Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashinable Enemies by Hart David Bentley

Author:Hart, David Bentley [Hart, David Bentley]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780300155648
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2009-04-21T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A Glorious Sadness

THE PAST IS ALWAYS to some extent a fiction of the present. In our more melancholy hours, it is soothing to surrender to wistful “memories” of those better worlds that we have as a race or a people forsaken; and, in our moments of complacency and self-congratulation, we take pleasure in “recalling” the darkness from which we have now emerged, or the barbarisms of which we have long since taken leave. There is nothing necessarily unseemly in this: it is all part of what Nietzsche called the uses of history for the purposes of life. And during the early centuries of Christendom’s long decline—say, from the Renaissance through the early industrial age—these purposes were usually served, among the educated classes of Europe, by two grandly conceived (and reconceived) periods of Western history: it became fashionable to cultivate both a kind of mordant disdain for the long night of a largely mythical Middle Ages and a kind of moony nostalgia for an antiquity that never was. The temperate atmosphere of a new and admirably confident humanism nurtured a very particular vision of pagan antiquity: a sort of lost paradise, a culture of superabundant vitality, beauty, and creativity, erected upon the foundation of a sane harmony between body and mind, and animated by an exuberant embrace of this world in all its fecundity, destructiveness, and inextinguishable power. The Greeks of the Periclean age, especially, acquired a (not wholly undeserved) reputation for intellectual vigor, wisdom, spiritual equilibrium, and spontaneous happiness; theirs came to be seen as Europe’s “golden age,” which could not be mourned vociferously enough.

Making allowance for the lushly picturesque medievalism of certain of the Romantics, one can say that, in general, this Hellenophilia was the great aesthetic and intellectual passion of whole generations of European scholars, philosophers, poets, and artists, a largely benign fever, reaching its warmest intensity from the middle of the eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, and infecting minds as splendid as Goethe’s and Hölderlin’s or as ridiculous as Algernon Swinburne’s. Even Nietzsche, however much he sought to expose the darker subterranean streams nourishing ancient Greek culture, could not resist the contagion. The sublime genius of the Greeks of the age of Attic tragedy, he claimed, lay in their ability to gaze without illusion into the depths of life and into all the chaos and terror of the world, and to respond not with fear, resignation, or despair but with joyous affirmation and supreme artistry; the pagan world as a whole, he believed, possessed a kind of vital power now impossible for us, one born from a ruthless willingness to subordinate all values to aesthetic judgments and so to discriminate, without any pangs of conscience, between the good—that is, the strength, elation, bravery, generosity, and harshness of the aristocratic spirit—and the bad—the weakness, debility, timorousness, ignobility, squalor, and vindictive resentfulness of the slavish soul. Nietzsche’s principal charge against Christianity, in fact, was that it constituted a slave revolt in values: a new and sickly moral

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