Christianity and Existentialism Part 5 Copyright Robert Fullarton

 Christianity and Existentialism Part 5

Copyright Robert Fullarton

Culture does not revolve solely around pleasure, but around the inquiry into life, no civilisations are great, but truly the more memorable ages have their sense of coherence, transcendence and value. Life itself needs existential analysis to see the depths of the human condition, but it does not need to indulge in baseness and endorse the selfish doctrine of modernity that pretends to promote individuality and instead creates segregation, baseness and persecution. 

Technology too, when used for the wrong means –when used as a catalyst for the entertainment business on an abnormal scale of events- can promote the popular pleasure principle mentality or baseness to which I have been referring to throughout the essay so far. 

To know the depths man must also search for the heights of his ascendant goals or destination –man must go beyond the pessimism of the existentialist philosophy that teaches, self pity, fatalism, putting man in a hopeless position and perhaps it does not even offer much for the individual man. Indeed Existentialism is essential to express the world of suffering and it certainly does express it, but it does not express the dimension of human joy within the realm of inner human structure- if life was pain in a perpetual motion, constant in every human life, at all times, then indeed life could be deemed to be the absurd, the sisphusian struggle, the malevolent curse of curses, but indeed it is not as uncongenial and as non-satisfactory as would have been supposed. We do not need a creed to preach the basic fundamentals of suffering once we have suffered in excess; the only answer comes in the antidote itself –life.

Angst and melancholia are comprised of a denial and that denial is the intellectual right for structure. This structure is in the prioritisation of our choices- a rather Kierkegaardian emphasis to make- that gives sentiment and value, reason and discipline to an otherwise dissolute existence. What does baseness mean? Baseness concerns inert confusion, nausea, sickness, depression, and a sort of death instinct seeps through. Man’s expectations are constantly frustrated by his own environmental limitations; therefore man must become adapt at dealing with his own environment and its limitations. Why exactly does man feel suicidal? Perhaps it is in the relentless refusal of desires that man crawls up from the kerb, with every desire dissipate, exhausted, wasted, his very libido, his very energy wasted. Where we have our sexual hunger denied us we have prostitution and pornography as a false substitute, where we have poverty we have welfare benefits, where we want alcohol like no tomorrow, we have pubs and plenty of booze, to wash away the memories, the emphasis for pleasure has left us with an insatiable appetite and the worst of all dull appetites is conformity. Every mood, every smile, all good intent, every creative urge, all necessities and hungers, turned on their head by society’s false promises. 

The door is always shut to the hungry and open to the gluttons. You have to be born a glutton to be a member of the club. This desire we speak of, a desire of our “manhood” is a desire to rise above a limitation, a shadow, an attachment that makes us base, primitive, ignorant and conditioned by pleasure and in turn we deny our cultural and individual need to reach new heights of discipline and structure. Existence depends upon a structure of its own. 

Under the conclusive findings of the structuralism or functionalism of modern anthropological insight –under the orientation of Levi-Strauss and his findings- and enquiries, we must silently confess that the historical rebellion “for freedom” has left the modern man, disorientated, set in confusion, the old primordial order has been dismantled, the old rudiments of a psycho-mythical mindset, has been rationalised.

Legally and physically the modern western man, on average, has the obvious advantage over the living conditions of say a typical worker in the factory districts of Shanghai or Mumbai. In such regions the old feudal order –caste system- persists, only it has succumbed to a new business class of rising entrepreneurs and profit over labour scheme. The old Marxian picture of Victorian London streams onwards to India and China, where the state has a sort of religious sentiment and authority over the common psychology of the individual. The modern western man however is on average not psychologically or intellectually free or particularly happier than the predecessors of the past century. The elucidation of human intellect needs labour, needs cultural emphasis –culture is supposed to be the celebration of the human endeavour or the best of a civilisation’s brightest minds- needs scientific enquiry, needs discipline, law, a healthy gravitational basis for which the private individual can gravitate towards.

The pillars of the old institutions that crumbled over centuries of sacrificial effort and conflict by the most endearing minds and possibly charismatic personalities, that has resulted in the psychological void leaving the modern man in the wasteland, by the wayside, confused, lost, without the structure- or as Strauss states “structure is order”- of the old disciplinary procedures, the old laws, the old taboos, the old chastisements and fears. Once these fears were removed, perhaps the capstone of church and state did indeed create the entire stony foundation, which has since collapsed within. The naïve aspirations of the common worker were simple and yet glorious in their day, cruel, tragic and yet glorious. A dual caption must be placed over the entire history of labour that has been directed under the enterprise of the ruling classes, a fools’-courage. Though the common peasant was exploited he was indeed happy in unawares of the privileges of the aristocracy, he simply strived for his daily bread, the sustenance of his family and his soul as he would have stated. A religious piety endured in the simplicity of the peasant with a quasi-mystical or psycho-mythical motive behind much of his operational agenda. The spiritual needs of the common man and woman were met not just in simplicity but also in the mindset of his world of associations, the state was a sort of security- even if it was an oppressor- all things were in motion within a church that had absolute power, with an authority that surpassed local regal authority- its dogma and doctrine were the limitations of popular intellectual stimulation- the moral capacities of “good and bad” the old censorship of chastisement of human baseness helped to regulate the authority of the establishment and to prohibit and reprimand criminal activity.

Where the very establishment of human happiness, belief, rational and irrational enquiry, intellectual and scholastic education are altered in the revolution of thought and action –we have indeed had one hell of a transvaluation of all values, a hideous scar has been cemented over with glamour and pomp, technological advancement, primitive mass psychology, cheap and tacky mass entertainment and a philosophy of cynical selfishness.

Man has indeed questioned the very fabric of the moral reality, the concepts of good and bad, dissected every form of efficient law and practice and let the levees break, the very sky has fallen in with regards to the intellectual agnosticism that permeates our modern western civilisation. A sort of Zarathustrian prophecy has reached its full climax, the old orders have long since been shaken, disturbed and knocked off their hinges and the possibility of a cultural nihilism have been exposed. The lowest nadir is soon to be reached in the most unromantic of all ages, this modern scramble in the dark, a faceless era, where man has no identity, has lost touch with the mystical, mythical, symbolic, nature of his own identity. A vast pervasive materialism has taken hold over too many easily persuaded minds-as cities bulge at the seem, art is sloppily reproduced in a warehouse by corporate moguls for greater profits, so fruitless and unimportant in the greater scheme of things.

I do not condone the atrocities of the aristocracy and the old European caste system. I certainly do not deplore the veritable rights of the peasant and the worker, but I also speak honestly as a citizen from a retrospective age, looking back on the excesses of material quantity, glamour, the amalgamation of classes into popular culture –popular myth- and see the dangers of excess, baseness and how the humanitarian whole can suffer in the slovenly minded gluttony that has come in our time. Psychological wellness in individuals leads to social wellness –of course this sort of airy-fairy pipe dream is never achieved- and the very acts of kindness, mercy, devotion are the absolutions of our existence that make the chaotic whole, seem harmonious in a tiny composite reality. In a world that encapsulates conflict, turmoil and confusion, that is utterly segregated, tribal and enunciated in the safety of numbers and powerful groups, it takes utter courage of every kind to speak your mind against a sort of dogma that draws water and authority. 

Even today in the east dogmas are lethal on the freedom and the existence of the individual, power again is in number and it is militaristic, it is apocalyptic, it is nihilistic in its ignorance of fact and phenomenon, it knows less about life because it superficially clings to a dogma and does not question nor search for answers. It also does not see the solution for individual angst in the small common day “miracles” of kindness and giving. All that makes a man is his legacy-some certainly act as if the world is imperishable and perish on the ignorance of their stupidity to think that they are invincible and infallible-against the unknown melodrama of life.

One must be born a member of the club, but rejection speaks volumes to the Christian who is hated almost as much as Christ is hated and indeed fated perhaps too, outside all doors, to the pale of loneliness beyond the naked eye. True practice of Christianity is an asceticism that has died to the ways of the world and been risen to a new life...the seemingly alien ways of Christian livelihood are contra to the ways of the world, natural raging passions, desires and lusts are denied, this is entirely a new nature for which all peoples must put on, clothe their minds with Christ and change.

In meaning and in depth, in structure of truth and canon of meaning, man builds and grows in what is greater, older, wiser and infinitely more powerful than what he is alone...but he is not a lonely existentialist he is a cog and a block in the heavenly structure, that lasts and grows, higher and higher into a holy mountain range, with peaks and wonders reaching tall.

What is truth? That is something to consider. Is there a reason behind the reason to question, a reason for the reasoning for man, for all things, the great and the many, the ugly and the sublime? Have you questioned yourself and gazed contently into your path of thought...to find the reason behind the appearance, the face behind the mask.

Christianity teaches us from Biblical sources that nature is spent of virtue and that nature is corrupt in core, that nature has in a sense clung to a nature of death and violence, to a realm of imperfection away from a God who seeks perfection with a will that goes beyond all natural understanding. So the existentialist is quick to point out the evils and decay within nature and quick to state "there is no god!" The existentialist is ready to put his faith in strange and weak movements of futurism and false utopias (such as the Marxist, feminist, fascist and humanist movements) he bewails the falling of moral structures and yet ironically he helps for moral structures to be demolished with watered liberality, with every zeitgeist (the movement of the age) and fad that comes and goes, his questions and accusations against absolute law and order, fan the flames for another revolt. Every man does what sees fit and what he calls right and what he calls wrong. This moral subjectivity and relativistic philosophy has done horrific damage to the strengths, standards, rich inner spirituality, intact moral standards and philosophy - for what man sees in his very fallible sight of conduct, thought and behaviour.  

Take for example the difference in Dostoyevsky's book the idiot, with the chief character Myshkin. He is a prince for another world, another kingdom another place, but not for this world of ours, he is an ideal of goodness, morality, character and order, but not for this system, for his opposes the world and nature of corruption, thus he is the good Christian and is despised for who and what he embodies.

Truth must be a bruised but unbroken reality,
a standard tested and not fully strained
worn but never torn from forces of opposition
truth is what it is against physical space
and timely questioning
where reality sheds her coats
of apparel
and all is seen beyond the veils
of appearance, falsehood
and disorder
truth beyond chaos outlasts
the rusting flotsam
and wreckage of false utopias
men will stare upon the stars
and wonder why?
For long ago upon
the old threads
of the ancient loom
where music was made
to stir creation
into living song
men were made for purpose
and in order
for good
is good
contra to evil
and good comes
forth from good men
out of evil times
and thus all love
is mightier
in the ant
despite the giants
of lovelessness
and selfishness
in man's pantheon
of wayward thought
and calamity