The Coming Pantheistic Revolution

While wandering around an antique shop last week, I came across an interesting book by Samuel J. Andrews called Christianity and Anti-Christianity In Their Final Conflict (1937). I had never heard of Andrews before but the title was interesting enough, so I opened it up and landed on a chapter entitled the ‘Pantheistic Revolution’. Andrews, who is a Christian, sees emergent Pantheism as a new and fundamentally more dangerous challenge to Western Christianity than the old-school liberal Atheism of the past;

Thus, while pantheism puts away old religions, it presents a new. This Atheism could not do. When the atheistic movement in France had affirmed its negation of God, of immortality, of worship, there was only blank nothingness before it. Between these negations and the restoration of Christianity these was no alternative. Men must go back, they could not go forward. Napoleon could not build a church on new foundations, he must rebuild on his old… The Church, therefore, with its doctrines of sin, redemption, and judgment, must be restored to its place.

Pantheism always stood out to me as the most reasonable and convincing idea about the nature of God or the Ultimate, when I first thought about this problem as a teenager. And today, I would still communicate something similar–even with my new belief and understanding of our Old Gods. In fact, I think the two beliefs are one and the same. Most Greeks had no trouble reconciling their Olympic Gods with a more philosophical and stoic understanding of a higher reality. In many ways, the Volkish Faith proposes a pantheistic notion of God. As we find divinity within ourselves individually and as a people, we necessarily appreciate the sacred dimension of nature. After all we are animals ourselves and thus apart of natural world.

Andrews goes on to address the deep conflict this new god-idea has with Traditional Christianity;

Turning to the revolutionary forces of Pantheism; these are found in its radical and irreconcilable antagonism to the fundamental facts and principles of the Christian faith. Christianity affirms a personal God; a supreme Lawgiver; the sinfulness of man; the necessity for a mediator; the sending of such a mediator; and the salvation through his Cross. Pantheism denies all this. God is not personal; man is not sinful; there is no need for any mediatorship; nor is there any mediator; human nature itself is divine.

Andrews then recruits Emerson and Heine to flesh out the consequences of Pantheism for the reader;

‘It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance, a new respect for the divinity in man, must work a revolution in all the offices and relations of men…Let a Stoic arise who shall reveal the resources of man, and tell men that with the exercise of self-trust new powers shall appear;…and the moment he acts for himself, tossing the laws, the books, and the customs out the window, we thank and revere him; that teacher shall restore the life of man to splendor, and make his name dear to all history.’

This bearing of Pantheism, when fully developed in individual men, upon the destiny of Christendom through its revolutionary forces, was [also] clearly seen by Heine, who in his Germany thus expresses himself: ‘these doctrines have developed revolutionary forces which only await the day to break forth and fill the world with terror, and with punishment.” Speaking particularly of Germany, he says: “Should that subduing talisman, the Cross, break, then will come crashing and roaring forth the world-madness of the old champions, the insane Berserker rage…That talisman is brittle, and the day will come when it will pitifully break…Thought goes before the deed, and lightning precedes thunder. German thunder will come, and ye will hear it crash as naught ever crashed before in the whole history of the world…Then will be played in Germany a drama, compared to the French Revolution will be only an innocent idyll. Just now all is tolerably quiet. The great actors haven not yet appeared upon the stage, the great army of gladiators. The hour will come.’

How far these predictions of Heine will be realized in any particular country, time must show, but that they will be realized in Christendom we see already the most significant signs. History never repeats itself; we shall see no repetition of the French Revolution. Atheistic materialism is out of date. Men are not now tempted to deny a God. On the contrary, humanity is Divine, and the first step is to make this real to ourselves. It is faith in this new humanity which is the impulse to establish a new order of things that shall be worthy of it.

The Christian Andrews gets many things right, but like Emerson, he is still trapped in a de-racialized universalist paradigm. Both of them speak only of the divinity of ‘humanity’ or the individual man, and totally miss the racial angle. The Volkish truth, on the other hand, asserts that each race or people has a specific god-way that manifests, as Jung would say, in their ‘collective unconscious’.

The second author quoted by Andrew–Heine–is a Jew. So obviously the ethnic angle of the ‘pantheistic revolution’ was not lost on him at all. Rather, Heine worryingly predicts the dramatic consequences a Germanic break with Christendom would entail. To me, it is clear that many Jewish intellectuals in the early 19^th century saw that the weak Talisman of the Cross (which they themselves hexed us with long ago) was losing its power. This is perhaps why they invented communism; it was means of herding the white masses away from the emergent—and truly socialist—Volkish [Pantheistic] revolution they saw coming.

In closing, Andrews doesn’t give much hope to his Christian brothers. It is, however, a positive vision for us;

In estimating the power of Pantheism, we must remember that it is far more than a religious philosophy. It is a faith—faith in the guidance of humanity [the Volk!] through the Divine dwelling in it. No great deeds are done except by those who have faith in their cause, and, therefore, themselves. We find an illustration of this in the wars of the French Revolution when the semi-religious worship of Democracy, as establishing the rights of man, filled its armies with marvelous endurance and a terrible energy. Pantheism is a faith, and can serve as an impulse to mighty deeds. Its mission is to bring a condition worth of our Divine Humanity [Race!]; and its first step is to uproot and destroy all that stands in its way. Nothing is to be spared which hinders the realization of its great end. Religious systems in conflict with it, and especially Christianity which teaches the sinfulness of man, are doomed to destruction. It will be satisfied with nothing less than the submission of Christendom to its authority, and with its homage paid to its great representative.