Can Christianity be noble?

A contrast with moralistic humanitarianism. Session 5 of the vitalism seminar (more Max Scheler).

Our time is marked by a crisis of the male, which has a number of dimensions. One is that young men, if their souls are intact, by nature have a longing for greatness. They want some hard path to follow, some high task to be demanded of them, some call to sacrifice and overcoming. But the surrounding society of consumerism and careerism offers them nothing like this. More than that, the moral outlook of progressivism that prevails in institutions looks with suspicion on their most vital inclinations in this direction. Their resulting frustration has accumulated and come to self-awareness. Hence the rise of the “new right.”

Following Nietzsche, one wing of this new right traces the flattened and degraded moral landscape of the present to the influence of Christianity. In this seminar, we have been following up on this accusation with an open mind. In significant part, it is a historical question, and we will be getting into historical arguments later in the seminar. But for today, we remain at the level of psychology, asking how the subtle movements of the psyche interact with the prevailing moral order – whether pagan, Christian, or modern-secular.

There is a tendency, both in Nietzsche and in his contemporary devotees, to regard modern humanitarianism as but a thinly secularized version of Christian ethics. Doing so is understandable, given the midwit political banners and rainbow flags draped over so many church buildings, and the despiriting or even nauseating character of what transpires inside them on a Sunday morning. But to accept this facile elision of Christianity and liberalism is to skip over a lot of ground, both historically and conceptually. Getting a fuller account, both of the nature of the Christian teaching and of the more proximate, historical sources of the lameness of the present, should help us to clarify the task before us in this moment of deep cultural reset.

In such an effort, one immediately runs into a problem: some of the most authoritative voices of the Church (both Catholic and Protestant) are indistinguishable from those of secular humanitarianism. For example, in last Tuesday’s letter to American bishops, Pope Francis appears to be an immigration maximalist, on humanitarian grounds, and dubious about the legitimacy of national borders. It is not for me, a neophyte, to mark out the true faith and identify theological error. But I will say that the version of Christian teaching surfaced by Max Scheler, the “Nietzschean Catholic,” is the one that strikes me as the most promising for working our way through the crisis of the present. Or at least, for clarifying what the crisis consists of. I find Scheler’s Christianity attractive also as moral psychology. It answers to human longings for nobility. And Scheler disentangles Christian love, rightly understood, from the toxic niceness of do-gooders.

Let’s dive in.