Christian Vitalism.

I will open rivers on the bare heights and springs in the midst of the valleys; I will make the wilderness a pool of water and the dry land fountains of water. I will put the cedar in the wilderness, the acacia and the myrtle and the olive tree; I will place the juniper in the desert together with the box tree and the cypress.  That they may see and recognize and consider and gain insight as well, That the hand of the LORD has done this, and the Holy One of Israel has created it.

Isiah 41:18-20

The other day, Ross Douthat did an interesting interview with Jonathan Keeperman: The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive. It's an interesting interview, especially this part which I thought was worthy of comment.

Douthat: Now a more personal objection, rooted in my own religious commitments. As you say, I have a lot of sympathy for the broad view that late modern life has become decadent and some sense of possibility, of action, of human capacity is really important to getting us either out of this trench or through whatever weird bottleneck digital life and A.I. are going to create. I agree with all that.

However, I’m also a Christian. All of the authors that I’ve mentioned who are part of the vitalist tradition — Nietzsche, Rand, Bronze Age Pervert — see themselves operating in opposition to Christianity. They see Christianity as fundamentally either a religion of the weak, or a religion of women, that it’s against the erotic.

When I look at the right-wing counterculture right now, I see people who are really into traditionalist Catholicism and whatnot, but there’s also a lot of people who, in their own story about what went wrong with the right — the normie right, the boring right of Kevin McCarthy — they think, at some level, it was a bunch of weak, thin, milk-drinking Christians who didn’t understand that what is actually best in life is to crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.

Keeperman: Sure.

Douthat: I’m curious, what is your attitude toward those debates? What’s your attitude toward Christianity and religion?

Keeperman: My belief is that there’s a tremendous amount of synchronicity between these two modes of operating in the world. It’s not just my belief. My favorite author, Ernst Junger — actually, Passage Press comes from his book, “Forest Passage” — there’s a great book of letters between him and Martin Heidegger. Junger’s view is that none of this vitalism is sustainable without religion, and actually Christianity, specifically, and that our idea of poetics and the inscrutable forces of the universe — against which our individual will is being tested at all times, and which a vitalist view of the world is insisting we’re constantly pushing against — all has to live inside of this framework of Christianity. So I don’t think these things are incompatible.

Douthat: Junger, if I’m remembering his trajectory correctly, was part of the German right. He’s not a Nazi, but he serves in the Third Reich, and he’s not someone who listeners should think of as like Heiddeger, who goes Nazi in that way, but Junger remains very much on the anti-liberal right throughout that period.

My sense of him is that he did have a view of Christianity as you describe, to some degree, but it was Christianity as a useful force for resisting the degradation of modernity and so on. Then he does actually become a Catholic in very old age. So you get to be a vitalist for many decades, and then at the end, it’s time to succumb to full Christianity. It seems to me that in vitalism, there are people who are anti-Christian, like Bronze Age Pervert, like the Nazis.

Keeperman: Sure.

Douthat: And then there are people who want to put it to use. But I’m a little ambivalent about having my religion put to use in that way.

Keeperman: Your concern is that it’s merely being cynically operationalized.

Douthat: Not even cynically. It’s more like Christianity is this great mythic structure within which we can operate, and that’s not what I believe about Christianity. I think Christianity is a true myth and imposes constraints. I guess that’s part of it. The Christian doesn’t just think that nature imposes constraints, it’s that God imposes constraints as well.

Now, what's interesting in this conversation is the implicit assumption of the incompatibility between Christianity and Vitalism.

I suppose we must begin by first defining terms.  Traditionally, vitalism was the notion that living things possessed some kind of "extra thing" which made them alive and distinguished them from inanimate things.  That's not what I think this conversation is all about. Vitalism, in the context above, is more about a essence which celebrates life and and all of it positive elements. Things like strength, beauty, youth, joy, fertility, Eros and so on. It's also an essence whose antithesis is the weak , the ugly the sterile and the joyless. Imagine Spring in all of its glory as opposed to late stage Autumn, with gloom of winter just around the corner. Vitalism is not just pro-life, but pro-healthy beautiful and bountiful life. I also want to make sure that the reader makes the distinction between the goodness of life and immanent beliefs that imply some kind of sacredness in natural things.

Looked at in this light, we then have to ask ourselves what is Vitalism's relationship to Christianity. In my opinion this relationship has broken down and while Christianity may be officially "Pro-life" on the books it doesn't operate that way in real life.

The more I look at this, the more that I'm am prepared to give some ground to the Vitalists criticism of modern Christianity in seeing it as "anti-vital".  This was, after all, Nietzsche's great criticism of Christianity in that enabled a revaluation of values by  inverting the values of the past. Instead of praising the beautiful, strong, fecund and joyus--as the pagan world did-- it  it elevated the weak, sterile, ugly and suffering. The essence of Nietzsche's critique of Christianity was that it was anti-life.

The pagan world, for all of its vitalism, was a brutal one, especially towards the weak, poor and those who were not "useful. Christianity's notion that even life's "losers" still had the imprint of the Imageo Dei  and were thus worthy of care and charity transformed the evaluation of the poor.  The poor were no longer seen as life's failures but an opportunity whereby Christian love could be expressed. And the poor, instead of being viewed negatively were seen positively instead.

Loving a man because he is a brother in Christ is a different proposition to loving a man because he is needy, and its very important to distinguish the man from his condition. And sometimes, theologians reflecting on the objects of Christian love have failed to make this distinction, or even worse, elevated the condition over the man.

Take for example, the evangelical counsels of perfection. Here we see that the notions of poverty, chastity and obedience are elevated as means to achieve Christian perfection through a denial of self.  But where the error can creep is in the understanding of why we deny. If we assume that wealth--material stuff--is an evil which distracts us from the pursuit of our love for God, we've entered into the world of Manicheanism, on the other hand, if we see the love of God as greater than the good of wealth we have stepped away from that world.  To reiterate, one evaluation sees riches as "bad", the other as a "good". 

Or take the notion of the "preferential option for the poor". Ostensibly, what is there to criticise about this notion, but if you think about it more deeply, you begin to see that under this schema its implied that  God's love to a person tends to be graduated inversely to their degree of material possession. Now imagine yourself as a poor devout Christian. Any effort at self-improvement with regard to material well being will have an inverse affect on God's relationship with you. It's a recipe that promotes poverty and encourages misery. It's a subtle way of saying that wealth is bad and poverty good.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying we don't have a duty to the poor, but the danger is in linking the strength of God's love to a man's material status thereby blessing or cursing the "materiality" of the man. As objectionable as the the prosperity gospel is,  the poverty gospel is its mirror image, and without any of its material benefits.

Likewise a theology which valourises the "margins" links God's love to the degree of disability or social dysfunction to the object has. The clear implication is this schema is the more one moves away from their marginal status the less one is pleasing to God. The logic here is that God is less likely to be in the middle or top and more likely to be in the periphery.  The Bourgeoisie, who've made some success of life,  are thus clearly objectionable.

Nietzsche was of the opinion the ressentiment was the mechanism that was responsible for the Christian hatred of the the good things but he was wrong. The more I've looked into this the more I am of the opinion that  asceticism is the door though which Christianity is made prone to "value inversion". I want to be clear, however, that I'm not repudiating the counsels of perfection,  as asceticism does have a place in Christianity, but it needs to be very strictly policed  lest it corrupts the faith it attempts to uphold. Human thinking is very sloppy, mix that with asceticism, and its very easy to see how life's maladies could be come elevated in the ascetic Christian schema, resulting in an outlook that makes joy, pleasure and strength suspect, or outrightly sinful.

But where the damage has really been done is in robbing Christianity of it's vitalism. It's one thing to love the poor, the weak and the marginal but it does not have come at the expense of loving the material, strong and beautiful.  There's room for both.

I would place myself in the Thomistic camp of Catholic thinking and if I had to give a technical description of what Christian Charity/Caritas is, it would be: A potency, which expressed in act, can instantiate or perfect form. It's a technical definition that does no justice to its implications. Poetically, it can best be described as a power that gives birth, plenitude, and is able to renew all things. It is the engine of life, strength, perfection, beauty and happiness.  When one actually begins to grasp what Charity/Caritas IS, one can understand why men give up everything for it, but not because the other things are bad, but because, when bathed in its light "all things are like straw".

Christianity is a vital religion, but the ascetic tradition has been a weak-point which has been exploited to wound the faith. I'm firmly of the belief that we are living in an age of heresy.

What interests me in our modern Christianity is the neglect of the vocation of the knight, a product of the ages of the faith. His disappearance from the Christian conscience is, I think, a manifestation of the mutilation of Christianity. And the reason I bright this up is because one of my favourite movies, Excalibur deals with just this theme. The movie iss full of Christian allegory and shows what happens when a kingdom goes wrong. One of my favourite scenes is when Percival recovers the Grail. England is wrecked with famine, pestilence, disease and misery. After Arthur drinks from the Grail the land and the king restores his strength. As the knights ride through the fields the trees begin to bloom and the land is reborn.

Christianity is a vital religion.