No one, in the last analysis, serves Satan against his will.
The Liberal, the worldly man, is the man who has lost his faith; and the loss of perfect faith is the beginning of the end of the order erected upon that faith. Those who seek to preserve the prestige of truth without believing in it offer the most potent weapon to all their enemies; a merely metaphorical faith is suicidal. The radical attacks the Liberal doctrine at every point, and the veil of rhetoric is no protection against the strong thrust of his sharp blade. The Liberal, under this persistent attack, gives way on point after point, forced to admit the truth of the charges against him without being able to counter this negative, critical truth with any positive truth of his own; until, after a long and usually gradual transition, of a sudden he awakens to discover that the Old Order, undefended and seemingly indefensible, has been overthrown, and that a new, more “realistic”—and more brutal—truth has taken the field.
And to oppose the radical Revolution with a Revolution of one’s own, whether it be “conservative,” ” non- violent,” or “spiritual,” is not merely to reveal ignorance of the full scope and nature of the Revolution of our time, but to concede as well the first principle of that Revolution: that the old truth is no longer true, and a new truth must take its place.
What, more realistically, is this “mutation,” the “new man”? He is the rootless man, discontinuous with a past that Nihilism has destroyed, the raw material of every demagogue’s dream; the “free-thinker” and skeptic, closed only to the truth but “open” to each new intellectual fashion because he himself has no intellectual foundation; the “seeker” after some “new revelation,” ready to believe anything new because true faith has been annihilated in him; the planner and experimenter, worshipping “fact” because he has abandoned truth, seeing the world as a vast laboratory in which he is free to determine what is “possible”; the autonomous man, pretending to the humility of only asking his “rights,” yet full of the pride that expects everything to be given him in a world where nothing is authoritatively forbidden; the man of the moment, without conscience or values and thus at the mercy of the strongest “stimulus”; the “rebel,” hating all restraint and authority because he himself is his own and only god; the “mass man,” this new barbarian, thoroughly “reduced and “simplified” and capable of only the most elementary ideas, yet scornful of anyone who presumes to point out the higher things or the real complexity of life.
No man, we have said often enough, lives without a god; who then—or what—is the god of the Nihilist? It is nihil, nothingness itself-not the nothingness of absence or non-existence, but of apostasy and denial; it is the “corpse” of the “dead God” which so weighs upon the Nihilist. The God hitherto so real and so present to Christian men cannot be disposed of overnight; so absolute a monarch can have no immediate successor. So it is that, at the present moment of man’s spiritual history—a moment, admittedly, of crisis and transition—a dead God, a great void, stands at the center of man’s faith. The Nihilist wills the world, which once revolved about God, to revolve now about—nothing.
For just as nothingness, the god of Nihilism, is but an emptiness and expectancy looking to fulfilment in the revelation of some “new god,” so too the “new man,” whom Nihilism has deshaped, reduced, and left without character, without faith, without orientation—this “new man,” whether viewed as “positive” or “negative,” has become “mobile” and “flexible,” “open” and “receptive,” he is passive material awaiting some new discovery or revelation or command that is to remold him finally into his definitive shape.
In the free world it is perhaps a horror vacui that chiefly impels men into feverish activity that promises forgetfulness of the spiritual emptiness that attends all worldliness; […]
The most extreme denier, the most disillusioned of men, can only exist if he exempt at least one illusion from his destructive analysis. This fact is indeed the psychological root of that “new age” in which the most thorough Nihilist must place all his hope; he who cannot believe in Christ must, and will, believe in Antichrist.