The meaning of "demonic nothingness"

Modern Age, Summer, 2003 by Michael Henry

ONE FAR-REACHING CONSEQUENCE of the secularizing trend of modernity has been a contraction of the mysterium tremendum of infinite transcendent Good to the much diminished degree of good in the mundanely utilitarian, a shrinking of reality that has been accompanied by an atrophied sense of evil. This eclipse of both transcendence and evil correlates with a profound loss of the sense of the height and the depth of human reality, so that the modern mind has become incapable of comprehending Eric Voegelin's observation that "man in his mere humanity, without the fides caritate formata, is demonic nothingness." (1) This radically contracted and deformed humanity, the direct consequence of immanentizing and deifying the human while endeavoring to purge it of all participation in transcendent divinity, is a spiritual pathology that nonetheless has much to tell us about who and what we are.

The twentieth century provided abundant evidence of mere humanity's potential for disorder and destruction in the aggressive totalitarian despotisms whose assumption of the divine prerogative of abolishing evil (as they defined it) served only to produce much more evil. This reached its culmination in Communism, which Gerhart Niemeyer (1907-1997), for one, saw as evil of an unprecedented character, a "demonic error" that in some ways was even worse than Nazism. (2) In Communism he saw an "evil that lies at the very core of man's reasoning about himself and the world," a corruption of reason that underlies the "total corruption of the human will" (3) in its denial of God and its assertion that the given world itself is evil.

In this rejection of all that is, rooted in the denial of human participation in the divine, Professor Niemeyer diagnosed the "total critique" of reality, the complete rejection of the world as evil, the profound metaphysical discontent he called "ontophobia," or fear of Being. The attack on reality as a whole confronts a deracinated humanity with a future "reality" foreseeable by magical (for example, dialectical) thinking but no present reality--only an existential void in which individual human beings have value merely as agents, or prophets, of the approaching epiphany of truth. Although Communism recognized the basic quality of untruth in evil, its "willed falsehood of consciousness" denied the truth that evil is rooted in the human heart and gave its adherents the goal of "bending realities to their will." (4) Hence the ideology's demonic spiritual havoc:

   Communists in public authority are not merely despots like the
   Asiatic rulers, or murderers like the Nazis, but also deniers and
   destroyers of the very foundation of public truth ... Communist
   destructiveness ... goes to the very structure of man's spiritual
   existence. It undermines the foundation of public order within which
   the human being can alone mature. The fruit of Communist rule must be
   spiritual chaos and progressive barbarization. (5)

One frequent theme in Niemeyer's analysis of Communism was its "peacelessness," its lack of "deference for being," (6) which derived from its hostility to the truth of reality. In Plato's terms, this is the equivalent of the soul completely enslaved to its worst despotic appetite, its eros tyrannos, which, because it rejects all good inconsistent with its own narrowly defined gratification, is essentially ruled by nothingness.

For Niemeyer, as well as for Voegelin, one of the basic falsehoods of modern ideologies is their denial of a universal share in the responsibility for evil, which is the reciprocal of the rejection of the universal human participation in transcendence. Also like Voegelin, Niemeyer found modern ideologies to be similar to the ancient Gnostic religions in the attitude of "metaphysical discontent," or "ontophobia," which projects evil from the human heart onto the world itself, with the belief that if we have the correct "knowledge" and act in the correct way we can save ourselves from evil. This takes place through a diremption of the evil from the good in the psyche so that it can be externalized and purged, or even exorcised by hatred rather than overcome and redeemed by love. Such refusal to tolerate the evil and imperfection endemic to the world entails the apocalyptic division of the human race into the self-appointed avatars of good, or the saved, and the totally evil, or the damned, between whom fellowship and common humanity are impossible. For the redeemed part of humanity to enter into the kingdom of perfect good and happiness the demonized part must be annihilated.

Niemeyer has exposed the nihilistic core of Communist ideology found in Marx's assertion that the point is not to understand the world as it is but to change it, by which he meant transforming it into something it is not. However, the "willed falsehood of consciousness" required for conceiving and attempting to realize such a scenario seems almost self-contradictory. The will is exercised consciously, so how and why would consciousness choose to make itself "aware" of what is not and cannot be? What is the root of this nihilism? How is the evil universally present in the human soul, from which man must seek redemption, completely transformed into an evil confined to social and political institutions, or to a strictly defined group of other human beings, or even to God Himself? Why do human beings fail to see that the rejection of what is, however imperfect the world may be, leads only to much greater evil? If the falsehood of consciousness is willed then people do see the truth but choose to deceive themselves into believing they do not see it--a demonic, nihilistic error.