26
PARTISAN REVIEW
If
I may use an extreme formulation: Kierkegaard represents the
end of Christianity which he radically defended against the Church.
If
his interpretation of Christianity were true, history would be
ended, replaced by an unhistorical martyrdom as the salvation of
the Christian individual; there would remain only men without
occupation, without marriage, without communication, devoted to
God's world-destroying commandment. True humanity would lose it–
self in negative decisions, in absolute indifference to the world, in the
absurd as an article of faith . Marx becomes, in a God-forsaken
world, the prophet not of God, but of supposed history which, how–
ever, puts an end to history in its old sense, by an anticipated revo–
lutionary reversal, a magical act, in which salvation arises as though
of itself from the absolute destruction of the past. He is a prophet
in the forms possible in the present world : as herald of science (in
place of God) but of a science which has in reality ceased to be
science-as a commander, not in the name of God but in the name of
history. Nietzsche, in a metaphysic of the will to power, proclaims
the leadership and the lawgiving of the
One.
On the basis of total
nihilism, he sees rebirth through the men who with ruthless logic and
total planning take history into their own hands. In this he is helped
by a metaphysic of the eternal return and the Dionysian life.
All three seem to justify the modern nihilist with his urge to
destruction: just smash all tradition, leave nothing, once everything
that is has been totally destroyed, salvation will appear.
But this characterization applies only to an aspect of the three
great thinkers that has proved to be as untrue as it is historically
effective.
The three have had their greatest influence through the extremes
of their thought. Kierkegaard has made possible a new orthodoxy in–
vested with the courage of the absurd. Liberal theology has been ef–
fectively attacked with the weapons of Kierkegaard.
It
has proven
possible to twist his attack on the Church into a force for Church
dogmatism. In the seemingly enlightened modern world, Marx's
eschatology has awakened a faith in a new magic of historical events,
it has absurdly transformed history into an authority replacing God.
Nietzsche's atheistic idea, which made the superman an aim, became
the idea of race, the apotheosis of power, the transfiguration of life
as Dionysian reality.
