Apotheosis of the Hungry God: Nihilism and the Contours of Scholarship

Abstract

The modern university is a demoralizing institution, largely devoted to the propagation of nihilism and liberation of desire. The apotheosis of this hungry god of the untrammeled will has taken more than 200 years, but the slow ascent has given humanistic scholarship its basic shape. The ascent of ‘reason’ over tradition and religion, at the end of the eighteenth century, caused conservative thought to emerge, reluctantly, and frame rational defenses of natural (i.e. spontaneously evolved) social institutions and belief systems. This has always been handicapped by the need to fight rationalism with reason. This same ascent inspired revolutionary theorists to frame their ringing denunciations and inspiring panaceas, most of which proved purely destructive because of the tragic inability of revolutionary practice to produce the promised and indispensable metanoia. Partly due to the limited success of conservative thought and revolutionary theory, untrammeled will has, more recently, ascended over reason, tradition, and religion, to give us the postmodern nihilism of Luciferian scholars.

Notes

1. Luciferians (or Satanists) should not be confused with Devil Worshipers, the former being a cult of defiant self-assertion, whereas the latter, like all who worship, are disposed to submission. Luciferians, also, are seldom supernaturalists, and understand Lucifer in a thoroughly demythologized fashion. The formal Luciferian cult originated in Aleister Crowley's Thelemite movement and the Theosophy of Blavatsky, Olcott, and Besant, with more recondite roots in the spiritualist enthusiasm of the 1840s. It was, indeed, presciently anticipated in Orestes Brownson's novel The Spirit Rapper (1854). Although sometimes superficially philanthropic, the essential Luciferian doctrine is encapsulated in Crowley's famous dictum, 'Do as thou wilt’, a maxim underscored by more recent Luciferian hierophants like Ragnar Redbeard and Anton Szandar LaVey. A weekly newspaper propounding this doctrine was published, between 1886 and 1903, under the title of Lucifer: The Light Bearer, in Topeka, Kansas of all places. Although avowed Luciferians have never been numerous, their doctrine being fissiparous and their external trappings often exceedingly silly, the Luciferians clearly have a great many fellow travelers. One thinks of the apostolate of Anne Rand on the right, and the epigone of Foucault on the left. Although there are considerable risks involved in the use of words like Luciferian and Satanic as terms of social analysis, they are really no more tendentious than the familiar structural vocabulary of modern sociology. And they have the great merit of connecting the fashionable doctrines of today, such as those of Rand and Foucault, to homologous teachings in the distant past, and by this connection showing that human beliefs more often recur than progress. This is at least partly the reason we find writers like Eric Voegelin, Alain Besançone, and Roger Scruton (2000, 2006) using the concept of the Satanic, not as a lurid metaphor, but in a technical and theological sense.