Nihilism Is Not Enough

Christianity answered the question of the pre-Socratics — "Why is there something rather than nothing?" — simply: because God willed it. But already in the first century, Christians were asking why there was still something rather than nothing. The cosmic renewal of the Second Coming felt late to those early believers,[3] who eventually accepted the delay by rationalizing profane history and its institutions — namely the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church — as vehicles to spread the Gospel. The "political atheism" of monastic retreat felt inappropriate in a persistent universe.

Nearly two millennia later, at the start of the twentieth century, Christian missionaries had traversed most of the globe and spread the word to whoever would listen. Almost on cue, signs and wonders proliferated. The last remaining "Caesars" or "Roman Emperors" (Kaiser Wilhelm Il and Czar Nicholas IT) died, an indicator of the arrival of the Antichrist foretold in Pseudo-Methodius' Apocalypse (c. 692) and Adso of Montier-en-Der's Libellus de Antichristo (c. 950); Europe cannibalized itself not once, but twice; the sun set on the British Empire; and total disintegration of human civilization became thinkable at Los Alamos. "But of that day and hour knoweth no man" (Matthew 24:36), the Bible cautions us. Perhaps, however, we can know the century, and for a while the twentieth century seemed as good a guess as any.

This question of apocalyptic violence reveals the agon between Athens and Jerusalem, political philosophy and Biblical revelation. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and his philosophical epigones whitewash mass violence as necessary en route to the "end of history." The rational is the real, the actual the ideal. After the bloodshed, the end will not entail fiery destruction, but insipid peace. Hegel prematurely identified the end with Napoleon's arrival in Jena in 1806 and Alexandre Kojéve followed suit with Joseph Stalin in the 1930s, though he may have been closer with the European Economic Community in the 1950s.[4] Francis Fukuyama built atop Kojeve's argument and announced that the end had finally arrived in 1989, months before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Fukuyama's argument has unsteadily held up. The final decade of the most tumultuous century in human history culminated in the endless Groundhog Day of the world-wide web. Crises in 2001, 2008, and 2016 threatened to catalyze new, darker eras for mankind, and each time fizzled out. The post-9/11 wars felt more like expensive postmodern projects than clashes of civilizations; the financial system recovered (albeit in fettered form) after the housing bubble burst; and populist revolts in the United States and United Kingdom distracted from reform more than they provoked it.

The containment of each of these crises required ever greater stretching — of budget deficits, of policy tools, of institutional trust. But for a long time, the center held. In his chronicle of late aristocratic Sicily, The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa coined the quintessential revolutionary bromide: "If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change."[5] In our static world we are told the inverse: for things to continue at all, everything must remain exactly the same.

The shift to a world of torpor and indifference seems to disprove, or at least complicate, René Girard's understanding of modern history. He envisaged runaway violence, both interpersonal and international, fueled by warring doubles: Fascism vs. Communism, the United States vs. the Soviet Union, secret counter-terrorist armies vs. terrorist cells. Such violence is uncontainable because of Christ's coming into the world. Girard liked to say that Christ was the first political atheist, the first person who did not believe the state to be divinely ordained or in the existence of a Gott mit uns in heaven. For on the level of political theology, what is Trinitarianism but the claim that Christ is the true Son of God and therefore that Caesar Augustus, the son of the divinized Caesar, is not truly the Son of God, and that ipso facto, the Roman Empire is not purely God's will? Or more generally with the Lord's Prayer, what is it but a daily reminder that God's will is always done in heaven and rarely here on earth?

Caesar's transcendence is underwritten by the instrument of torture whose gathering and binding power Christ destroyed. More generally, all powers and principalities depend for their existence on scapegoating violence. For Girard, mimetic violence and the scapegoating of victims are the "things hidden since the foundation of the world." Unlike efficient markets or the natural laws of science, the better understanding of which does not stop markets or natural laws from functioning, scapegoating only works when, on some level, the persecutors do not know what they are doing. One can channel the negative energy in a rancorous village against an elderly and unattractive woman and accuse her of witchcraft, and the accusation may even unite the villagers, but only if they see the accusation as an almost religious epiphany and not as the product of psychosocial mania. If the sacred is disguised or mythologized violence, then the Gospel revelation of this foundational violence will, over time, lead to the gradual desacralization, deconstruction, destruction, and death of all cultures.

Over history, the Christian revelation makes scapegoating impossible and forces us to find alternative, natural explanations ("many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased" [Daniel 12:4]). This acceleration of science and technology also leads to the acceleration of unlimited violence, which now has the potential to destroy the planet: "To understand that we are already living through this process of revelation, we have only to think about our relationship, as members of a world community, to the terrifying armaments with which mankind has furnished itself since the end of the Second World War."[6] To the core issue of nuclear and thermonuclear weapons, one might also need to add environmental destruction (Matthew 24:7 or 24:29, Girard speculated), bioengineering and bioweapons (the scientific demystification of the "twin nuclei," 1952 with H-bombs and 1953 with DNA), nanotechnology, killer robots, or runaway Al (including in its low-tech totalitarian surveillance forms).

For Girard, the modern political solutions to violence were effective only insofar as they remained mythical or somewhat "katechontic,"[7] working to slow the thinning of culture. At their worst they are tragicomically counterproductive. Even the most modern of the political philosophers, who tried to ground the new society on the "low but solid ground"[8] of general enlightenment, did not understand that their project would unravel society more than reconstruct it.

Thomas Hobbes, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Carl Schmitt were foundational thinkers who did not think deeply enough to reach the foundations. They did not demythologize all the way back to the beginning. The Hobbesian war of all-against-all was not resolved in the distant past by the frenzied combatants sitting down to have a nice legal chitchat in which they drew up a "social contract." It was resolved by collapsing the war of all-against-all into a war of all-against-one. Girard understood Nietzsche's eternal recurrence as the sacrificial cycle, in which the recurring "death of god" is truly the "murder of god." Girard thought that Nietzsche (unlike the more banal atheists of the eighteenth century) at least understood that much about the victimization of Christ and Dionysus. He also thought, however, that the effect of this staring contest between modernity and the violence of the past would be quite the opposite of Nietzschean renewal and liberation: "The eternal recurrence is the past which Christianity has abolished. History from now on treads the bottomless spaces of Christian knowledge... One does not know if the colossal finish [of Twilight of the Gods] marks the end of a cycle only, the promise of a thousand renewals, or if it is truly the end of the world, the Christian apocalypse, the bottomless abyss of the unforgettable victim."[9]

Schmitt anchored his political theology on the katechon, and hence never forgot the lurking possibility of apocalypse.[10] Girard understood the katechon as a "principality and power" (and hence as somewhat demonic)[11] that nevertheless had a stabilizing and pacifying role to play in historical Christianity and still has such a role in 2023. But Girard considered Schmitt's The Concept of the Political and misadventure in nationalism as the very opposite of katechontic, as instead accelerating history towards the United Nations and the one-world state. From a Girardian perspective, Schmitt was too focused on the political and too interested in preserving the ultimately nihilistic distinctions between friends and enemies.

Girard's political atheism, his anti-political and apocalyptic thinking, became the target of the most devastating attack ever launched against him, that by Pierre Manent in 1982. Manent denounced Girard as more wrong or wicked or insane than another modern political philosopher, Niccolo Machiavelli:

But more so than the theories of Marx, Freud, or Nietzsche, Girard's can be associated with the greatest of the masters of suspicion: Machiavelli. Machiavelli, too, declares that the foundation and the preservation of cities is essentially violent, and that men live continually off the good effects of this violence which they don't want to look in the face. But Machiavelli knows what he is saying: if what we call humanity is founded on violence, then this active power of violence must be preserved so as to prevent human beings from falling under the influence of a mendacious non-violence — the non-violence of Christianity.... Girard remains strictly within the terms of Machiavellianism. Simply put, he places a positive sign where Machiavelli places a negative sign, and vice versa. But this reversal is absurd. If the political nature of man is violence, then the non-violence of Christianity is just what Machiavelli said it was, violence against nature, violence to the second degree, "pious cruelty." If human "culture" is founded essentially on violence, then Christianity can bring nothing but the destruction of humanity under the fallacious pretext of non-violence.[12]

Manent would later recognize this critique as too sweeping. Girard's political atheism was not absolute. He was not a monk. He was a keen observer of current events. He was enthusiastic about the moderate conservatism of Charles de Gaulle. He hoped that Ronald Reagan's theatrical politics might end the Cold War, and he feared that George W. Bush's rigid neoconservatism would lead us into never-ending conflict. He saw Nazism and Communism as mimetic doubles, as two extremist and totalitarian movements that imitated each other in their hatred for one another and in their mass murder of millions; but even so, he distinguished Communism as the more dangerous of the two, as a form of "ultrachristianity" that is more tempting and therefore more dangerous in our post-revelation world.[13]

But on the level of theory, on the level of what one might call "absolute truth," such practical and situational interventions are not well-grounded. On this level, Girard believed one should desire to become a saint and be willing to become a martyr. In this sense, he diverges radically from Manent's "political" or "philosophical" paradigm. Far more than a professor of literature, Girard's true calling was to be a preacher of the end times. "To say that we are objectively in an apocalyptic situation... is to say that mankind has become, for the first time, capable of destroying itself, something that was unimaginable only two or three centuries ago."[14] If there is a hope for Girard, it is merely the desperate hope of Jonah in Nineveh. Against all reasonable expectations, the city might listen to the jeremiad of doom and repent of its wicked ways. And so, the great violence might be deferred for the time being.

Girard's stance betrays a sense of helplessness to stem the violent tide. He does not exaggerate his own role in world events. For Girard, it is not a matter of his own dangerous and subversive message or of his all-encompassing theory or of his sweeping books, but much more importantly and simply, of the great Judeo-Christian Spirit working through History:

I believe we are undergoing unprecedented change, change more radical than humanity has ever been subject to before. This change... does not depend on any books that we might or might not write. It is simply part of the terrifying and wondrous history of our time, which manifests itself in places other than our writings.... Books themselves will have no more than minor importance; the events within which such books emerge will be infinitely more eloquent than whatever we write and will establish truths we have difficulty describing and describe poorly, even in simple and banal instances.[15]

How did we arrive at this point? To put it mildly, most great prophets of early modernity did not envision a listless future. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Thomas More, Tommaso Campanella, and Johann Valentin Andrae felt change afoot and wrote books speculating about the future, debating what new, ideal societies we might build.[16] But none of them were as attuned to the importance of technological progress as Francis Bacon, whose posthumously-published New Atlantis predicted and even prescribed the course of the modern history.

Bacon intuited that the mastery and control of science was inseparable from the mastery and control of all things. The book's eponymous, hyper-advanced city, Bensalem,[17] is administered by a deep state-esque technocratic institution known as Salomon's House (or the "College of the Six Days' Works'').[18] Characteristically of early modernity, the House's ambitions are nearly limitless: "The End of our Foundation," one of the Fathers of Salomon's House reveals to the narrator, "is the knowledge of Causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible."[19] This suggests that science will make an interventionist God obsolete. Indeed, the Father lists among the impressive array of Salomon House's powers the ability to create "all delusions and deceits of the sight, in figures, magnitudes, motions, colours"[20] — which would have given them the ability to manufacture even the miracles upon which the common Bensalemites' Christian faith rests.[21] When Bacon's narrator encounters Bensalem, it is hidden from the rest of the world. But the extensive descriptions of Bensalem's arsenal ("ordnance and instruments of war, and engines of all kinds: and likewise new mixtures and compositions of gun-powder, wildfires burning in water, and unquenchable")[22] may portend a violent global conquest. In implying that science and technology could conquer Heaven and Earth, Bacon was exceptionally prescient in anticipating the early modern zeitgeist.

Salomon's House is a nearly omnipotent institution, but it does not run on autopilot: it is made great by the great men who control it. Bacon was such a man in the real world. He intuited and directed the course of early modernity with an agency and intelligence scarcely believable today. But however well he understood his era and the direction of science and technology, even Bacon could not have imagined among Bensalem's "ordnance and instruments of war" anything as potent as a nuclear bomb. Such a weapon would have opened a Pandora's Box for the House of Salomon. Their military expansion would have devolved from a virtuous crusade into a necessary means of self-preservation, lest they allowed other nations to develop such technology. To prevent such development, Salomon's House may have needed to establish a world government, which in former times was understood to be synonymous with the Biblical Antichrist. In Bacon's early modern understanding, a lone individual could be sufficiently powerful and empowered to be the Antichrist. A careful reading of Bacon's text reveals that Joabin, a mysterious merchant doubling as a this-worldly philosopher-king, may be the not-altogether-unsympathetic Antichrist.[23]

As science and technology advanced in the real world, we entered a "middle modernity" that was materially more prosperous than early modernity but showed signs of late modernity's skepticism of human agency.[24] John Henry Newman's Loss and Gain (1848) reflects this shift. The semi-autobiographical novel follows a young man, Charles Reding, on his spiritual journey at Oxford University. Reding's Anglican peers tell him that Anglican doctrine holds that the Pope is the Antichrist, as taught by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer in his First Book of Homilies (1547). Gradually, however, Reding realizes that his contemporary Anglican peers do not actually believe that an individual like the Pope is, or perhaps even can be, the Antichrist, and his doubts about the Catholic Church dissipate. Half a century later, the most powerful literary treatments of the Antichrist — Vladimir Solovyov's War, Progress, and the End of History (1900) and Robert Hugh Benson's Lord of the World (1908) — both depict the Antichrist as an individual, but an individual with curiously few differentiating features.[25] Something has subtly shifted between Bacon's account and theirs. Their Antichrists are compelling writers and orators, but their words are, in Solovyov's case, implausibly miraculous syntheses of different ideas, or, in Benson's case, totally forgotten by those who hear them.[26] They are constructs — embodiments of ideas, mirrors of our failings.

Our fear of the atom bomb completed the slide into late modernity. At Los Alamos, we seemingly handed the reins to the scientists, and science seemingly "ended" (in the Hegelian dual sense of culminated and terminated). In the aftermath, great thinkers like Bacon made way for uncontroversial academic bureaucrats, who do not design the machine but rather exist as tiny cogs within it. That machine represses our would-be Bacons, in what might generously be understood as katechontic fervor or (less generously) as existential angst.

Today's academic bureaucrat par excellence is Oxford Professor Nick Bostrom, who, as much as any of his contemporaries, embodies and articulates our paralyzed mediocrity and conformity. Bacon mischievously hinted that he sympathized with a high-agency Antichrist while Newman, Solovyov, and Benson wrote openly against it. Something like Bostrom's work, suffused by the peace-and-safety logic of late modernity, suggests no understanding of the issue at all. In "The Vulnerable World Hypothesis," Bostrom (or perhaps merely a simulation of him) lists the ways in which the world might come to an end. He then proposes four countermeasures:

1. Restrict technological development.
2. Ensure that there does not exist a large population of actors representing a wide and recognizable human distribution of motives.
3. Establish extremely effective preventive policing.
4. Establish effective global governance.[27]

Bound by the fetters of late modernity, great individuals are despised or ignored. Even Solovyov's and Benson's papier-maché Antichrists would struggle to win over a crowd. But a world hostile to individuals is not free of the threat of the Antichrist — instead, the Antichrist may arrive as an institution or a system. How might such an Antichrist rise to power? As powerful as Solovyov's and Benson's stories are, the daemonium ex machina ways in which their Antichrists conquer the world feel thin. But reading Bostrom, we may deduce an answer: by playing on our fears of technology and seducing us into decadence with the Antichrist's slogan: peace and safety. Bostrom does not differ from Bacon in his atheism and materialism, which Bacon shared and which defined even early modernity. But he and the zeitgeist he embodies are focused single-mindedly on saving us from progress, at any cost.

There has been no great literature confronting the Antichrist since Solovyov and Benson at the beginning of the 20th century.[28] But were a brave author to write a novel refuting Bostrom, she would do well to recall that a force powerful enough to control the world is a force powerful enough to destroy it. "For yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night. For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape. But ye, brethren, are not in darkness, that that day should overtake you as a thief." (1 Thessalonians 5:2-4)

All of this brings us back to that two-millennia old question: why is there still something and not nothing? For the younger Girard, the long decades of the nuclear age felt like the countdown to Armageddon, with some very close calls in the 1950s and 1960s, and still a felt sense of crisis in the 1970s and 1980s. When I asked the older Girard in 2005 whether he still believed that we were living through the end times, he answered in the affirmative, but also with a certain qualification: the end times might feel like a time when little happens and might go on for many decades in a zombie-like manner.

What can the unreconstructed Girardian say about these seemingly failed predictions concerning the end of the world? Perhaps one needs to interpret our time (the last thirty or fifty years, in particular) as a strange "no-man's land between total revenge and no revenge at all, that specifically modern space where everything becomes suffused with sick revenge,"[29] as a place where men are not mad enough to bring about the Apocalypse and not sane enough to embrace the Kingdom of God. While far beyond the scope of this essay, a sketch of such a "zombie" cultural period, in which history does not end but does seem to slow, would cover many topics:

The stagnation of science and technology is overdetermined, driven in part by excessive regulation (think the Food and Drug Administration or the Nuclear Regulatory Commission) and in part by overly tracked education (think robotic and indentured science Ph.D. students), but primarily by fears of a runaway arms race. The industrial butchery of World War I had already killed our Enlightenment-era optimism that science and technology were unalloyed forces for good. But at Los Alamos science seemed, for the first time, to have truly pushed history in a darker direction.

What followed was science in a new, scaled, bureaucratic form, far from the schoolchild ideal of the lone, brilliant inventor. The first instantiation of this model — the Apollo Project — took us to the Moon. But the scale soon became a bug, not a feature, agglutinating into an incrementalist, political, gerontocratic bureaucracy.[30] Technology more broadly experienced a similar slowdown, with exceptions in telecommunications and computers.[31]

But maybe we are wrong to call this slowdown a drawback, if continued progress would simply unearth ever more means of self-annihilation. We may bemoan the physicists and lesser scientists who putter around with DEI and the politics of peer review and grant applications. Parochialism, welfarism, and bureaucracy have degraded science into a sociopathic and pseudo-Malthusian institution. But they have also prevented it from blowing up the world.

The slowdown in science and technology was palpable by the time of my undergraduate years in the late 1980s, in which most fields of science and technology (nuclear engineering, aerospace engineering, mechanical engineering, physics, chemistry, etc.) had become dead-end cul-de-sacs. A certain narrow cone of progress continued with computers, software, the internet, the mobile internet, etc. This shift from the world of atoms (and atom bombs) to the world of bits can be thought of as a shift to interiority, a loss of interest in the external world in favor of inner or virtual worlds.[32] In the decades that followed, the younger generations spent more time ensconced in the metaverse, more time in their basements playing video games, more time indulging in excessive yoga and meditation (and almost any amount is excessive), and sought psychology and parapsychology and psychedelic drugs and psychopharmacology when their sedated lifestyles brought them little joy.

Our retreat to the interior is difficult to explain, but one clue may lie in cosmology. As our cosmological models implied a larger and larger universe (and eventually a multiverse), our insignificance became more apparent. The theory that the world is a computer simulation, with an at least semi-benevolent creator behind it, is oddly more comforting than the physicists' model of a multiverse, which implies that we occupy a radically unrepresentative part of the cosmos. Reasoning from induction — and hence conducting almost any scientific investigation — is impossible in a nigh-infinite multiverse. As a result, the multiverse becomes a gateway drug for thought experiments about consciousness — Boltzmann brains, the Matrix, Cartesian demons — and a Lovecraftian horror of the exterior world settles in.

It was not just science and technology that reflected a fear of apocalyptic violence: our interpersonal relations became strained to the point of sterility and exhausted sexuality. The global rate of population growth peaked in 1968 at 2.1% per year, driving a wave of neo-Malthusian hand-wringing from Paul Ehrlich,[33] the Club of Rome,[34] and Hollywood.[35] As quickly as the rate of growth had shot up, it plummeted. In the decades that followed, the total fertility rate collapsed below replacement in nations as seemingly varied as the United States, South Korea, Iran, and Italy. The unsettling universality of our anti-natalism resists any local explanation.

Back in 1967, in the Summer of Love, neither Gore Vidal nor William Buckley predicted that the sexual revolution would end with less sex and less childbearing; that Roe v. Wade would end with a whimper against the backdrop of relatively few abortions, few babies, and strained gender relations; or that homosexuality would end with "trans." Traditionalist conservatives see the transgender phenomenon as the narcissistic self-mutilation of sexual organs, metamorphosing men and women into medieval eunuchs. But escaping to a new identity is an understandable, if unhealthy, response to the dysfunction of modern gender dynamics.

The reticence to procreate, to desire others and to desire to have children, is the most disturbing indicator of a generally radically weakened mimesis. The Baby Boomers and Gen Xers were the last generations that could unabashedly want things: fast cars, luxury houses, wealth. Millennials and Gen Zers in the 2020s must be content with marijuana, Netflix, and social media.[36]

The finance boom of 1982-2007 can be seen as a shift to interiority, as would-be cowboys sublimated their masculine energy into trading floors and spreadsheets, but even by the late 1980s the materialism of Patrick Bateman or Gordon Gekko felt not just gauche, but dangerous. In the 1990s and 2000s, "trashpirationalism" continued in bling-heavy hip-hop culture, but even that mellowed out into the designer suits and (somewhat) reserved grandeur of 2010s Drake and Kanye West. Silicon Valley, the greatest font of wealth in modern American history, frowns upon materialism altogether. The athleisure, Apple Watches, and modest Palo Alto residences of highly-paid engineers and venture capitalists might suggest a healthy avoidance of status games, or maybe they just indicate dulled utility functions and a fear of distinguishing oneself.

This low-testosterone world seems incompatible with the animal spirits of expansionary capitalism; but perhaps if there are fewer things over which we compete, there are fewer things over which we might hurt or murder one another.

In his 2019 book The Decadent Society, Ross Douthat seemingly laments the four horsemen of stagnation, sclerosis, sterility, and repetition, but offers suspiciously far-fetched means by which our languor might end (radically post-liberal politics, an Afro-futurist Renaissance, immense technological leaps like "warp drives"). If Douthat is tacitly comforted by the implausibility of these paths, it is because he senses that our soft, comfortable ways militate against not only a more dynamic society, but against an apocalyptic escalation to extremes.

As we amuse ourselves with memes and Tik Tok videos, we are less likely to stumble into one of Douthat's dreamscapes than into a mundane, but more plausible, catastrophe. We might start with the deteriorating fiscal position of the United States — particularly the $1.6 trillion student debt, the time bombs that are Social Security and Medicare, and the runaway compounding interest on interest of the federal deficit and debt — with no solutions within the Overton Window. Or we might turn to the (not unrelated) problem of near-universal demographic collapse, which also seems impossible to ameliorate.[37] Should we reverse our demographic decline, the demand for the energy required to sustain billions more people will hit resource or pollution constraints (or both). But should we avoid resource and pollution constraints with a cornucopian new method of energy production, like fusion power, would we then be imperiled by its geopolitically unstable dual-use applications?

The consensus, base-case understanding of 1970s-2000s globalization — that the developing world would simply converge with the developed world — seems utopian in retrospect. The emerging market economies of Latin America, Africa, India, and Russia all grew much more slowly than the world projected a few decades ago.[38] But today, we face a dilemma. If we fulfill that utopian goal, might the competition among so many growing nations trigger resource wars around the world? And if the non-convergence that we experienced continues, will countries sick of stagnation pivot toward the Communist Chinese model?

Our zombie era has been stretched as far as it will go. Like Hamlet, we would like to put off the inevitable choice for as long as possible — but even those soothed by a listless world know that all mediocre things must come to an end. One problem remains for the Girardian. Hamlet's refusal to act seems to be a form of political atheism. It is even understandable amidst the rottenness that is Denmark. But clearly neither Girard nor Shakespeare would call Hamlet a role model — his death and the ultimate failure of his eventual action seem to suggest otherwise. What are we to make of this?

It is difficult to distinguish between Hamlet's political atheism and that of Shakespeare, just as it is difficult to distinguish between Antichrist and Christ. Both distinctions hinge on sincerity and authenticity — that is to say, faith. Hamlet studied lofty questions of philosophy at the University of Wittenberg and made the mistake of believing this elevated him above earthly affairs. His understanding of philosophy could not pull him out of his malaise, because the uniqueness of his situation — and ours — resists categorical and purely rational study. The eventual action he takes is nihilistic, informed by neither politico-theological conviction nor true political atheism.

While we delay like Hamlet, "[w]e pretend not to see the disintegration of our cultural life, the desperate futility of the puppet shows that occupy the empty stage during this strange intermission of the human spirit. A silence has descended upon the earth, as if an angel were about to open the seventh and last seal of an apocalypse."[39] We pray that the puppet shows can go on for a while longer, that what is left of the old sacred structures and of the remnants of the katechon can hold together for our time — and that the Day of the Lord will not happen anytime soon: "But who may abide the day of his coming? and who shall stand when he appeareth? for he is like a refiner's fire, and like fullers' soap." (Malachi 3:2)