“ . . . wrestling with (my God!) my God”: Modernism, Nihilism, and Belief

Belief’s Modernity

In the tradition of Pascal, inherited religious belief is wracked by doubt and the believer is brought face to face with intimations of nothingness. In the aftermath of Nietzsche, an inherent loss of faith gives rise to new valuations, negative and affirmative, of nihilism and new figurations of belief. Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry vacillates between Pascalian tradition and Nietzschean aftermath. I want to explore the resulting poetics of nihilism and belief.

Pascal and Nietzsche are not relevant here as intellectual influences on Hopkins but rather as philosophers whose thought defines the contours of the problematic of belief in the modern age. The inaugural philosophical articulation of modernity is attributed to Descartes, at least in the eyes of Nietzsche and Heidegger (whose perspective orients my own here). In response to the insurmountable doubt that skepticism cast on Christian revelation and church doctrine as source and guarantee of truth, Descartes shifted the foundation of truth onto the human mind itself: I think, therefore I am. The new foundation of truth nevertheless retains and refashions, Heidegger argues, two elements of the Christian foundation. First, it posits a “self-supported, unshakable foundation of truth, in the sense of certainty,” and second, it determines “the essence of freedom” as “being bound by something obligatory.”¹ As refashioned by Descartes, the sense of certainty and the freedom welded to obligation are now founded not on divinity but on the “I,” that is, the impersonal, universalizing “I” of the cogito ergo sum. Heidegger then turns, again without affixing causality, from the cogito’s Christian antecedent to its corollary and future in the modern techno-scientific project in which what counts as reality is whatever comes within the ken of the abstract impersonal calculating subject that is modern Man.

In the immediate wake of this philosophical launching of modernity, Descartes’ younger contemporary Pascal disputes the cogito’s claim to certainty—not, however, in order to dispel doubt and restore certainties of doctrine and revelation, but on the contrary because doubt is insurmountable by reason and because the finitude of human beings’ understanding leaves them helpless in the face of their own mortality. Belief is sustained by the heart: “It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by reason.”² Heidegger notes just this contrast between Pascal and Descartes but seems to reduce Pascal to a mere dissenter from Descartes’ modernity without entertaining all the consequences of their contemporaneity itself:

At nearly the same time as Descartes, Pascal discovers the logic of the heart as over against the logic of calculating reason. The inner and invisible domain of the heart is not only more inward than the interior that belongs to calculating representation, and therefore more invisible; it also extends further than does the realm of merely producible objects. Only in the invisible innermost of the heart is man inclined toward what there is for him to love: the forefathers, the dead, the children, those who are to come.³

The evocation of love as this sort of communal bond of family-tribe-nation is far from Pascal. The emotional wellspring of belief in the Pascalian structure of feeling is terror: the terror of death if there is no God and the terror of eternal misery if there is and you have failed to believe in him. “One needs no great sublimity of soul,” Pascal writes,

to realize that in this life there is no true and solid satisfaction, that all our pleasures are mere vanity, that our afflictions are infinite, and finally that death which threatens us at every moment must in a few years infallibly face us with the inescapable and appalling alternative of being annihilated or wretched throughout eternity.

Nothing could be more real, or more dreadful than that. Let us put on as bold a face as we like: that is the end awaiting the world’s most illustrious life. Let us ponder these things, and then say whether it is not beyond doubt that the only good...