The West (so-called Christendom) is confronted with a new menace, a sort of psychedelic mysticism, and is being haunted by the spirit of Zen, a cult of iconoclasm. There is a tendency toward an anti-puritanical hedonism and a detached existence that has resulted in mental troubles, various forms of violence, including campus riots, and other signs of psycho-social deterioration. All this is a serious symptom of the spiritual decline of the West.
With the rise of existentialism and the impact of Zen on the West, there has emerged a mood known as the “new humanism” with emphasis on personal freedom and human autonomy. Proponents of the new humanism assert that modern man has come of age and can now manage very well without God. Some even blasphemously pronounce that God is dead. Such a stance is not really new; it has a counterpart in the radical school of Zen, founded more than a thousand years ago by Lin-chi (d. 867), who advocated: “If you want to grasp the correct view of Dharma … smash whatever you come across.… Smash the Buddha, Patriarchs and Arhats, if you come across them. Smash your parents and all your relations.” Then, we are told, one will really be “emancipated.” The emancipation of man demands the abolition of all authority and even the death of God.
But, in fact, the dignity of man is related intrinsically to the existence of God. To use Dostoevsky’s words: “If God does not exist, then I am God.” In place of the God-man appears the man-god, the strong personality who stands beyond morality, to whom everything is permitted, who feels he can break laws as he wills. Thus the humanity of man disappears. So, as Konstantin Mochulsky points out, it was one of Dostoevsky’s greatest discoveries that “the nature of man is correlated to the nature of God; if there is no God, there is also no man.” Instead, there is a “new demonic being.”
In China, a special name, “Mo-Wong” (“demon-King”), has been ascribed to the Zen-Masters, who have absolute faith in their own inner being and therefore want to live from within, unbound by rules or any kind of external authority. Now we find in the West their spiritual grandchildren, the hippies. The hippies are victims of a particularly destructive philosophy. They believe that the human being has marvelous resources within himself that can be released and made available to him; all he needs to do is to submit to certain kinds of stimulus and let his psychic equilibrium be disoriented by chemical agencies (such as LSD) that give him the sensation of experiencing tremendous things. There is an absolute freedom in the hippies’ way of life. And in the self-destructiveness with which this freedom often expresses itself, there is selfishness, callousness, irresponsibility, and indifference to the feelings of others.
Furthermore, there is a complete rejection of or indifference to the political system, and a nihilistic desire for destruction of all existing social and political forms. This is the product of postwar disillusionment and restlessness. The hippies have raised their voices against virtually every aspect of society: parents, politics, marriage, the family, the savings bank, organized religion, higher education. They find society too hideous to contemplate, and so they withdraw from it. They are antisocial to the point of being neurotic. Such an attitude is spiritual suicide. To look upon life as utterly meaningless is equivalent to repudiating God and resigning oneself to an everlasting emptiness. Culture, morality, and faith alike perish in the blackness of this chaos.
We in no wise wish to defend the present humanist system and culture. We are not unaware of the danger of today’s sensate culture, which is in process of disintegration. We also realize that, as Elton Trueblood has written, “we live in a ‘cut flower’ civilization” that may be radiant, fragrant, and lovely now but will soon wither and die, because it has been severed from its root. We further acknowledge that any system that is alienated from the truth of God has no absolute value and is doomed to failure. As Pitirim Sorokin pointed out in The Crisis of Our Age, “the history of human progress is a history of incurable stupidity. In the course of human history, several thousands of revolutions have been launched with a view to establish a paradise on earth. Practically none of them has ever achieved its purpose.” Man in his finitude and sinful nature can never build an ideal society. Without the Kingdom of God, we are doomed to weary and torturous pilgrimages from calamity to calamity, from crisis to crisis.
However, though Christian believers too stand against the humanist culture, their position is intrinsically different from that of the hippies. In the first place, of course, it starts from belief in God, while the hippies are non-theistic and are “against the Lord and against his anointed.” In the second place, the hippies offer views that are negative and even destructive. They provide no positive answer and therefore offer no hope; they simply protest. But no one can save the culture by mere negative attack or denial. Why is human culture sick? Why is modern civilization breaking down? We must search for the root cause of human disease. The chief cause of the failure of humanist culture lies in its alienation from Christian faith and its negligence in things spiritual. The whole movement of the hippies, whether in the modern existentialistic form of the West or in the Oriental garb of Zen, represents only a reaction in the trend of human thought. It is essentially a negative protest by human nature against the objective order, against the established system, and against shallow rationalism. And it is a movement only inward, not upward toward the “things above.” Its kernel is the deification of the historical function of human nature, but it still remains ensnared (not emancipated) in the very pit of traditional humanism. What mankind really needs is regeneration by the grace of God, not self-deification by the efforts of man.
The new humanism with its emphasis on total freedom and its false notion that modern man has come of age and can now manage very well without God differs from the old one, not for the better, but for the worse. It will inevitably turn out to be more disastrous. Yet it is nothing more than a way of defeating its own purpose, and as a result it will lead to its own destruction. For when man rebelled against the Most High God and cut himself off from His life and love and fellowship, then he separated himself from “the fountain of living waters,” which is the source of all blessings. The glory of God departed. Then man no longer walked in the light but sat in darkness and in the shadow of death. Modern man is now confronted with the menace of a new Dark Age; he is marching toward nihilistic destruction. The whole culture speaks of the loss of the human and the death of hope. In order to escape the demon of despair, modern man seeks in vain to transcend nihilism by a mystical leap of faith rooted in nothing. Drug-induced mysticism through the use of LSD is the most eloquent testimony that modern man has come to the dead end of his hope for finding a rational answer to his existence, and has no way out of his predicament whatsoever—unless he completely forsakes the false creed of human autonomy (i.e., the spirit of Zen, the cult of iconoclasm) and comes back to God, looking unto Jesus Christ who is the Light of the world, the hope of glory, and the only Saviour and emancipator of mankind.
