A book written in a basement
In the early 1960s, in a basement flat near downtown San Francisco, a young man sat at a desk covered with stacks of books and folders of notes. Little daylight reached the room. A murder had been committed there some years before he moved in, and neighbours said something unpleasant still hung about the place; the tenant had covered one wall with icons and kept a red lamp burning in front of them. His name was Eugene Rose. He had been baptised into the Orthodox Church a short while earlier and would not be tonsured a monk for another eight years.
What he was writing was meant to be enormous: a chronicle in fourteen chapters called The Kingdom of Man and the Kingdom of God. Only the seventh chapter was ever finished in typescript. That chapter is the book we now have under the title Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age, published by his brotherhood in 1994, twelve years after his death, and correctly attributed on the title page to “Eugene (Fr. Seraphim) Rose”, because the man who wrote it was not yet Fr. Seraphim.
What the word actually means
The word has been worn smooth by use. Most people hear it and picture something loud: a terrorist, a wrecked gallery, a young man in black declaring that nothing matters. Rose begins by clearing those away. Such things, he says, are the spectacular surface of the problem and not the problem. He wants the mentality underneath, the one that produces them and also produces much quieter people.
For the definition he goes to the man he regarded as the fountain of philosophical nihilism, and quotes him directly. Nietzsche's sentence runs: “That there is no truth; that there is no absolute state of affairs — no ‘thing-in-itself.’ This alone is Nihilism, and of the most extreme kind.” Rose notes that most of us have heard the same doctrine in its domesticated form, in the sentence that all truth is relative. Then he draws the conclusion that gives his book its shape.
the question of Nihilism is, most profoundly, a question of truth; it is, indeed, the question of truth
Eugene (Fr. Seraphim) Rose, Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age, ch. I “Introduction: The Question of Truth” (St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, Second Edition, 2020)
Two sentences that cannot be said
The most bracing passage in the book is also the shortest, and it is a piece of ordinary logic that anyone can check. Two statements are in wide circulation: all truth is empirical, and all truth is relative. Rose points out that the first is not itself an empirical statement — no experiment establishes it — and the second is itself an absolute claim. Each destroys itself in the act of being made. Whatever else follows, this much does: if there is any truth at all, it cannot be merely relative.
From this he draws a corollary with wider consequences. The first principles of any system of knowledge cannot be established by that system, because they are what the system begins from; they must be given in advance. The coherence and uniformity of nature, the reliability of reason to draw conclusions from observation, the assumption that what one person knows another can know too — none of these is a laboratory result. They are held, and held reasonably, but they are held by faith in the plain sense of the word.
He is careful here, and it is worth being careful with him. He is not attacking science, and he is not scoring a debating point against scientists. His argument is that everyone, in every age, stands on something not proved by the methods they use afterwards, and that the interesting question is never whether a person has faith but what his faith is resting on.
Four stages, and the first is the quietest
The body of the book traces a sequence Rose calls the nihilist dialectic: four stages, each following from the first denial rather than opposing it. He is explicit that they overlap, that they are not simply chronological, and that no one is a pure example of any of them; most people are a mixture of at least two.
Of these, the first is the one he treats at greatest length, and the one likeliest to describe the air a reader is breathing. He describes a civilisation that still speaks, on formal occasions, of eternal verities and human dignity and Christian civilisation, while nobody in the room takes the words with entire seriousness. They have become ornaments of language, evoking a memory of a time when they meant something definite. Nothing has been denied. The meaning has simply been allowed to leave.
Whether his four-stage scheme is the right map of modern intellectual history is a fair question, and a reader is free to think it too tidy. The observation underneath it is harder to dismiss: that outright denial is rare, and that beliefs usually die by being kept on as decoration.
- Liberalism — not a political party but a temper of mind, in which truth is neither attacked nor defended but quietly moved off the centre of the table. The old words are kept and the old meanings are allowed to drain out of them.
- Realism — the narrowing of the real to what can be measured, so that anything else becomes decoration or sentiment.
- Vitalism — the substitution of vivid experience for truth, once truth has been given up: intensity as a criterion, feeling as evidence.
- The nihilism of destruction — the open turn against order itself, which the twentieth century saw at a scale nobody had imagined.
He was describing a country he had lived in
This is the point at which the book stops being an essay. Eugene Rose was not a spectator of the condition he was analysing. He had rejected the Protestant Christianity of his boyhood as thin, gone looking for reality in Western philosophy and then in the religions of the East, and arrived at nothing. He read Nietzsche until the sentences had a charge in them. He experimented deliberately with breaking down logical thought, on the theory that reason was the obstacle.
Hieromonk Damascene, who edited the manuscript, records that when Eugene was asked long afterwards to describe those years he would say only that he had been in hell. He drank. He hammered on the floor and shouted at the God he had announced was dead. Once, drunk, he wrote that he was sick, as all men are sick who are absent from the love of God.
That sentence is the key to the tone of the whole book. He is not standing above the nihilist and describing him; he is describing something he had been. It also explains an odd generosity in his later writing about atheists.
He thought that a furious, hating atheism — the kind that grapples with God and accuses Him of injustice — is a spiritual condition rather than the absence of one, and that it has more than once ended in the sight of the One the atheist was actually looking for. The danger, in his reading, was never the great deniers. It was the people for whom Christ had quietly become a word.
Neither apology nor diatribe
Rose sets out his method at the start by naming two ways of getting it wrong. The first is diatribe: condemning Nazism for its barbarism, or the avant-garde for its pessimism, which he thinks leaves the root untouched, since error is defeated only by truth and most criticism of nihilism never reaches the question of truth at all.
The second is the opposite, and he handles it more carefully, because he feels its pull. It is easy to see the nihilist as a casualty of a sick civilisation — and there is something in that, he grants, since an age whose best as well as worst minds turn to nihilism is plainly ill. But sympathy is not a diagnosis, and he warns against a particular slide.
He will not let anyone off on the ground of being a victim, himself included; there is no such thing, he says, as an entirely innocent victim. This is not a comfortable book about how everyone is doing their best. It is also not a book that enjoys the discomfort it causes, which is a rarer thing.
to allow sympathy for an unfortunate person to pass over into receptivity to his ideas
Eugene (Fr. Seraphim) Rose, Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age, ch. I (St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, Second Edition, 2020)
Is it true, or does it work for me?
Here is where a book from 1962 becomes a question for a reader in 2026, and the question is not a rebuke to anyone. It is simply the fork in the road. There are two ways to ask about a religion. One is: is this true — is the world in fact like this, whether or not I find it congenial? The other is: does this work for me — does it steady me, suit my temperament, fit the life I have?
The second question is not wicked, and everybody asks it. The trouble Rose identifies is what happens when a culture forgets that the first question was ever asked. Once truth has moved off the centre of the table, religion survives as a preference, and preferences are chosen by fit. A faith held that way cannot ask anything of you that you did not already want, because the moment it does you will change it for one that suits better.
Orthodox Christianity asks the reader to take the first question seriously, and it is fair to say plainly what that involves. It means the claim that God became man in a particular place under a particular governor, that He rose, and that the Church He founded has handed on His teaching rather than invented it, is either so or not so. It is not being offered as a style of spirituality, or as a set of practices that some people find helpful.
Many Christians of other traditions would say exactly the same about their own convictions, and in saying it they are asking the question Rose cared about. That is real common ground, and it is worth more than it usually gets credit for.
Beyond nihilism
The last chapter turns to the optimistic version of modern man: the idealists, the scientists pushing back frontiers, the young people working for peace and brotherhood and confident of the future. Rose takes them seriously and declines to sneer. His criticism is narrow and specific. Their faith and their hope are directed entirely at this world, and the goods of this world pass away; a hope pinned wholly to things that end is a hope that will not survive the things ending.
Against that he sets an inversion he knows will sound like a paradox, and which he introduces almost apologetically, aware that it lays him open to the charge of having a nihilism of his own. The Christian, he says, is in an ultimate sense a nihilist too — but the other way round.
The difference, as he puts it, is that one nothingness proceeds from an abyss and the other from abundance, and that calling the Christian's poverty nihilism is really only a literary device, since what it is in practice is fullness. He adds a warning that many readers will find hard, and which is nonetheless the logic of his whole argument: the human mind will not stay empty, and the man who cannot believe in Christ will end by believing in Antichrist. One may dispute the conclusion. The premise — that nobody actually manages to believe nothing — is not easy to refute.
to him, in the end, the world is nothing, and God is all
Eugene (Fr. Seraphim) Rose, Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age, ch. V “Beyond Nihilism” (St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, Second Edition, 2020)
How to read it, and whether to
Nihilism is his hardest book, and it is not the place to begin. It is early, unrevised, philosophical in a way his later writing is not, and it carries the marks of the years it came out of. Fr. Seraphim himself later thought his earliest pieces rather abstract. A reader wanting his voice at its warmest should start with God's Revelation to the Human Heart, a lecture he gave to students at Santa Cruz in 1981, which is forty-odd pages long and is mostly stories.
But the short book has one thing the later ones do not. It is the record of a man mapping the country he had just escaped from, while the roads were still fresh in his memory, and it is written to people still living there. He did not think that modern men could come to Christ fully until they had first seen how far they had gone from Him — until, as he put it, they had faced the nihilism in themselves.
That is the offer, and it is an offer rather than an accusation. If the question of whether anything is finally true has stopped being a live question, there is a book by a Californian in a basement who found that it was still live, and nearly died of it, and came out the other side into a small dark church in San Francisco where the service was in a language he did not yet understand. The door of that church was not locked. It generally is not.