Life. Think about that word for a moment. What does it mean? Well, for most people it means something very simple: not being dead, or, having biological functions that are presently ongoing (rather than expired). For most it does also mean a bit more, of course, constituting, perhaps, that which we experience, our feelings and relationships and all that goes on. Hence, life has an experiential rather than merely biological quality. The downside of either conceptualization, however, lies in the ultimate conclusion to be drawn from them: life doesn’t really mean anything. I asked, “What does it [life] mean?” and what these answers constitute is that life is quite passive in nature, it’s either not being dead or being part of something. The received opinion of modernistic society is that “life sucks” or “life has no meaning,” and thus it must be given meaning or we should just focus on the experiential aspect, which leads into hedonism.
I see this sentiment expressed widely among the youth of modern (American) society. Pilate’s Quid est veritas? has become Quid est vita? Why do we live, why do we experience anything, at all? Recently, I heard a young man express the sentiment, “Life doesn’t have any meaning, you don’t need to attach meaning to things that don’t need it,” spoken in a tone fully confident in and fully satisfied by this assertion. Now, this young man clearly has purpose in life, as he does things to occupy himself and advance himself, so he is certainly downstream of the “life is experience” school, moving into hedonism, from what I’ve observed. Personally, I’ve had friends express to me their desire to carpe diem (or, in more modern parlance, “YOLO”), have fun, and hope to die before they get old (before their 30s it seems). No single statement has shocked or disgusted me more, not even people telling me that they hate me, because that sort of sentiment is purely directed at me, and I can handle it, but this other sentiment is self-directed and self-destructive. What confluence of factors leads someone to so devaluing life that they want to burn brightly and quickly, seeking no more?
Certainly, it is the godlessness of modern society. A nihilistic materialism has become the god of this age1 and thus all has been reduced to mere matter and energy (plus limited time with which to experience that matter and energy). With nothing more than these being real, what use is there in believing in anything more than these? Hedonistic libertinage follows soon after because, since humans have the additional capacities for reasoning and metacognition (which materialists will not probe deeper) we can better satisfy our basic primal needs for self-preservation and reproduction, and can do so to an extensive degree owing to our advanced abilities (and since nothing exists to tell us to do otherwise, why not do so?). The dictum “I was not; I was; I am not; I do not care” is far more pervasive than the Golden Rule was, and that Epicurean attitude is appropriate as that ancient Hellene is something of a patron saint to the modern humanists. These sentiments trickle into our popular consciousness, peddled by media and entertainment, which dramatizes and thematizes these nihilisms and delivers them into living rooms nationwide; the mass production of “shows about nothing,” as philosopher Thomas Hibbs calls them.
Well, what can we do about all this? Nietzsche, often regarded as the father of nihilism but more so its herald or doomsayer, was terrified by this question. In fact, he was maddened by it, experiencing a well-noted decline in his sanity during his final years. This decline was perhaps foretold in Nietzsche’s parable of the madman, the source of his infamous “Gott ist tot” remark, recounted in his seminal The Joyful Wisdom:
Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!” —As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?—Thus they yelled and laughed.
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? … Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
“How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us?” …
Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. “I have come too early,” he said then; “my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves.”
It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: “What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?”
I’m not sure if Nietzsche is supposed to be taken as the Madman in this parable, although it would certainly be fitting (especially given his later life), but whatever the case the meaning of the parable is powerful. Nietzsche foresaw the death of religion in Europe and across the world and wanted to find a way to protect humanity from it. When Christianity (or religion) died “there [would be] no necessities left to hold onto anymore.”2 Nihilism is not what Nietzsche promoted, nihilism is what Nietzsche feared. Nietzsche’s thinking was an attempt to help civilization circumvent the maelstrom of nihilism and create some sort of meaning in a world that had lost (or would lose) it, wherein true Nietzscheanism is found, in his concepts of master–slave morality, the Apollonian and Dionysian duality, the Übermensch, and others. However, Nietzsche must’ve been tortured by the increasing sense of the enormity and utter blackness of nihilism, a beast that outgrew his own counteroffensive to it.3
What Nietzsche was harrowed by we’ve become placated by, however. Nietzsche, through the Madman, said “[his] time is not yet,” but certainly if he lived in the time he foresaw, our time, he never would’ve become the man he was. For he would’ve been so tortured he would’ve been corrupted into either a hateful young man who frequents the vile underbellies of the Internet, a madman, or a suicide statistic. This is the banality of madness, mirroring evil, that we are all mad yet when society erupts with perversion (whether forever wars, discrimination, mass shootings, or whatever) we can’t seem to fathom why or hold anyone truly accountable, for if we were to do so the blame would inevitably come back to us.4 So, truly, our society is sick, and it has come to walk a self-destructive path, one that ends at a precipice.
How can we treat society, then? Well, there is one way, which is to treat the symptoms. In the same way that a cancer patient’s nausea, bleeding, or pain can be treated with antiemetics, procoagulants, or analgesics, we can take care of the leaks that spring. However, this isn’t actually treating the disease, the source, but the symptoms, that which is downstream. It isn’t chemotherapy, just maintenance. So, things like the promotion and destigmatization of mental healthcare, the spread of “wellness culture,” the reconfiguration of workplace dynamics, and other such “social therapies” are just bandaids on a dam. The most effective, and necessary (for our times), method is a direct treatment plan, one which precisely targets the specter of nihilism.
Now, with modern society being so deeply rooted in meaninglessness, which has filtered into the academy and the sciences and the arts, it seems that we can’t escape this. Everything has become so suffused with nil that seemingly the way out itself has been abolished. Let me assure you, however, this is just a misperception inculcated by the culture, not how things really are. There is a way out, and for 2,000 years the Church has been the light guarding that Way. Our saints have shared their wisdom and kept that light alive, but it is up to the rest of us to share it. We must receive the treatment of the Great Physician.
Now, what exactly is the treatment plan? There are a few ways I could approach this, but I think I’ve come up with a reasonably easy way. Let us first note what exactly the nihilist is asserting. He is saying that there is no meaning, that if we affirm anything more concrete and robust than “I exist, I have needs, matter exists, I have the power to use matter, and so I should use my power to satisfy my needs,” we are being facetious. Echoing the young man I mentioned earlier, “you don’t need to attach meaning to things that don’t need it.” Now, what is the flaw in this reasoning? Well, it’s quite simple. You can’t explain something by mere negation, when you remove something you must put something in its place, but what you posit must satisfactorily fill in the empty space left by what you’ve negated.
Let me put it this way. Why do we have eyes? Well, because there is visual light we, with many other animals, have been designed with organs capable of processing that light and processing the light emitted or refracted by other objects in the external world. What this implies is that what is necessarily antecedent to our eyes, or more specifically, our sense of sight, is the existence of light. That’s quite simple, isn’t it? Now, let me ask, what would happen if there was no light? Well, that should be just as easy: there’d be no eyes! If our sense of sight is contingent on the existence of light then the nonexistence of light would lead to the nonexistence of sight. Indeed, this is empirically affirmed by numerous species of chthonic and abyssopelagic creatures, who, not having light in their natural environments, lack visual processing organs.5
Taking this into consideration we can return to the issue of existential meaning.6 If the existence of light is antecedent to the sense of sight, then what does this tell us about our sense of meaning? While the nihilist is quite content to say that we shouldn’t waste our time waxing poetically about such notions I counter by asking why in the world should we have such notions to begin with? If existential meaning isn’t a thing that truly exists, why should we ever have acquired a sense for it in the first place? If the nihilist’s reality was the truth, I would imagine that we’d all be blind to anything such as “higher meanings,” “introspection,” “critical thinking,” or anything that has consistently stuck humans in a quagmire of existential dread. Like our sense of sight, our sense of meaning is contingent on an actual notion of meaning that can be sensed.7
There is no such thing as an animal with an inborn sense of delusion. No mere biological lifeform has ever developed in its biology something with no advantage to its basic needs for self-preservation and reproduction. Now, it is true, and the nihilist can rightly argue, that hallucinations, illusions, delusions, or other errors in perception exist, that one can indeed sense things that aren’t true or proper. However, this isn’t a finishing blow to my position, and it in fact affirms what it’s supposed to deny. You see, if someone hallucinates that someone is in their house it is their sense of sight (eyes) that is malfunctioning, and if someone hallucinates a voice it is their sense of hearing (ears) that is malfunctioning. What this means is that a malfunction in perception presupposes the existence of that sense. To have a visual hallucination you must be able to see and understand what seeing is, and to have an auditory hallucination you must be able to hear and understand what hearing is. Therefore, our sense of existential meaning cannot be illusory because it is never the sense itself that is erroneous but the perception of the sense. What I’d say is that false understandings of life’s meaning are what is illusory, those are what constitute malfunctions in our sense of existential meaning, the most egregious being the rejection of the sense itself.
On the other hand, one must consider that the conditions for an error in sensory perception to take place are highly specific and require antecedent conditions psychological, neurological, emotional, biological, biochemical, etc. in nature. One’s mind must be in an incredibly peculiar and stressed state to undergo a hallucination, and hallucinations are rarely experienced collectively.8 I’d argue that it’s highly unlikely that billions of humans across thousands of years, from every place, every period, every race, from every conceivable walk of life, have had a notion of existential meaning that they merely hallucinated. To believe that such an enormous amount of people all suffered from the same delusion is the actual delusion. There is no way for the 99% of humanity that came before our species of self-inflated egos and militant atheists, homo ignorans, to have been the ones in the wrong.
Furthermore, in the wisdom of C.S. Lewis I think we can find another hole to poke in the nihilistic balloon. The nihilistic understanding is, of course, that existential meaning is a farce, that ascribing such notions to any aspect of reality is a futile undertaking. Why waste our time on such exertions when we can just keep to ourselves and our pleasures? I find the nihilistic worldview to be much like a certain villain in Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, the Lady of the Green Kirtle. For those not familiar with Narnia, either in general or with the particular story she’s from (The Silver Chair), I’ll summarize: the main characters of this particular novel find themselves in the chasms beneath Narnia, Underland, and get ensnared by its queen, the Green Lady. In order to keep them trapped in her dark and gloomy realm she tries to convince them that all their notions of the surface world, of Narnia, are figments of their imagination:
The witch shook her head. “I see,” she said, “that we should do no better with your lion, as you call it, than we did with your sun. You have seen lamps, and so you imagined a bigger and better lamp and called it the sun. You’ve seen cats, and now you want a bigger and better cat, and it’s to be called a lion. Well, ‘tis a pretty make-believe, though, to say truth, it would suit you all better if you were younger. And look how you can put nothing into your make-believe without copying it from the real world of mine, which is the only world. But even you children are too old for such play. As for you, my lord Prince, that art a man full grown, fie upon you! Are you not ashamed of such toys? Come, all of you. Put away these childish tricks. I have work for you all in the real world. There is no Narnia, no Overworld, no sky, no sun, no Aslan. And now, to bed all. And let us begin a wiser life tomorrow. But, first, to bed; to sleep; deep sleep, soft pillows, sleep without foolish dreams.”9
I find this whole dialogue to be remarkably reminiscent of the rhetoric of atheists and nihilists, who regard the fantasies of the theist as trifling child’s play, intellectual rigamarole. “Come, all of you, put away these childish philosophies,” the Skeptic of the Green Kirtle declares, trying to wean us of our shameful toys and foolish dreams. It is a deceitfully nurturing role. Now, the response Lewis crafted to the Green Lady’s trickery is truly genius, I must say, for not only does it come from a most unlikely source, the character Puddleglum (a sad and gloomy person you’d think would be more than willing to stay in this sad and gloomy cavern), but also for it’s quite insightful:
“One word. All you’ve been saying is quite right, I shouldn’t wonder. I’m a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won’t deny any of what you said. But there’s one more thing to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things—trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we’re leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that’s a small loss if the world’s as dull a place as you say.”10
Bravo, Puddleglum! This is a clever and incisive retort to the Green Lady for a very simple reason, a reason that meshes quite nicely with my own: the very notion of Narnia must mean it is real, for it couldn’t be any other way. As Puddleglum professes, “Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things—trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones.” Believing in an imaginary Narnia can’t be worse than believing in the real Underland.
Now, Lewis here isn’t arguing, or trying to impress upon his young readers, that believing in figments of the imagination is a good thing. We’re most certainly not professing the Noble Lie of the atheistic ethicists. Rather, Puddleglum’s response is more of a dramatic irony, because we readers know Narnia does in fact exist, as we’ve read the novels and explored the world with our own eyes and minds. Puddleglum is certainly aware of this too (I believe Lewis intended to indicate that Puddleglum certainly did believe in Narnia) and thus his true argument is, “Of course you’re wrong, how could I have come up with something so grand?” Child’s play is not enough to account for Narnia, nor for us “aliquists.”11
Therefore, chalking up our sense of meaning to mere delusion is untenable, and thus we must still reckon with why we have such a sense. If all that reality genuinely constitutes is mere transience, matter, and the self then we would be blind to anything beyond that. Hence my earlier argument: we do sense something beyond that, thus there must actually be something beyond that. As I also said earlier, it would not be the sense itself that is wrong, but however we perceive that sense. Coming from a Christian perspective I’d obviously argue many have misperceived the divine light, the Logos, but I’d use the terminology of illusion, because illusions are misperceptions of actual stimuli, rather than the perception of a stimulus in the absence of it (hallucination), because in the various fragmentations of God’s Truth that men have produced there is the logos spermatikos, the seminal or innate Logos.12
Now, having said all this, the nihilistic system must necessarily unravel. Why? Because it simply can’t account for this revelation. If life has meaning then there must be something more than the mere materiality “worshiped” by the nihilist/hedonist/modernist.13 The reason why, of course, is that “meaning” is not material. Can you isolate “meaning” in a beaker, in a centrifuge, under a microscope? No, not at all! As author Terry Pratchett wrote in a novel of his:
Take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy.14
Amusingly, Pratchett was an atheist and this statement is supposed to argue for nihilism. It holds true, however, because you can’t find “one atom of justice” or “one molecule of mercy.” What is the aesthetic or ethical distinction between a hydrogen and nitrogen atom? Nothing. There are structural and physical differences, but these differences have no intrinsic value, they just are. You cannot say that the fact that oxygen bonds easily to hydrogen because its electronegativity attracts hydrogen’s electron is moral or immoral, because there is no reason to pass such a judgment on mere matter; it just is. So, Pratchett is being an honest atheist and admitting that his system cannot ground morality, which he’s fine with. However, we’ve demonstrated that something “more” does exist, namely, meaning. But, again, we can’t physically quantify or isolate this concept, we cannot grind down the universe and pick it out of the ensuing rubble. Therefore, meaning constitutes something immaterial or nonphysical, and since materialism only has the capacity to accept and explain material things this observation therefore implodes it.
It is important, however, to make sense of what we mean when we say “something ‘more’ does exist, namely, meaning.” Because what in the world is meaning? Since, as I’ve addressed, there have been various “meanings” perceived by different peoples, although I’ve been endeavoring toward a singular and universal ideal in contrast, I still have provided this ideal with any meat/substance. “Meaning” represents an intrinsic quality that connects us to a higher, metaphysical reality, much like the way our senses connect us to the physical world. It is not contingent upon individual perspectives or societal constructs but exists independently as an objective reality. “Meaning” encompasses the pursuit of purpose, significance, and coherence in our lives. It is a classic Christian maxim that has spread across the universal Church beyond its Presbyterian origins that says, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever.” In the Christian tradition, God is recognized as the Supreme, the ultimate basis of all reality, and thus all transcendentals are grounded in and oriented toward Him. According to this perspective, what we conceive of as “meaning” is mankind’s intuition or practice toward this end. Meaning encompasses the values, principles, and practices by which we glorify and enjoy God, aligning our lives with the divine purpose.
In conclusion, meaning does exist and this fact alone undermines any materialistic or atheistic system. However, it’s not enough to merely acknowledge the existence of meaning, because no matter how smart one’s logic gets it remains merely cerebral until we find a way to manifest it in the real world. Something more does exist, life does mean something, and this we must find out, rather than groveling in pitiful self-love and self-aggrandizement. The hopeless abandon of nihilism must not be feared, we can rehabilitate Nietzsche, and we can, most importantly, rehabilitate ourselves. We find our hope in our Meaning, our Truth, our Life, One that is so loving He came to us in the flesh and tells us:
Come unto Me all you that labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly in heart, and you shall find rest unto your souls. For My yoke is easy, and My burden is light (Matt. 11:28-30).15
This is historically and philosophically demonstrated by the Eastern Orthodox theologian and monk Seraphim Rose in his short work Nihilism.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, tr. Richard Polt, 53.
This renders Nietzsche a quite misunderstood and also sympathetic character, because while he went in a vastly different direction from what would’ve eased him he still managed to testify for all the bleakness of the godless world and life.
An interesting part of Christian theology, or, to be more specific, Eastern Christian theology, is the interconnection and mutual accountability of sin. In what sense this is applicable to what I’ve just said is demonstrated in the following excerpt from Dr. Timothy Patisas’ The Ethics of Beauty (p. 60):
There are so many possible angles of interdependence and mutual influence at work in human action that we could never hope to untangle them all. So, finally, (d) Orthodoxy counsels us to repent not only of our own sins but of the sins of the entire world. That way, we address our responsibility more accurately, account for the influence of anything that might weaken our moral agency, and become free.
Again, only if we are willing to repent of the sins committed by others–since they also posses a limited moral freedom and we are in part (perhaps in many cases the decisive part?) responsible for their sins–can we ourselves become more fully free.
…
Do others cause us to sin? Yes, but let us repent of the sin in us that caused them to cause us to sin. That way, we become free of our own sin and of the sin caused in us by others.
We are all accountable in some sense, and thus we cannot remove ourselves from the world and act holier-than-thou. Hence Christ’s exhortation to “first take the log out of your own eye” (Matt. 7:5) when we castigate others for their sinfulness (which, as Patitsas points out, is our own). Patitsas’ comments on this are very elucidating, and should be even for a non-Orthodox Christian, and if you ever find yourself in possession of his book (which I strongly recommend) the full context of the excerpt above can be found on pp. 55-65.
In some cases they do have them, but they’re hypersensitive so as to capture the little light that is present that deep or they’re attuned toward perceiving bioluminescent light.
I must admit and give credit by stating that what follows is primarily influenced by and a rendition of C.S. Lewis’ argument from desire, applied to the matter of existential meaning rather than the immortality of the soul. I hope he’d approve of it.
It is true and can be genuinely questioned if there is any analogical value between this “sense of meaning” and an empirical/physical sense such as sight or hearing. I believe this to be the case, that while this sense might not be substantively analogous this sense is mechanically similar, namely by also being the detection and response to an external stimuli (an ideal of “meaning” within external reality). It is a sense in the same way that the classical notion of the “sensus divinitatis” is a sense, mechanically but not substantively similar to sensory perception.
These facts should be familiar to one versed in Christian apologetics since the psychology and neurology behind hallucinations are well-known to apologists owing to the hallucination hypothesis of Christ’s resurrection (I discuss that in my article “He Is Not Here!”, part of my short-lived Resurrection apologetics series; cf. Josh and Sean McDowell, Evidence That Demands a Verdict, 287-92; Gary Habermas and J.P. Moreland, Beyond Death, 119-20; Lee Strobel, The Case for Christ, 238-40).
C.S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, 632.
Ibid., 633.
I’ve coined this using the Latin word aliquis, which, meaning “something” or “anything,” can be considered antonymous to nihil, the Latin root for nihilism. Hence, aliquism is the opposite of nihilism, the belief that there is something.
Indeed, as C.S. Lewis argued in The Abolition of Man, quite many ethical systems across cultures and time periods have agreed on certain fundamental truths and principles (I refer here to his appendix “Illustrations of the Tao,” pp. 83-103).
Let me do note that this generalization of several different terms isn’t a reductionism or gross simplification, but rather an entirely reasonable affirmation of the common interaction of these different beliefs. Hedonists are often nihilists are often atheists are often hedonists etc. While one can certainly be a hedonistic theist, a nihilist must of necessity be an atheist and while an atheist can certainly be an objectivist/non-relativist, as I’m about to demonstrate in the main text this isn’t sustainable. So, there is a (qualified) connection between these different terms I’m using.
I use the KJV here for the poetic and aesthetic value that its language retains far better than modern translations (its one enduring advantage).