I recently recorded my final episode on the Communist project to build a secular utopia under Stalin and you can listen to it through this link:
General
Interview on History of Byzantium Podcast
Not long ago, I was interviewed on a wonderful British podcast called The History of Byzantium. The host, Robin Pierson, had received a lot of queries from his listeners about the Orthodox Church as he told the history of a civilization profoundly influenced by it. Here you can listen to the interview.
Communist World-Building in Stalin’s Revolution from Above
If readers of this blog have been wondering what work I’ve been doing since the release of Age of Nihilism, this link will give an idea. The episode, from my companion podcast, is about one effort to evade the “specter of nihilism” that overshadowed the West with the decline of secular humanism, an effort directed at the ideological transformation of Russia.
The Paradox of Marxist Anthropology, or, More Bad News for Mrs. Gumdrop
My previous post of July 20, “Social Darwinists on Mrs. Gumdrop Street,” discussed the precipitous decline of compassion for the poor among the West’s nineteenth-century, post-Christian intellectuals. Ideological liberals like Herbert Spencer and Francis Galton exchanged “love thy neighbor” with “survival of the fittest.” However, in one of the great paradoxes of secularization, so did the period’s greatest socialist.
Continue readingInterview with Buck Johnson about Age of Nihilism
Buck Johnson, a podcaster with Counterflow, recently interviewed me about my book Age of Nihilism. If you would like to listen, you can access the video here.
Social Darwinists on Mrs. Gumdrop Street
In a previous post, I ruminated on an imaginary encounter between Charles Darwin–visionary of a secularized anthropology–and a working class widow begging for alms with her orphaned children on a cold and rainy street in central London. I named the woman and the street where she stood after Mrs. Gumdrop (Katerina Marmelodova), a character in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. That novel depicted the effects of an anthropology–or vision of humanity–in which people are no longer the image of God (imago Dei), the greatest standard by which a creature can be evaluated and the source of transcendent human dignity. Instead, people are beings–even animals–belonging to a genus-species named Homo sapiens. Measured biologically rather than theologically, man came to have a value only as great as his contribution to the natural order in which he lived. In a time of industrial competition and liberal individualism, this may have made those at the top of society great. But it made those at the bottom of society less than great, and even expendable.
Continue readingVolume Four Released
The fourth and final volume of Paradise and Utopia: The Rise and Fall of What the West Once Was, has recently been released by my publisher Ancient Faith Publishing.
The Age of Nihilism: Christendom from the Great War to the Culture Wars tells the story of how our civilization and its supporting culture, which once oriented the West toward a heavenly transformation of the world, reached a point of despair through secularization.
Continuing the narrative of The Age of Utopia: Christendom from the Renaissance to the Russian Revolution, the new book describes the “specter of nihilism” which appeared in the West at the end of the nineteenth century, the very moment secularism seemed triumphant. Part one reflects on the way nihilism became manifested in the music of Richard Wagner (composer of the famous “Wedding March” and “Ride of the Valkyries”), the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (author of the claim that “God is dead”), the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud (with its degrading theory of the “Oedipus Complex”), and the painting of Pablo Picasso (which both documented and promoted the disintegration of the human image). It also presents the literature of Fyodor Dostoevsky (author of The Brothers Karamazov) as a powerful warning against secularization, though this warning was largely ignored until the specter of nihilism overwhelmed the West in the First World War.
Part two of the book tells the story of how three secular ideologies arose to exorcise the specter of nihilism, and how each ultimately failed to restore the linkage of heaven and earth once found in traditional Christianity. First Communism, then Nazism, and finally liberalism all tried once again to transform the world, but as ideologies they were counterfeits of true cosmological transcendence. Along the way, tens of millions of people in the West were killed through forced starvation (Communism), genocide (Nazism), and abortion (liberalism). Ideological world-building proved to be even more nihilistic than the secular humanism it tried to replace.
Part three reviews the failure of ideological world-building, focusing especially on liberal democracy in the West since the collapse of Communism (though an account of how the Soviet Union fell is also offered). As utopia became dystopia, existentialists, hippies, neopagans, and culture warriors all sought in vain to restore the dignity of humanity in a desecrated world. The narrative ends with the tragic outbreak of war between Russia and Ukraine in 2022.
A conclusion to the book series offers a reflection on the fundamental tragedy of the rise and fall of what the West once was: That after the Great Division of the eleventh century, our civilization and its supporting culture progressively lost the capacity of repentance and the virtue of humility on which a healthy culture depends. The great counterfeit of paradise, utopia, became inevitable when heaven was removed from earth and mankind directed toward a merely promethean transformation of the world.
The book can be purchased through Amazon here. The entire four-volume series can be purchased at a discount here.
Christendom’s Anthropological Baseline
The claim that a human being is nothing more than a highly evolved animal, known collectively by the genus-species designation Homo sapiens, represented a turning point in the history of the West. Man, once dignified by the image and likeness of his Creator, became one with a spiritually untransformed world.
The claim did not come suddenly, of course. It was the outcome of centuries of reflections and assertions about the nature of man. It was a consequence of what in The Age of Utopia I call the “desecration of the world,” the progressive de-sanctification of a cosmos once filled with heavenly immanence. Beginning with the Renaissance, intellectuals proclaimed man’s autonomy in relationship to heaven. Instead of being the the image of a transcendent God, man was reconceived as Prometheus, after the mythical pagan figure symbolizing liberation from divinity. To this end, eighteenth-century secularists like Rousseau came to celebrate freedom from a distant “watchmaker god,” just as Voltaire envisioned, in his novel Candide, a humanity that could “cultivate the garden” of the earth without divine interference.
Man as Homo sapiens seemed to secure for the nineteenth century a hard-won autonomy. Yet in the end, the new anthropology not only subverted man’s dignity but the very autonomy it sought to secure. To understand this, it is necessary to consider what might be called Christendom’s anthropological baseline, the conviction that man is imago Dei and not Homo sapiens–nor even Prometheus.
Continue readingFrom Imago Dei to Homo Sapiens
One of Christendom’s “lost realities” is the conviction that humanity stands in a totally unique category of being, separated from all other forms of life as the “image of God” (imago Dei in Latin; ikon Theou in Greek). This theological conviction long governed the way the West looked on itself and the rest of the world. But in the nineteenth century, as modern biology displaced theology, a rival assertion about human being appeared. The new conviction was that man was simply an animal deserving a taxonomy like any other animal. Accordingly, he is not imago Dei but Homo sapiens. And though he might be superior to the earth’s other animals, he is, in the end, only an animal. This conviction marked the West’s greatest anthropological revolution since Pentecost.
Continue readingVolume Three
Much time has again passed since my last post. Much of it was spent completing the third volume of my book series, The Age of Utopia: Christendom from the Renaissance to the Russian Revolution. 
A brief description of it can be found under the Books tab on this website, and it can be ordered online through Amazon here.
Age of Utopia has actually been out for the better part of a year. Since its appearance, I have been busy writing the final volume of Paradise and Utopia, entitled The Age of Nihilism: Christendom from the Great War to the Culture Wars. I will offer updates on that as its release approaches in a month or two.
PARADISE AND UTOPIA 