Jünger (and Lewis) on the homo religiosus

From section 24 of Ernst Jünger’s 1951 treatise on freedom in the face of the authoritarianism of the modern state, The Forest Passage:

Still more important is the consideration that in many people today a strong need for religious ritual coexists with an aversion to churches. There is a sense of something missing in existence, which explains all the activity around gnostics, founders of sects, and evangelists, who all, more or less successfully, step into the role of the churches. One might say that a certain definite quantity of religious faith always exists, which in previous times was legitimately satisfied by the churches. Now, freed up, it attaches itself to all and everything. This is the gullibility of modern man, which coexists with a lack of faith. He believes what he reads in the newspaper but not what is written in the stars.

One thinks immediately of CS Lewis’s observation, in his 1943 essay “Equality,” that “spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.”

But just what happens when you’ve spent a generation or two gobbling poison? Later in The Forest Passage, Jünger further describes this gullible, average modern man mentioned above—the kind mass-produced by materialistic modern education (of whatever political persuasion):

Theologians of today must be prepared to deal with people as they are today—above all with people who do not live in sheltered reserves or other lower pressure zones. A man stands before them who has emptied his chalice of suffering and doubt, a man formed far more by nihilism than by the church—ignoring for the moment how much nihilism is concealed in the church itself. Typically, this person will be little developed ethically or spiritually, however eloquent he may be in convincing platitudes. He will be alert, intelligent, active, skeptical, inartistic, a natural-born debaser of higher types and ideas, an insurance fanatic, someone set on his own advantage, and easily manipulated by the catchphrases of propaganda whose often abrupt turnabouts he will hardly perceive; he will gush humanitarian theory, yet be equally inclined to awful violence beyond all legal limits or international law whenever a neighbor or fellow human being does not fit into his system. At the same time he will feel haunted by malevolent forces, which penetrate even into his dreams, have a low capacity to enjoy himself, and have forgotten the meaning of a real festival. On the other hand, it must be added that he enjoys the advantages of a peaceful age of technological comfort: that the average life expectancy has significantly risen; that the basic tenets of theoretical equality are universally recognized; and that, in some places at least, there are models to be studied of lifestyles that, in their comfort for all levels of society, their individual freedoms, and automatized perfection, have perhaps never existed before. It is not unthinkable that this lifestyle will spread after the titanic era of technology has run its course. Just the same, man is suffering a loss, and this loss explains the manifest grayness and hopelessness of his existence, which in some cities and even in whole lands so overshadows life that the last smiles have been extinguished and people seem trapped in Kafkaesque underworlds.

This is strikingly recognizable, like a description of the entire population of Twitter. And again—this is from 1951.

And what is one to do, at least with regard to reorienting man’s religious instinct? Jünger continues:

Giving this man an inkling of what has been taken from him, even in the best possible present circumstances, and of what immense power still rests within him—this is the theological task.

This is a tall order, not least because of the objection that Jünger anticipates earlier: of the self-evident goodness of statistical progress. Compare Jonah Goldberg’s review of The Reactionary Mind, by Michael Warren Davis (which I briefly recommended in my reading year-in-review). Davis spent much of his book pointing out the dislocation, distraction, and spiritual rot of modern culture and Goldberg responded with life expectancy and GDP. These people are not speaking the same language.

Food for thought.

The Forest Passage isn’t solely about modern man as a hungry homo religiosus, but it’s a significant support for Jünger’s overall argument about the powerlessness of the individual—atomized, overawed, divorced from the institutions that used to offer support, and neither educated nor pious enough to develop the individual will to resist—in the face of the state, which seeks to usurp the place of everything of importance in the individual’s life. This, as it happens, is something Jünger knew a lot about.

It’s dense and borderline mystical in places—an altogether German combination—and very good so far. I look forward to finishing it.

I’ve posted one of Jünger’s sharply observed descriptions of a typical modern man before, The Glass Bees’ Fillmor, “one of the highest peaks” in the modern “mountain range of narrow-mindedness.” Read that here. And I’ve speculated on one very particular field’s role as a substitute religion here.