This concluding chapter offers some reflections on the nature of nihilism in the works explored. An overview is given of the different versions of the problem of nihilism that the thinkers and writers examined here have sketched. This is followed by another comparative overview of their different proposals for solutions to nihilism. A section is also dedicated to showing the many ways in which the thinkers of the nineteenth century anticipated key elements of twentieth-century existentialism. Among the elements discussed are the realization of the nothingness, authenticity, existential freedom, rebellion, the existentialist hero, and the absurd. The chapter concludes with some reflections on the relevance of nihilism in the twenty-first century.

Chapter 9 gives a reading of Nietzsche’s account of nihilism based on his unfinished work known as The Will to Power. Given the death of God and the collapse of traditional values, people are debilitated by a sense of hopelessness and meaninglessness. Traditional values no longer seem meaningful. Nietzsche outlines three key cosmological values that one is obliged to abandon once one has reached the stage of nihilism: (1) the idea that there is any purpose or goal in the universe or in human existence; (2) the notion that the universe constitutes some kind of unity or coherent system; and (3) the very notion of truth itself. Nietzsche includes, among the group of metaphysical prejudices or false beliefs, the law of contradiction itself, which is often considered to be the very foundation of any kind of rational thought. These metaphysical prejudices constitute the preconditions for science itself. Nietzsche raises the question of the possibility of creating a new set of values on the strength of one’s own authority. But he believes that people in his age have not yet emancipated themselves from nihilism to the extent that they can do this.

Can we make sense of the idea that nature imposes certain limits on our activities? Seemingly not if we accept the disenchanted conception of nature that goes hand in hand with scientific naturalism, for it is typical of such a picture that the only source of value is to be found in our desires or utilities, and that it makes no sense to suppose that our activities could be normatively constrained from without – as would be the case if there were an external source of value. My aim in what follows is to explore the possibility of defending this realist picture without inviting the charge that we have succumbed to a speculative metaphysics. To put in the terms presupposed by the typical naturalistic philosopher, the question is whether we can make sense of the idea that nature imposes certain limits on our activities without endorsing supernaturalism. The terms ‘naturalism’ and ‘supernaturalism’ tend to be treated as antonyms, but they have various significations and one of my tasks will be to disambiguate them, to agree with the naturalist that supernaturalism can be suspect, but deny that it follows from this that there is no external source of value, nor that we must be atheists, nor even that the term ‘supernaturalism’ should be dispensed with.

In the titles and subtitles of David Jasper’s ‘sacred trilogy’ the word ‘sacrament’ appears only in his third book, but Jasper adopts the language of sacrament throughout to designate the way that transcendent reality becomes wholly immanent and gives rise to silence. Sacrament is thus no longer understood to be a manifestation of the divine through a material thing but as the silence of what Jasper names as “Total Presence”, instantiated in both the textual body of the world and in human bodies that make a journey into the desert place. This sacramental phenomenon comes to a focus in the text of poetry, novels, the visual arts and music. This chapter reflects on the extent to which this refiguring of sacrament might enable us to re-think the boundary between the ‘sacred’ and the ‘secular’ which seems to persist in our late-modern age. It does so by developing five themes in relation to sacrament: the death of God and universality; the sacred; inside/outside of the text; participating in Christ; and community.

This chapter addresses the advent of Nothing within the history of religions as an advent necessarily within literature, and within the ritual enactments of literature as sacred. If the Commedia of Dante is our most profoundly heterodox work while at the same time our most purely orthodox, then Joyce is the late modern counterpart of Dante, and Finnegans Wake is not only the final epic of late modernity, but also at once deeply primordial and apocalyptic, so that its pure heterodoxy is nonetheless a profoundly liturgical work. Only the advent of a uniquely modern Nothing makes possible this universal liturgical celebration. This Nothing is more primal in the Wake than the liturgical movement of anamnesis, but this is an anamnesis of the fall, condemnation, and crucifixion of H.C.E. or Here Comes Everybody, repeated again and again, even as the host is ever broken in the mass. Thus the epic becomes our only purely liturgical epic, embodying a pure action that is a purely ritual action, one truly irresistible to all who actually encounter it as a liturgical mode of being, which is our most sacred mode.