“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885)
When Nietzsche, creator of the idea of the human individual’s ‘will to power’, announced the murder of God, his intention was for us to focus on our human potential. Nietzsche’s aspiration was that humanity would rise from this murder empowered, as the Olympians had rebelled from Chronos, and escaped his belly, so he hoped humanity would rise to its full potential. The great German philosopher even created his unique theology to help us focus on achieving this potential. He conceived the Theory of Eternal Return, a universe where each and everyone's lives is repeated for eternity without beginning and without end. When each and every moment of our lives is indelibly engraved for eternity and destined to be forever repeated exactly as it has occurred, our actions assume a sense of urgency and gravity that requires our entire focus. That was the objective of the German thinker. Of course, history has proven him thoroughly wrong. Alas, the fate of the Olympians, consumed by trivial arguments and petty pursuits, should have been foretelling of what was to come. Without a higher purpose, humanity has abandoned itself to the impermanence of the material world. And since everything in the physical world is transient and constantly fleeting, how can we achieve our true potential when our focus is on our ever-shifting desires and impulses. Since man began to look away from God, he turned his gaze inwards and towards his body. We have become neurotic, obsessed with our immediate urges and physical stimuli. We have regressed to the anal stage of a child’s psychological development, as described by Freud. But the drama of a thwarted development does not stop at the ridicule of a sprawling society of dissatisfied and unfulfilled human beings, constantly preoccupied with their sexuality. The insanity of consecrating our wants as something absolute, worthy of our complete attention, is leading to widespread devastating sorrow. Children are being told that men can get pregnant, and women have phalluses. Gender dysphoria, and its lucrative pharmaceutical industry, is being cynically pushed in our schools where psychologically vulnerable children are spurred to seek horrific chemical castration, amputations and mutilations. Without God our societies have degenerated towards a morbid nihilism that promotes barbaric pre-Christian and pre-Hellenic, Neolithic viciousness. Our societies are ripe with cruelties unseen in the West since Alexander spread the Aristotelian virtues of ethos, logos and pathos (truth, reason and compassion) across the known world.
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The horrors we are witnessing today should clearly let us understand that man is not ready to fill the shoes of our Creator. Fortunately, we need not fear that God is dead because Max Planck, the father of Quantum Physics, the man who discovered the quanta, has resurrected him. For anyone of you who still doubts that our Lord walks amongst us, you may, like Saint Thomas, put your finger in the wound, and listen to the words of the great physicist.
“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” Max Planck, interview by JWN Sullivan, The Observer (25 January 1931)
No serious student of natural sciences today can ignore the evidence of a higher realm of existence, which permeates and precedes our physical world. The Nobel Prize in physics this year was awarded a team of 3 physicists that have astoundingly demonstrated the innexistence of local reality. If you and I were to meet face to face, say over a bottle of wine, as learned individuals, we would both know that the bottle in front of us is merely a projection of our minds, and yet we would concur interacting with the same wine. Our perceptions of the wine may differ, and each one of us would preserve his or her unique sense of individuality, but our individual minds would be interacting to produce the same object, the same bottle of wine. If the object we are both perceiving is not present in its local reality but the projection of our mind, it follows necessarily that our individual minds are connected, or in all likelihood, our minds are the individual expression of a single mind, what the Greeks refer to as Apeiron, or what Marcus Aurelius called the Creative Reason of the Universe. Nor should this discovery surprise us. After all, it is only in very recent times that we have foolishly fallen to the idea that there is nothing beyond the material world of our senses. Poets, artists, architects, musicians and scientists alike, throughout the millennia of human evolution never ceased to realise the presence of a higher being. In the Christian tradition, with but very few exceptions, everything our ancestors built was always produced with liturgy in mind, and the same is true in every other civilisation. In the history of our species divine inspiration has always laid the foundations of all our endeavours.
So why is it that so many people nowadays, dare not contemplate the existence of a God that has made Himself so clearly visible and fathomable, today more than ever before. Part of the problem is that after an entire generation refusing to heed to a higher authority, we have demeaned ourselves to our material boundaries and are now too selfish and myopic to imagine a man such as Christ could ever have existed. We fail to see our own potential and prefer to ignore our history. But there is of course yet another reason for our blind apathy. In a world without God, we need not fear being accountable.
My prayer for us, is that we all may overcome this novel fear of our mortal condition as sinners and stop depriving ourselves from fulfilling our true potential as human beings. Do not succumb to fear. Do not let yourself be trapped by bodily urges and the egocentric neurosis of atomised, post-modern, nihilist propaganda. We all are part of something far greater than ourselves. Regardless of the innexistence of ‘local reality’, the perception of your body is very real. Your body is there, it is a vessel to navigate this world. It exists, and it is indeed extremely important. Respect it and cherish it as the wonderful, joyous temple it truly is, but do not become its slave. Master your body as a captain would master his ship. Keep your helm on the bearings that fill your life with meaning. Look into what transcends ‘local reality’. A captain is not merely concerned on the waves thrashing at the bow. He commands the ship and keeps her bearing steady towards her destination. The destiny of the ship is not confined to the planks of her hull. Her destiny is revealed in her voyage. Project yourself beyond the body. Turn your gaze outwards, the same way human beings have always done throughout the ages. Embrace your history, your community and the marvels of Nature. Seek knowledge and all that is true, beautiful and good. As long as you seek the Grace of our Lord by repenting your sins, forgiving those who have wronged you and practicing selfless love, you have nothing to fear. Repent your sins, forgive your brethren and love selflessly; sure enough you shall rise to fulfil the immense potential each and everyone of us has been gifted as human beings, creatures made in God’s very own image.
Copyright © Carmelo Pistorio 2023
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