Polishing the Turd of Nihilism

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 6 August 2015.

Camus in Stockholm

One thing I have been wondering about the project is why the French matter so much to it.

In my mind, they matter because the project needs to take on the philosophies of our age and expose their limits. Graham Greene nailed this approach in The Power and the Glory: a very weak, broken, and ineffective priest fizzles out and a noble, hard-working atheist lieutenant triumphs, and yet the triumph is empty and everything the priest stood for lives on or is resurrected in others.

I've come to see Arthur as this triumph of the Church, a type of lodestone of the Church. In and of himself we see both beauty and failure. His perfection doesn't lead anybody anywhere; his brokenness does, because the brokenness is completed by Christ. On the other hand, Farthington and Steffi are obsessed with perfect systems--the ultimate manipulations or the fruition of grand ideologies.

Somewhere in between are the French, who I think are about polishing the turd of nihilism. Camus and Sartre try to give us some sort of way to be Christian without Christ. Baudrillard and Derrida delight in exposing the limits of language. There's a poetry and a beauty to what they write, but with the former, I see misplaced faith in the lack of God, and in the latter, I realize I'm not chasing shadows of truth, just shadows of shadows of shadows. Of course, I'm not well-read enough in any of them, but out of all of them, Camus is the only one who holds my attention for long. I worry about things that spark my intellect without engaging my soul; I prefer the combination of the two.

And really, I worry that our project gets mired down in confronting these philosophies and that we don't direct enough energy toward its core, which in my eyes is evangelization. We have written far more criticism about the project than we have created the project itself, or rather, somehow the criticism has become the project itself!

We have a lot about exposing the limits of the world, but not enough drawing people toward the beauty of God. Perhaps I'm blaming French philosophy for this effect because it is the effect French philosophy has on me.