Christ or Nihil

Milbank closes a superb article on the “radical pietists” (Hamann and Jacobi) with this paragraph:

“Because [the radical pietists] point theology to a radical orthodoxy they also show how theology can outwit nihilism. Not by seeking to reinstate reason, as many opponents of postmodernity would argue. This is absurd, because nihilism is not scepticism, nor relativism. No, as Hamann and Jacobi understood, the rational Enlightenment already in effect taught nihilism. For nihilism is the purest objectivity, since it is possible objectively to conclude that there is only nothing. Indeed, as Catherine Pickstock has argued, only nothing fulfills the conditions for a perfectly inert, controllable and present object . . . .

“What the radical pietists realised was that to be human means, primarily, that we must reckon with an immense depth behind things. There are only to possible attitudes toward this depth: for the first, like Kant, we distinguish what is clear from what is hidden: but then the depth is an abyss, and what appears, as only apparent, will equally induce vertigo. This is why critical philosophy, the attitude of pure reason itself, is also the stance of nihilism. The twist added by postmodernism is simply that appearances themselves cannot be made clearly present, but are in ceaseless flux. The second possibility is that we trust the depth, and appearance as the gift of depth, and history as the restoration of the loss of this depth in Christ. By comparison with this reason – Christianity – we can see easily the secret identity of all impersonal religions which celebrate fate or the void with the nihilism of modernity. Hence it is indeed for radical orthodoxy an either/or: philosophy (Western or Eastern) as a purely autonomous discipline, or theology: Herod or the magi, Pilate or the God-man.”