THE NIHILIST TEMPTATION

Nihilism is at the door:
where does this one come from, the most disturbing of all guests?

F. Nietzsche

We will enter into the Gospel passages of this Lent through pictures. For this first Sunday we thought of Christ in the desert by Ivan N. Kromskoy (1837-1887), a work that our artist confesses he painted «with tears and blood». We see a Christ in a desolate landscape, a desert of stones, in which emptiness dominates. And his face is also empty, closed in nothingness, restless, suffering, and even doubtful. All his drama is internal. It does not seem that temptation is about bread, nor about power or miracles, but about faith; a faith that can open up to the mystery of God or be thwarted in nihilistic temptation. Nietzsche, in Posthumous Fragments (1887-1888), reminded us that nihilism is generated where there is no purpose, where there is no answer to the why, where supreme values ​​no longer have meaning. Nihilism insinuates itself into thoughts, erases horizons, weakens the soul, saddens the passions. The anguish it generates then seeks an anaesthetic in consumption (bread), in the exercise of dominion (all the kingdoms of the earth) and in the challenge to death (throwing oneself from the temple). We must also remember that the negativity that nihilism spreads affects not so much suffering, which in any case accompanies every existence, but the senselessness of one’s own living and one’s own dying. The Christ of Kromskoy seems affected by this temptation and is on the point of making a decision. But which one? The Hellenistic culture, to which we are all indebted, attempted to overcome nihilism with the art of living (téchne toũ bíou), which consists in recognizing one’s own abilities and in making them explicit and then seeing them flourish according to measure (katà métron), as Umberto Galimberti observed. But is this enough? The Gospel page of this Sunday offers us another solution: the word of God. Jesus opts for the Word, and it is no coincidence that he firmly responds to the enemy’s insinuations by quoting the book of Deuteronomy (Dt 8:3; 6:13; 6:16). Is the Word then the antidote to despair, to the pain of living, to depression, to nihilism, as we said above? Yes, because even before we think of it as a content that wants to reveal to us, a horizon that wants to open up to us, the Word is first, an oblation, as Gadamer observed, that is, it is God himself who reaches us, and gives himself to us, becoming our neighbour and companion on the journey. The solipsistic and infernal solitude is thus conquered within a relationship in which we can find meaning, root and fulfilment. Heidegger said that it is important to notice nihilism, a disturbing guest of our soul, and look it straight in the face. This is what Jesus did in the desert, in no short time, he took forty days. From that experience he emerged not only victorious but more a man.

Commentary by b. Sandro Carotta, osb
Abbazia di Praglia (Italy)

Translation by f. Mark Hargreaves,
Prinknash Abbey