Paradise and Utopia

Father John describes the way the First World World shattered confidence in utopia with Western Christendom, and how the growing specter of nihilism caused a small and diverse group of intellectuals to return to traditional Christianity in the years that followed.

In this final episode telling of Dostoevsky's encounter with the "specter of nihilism," Fr. John brings attention to the novelist's characters that most revealed the radiant hope of Christ. The first of these was Prince Lev Myshkin in the novel The Idiot. The second was Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov. The episode concludes with an excerpt from Age of Nihilism about Dostoevsky's vision of the heavenly transformation of the world.

Returning to a literary career after a decade of exile, Fyodor Dostoevsky confronted one of the great delusions of secular humanism: that man is ultimately a rational being whose happiness depends on the exercise of self-interest. Characters in his novels The Idiot and Demons were designed to demonstrate that nihilistic self-destruction is the only outcome of such convictions. Father John concludes the episode by showing how nihilism played itself out in the fictional moral collapse of Dostoevsky's protagonist Raskolnikov and the real-life moral collapse of Friedrich Nietzsche.

In this final presentation on the nihilistic philosophy of Nietzsche, Fr. John considers the philosopher's final work, an autobiography entitled Ecce Homo. The book's strange title is discussed in light of Nietzsche's claim to be the West's alternative to Christ. The episode ends with a spiritual and psychological reflection on why, having completed the work, Nietzsche went totally insane.

Friedrich Nietzsche is in many ways the father of modern nihilism. In this episode, Fr. John describes the philosopher's relationship to the atheism of contemporary utopian Christendom, and how the music of Richard Wagner played a role in leading him toward nihilism. As with previous episodes, this one introduces the listener to some music that is both beautiful and historically important.

In this introduction to the final part of Paradise and Utopia, Fr. John reads the prologue to his recently released book, The Age of Nihilism: Christendom from the Great War to the Culture Wars. The episode introduces the nihilistic philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and the role compositions by Richard Wagner played in his formation. Included are musical excerpts of the latter's famous "Wedding March" and "Ride of the Valkyries."

In this final episode of part three of the podcast, Fr. John Strickland traces the outcome of secular humanism in the case of the Russian Revolution. Though numerous Orthodox Christians warned of the impending disaster facing a post-Christian Christendom, Vladimir Lenin and his Bolsheviks took advantage of discontent caused by the First World War to plunge violently into a project of counterfeit transcendence they called "building socialism."