What can Father Seraphim and a dwarf teach us about nihilism? A lot.
Contemporary Philosophy Is All About Nihilism
Contemporary philosophy, far from a pursuit of wisdom, is more about deconstruction than anything else–a continual and persistent war on tradition. Here’s an excerpt from the Companion to Continental Philosophy:
The responsibility of the philosopher–in Husserl’s words ‘the civil servant of society’–is the production of crisis, disturbing the slow accumulation of the deadening sediment of tradition in the name of a reactive historical critique whose horizon would be an emancipated life world (12).
The history, and current practice, of philosophy is a war on what is traditional, foundational, and makes claims to truth. Here’s another excerpt:
For the continental tradition [sic.], philosophy is a means to critique the present, to promote a reflecive awareness of the present as being in crisis, whether expressed as a crisis of faith in a bourgeoise philistine world, a crisis of the European sciences, of the episteme of the human sciences of nihilism, of the objectification of Being . . . of the technological domination of nature, etc (12).
Thus according to the above quotes, when approaching a work of continental philosophy, we should ask the questions,
- What tradition or ‘dogma’ is the philosopher challenging, and
- What is the means of crisis being applied to it? What is the philosopher trying to emancipate and why?
- What is the telos, the end state, of that emancipation?
The best of philosophy, then, is to state the crisis–but what does it do to solve it?
It can’t. That’s not the point of philosophy.
Father Seraphim and Nihilism
Philosophy is perpetual critique, as Martin Heidegger argued in Philosophy and Christianity: The Christian gives up the search and settles for a deity. The true philosopher maintains the search as the ultimate end.
We could call this pursuit of philosophy, thus, nihilism. Father Seraphim Rose …
In essence, nihilism has been defined succinctly by Nietzsche: “That there is no absolute state of affairs . . . This alone is nihilism, and of the most extreme kind.” And by truth we mean absolute truth, which we already deinfed as the dimension of the beginning of the end of all things, thus the popular translation of ‘all truth is relative’ which is the foundational doctrine of nihilism for the masses and the elite (Nihilism, 12).
The way out of nihilism?
Enter Abba John the Dwarf
Affirming Truth Himself and enter the path of becoming more and more like Him. Abba John the Dwarf of the
4th Century …
Abba John said, “I think it best that a man should have a little bit of all the virtues. Therefore get up early every day and acquire the beginning of every virtue, and every commandment of God. Use great patience, with fear and long suffering, in the love of God, with all the fervour of your soul and body. Exercise great humility, bear with interior distress; be vigilant and pray often, with reverence and groaning, with purity of speech and control of your eyes. When you are despised, do not get angry … (Lives of the Desert Fathers).
Unlike philosophy, Orthodoxy is a practice. The crisis those who practice this Way is the crisis of the human heart: of being created to become a divine being (what we call ‘deification’), and the myriad attachments we have to a fallen world that play out in our actions and our thoughts. Orthodoxy is a tradition rich in practice for how the human person can become more and more like God, as passed down by Christ and the Apostles.
More by St John the Dwarf …
Do not pay attention to the faults of others and do not compare yourself to others, knowing you are less than any created thing. Renounce everything material and that which is of the flesh. Live by the cross, in warfare, in poverty of spirit, in voluntary spiritual asceticism, in fasting, in penitence, in tears, in discernment, in purity of soul, taking hold of that which is good (Lives of Desert Fathers).
True Warfare Lies Within
This is the warfare–not of ideology, not of dead philosophers, but of and within the soul of the human person! The warfare that does not end till our breath does. It is a defeat of Nihilism and the growth of the human heart. It is death of the ego, and birth of a new being. And it impacts everything: how we see the world, how we respond and relate to those around us–including creation–and even our work. St John the Dwarf …
Do your work in peace. Persevere in keeping vigil, in hunger and thirst, in cold and nakedness, and in sufferings. Shut yourself up in a tomb as though you were already dead, so that at all times you will think death is near.
This is, as the early Church Fathers called it, truth Philo-sophia: a desire to become more and more like Christ.
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