious, will destroy themselves, others, rebellious but weak, will destroy one another, while the rest, weak and unhappy, will crawl fawning to our feet and whine to us: "Yes, you were right, you alone possess His mystery, and we come back to you, save us from ourselves!"
Oh, we shall persuade them at last not to be proud, for Thou didst lift them up and thereby taught them to be proud. We shall show them that they are weak, that they are only pitiful children, but that childlike happiness is the sweetest of all. They will become timid and will look to us and huddle close to us in fear, as chicks to the hen. They will marvel at us and will be awe-stricken before us, and will be proud at our being so powerful and clever that we have been able to subdue such a turbulent flock of thousands of millions.
They will tremble impotently before our wrath, their minds will grow fearful, they will be quick to shed tears like women and children, but they will be just as ready at a sign from us to pass to laughter and rejoicing, to happy mirth and childish song. Yes, we shall set them to work, but in their leisure hours we shall make their life like a child's game, with children's songs and innocent dance. Oh, we shall allow them even sin, they are weak and helpless, and they will love us like children because we allow them to sin. We shall tell them that every sin will be expiated, if it is done with our permission, that we allow them to sin because we love them, and the punishment for these sins we take upon ourselves.
And we shall take it upon ourselves, and they will adore us as their saviours who have taken on themselves their sins before God. And they will have no secrets from us. We shall allow or forbid them to live with their wives and mistresses, to have or not to have children according to whether they have been obedient or disobedient- and they will submit to us gladly and cheerfully. The most painful secrets of their conscience, all, all they will bring to us, and we shall have an answer for all. And they will be glad to believe our answer, for it will save them from the great anxiety and terrible agony they endure at present in making a free decision for themselves.
And all will be happy, all the millions of creatures except the hundred thousand who rule over them. For only we, we who guard the mystery, shall be unhappy. There will be thousands of millions of happy babes, and a hundred thousand sufferers who have taken upon themselves the curse of the knowledge of good and evil. Peacefully they will die, peacefully they will expire in Thy name, and beyond the grave they will find nothing but death. But we shall keep the secret, and for their happiness we shall allure them with the reward of heaven and eternity. Though if there were anything in the other world, it certainly would not be for such as they.
Chilling and prescient, not so much about the Church but of the totalitarianism to come, whether or not it is cloaked in religion. That last sentence is so revealing of the contempt that the Inquisitor has for his wards. Because even if there is a God and an afterlife, it is not meant for these insects who could never be worthy of what Christianity tells them is their ultimate destiny. So, insists the Inquisitor, we few among the elite tell them the noble lie, we tell them what they need to hear so that they will obey and will live in the hive society we create for them. It's for their own good. And we, the noble liars, will nobly take on the unhappy burdens of freedom and rule so they may live and die in peace.
Jesus is cruel because he expects too much from humans, whereas the Inquisitor is kind because he expects nothing. He tells Jesus that his believing in the human possibility to be truly free, to become fully human persons, was criminally naive:
But Thou didst think too highly of men therein, for they are slaves, of course, though rebellious by nature. Look round and judge; fifteen centuries have passed, look upon them. Whom hast Thou raised up to Thyself? I swear, man is weaker and baser by nature than Thou hast believed him! Can he, can he do what Thou didst? By showing him so much respect, Thou didst, as it were, cease to feel for him, for Thou didst ask far too much from him- Thou who hast loved him more than Thyself! Respecting him less, Thou wouldst have asked less of him. That would have been more like love, for his burden would have been lighter. He is weak and vile. ... Mankind as a whole has always striven to organise a universal state. There have been many great nations with great histories, but the more highly they were developed the more unhappy they were, for they felt more acutely than other people the craving for world-wide union.
He tells Jesus that when tempted in the desert he failed in what could have been a truly salvific mission. Rather than to have initiated the human farce that ensued, he could have created the perfect totalitarian state had he not resisted the tempter:
Hadst Thou taken the world and Caesar's purple, Thou wouldst have founded the universal state and have given universal peace. For who can rule men if not he who holds their conscience and their bread in his hands? We have taken the sword of Caesar, and in taking it, of course, have rejected Thee and followed him [the tempter]. Oh, ages are yet to come of the confusion of free thought, of their science and cannibalism. For having begun to build their tower of Babel without us, they will end, of course, with cannibalism.
This is the Grand Inquistor's project: to relieve the people of the burden of freedom, to allow them to live as children, as innocents who never have to become free, mature individuals, who have no moral responsibility except to obey. The Grand Inquisitor sees himself as a benefactor of humanity because he relieves them of their suffering, a suffering that follows from their being called to freedom by Jesus. This maps remarkably well to Snyder's depiction of Ilyin's, and so Putin's, Christian fascism, particularly this idea of the Russian people as innocents:
Like fascists and other authoritarians of his day, Ilyin insisted that his nation was a creature, “an organism of nature and the soul,” an animal in Eden without original sin. Who belonged within the Russian organism was not for the individual to decide, since cells do not decide whether they belong to a body. Russian culture, Ilyin wrote, automatically brought “fraternal union” wherever Russian power extended. Ilyin wrote of “Ukrainians” in quotation marks, because he denied their separate existence beyond the Russian organism. To speak of Ukraine was to be a mortal enemy of Russia. Ilyin took for granted that a post-Soviet Russia would include Ukraine. Ilyin thought that Soviet power concentrated all of the Satanic energy of factuality and passion in one place. And yet he argued that the triumph of communism showed that Russia was more rather than less innocent. Communism, he maintained, was a seduction by foreigners and deracinated Russians whom Ilyin called “Tarzans.” They lusted to violate immaculate Russia precisely because it was guileless and defenseless. In 1917, Russians had simply been too good to resist the cargo of sin arriving from the West. Despite the depredations of Soviet leaders, Russians retained an imperceptible goodness. Unlike Europe and America, which accepted facts and passions as life, Russia retained an underlying “Spirit” that recalled God’s totality. “The nation is not God,” wrote Ilyin, “but the strength of its soul is from God.”
When God created the world, Russia had somehow escaped history and remained in eternity. Ilyin’s homeland, he thought, was therefore free from the forward flow of time and the accumulation of accident and choice that he found so intolerable. Russia instead experienced repeating cycles of threat and defense. Everything that happened must be an attack from the outside world on Russian innocence, or a justified Russian response to such a threat. In such a scheme it was easy for Ilyin, who knew little of actual Russian history, to grasp centuries in simple phrases. What a historian might see as the spread of power from Moscow across northern Asia and half of Europe was for Ilyin nothing more than “self-defense.” According to Ilyin, every single battle ever fought by Russians was defensive. Russia was always the victim of a “continental blockade” by Europe. As Ilyin saw matters, “the Russian nation, since its full conversion to Christianity, can count nearly one thousand years of historical suffering.” Russia does no wrong; wrong can only be done to Russia. Facts do not matter and responsibility vanishes. (pp. 23-24)
Russia is innocent, and all evils, from Communism to homosexuality, come from the West. Everything that Russia does, no matter how barbaric, is by definition in self-defense against the corrupting influences of the West. It's not hard to see how this translates into Putin's justification for his invasion of Ukraine. He wants to save the Ukrainians from the corrupt West. Any brutality he must commit is in the service of returning them to the innocence that they want deep down, even if they are not conscious of it. They are like children who must be disciplined for their own good against temptations they haven't the good sense to resist.
I'll probably have another post about the thinkers that Rose presents in A World after Liberalism, but I think that the same basic idea is at the heart of what these more "Western" thinkers want. It is a nostalgia for an Edenic existence before all the complications of human cultural evolution. The main difference these thinkers from the West and the Russian thinkers is that they see Christianity as the primary obstacle to achieving a return to such a society. Rose says,
Alt-right thinkers are overwhelmingly atheists, but their worldview is not dismissive of religion or religious questions. On the contrary, to read deeply in its foundational sources is to discover a movement that takes Christian thought and practice seriously. It is the conflicted tribute paid to their chief adversary, whose moral assumptions, they believe, distort our culture and twist our consciences. Against Christianity they make two related charges. Beginning with the boast that Europeans effectively created Christianity—not the other way around—they argue that Christian teachings have become socially and morally poisonous, providing inspiration to ideologies of white disempowerment. They insist that conservatives are therefore tragically mistaken to see in Christianity a buttress against the spread of liberal and progressive values. From the alt-right perspective, such values are the rebellious offspring of Christianity, whose legacy is not the preservation of a cultural past, but the ongoing subversion of traditional ways of life.
That is, pre-Christian ways of life. The Alt Right finds support in figures like Nietzsche and Heidegger and those influenced by them on both the Left and on the Right who see Christianity as a disaster because of the way they have alienated humans from a more natural, organic way of living. They see Christianity as the source of all unhappiness and alienation.
But for Christianity alienation is not a bug. Christianity--as with all the post Axial religions/philosophies--is all about disembedding humans from the natural world so that the human soul might know and be aligned with a transcendent order. It's about moving out of the cave. The Grand Inquisitor, Ivan Ilyin, and Rose's thinkers, in varying degrees, reject the existence of such a transcendental order. Nothing exists outside the cave, and any effort to go out from it is delusional and dangerous. They propose as a religious solution that would return culture to an embedded paganism, a religion of land and blood, rather than going forward toward an idea of a human future in which humans live as free individuals in communion. Such a future, they insist is impossible, so they preach instead a return to the cave, to Eden and infantilism. Rose explores what that means on the Right, but even on the Left, the postmodern polytheism proposed by Dreyfus and Kelly in All Things Shining or the pagan animism extolled by Richard Powers is acceptable in a way that the disembedding dynamic Christianity is not. That's why Christianity is hard--you have to go through the alienation to get to something deeper and more profoundly connecting. It's not supposed to be easy.
Alienation is the fundamental human problem, and the human future boils down to which solution most humans will choose--to return to some kind of womb existence in a hive society, or to choose cultural and political forms that take a chance that humans are capable of becoming truly free, of leaving the womb and individuating, and of eventually moving out of their alienation into a deeper communion with one another, with the natural and the spiritual worlds. This cannot be accomplished if one remains forever in a hive or cave or cult. What was lost can be restored, but only by moving forward.
This is what I mean when I say that the future will be shaped either by good or bad religion. Good religion looks forward inspired by the possibility of realizing a richer, more deeply free, more fully mature and realized human future. Bad religion looks backward in nostalgia to restore a childish innocence. Good religion has faith in humanity in the same way that the Inquisitor's Jesus does. Bad religion, like the religion of the Inquisitor has no such faith, and seeks to quash human freedom, to impose instead its fascistic control. There is no going native in the past, which is what all bad religion wants to do in one way or the other.
Secular Liberalism, for all its limitations, at least insofar as it affirms the sanctity of human freedom, is morally more advanced than that kind of Christianity that flows from the cynical presuppositions about humanity held by the Grand Inquisitor. In order for people to be free, they have to make mistakes. That's why in the story of the prodigal son, the prodigal is morally more advanced than the older brother who follows the rules and stays at home. The prodigal by any conventional moralistic standard is a reprobate, and yet in the eyes of God he is closer to fulfilling his human destiny than the older brother, who stews in his alienation and resentment. The prodigal has not yet arrived; he has only begun his journey toward becoming him who he was created to be. The older brother hasn't even started.