Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-l7hp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T04:09:26.487Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Nihilism in the Twentieth Century: A View from Here

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Clyde L. Manschreck
Clyde L. Manschreck
Affiliation:
Professor of the history of Christianity in Chicago Theological Seminary, Chicago, Illinois, delivered this Presidential Address at an evening meeting of the American Society of Church History in Chicago on December 28, 1974.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Nihilism has been present in Western culture for many centuries, but no century has been so permeated by nihilism as has our own. With perceptive insight Alexander Salzhenitsyn recently observed that Western democracy is in its “last decline,” has no ethical foundation, and consists only of “parties, and social classes engaged in a conflict of interests, just interests, nothing higher.” Solzhenitsyn's observation can hardly be brushed aside. His words describe a nihilism that is prominent in more than Western democracy, Nihilism reaches as far back as Ecclesiastes in our Old Testament and Nargarjuna in Buddhism. Perhaps no century has been without it, but in our century it has become pervasive, finding expression not only in a flood of literature but in virtually every phase of our existence. The Nazi holocaust, Vietnam, the “death of God,” and Watergate fall within its scope. It is so pervasive that it merits attention, especially from church historians.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 45 , Issue 1 , March 1976 , pp. 85 - 96
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1976

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. Newsweek 83, no. 11 (03 18, 1974): 100.Google Scholar

2. See Payne, Pierre S. Robert, The Terrorists (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1957), pp. 1–130.Google Scholar

3. See Rosen, Stanley, Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay (New York: Yale University Press, 1969).Google Scholar

4. See Thielicke, Helmut, Nihilism: Its Origin and Nature—with a Christian Answer (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961).Google Scholar

5. The World as Will and Idea, tr. Haldane, R. B. and Kemp, J., 3 vols. (London: K. Paul Trench, Trübner, 1883-1906).Google Scholar

6. Hegel, G. W. F., Philosophy of History, tr. Sibree, J. (New York: Dover, 1956).Google Scholar

7. Dostoievsky, Fedor, The Brothers Karamazov, tr. Garnett, Constance (New York: Random House, n.d.), pp. 742, 815.Google Scholar

8. Carroll, John, Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), p. 37.Google Scholar

9. Dostoievsky, , Brothers Karamazov, p. 318.Google Scholar

10. Eliade, Mircea, Myth, Dreams and Mysteries (New York: Harper & Brothers, pp. 235–236.Google Scholar

11. Becker, Ernest, The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press, 1973).Google Scholar

12. Quoted in Carroll, , Break-out, p. 37.Google Scholar

13. Ruseell, Brtrand, Seleeted Papcrs of Bertrand Russe'l (New York: Modern Library 1927), p. 3.Google Scholar

14. Ibid., pp. 11 ff.

15. See The Humanist 13, no. 2 (March-April, 1953).

16. Emrich, Wilhelm, The Literary Revolution and Modern Society and Other Essays (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1971), p. 29.Google Scholar

17. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Arensberg Collection.

18. Motherwell, Robert, ed., The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (New York: Wittenborn, 1951), pp. 246 ff.Google Scholar

19. Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire.

20. Philadelphia Museum of Art.

21. William Rubins Collection, New York, New York.

22. Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York.

23. Eliot, T. S., Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (New York: Hareourt, Brace & World, 1962), pp. 3–7.Google Scholar

24. Ibid., pp. 29–31.

25. Ibid., pp. 8–12.

26. Ibid., pp. 53–69.

27. Ibid., pp. 79–82.

28. Shapiro, Karl, Essay on Rime (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1945), II. 1716-1738.Google Scholar

29. Millay, Edna St. Vincent, “Dirge without Music” in The Buck in the Snow and Other Poems (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1928).Google Scholar

30. Millay, Edna St. Vincent. Poems Selected for Young People (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1929).Google Scholar

31. Millay, Edna St. Vincent, Collected Poems (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1956), p. 191.Google Scholar

32. Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness, tr. Barnes, Hazel E. (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), p. 439.Google Scholar

33. Ibid., pp. 104, 115.

34. Sartre, Jean-Paul, No Exit and Theec Other Plays. tr. Stuart, Gilbert (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949), pp. 61 f., 105.Google Scholar

35. Ibid., p. 116.

36. Ibid., p. 122.

37. Ibid., p. 56.

38. Camus, Albert, The Strunger, tr. Stuart, Gilbert (New York: Vintage Books, 1957), p. 1,Google Scholar

39. Ibid., p. 154.

40. See Camus, Albert, A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Brée, Germaine (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1962), pp. 144 ff.Google Scholar

41. Beckett, Samuel, Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove Press, 1954), p. 7.Google Scholar

42. Ibid., p. 52.

43. Ibid., p. 61.

44. Quoted in “Insight,” The Chicago Daily News, 28 October 1969.

45. Berger, Peter L., A Rumor of Angels (New York: Doubleday, 1969), p. 10.Google Scholar

46. Ibid., p. 39.

47. Ibid., pp. 47 f.

48. Altizer, Thomas J. J. and Hamilton, William, Radieal Theology and the Death of God (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), p. 11.Google Scholar

49. Berger, , Rumor of Angels, p. 6.Google Scholar

50. Wiesel, Elie in The German Church Struggle and the Holocaust, ed. Littell, F. H. and Locke, H. G. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1974), chap. 15.Google Scholar

51. Quoted in “Everyday,” The Chicago Daily News, 24 January 1973.

52. Carroll, , Break-out, pp. 44 f., 48.Google Scholar

53. Address by Albert Jenner, Esq., Annual Meeting, Inter Seminary Faculties Union, North Park Theological Seminary, 6 December 1974.

54. See Cochraue, C. N., Christianity and Classical Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940)Google Scholar; also Jonas, Hans, The Gnostic Religion, 2d ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), pp. 320–440.Google Scholar