Crisis in the West - Part II

WITH the appearance of the specifically modern type of humanity there suddenly comes into existence a really unique situation, as a result of the twofold work of destruction which now begins to go forward. For the first time there arises the tremendous danger of a collective annihilation of religion, both of the natural religion of the ancients and of the natural-supernatural religion of medieval Christianity. We are not in a position to appreciate quite clearly the significance of that terrible howling of the wolf-man who appears at the end of this long process of development. […] Mankind’s fall from the lofty spiritual heights of the Middle Ages must be in another category altogether from that of the ancients, for their religious level was, after all, but a natural one. The howling of the wolf that we hear today is, therefore, the distinctive cry for help uttered by the man who feels by instinct that he has lost both the classical and the Christian piety, the cry for help of a man who, as a metaphysical being, now feels himself really cheated out of the ultimate reason for his existence. It is the cry of the man, now self-dishonored and spiritually bankrupt, who may perhaps rapturously await the approach of a new revelation, but who, after the absolute revelation of Christianity, will await it in vain. In this way he may come to feel that unless he himself returns to the Christian message, the universal defeat of the human spirit will draw appreciably near. And in all this is to be found the element of metaphysical terror which is voiced in his very cry of distress. For that cry is itself a self-manifestation of the metaphysical depths which exist even in this man who is spiritually bankrupt; and the irony of it is that such a man is always incapable of interpreting this unconscious metaphysical manifestation of his own being in the one and only sense in which it is susceptible of interpretation. Here we find verified, almost literally, the profound ideas which, in 1849, in his work, Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard propounded to the entire nineteenth century, as in a single great sermon after the manner of Savonarola. We can, indeed, truly say that the crisis of the spiritual sickness is reached when the dying man no longer recognizes himself as moribund. It is the point where the paroxysm of fever turns, as it were, into spiritual delirium.