The meaning of "demonic nothingness".

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.

Although Voegelin himself does not give a detailed explanation of "demonic nothingness," some understanding of what he meant by this phrase can be drawn from his analysis of consciousness. He begins from the experiential understanding of consciousness as the sensorium of transcendence and characterizes human nature accordingly as "openness to transcendence." Ontologically, humanity is one pole of the tension of consciousness, with the soul as the place of the tension, in which "divine and human reality participate in each other without merging into one," a participation we cannot transcend to reach a noumenal world of things in themselves. (7) Moreover, while consciousness must be understood as located or based in the body, it cannot be caused by the body. The reduction of consciousness to a merely physical epiphenomenon manifests the morbid loss of reality and the "resistance to truth." Nor is the tension limited to consciousness for, as Plato was already aware, reflection on reality illuminates it as all having the fundamental structure of tension toward the divine good. (8) Without the constitutive role of divine transcendence, "the world of consciousness becomes a wasteland (of different degrees in different thinkers), and the fascination with the vital sphere--sensuousness and vital forces, their growth and decline--dominates philosophical attitudes." (9)

It is precisely the participation that constitutes human nature--and hence human equality--so that resistance to or rebellion against it is also to some degree a refusal to be human and to share a common humanity, with a resulting loss of human dignity.

   Since it is precisely this participation in the divine, this being
   theomorphic, that essentially constitutes man, the dedivinizing is
   always followed by a dehumanizing .... Such dedivinizing is the
   consequence of a deliberate closing of oneself to the divine [and]
   ... there occurs a loss of reality ..., and if one closes oneself to
   this reality, one possesses in one's range of experience less of this
   part of reality, this decisive [divine] part that constitutes man.
   (10)

The loss of reality, "the murder of God ... [that] logically led to the murder of man," (11) is a deliberate preference for a false consciousness (there is never abandonment by the divine). (12) And the murder of God, which cannot alter the structure of reality or abolish the essential human longing for the divine, necessitates an interpretation of experience adapted to the claim of human spiritual self-sufficiency. If "man experiences himself as tending beyond his human imperfection toward the perfection of the divine ground that moves him," (13) an experience that provides nothing for the intellect to grasp with certainty, then with the rebellious removal of the divine what remains is a perfection-imperfection polarity immanentized in both the world and the soul. In Nietzsche's case the great longing is for the future man-god whose approach should be experienced much as Nietzsche had once imagined the tragic chorus ecstatically anticipating the arrival of Dionysus. This is not a reversion to paganism, but an anti-Christian rejection of any truly divine pole in the existential tension. The tension is distorted in the notion that mankind is progressing toward a "higher" man who will be divinely self-sufficient, that is, free of existential tension, and of evil. (14)

If, as Voegelin says, "the concept [of human nature] was not developed inductively but as an expression of the love for the divine ground of being that a philosophizing human being expresses concretely as his essence," (15) then the rejection of this love reduces human nature to "demonic nothingness," a phrase rooted in the Western tradition of analyzing the experience of the closed soul, the contracted self that futilely attempts to find happiness through its own powers. Those who have reflected deeply on this have seen the meaning of this phrase in the charade in which the ego assumes the salvific role of the divine, an ontologically impossible task akin to maintaining that, if humanity could somehow send the earth out of orbit and away from the sun, we would then be much better off with our artificial light. Nevertheless, the ego can deceive itself into believing that it has the power to eliminate evil from itself, if not from the entire world, that it can be self-sufficient and independent of any other being--that, in a word, it can be a god.

For example, in his Confessions Augustine recounts his spiritual journey from alienation from God to loving faith through the constant pull in his soul toward the divine both within and beyond it. Looking back on his pre-Christian life, Augustine sees that it was based on a willful determination to be the source of his own happiness, which only diminished his humanity to an isolated ego turned inward in the tension of unsatisfied immanent desires. It was a life surrendered to libido, the evil will, driven by the fear of falling out of existence through the failure to command constant power, pleasure, and the esteem of men. The basic state is one that Augustine labels pride (superbia), or amorsui, a self-divinizing will that prefers the tension of unsatisfied desires to the tension toward transcendence. "Demonic" to Augustine would mean that a person willed to be thus diminished, knowingly and persistently willed the lie of being able to supply all the good necessary for his soul's true happiness. This is also, of course, always to some degree an alienation from reality because the things of this world lose their aspect of tension toward transcendence and have significance only as objects of the ego's desires for them. The soul that is so disordered will inevitably inflict disorder on the world around it, and since all have some degree of pride all have a share in the responsibility for the evil in the world.

But through his conversion by divine grace Augustine consents to be liberated from the spiritual isolation of the proud ego and is led into the ontophilic solitude of the soul's dialogue with God in which the experience of desire is profoundly transformed. The ego is filled with clamoring desires that can be satisfied to the point of satiation and surfeit, so that life is experienced as one unfulfilling gratification after another. But in its depths the open soul finds a desire for the divine that seeks only to be increased and intensified, not satiated. In Augustine's words, in the love of God his soul "clings to an embrace from which it is not severed by fulfillment of desire." (Confessions. X, 6) In other words, in this life, at least, the soul finds its deepest happiness in the increase of the tension toward transcendence, not in its elimination or even reduction.

The experience of conversion is thus one of death, the death to enslavement to the demands of the ego, an experience that Augustine succinctly captures in the paradoxical idea of a mors vitalis, the death of the ego that is the opening of the soul. (16) When Augustine, who found the converted soul opened to God luminous with truth, looked back on his former life he saw that it was by comparison a sadly diminished human existence, oriented toward a nothingness that the soul perversely proclaims the true good. Human nature has a tendency to excessive self-love that in fantasy drives the attempt to grasp divinity, but the consequence in ineluctable reality is a drastic shrinking of ontological substance. As Adam and Eve found out, self-divinization is a horrifying encounter with mere humanity's nothingness.

In the modern world F.M. Dostoevksy was one who descended into the infernal regions of the closed soul and found them utterly barren, permeated by the black miasma of a nihilistic self-will that is actually the psyche's self-hatred for not being God. For example, the character Kirillov in The Devils feels himself compelled to prove that he is a god. This necessarily leads him into, not paradox, the attempt to express the ineffable in human language, but contradiction, the perverse attempt to prove that what manifestly is not nonetheless is. According to the tortured logic of his thinking, the only way in which he can prove that he is a god and there is no other God is by a suicide that is an expression of his own autarkic self-will that refuses to submit to anything, even his natural, given instinct for self-preservation. Because to will or desire good that is given is to submit to some higher power, to become the anti-God Kirillov must will only what Augustine saw as the complete loss of all good, namely, non-existence. He must reject everything, for he is the demonic god of the refusal. In fact, Kirillov's thinking is so corrupted that he claims to believe that self-destruction is complete mastery of one's own existence and therefore the most basic psychic drive is toward "self-realization" through suicide. That self-deification requires suicide merely exemplifies the truth that to will to be one's own god is to will to be nothing. And the suicide of the man-god is actually an oblique form of destruction of the world, or "cosmicide." (17) This is the apotheosis of the self-will, for it is the death to all that is good by the power of Another in order to become the "god" of nothingness. If God is the totality of goodness, then the "divine" self-will must, contrarily, will the complete antithesis of God, for if it accepts any good from God or submits to the world existing as God wills it, then the self-will is no longer sovereign. (18)

Ivan Karamazov's rebellion is in a different key because he claims moral superiority to the God who, Ivan asserts, seeks to produce eternal harmony at the cost of the suffering of innocent children. Like Kirillov, Ivan knows exactly what he is doing, willfully seeking to usurp the place of divinity, of the possessor of the supreme will, and rejecting a transcendence beyond human comprehension. Ivan tells Alyosha that he will never accept the universe with the suffering of innocent children on the grounds that it does not conform to the standard of justice of his "pathetic, earthly, Euclidean mind" but will accept only a "justice" that his own intellect can comprehend, by which standard God is inevitably unjust, as God could not be subject to Job's demand for an explanation of his suffering. Ivan wants God brought down to his own level and forced to submit to his indictment out of what he likes to think is "love of humanity." And if God and the universe do not conform to his own limited understanding of order then he prefers nothingness to existing in a universe over which he is not the master.

  I need retribution, otherwise I will destroy myself. And retribution
  not somewhere and sometime in infinity, but here and now, on earth,
  so that I see it myself .... I don't want harmony, for love of mankind
  I don't want it. I want to remain with unrequited suffering. I'd
  rather remain with my unrequited suffering and my unquenched
  indignation, even if I am wrong. (19)

Dostoevksy's point is that such a soul knows that it is wrong but would rather have things according to its own perverse will than be right by submission because the ego prefers self-assertive nothingness to not being the supreme will. In Camus's terse summation, "Ivan incarnates the refusal of salvation." (20) As Dostoevsky's Underground Man expresses the psyche's perverse craving for autonomy, "twice-two-makes-five is also a delightful little item now and then."

The humanly destructive consequences of this rebellious attempt to confine God to the "Euclidean mind" are revealed in Ivan's "poem" of the Grand Inquisitor who, confronting Christ, whom he has arrested and imprisoned for daring to invade the Inquisitor's domain, reveals why he is His antagonist. (21) The Inquisitor had once practiced an ascetic life in the wilderness, mastering his own passions, blessing the freedom bestowed on mankind and "preparing to enter the number of [God's] chosen ones, the number of the strong and mighty, with a thirst 'that the number be complete.'" (22) But when he realized that the vast majority of human beings were never going to be "strong and mighty," as he thinks he is, he refused "to serve madness" and joined the ranks of those who have "corrected" God's work, and who thus claim superiority to God. He claims that he "left the proud and returned to the humble, for the happiness of the humble." In the Inquisitor's imagination he can abolish the excessively burdensome tension and freedom from human existence by becoming the "god," the absolute master, of a "humanity" inevitably diminished to contemptible "children"--not true children, who are complex individuals, but imaginary one-dimensional beings lacking in individuality. (23)

It is, of course, actually himself and his own need for God that the Inquisitor despises. His earthly paradise is a projection of his own soul from which God has been expelled and in which the ego dares to claim the power to murder--publicly execute--God Himself, in order to have the satisfaction of being self-sufficing. But the Grand Inquisitor knows and admits it is a lie, and so unmasks the evil in the soul's deceiving itself into believing that its "corrected" version of the world is better than the world as given and that "paradise" can be attained by eliminating the tension toward transcendence. The power of loving participation in the divine is destroyed in the weakness of arrogantly bending reality to the will.

The Elder Zosima, who is the anti-Inquisitor, explains the true power of transcendent goodness in his final discourse to his fellow monks.

   One may stand perplexed before some thought, especially seeing men's
   sin, asking oneself: "Shall I take it by force, or by humble love?"
   Always resolve to take it by humble love. If you so resolve once and
   for all, you will be able to overcome the whole world. A loving
   humility is a terrible power, the most powerful of all, nothing
   compares with it. (24)

So, after listening silently to the Inquisitor's self-justifying non serviam, Christ kisses him on the lips. The parting kiss of the silent Christ, who does not rebuke or even remonstrate with the Inquisitor, is the expression of His love for him even in the latter's self-destructive rebellion. Unlike the Inquisitor, God does not bend human beings to His will but invites only a freely chosen response. The kiss burns on the Inquisitor's desiccated lips as a constant appeal, but his ego will never surrender.

The Inquisitor, Ivan's alter ego, is actually in hell, the spiritual torment of being unable to love. Despite Ivan's professed outrage at the sufferings of children he never lifts a finger to alleviate the actual misery of even one child--it is Alyosha who does this. It is all intellectual rebellion with Ivan. (25) The extreme of the sort of demonic nothingness that Ivan clings to is what the Elder describes as the defiance of the proud even in hell and their frustration and rage at not being able to annihilate the world or even willfully remove themselves from existence. They cannot hate God without hating everything created by God, including themselves, and they are determined to hate even if they are wrong. The Elder neatly symbolizes the contradiction of their existence: "And they will burn eternally in the fire of their wrath, thirsting for death and nonexistence. But they will not find death," for their thirst can never be slaked by the consuming flames of nihilism in which they have buried themselves. (26)

The rebellious psyche transmutes its intense human longing for transcendence and salvation into a dream world of self-sufficiency that requires the creation of a false consciousness, a Second Reality, a fantasy in which the psyche indulges uncritically in dreams of self-salvation. Ivan is shocked when the implications of his theory emerge in his half-brother Smerdyakov's murder of their father, as the symbolic murder of God, for if Ivan sees self-justification in intellectually rebelling against God, he has not thought through all of its implications. (Dostoevsky certainly uses patricide as a symbol for the murder of God.) When Ivan's unconscious, in the form of a not very awesome devil, appears to him to satirize his theory Dostoevsky is grappling with the mysterious process of self-deception, for it is clear that Ivan really knows that his bold defiance of God in the supposed manner of Satan, the "intelligent spirit, the dread spirit of death and destruction," is actually nothing but braggadocio. In the devil's version Ivan's theory draws from the unrealistic premise that it is possible to "destroy the idea of God in mankind" the absurd conclusion that then

  everything will be new. People will come together in order to take
  from life all that it can give, but, of course, for happiness and joy
  in this world only. Man will be exalted with the spirit of divine,
  titanic pride, and the man-god will appear. Man, his will and his
  science no longer limited, conquering nature every hour, will thereby
  every hour experience such lofty delight as will replace for him all
  his former hopes of heavenly delight. Each will know himself utterly
  mortal, without resurrection, and will accept death proudly and
  calmly, like a god. Out of pride he will understand that he should not
  murmur against the momentariness of life, and he will love his brother
  without any reward. (27)

This impossible dream is what an Existentialist would call an absurd existence, empty, meaningless, and hopeless, although described in somewhat ironically exalted language. The notion of divine titanic pride is, of course, a contradiction in terms and a substitute for demonic pride. What the Devil is describing is a completely closed soul that attempts to be the self-sufficient source of its own happiness. That Ivan is aware of the absurdity of the whole idea is given away in the assertion that the man-god "will accept death proudly and calmly, like a god." Aside from the fact that gods seldom die, a god that must die is a being that submits to a higher order, not a divinity with a sovereign will that can indulge in titanic pride.

Dostoevsky, who was certainly aware of the nihilistic theories gnawing at the foundations of Western order, labored to reach the root of the modern atheistic ideology that seeks to purge the world of evil by human power alone. Such ideologies are demonic in their willful rejection of the divine and even though they may make some statements that are true, nonetheless at the core ideologies are lies and are sustained only by more lies. They are ontologically like voids in the sense that, compared to the reality around them, they are nothing, but if unleashed they can devastate the reality of the world like some marauding black hole.

Although millions of people have been politically mobilized by various ideologies, the ideological rebellion against reality is primarily an intra-psychic event that inevitably has external consequences. Human beings exist so much in a common world and so profoundly share a common humanity that when the rebellious thoughts, publicly uttered, stir up a response in the precariously balanced souls of others, the evil can multiply exponentially. Somewhat in the way that children can wish they were adults in order to possess the imagined power and freedom of adults, so the psyche that rebels believes that, as far as its own existence is concerned, it can play the role of God.

But if the concept of human nature is "an expression of love for the divine ground of being" then rebellion will mimic this existence in tension toward perfection, but without the substance of divine order and without love. In the balanced open soul there is an awareness of evil that the soul knows itself to be powerless to remove. However, in the loving response to the call of transcendence it finds, by humble love, the power that will, in its own time, free the soul from evil. Because the incarnate soul exists in time, salvation is a temporal process that requires patience, that is, the ability to live in the tension, in hope and expectation of being freed from evil, primarily the evil within the soul itself. But rebellion collapses the tension toward transcendence and replaces it with the conflict between a "divine" ego and an imperfect self that must be molded to the ego's standard of perfection. The human self-divinization requires a false consciousness that engenders errors about reality as it is known by experience.

One error is in the tacit assumption that God's will is despotic, a self-will like a human ego, so that the rebellious soul is actually revolting not against God as He really is but against an anthropomorphic cosmic tyrant who denies human freedom. The rebellion then creates man in the image of a divine titanic unrestrained self-will. But this is also a willed falsehood. Christ's response to the Inquisitor is not divine wrath but silence and a kiss. No one who dared to defy the Inquisitor would ever receive such a mild response.

In the Christian experience (and modern ideologies have grown out of and reacted against a Christian culture), in approaching human beings God does not employ awesome and dreadful powers to cow us into submission but tenders something interpreted as humble love, seeking a similar response. But as the Elder Zosima so eloquently expressed it, the weakness of humility is deceptive, for "a loving humility is the most terrible power, the most powerful of all." That is, God's power is manifest, not in the ways of worldly power, but precisely in what the world considers weakness. The soul's openness to transcendence enables it to transmute its worldly proclivities into a divinely energized power. The closing of the soul against transcendence is a strangulation that produces psychic necrosis, or nothingness. For the Inquisitor, however, weakness is manifest in power.

Another problem in self-salvation is that evil is not a substance in the world that can be destroyed but the effect of a void in human nature, and the soul lacks control over a source of good with which to fill it. Dependent on God for every good, including its own existence, the soul cannot generate any good with which to overcome its own evil and ends up attempting to fill up the nothingness of evil with the nothingness of imaginary reality.

A third difficulty is that while the locus of evil in the psyche is the ego, the source of selfishness and self-interest, the part of the soul that proudly proclaims self-salvation is precisely the ego. Thus within the soul the battle to eliminate evil is actually the ego struggling to eliminate itself, much as Kirillov's determination to be God compelled him to annihilate himself. An ego attempting to destroy itself, with the assumption that there is nothing else in the soul such as tension toward transcendence, is a psyche in pursuit of nothingness.

Yet another error in self-salvation is its ignoring of the universally experienced fact that good and evil are so inextricably intertwined in this world that attempts to eliminate evil by force always destroy good. Once unleashed, the will to human self-salvation leads inexorably to human extinction, if not physically then spiritually. As Shigalyov succinctly formulates it in The Devils, "I have become entangled in my own data, and my conclusions directly contradict my original premises. I started out with the idea of unrestricted freedom and I have arrived at unrestricted despotism. I must add, however, that any solution of the social problem other than mine is impossible." (28) Although it ostensibly exists in expectation of the pleroma, self-salvation actually is nothing, the unreal, the refusal to be human, disguised as something.

Finally, there is the mystery of time. Demonic nothingness is a rejection of reality as it is in the present in favor of an imaginary "reality" in the future, whether this imaginary reality is a racially perfect society or a workers' paradise or an individual's apotheosis. But, as philosophers and mystics have often noted, the present is all that is real. Past and future do not exist, Augustine said, except in our minds. The result is that ideologies dictate the reduction of existence to nothingness, since human beings are required to live in a non-existent future. If time exists only in minds and the future exists only as known by the timeless mind of God, then the one who claims to know the future also claims to speak from a vantage point beyond time. It is only the demonic will of the rebel that claims to be able to do this.

Why the psyche should choose perversely to love what it really knows to be false and hate what it really knows to be true is, ultimately, a mystery. But since the psyche really knows that all that is comes from God, including itself, it can attempt to defeat God in only two ways: on the small scale, by attempting to annihilate itself in the refusal to accept God's will for personal existence, and, on a larger scale, by attempting forcefully to wrench the world into a different shape, by changing reality so that the ego becomes the god of this world, all tension toward transcendence is eliminated, and God is defeated through being reduced to irrelevance to human life. Why does the ego hate God? Perhaps because deep down it knows it is mortal, a purely temporal part of the soul that, when controlled, has a certain necessity for life in this world, but is not the true self and not the part of the soul that is drawn to God. Indeed, an overwhelming attraction to God not only dissolves the ego, it also so thoroughly drowns out the concerns of earthly life that the soul loses interest in living in this world: "Dying because I cannot die" is the way St. John of the Cross put it.

Gerhart Niemeyer's argument was that the West should regard Communist nations as carriers of a radical ontological evil. Like Niemeyer, Voegelin traced the source of ideological disorder to a disturbance in the balance of consciousness in which the ability to live in the temporal imperfect world, subject to its reality, while also oriented toward the ultimate reality of divine transcendence, is lost, or deliberately abandoned, to engender an existence in which the divine perfection is attainable in this world. As Voegelin pointed out, every rebellion ends up assuming the same structure as that against which it rebels, so that the "demonic nothingness" is actually the closed-soul deformation of a transcendently perfected human nature. The demonic nothingness of such willed falsehood is the earthly equivalent of hell, for which the only remedy is "the open soul's stillness from which right words and actions flow." (29)

(1.) Eric Voegelin. The New Science of Politics (Chicago, 1952), 79. (2.) "Risk or Betrayal? The Crossroads of Western Policy" appeared in Modern Age, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Spring 1960), 119-128. The article was a response to a position taken the year before by the Briton Philip Toynbee, in a slender volume called The Fearful Choice, that, given the most dire alternatives, surrender to Communism was a lesser evil than taking any serious risks of destruction in a thermonuclear war. The book contained, besides Toynbee's own paper, responses by a number of others, but, although most disagreed with Toynbee's position, none laid out a thorough rebuttal based on an analysis of the underlying assumptions. This was Niemeyer's undertaking. Niemeyer published two other articles that dealt with the morality of risking nuclear war: "The Probability of War in Our Time," in Orbis, Vol. I, No. 2 (Summer 1957), 161-183; and "National Self-Defense and Political Existence," which originally appeared in The Intercollegiate Review (March-April 1966) and was reprinted in Aftersight and Foresight: Selected Essays (Lanham, Md., 1988), 115-124. (3.) As Niemeyer saw it, the contributor to The Fearful Choice who admitted "I might not very much mind living under Soviet domination (I would hope to avoid concentration camps)" revealed a shallow assumption that the question whether the laws that govern his existence would be made by Parliament or the Communist Party would most likely make little difference for his essentially egocentric life of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain in his private cosmos. In the superficial sense he might have been right, for intellectuals who were willing to support the Party lived relatively comfortable and privileged lives. But beyond the superficial sense, this sanguine view exposes a deficient understanding of reality as well as a lack of a sense of common humanity. (4.) "Risk or Betrayal?" 123. As he elaborated on the bending of realities, "Where life resists them, they suppress it by compulsion. Where truth contradicts them, they silence it by decree. Where conscience speaks, they press it into the rigidity of organization. Where failure dogs their steps, they burden it on others within the vast reach of their rule .... The unreality of their thinking is protected by the enforcement of ideological dogmas." Ibid., 123. (5.) Ibid., 124. (6.) "Deference for being" and similar phrases are characteristic of Niemeyer's understanding of the appropriate attitude of a philosopher. (7.) "There is no Archimedean point from which participation itself could be seen as an object." Eric Voegelin, Anamnesis, tr. and ed. by Gerhart Niemeyer (Notre Dame, 1978), 153. (8.) See Plato's Phaedo 75-75b. (9.) Ibid., 17. (10.) Eric Voegelin, Hitler and the Germans, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 31, tr. and ed. by Detlev Clemens and Brendan Purcell (Columbia, Mo., 1999), 87. See also The Ecumenic Age, Order and History, Vol. IV (Baton Rouge, 1974), 334. (11.) Anamnesis, 171. Also, "The death of God and the death of Man are correlative phenomena; both the making of gods and the making of Selfs manifest man's loss of his identity." "The Eclipse of Reality," in What Is History? And Other Late Unpublished Writings, ed. by Thomas Hollweck and Paul Caringella, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 28 (Baton Rouge, 1990), 138. (12.) As a matter of precise terminology, however, Voegelin points out that the defection from God is not "willed," because in classical and Christian thought the concept "will" expresses the order of reason and spirit. As Augustine would put it, the free will is truly free only when it turns toward God. In Christian thought, Voegelin says, the preferred term to designate a will that defects from God, from reason and spirit, is concupiscentia or libido, which expresses "existence-powerful desire that is not ordered by reason or spirit." Hitler and the Germans, 107. (13.) Anamnesis, 103. (14.) As Niemeyer put it, "The kind of thinking which gives the character of salvation from all evil to progress ... constitutes an illicit pulling of divinity into the historical immanence, and a fallacious deification of political forces and political mission, from which stem the polarization of humanity into two essentially unequal elements, and the justification of total power ('murder,' Camus would say) of one over the other." Gerhart Niemeyer, "Ideas Have Also Roots," in Aftersight and Foresight, 219. (15.) Anamnesis, 150. (16.) In describing his inner turmoil at the critical moment of his conversion Augustine says "Insaniebam salubriter et moriebar vitaliter," that is, literally, "I was healthfully insane and vitally dying." (17.) The term "cosmicide" is used by the Polish science-fiction satirist Stanislaw Lem. For another version of the idea that suicide equals world-destruction, not just the end of the world for the deceased, see Dostoyevsky's last short story, "The Dream of the Ridiculous Man. (18.) As Kirillov puts it, "If God exists, then the whole will is His and I can do nothing. If He doesn't exist, then all will is mine and I must exercise my own will, my free will [literally, self-will, svoevolie]." His actual meaning is the reverse: if he can assert his absolute self-will, then he has supplanted God. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Devils, 634. (19.) Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, tr. by Richard Pevear and Llarissa Volokhonsky (San Francisco, 1990), 244-45. Italics in the original. (20.) Albert Camus, The Rebel (New York, 1956), 56. (21.) Although the story of the Grand Inquisitor to some degree reflects Dostoevsky's anti-Catholicism and particularly his dislike of Jesuits, I think one can ignore that without losing any of the psychological significance of the tale. (22.) The Brothers Karamazov, 260. (23.) The Inquisitor and other superior individuals like him shall prove to such Untermenschen "that they are feeble, that they are only pitiful children .... They will tremble limply before our wrath, their minds will grow timid, their eyes will become as tearful as children's or women's, but just as readily at a gesture from us they will pass over to gaiety and laughter, to bright joy and happy children's song. Yes, we will make them work, but in the hours free from labor we will arrange their lives like a children's game, with children's songs, choruses, and innocent dancing .... And they will have no secrets from us." Ibid., 259. (24.) Ibid., 319. (25.) It should be noted that Ivan's demand for retribution for those who torment children is, at least in part, an externalization of the evil within himself. When the young woman Liza relates to Alyosha her dream of crucifying a child and calmly eating pineapple compote while watching the child suffer, she mentions that she had already told this dream to Ivan who had laughed and agreed that it was "good." Alyosha replies that Ivan, who collects stories of child abuse, "may believe in the pineapple compote himself." Page 584. (26.) Ibid., 323. (27.) Ibid., 649. (28.) Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Possessed, tr. by Andrew R. MacAndrew (New York: New American Library, 1962), 384. The Possessed is a common translation of the title, but The Devils is more literal. (29.) Gerhart Niemeyer, "After Communism--What?" in Within and Above Ourselves: Essays of Political Analysis (Wilmington, Del., 1996), 274.

MICHAEL HENRY teaches philosophy at St. John's University in New York City, and is series editor of the Library of Conservative Thought of Transaction Publishers.