Fear and Trembling in the Postmodern World: Part 1 - Blitz
And now, for something entirely different! A long-form essay in multiple installments.
Dear Reader,
Five years ago, following a time of spiritual crisis, I wrote a long-form essay titled, “Fear and Trembling in the Postmodern World.” The conclusions I reached in that essay have influenced me ever since. While I never look back on something I’ve written without noticing things I would like to change, I feel this work has mostly stood the test of time. I therefore present it to you unedited, but I am breaking it up into multiple articles so it will be less overwhelming. I hope you enjoy this project and take personal benefit from it. Thanks for reading!
Part One: Blitz
Have you ever woken in terror at the sound of thunder? Yes, of course you have. In that moment between sleeping and waking, you imagine yourself under attack. Adrenaline rushes through your veins—your heart races. Even in the light of day, the crackle of lightning and echoing roar of thunder have the power to make us stand in awe. In the dark of night, this spectacle can terrify.
On such a night, Martin Luther is said to have been riding in the countryside when he was caught in the middle of a thunderstorm. A bolt of lightning struck near his horse, and feeling the mad rush of terror, he uttered that famous prayer to his family’s patron saint: “Help me, Saint Anne! I will become a monk!”
When this story is related by historians, it is typically followed by the explanation that Luther was, after all, a medieval man. The new men of science were conquering the cities, but Luther was a country boy through and through. He spoke of demons and the devil not in a purely hypothetical manner, but as apparitions before his eyes. He feared the goblins of the forest and the terrors of the storm. Yes, the word blitz (German for “lightning”) and its Latin equivalent are sprinkled throughout Luther’s writings. The might of God as displayed in the violence of nature had a firm hold on his thinking. This should hardly surprise us. After all, his Saxon ancestors assigned the power of thunder to Thor.
I too had a close encounter with lightning. I was lying in bed one evening when I was about twenty years old, listening to a storm pass. At first, the thunder came at regular intervals and shook the walls of the house. Then it lessened in severity until it was only a low rumble in the distance. Thinking myself perfectly safe, I set about the business of slumber, only to be jolted by the loudest noise I had ever heard. It was as if the bolt of lightning had struck within that very room. My heart seemed to pound out of my chest, and to borrow a phrase from the King James Bible, I was sore afraid. The next morning, the prized white pine in our front yard was etched with an unmistakable scar, and we realized how close we had come to this outburst of nature. However, I had no intention in that moment of adopting the monastic life. Rather, I marveled at how my modern shelter had protected me.
Our ancestors knew what it was to fear a lightning bolt. They lived in constant dread of the forces of nature. This anxiety is best demonstrated by how they assigned deity to nature itself, imagining every whisper of the wind to be the product of divine machinations. Perhaps this was due to a vain hope that if nature was controlled by gods and those gods could somehow be appeased, they might be spared the awful miseries it dealt them year after year: floods, drought, disease, pestilence, earthquakes, and whirlwinds. For them, the world was less a well-oiled machine and more a teeming chaos. Thus, in the mythology of ancient Babylon, the god Marduk slew Tiamat—the great sea goddess who symbolized the primordial chaos of the waters—and made the heavens and earth from her corpse.
Yes, the power of nature to take from them their lives and livelihoods caused the ancients to dwell in constant anxiety of the world around them. Modern man thought he could solve this problem. Wishing to never live in dread again, he sought to understand the world around him, and in understanding to move beyond fear. Much good came of this venture, and many natural mysteries were explained. Thus, when you and I see lightning and hear thunder, we understand that they are caused by an electromagnetic field, and this small bit of knowledge eases our fear by providing the illusion of control.
But though modern man plumbed the depths of nature’s mysteries and found the answers to many questions, his anxiety by no means decreased. Just when he imagined he could know his fear, and by knowing it control it, a new specter rose to haunt him. Despite his best efforts, nothing could have prepared him for a far greater source of anxiety: the evils of the human heart. Here was the most fearsome and uncontrollable enemy of all—one far crueler than nature, and with a greater power to destroy.
The more people were able to tame nature with the strength of their minds, the more their evil hearts grew in their destructive capacity. Many of the blessings of science led to curses the moment they were placed in the hands of selfish, grasping human beings. A revolution in industry threatened as much harm to nature as nature had caused to humanity. No sooner were atoms harnessed for energy than they were used to create weapons that presented an existential threat to life on earth. The internet was meant to bring us together, but it has proved equally adept at tearing us apart. In every case, it was not nature or technology that was evil, but the humans who sought to control it. The fault, as Shakespeare once wrote, is not in our stars.
Now we stand no longer afraid of the blitz, but terrified of ourselves. Not that we would admit it, for humans always endeavor to convince themselves of their own innate goodness. Yet our insistence is hollow, for our deepest anxieties betray us. We are not only scared of our neighbors: we are terrified that the same evils we see in them might exist within us. This is a great anxiety of our age, which we constantly seek to deny. We have striven to move beyond the fear of nature, only to be confronted with the fear of ourselves, and for all our wisdom, we are running scared.
The horrors on the banks of the Somme, the Soviet gulags, the Rape of Nanking, the crematories of Auschwitz, the mountains of dead in Dresden, and the mushroom clouds in Hiroshima and Nagasaki all pointed to the inescapable conclusion that there is real evil in this world, and it lies within the heart of man. Any other conclusion would render the word “evil” meaningless. It was not the unfeeling whims of nature that brought us low, but the very will to power we once praised.
The modernists who were willing to admit this found their utopian dreams shattered, but many clung to the hope that it was only a few bad apples that had spoiled the bushel, and a perfect society was still within reach. As the postmodern age dawned, they suppressed their fears rather than facing them. In the words of W.H. Auden’s great post-war poem, The Age of Anxiety,
We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.1
Are we so much better than the ancients, who knew what it was to live in fear while standing in awe? Ah, but there is a greater fear than these.
TO BE CONTINUED…
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PUBLISHED ELSEWHERE:
“The Ancient Origins of the Nibelungenlied” at the Mythic Mind Substack
Auden, W.H. The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue. Ed. Alan Jacobs. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. 105.