Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age

In 1962, the young Eugene Rose undertook to write a monumental chronicle of the abandonment of Truth in the modern age. Of the hundreds of pages of material he compiled for this work, only the present essay has come down to us in completed form. Here Eugene reveals the core of all modern thought and life--the belief that all truth is relative--and shows how this belief has been translated into action in our century. Today, three decades after he wrote it, this essay is surely timelier than ever. It clearly explains why contemporary ideas, values, and attitudes--the "spirit of the age"--are shifting so rapidly in the direction of moral anarchy, as the philosophy of Nihilism enters more deeply into the fiber of society. Nietszche was right when he predicted that the 20th century would usher in "the triumph of Nihilism."

Indeed, the Christian is--in an ultimate sense--a "Nihilist"; to him, in the end, the world is nothing, and God is all. On the one hand, the true Nihilist places his faith in things that pass away and end in nothing. On the other hand, the Christian, renouncing such vanity, places his faith in the one thing that will not pass away, the Kingdom of God.