The human rejection of God and man, the destruction and even the devouring of the past and future—these lead to the nihilistic dynamic that there can be no proper beginning, middle, and end of the human story. It doesn’t go anywhere or mean anything. It will simply cease when there is nothing left to eradicate.
When was the last time you received an awkward compliment? How did you respond? How would you respond to this one? “Father’s homilies are really distinctive—they have a beginning, a middle, and an end!”
What do you think the speaker was getting at? Perhaps he was referring to a kind of public speaking (I wouldn’t call it “preaching”) that is illustrated by “The Three C’s—Commence, Continue, Cease.” The speaking starts and eventually stops, but it doesn’t go anywhere. It doesn’t constitute a whole, and it is not a vehicle to greater understanding.
I imagine that many times, after witnessing yet another such display from a pulpit, we think to ourselves, “Well, that was useless—but at least it didn’t take very long!”
Can we take the dynamic of The Three C’s and apply it to human history? We can say that human history has commenced; it continues; it will cease. Can we summarize human history then as was done by Ernest Nagel, who described human history as, “an episode between two oblivions”?
These are broad and deep questions that I’ve addressed elsewhere, especially in my books and lectures. Here, I want to focus on a specific time and trend in human history, i.e., the progressive impulse toward annihilation.
I will sketch below the route that human history has been following. I don’t like where we are headed. We’re running out of goods to reject or destroy. We’re almost at the point of no return. I’m thinking now of the ominous signs indicating the onset of the New Jersey Turnpike: Last Exit Before Toll. We need to put on our turn signal and move to the exit ramp while there’s still time. We can’t afford to get this wrong.
Consider this timeline:
This timeline represents the progressive evacuation of the divine and the human, which I describe as a process of incremental annihilation. This dynamic, already far-reaching, begins to broaden in scope. The past and the future must be eradicated. Thus, we see:
The narcissistic cannibal, caught in an unbearable present, aims his appetitive rage at the past and the future. We see this repudiation of the past in the recent advocacy of human composting. The human body and all that it represented may be broken down into its component parts and then absorbed by the hungry living. At the same time, we are being urged to cannibalize our future by reducing our children to the status of sexual consumables by normalizing pedophilia.
The human rejection of God and man, the destruction and even the devouring of the past and future—these lead to the nihilistic dynamic described above, that of “Commence, Continue, Cease.” On this view, there can be no proper beginning, middle, and end of the human story. It doesn’t go anywhere or mean anything. It will simply cease when there is nothing left to eradicate.
Shakespeare’s Macbeth caricatures human life as, “…a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Is this not a poetic summary of human life as an “episode between two oblivions”—a story that results in nothing? This 500-year-long tale of narcissistic nihilism, ending finally in a comprehensive cannibalism, is a perverse inversion of the Church’s “Fiat” (Luke 1:38) and her “Nunc dimittis” (Luke 2:29)—it is a complete rejection of divine gift and promise. The tellers of this tale may be human, but its author is a spirit, namely, Satan.
Republished with gracious permission from Crisis Magazine (February 2023).
The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.
The featured image is courtesy of Pixabay.