The Hope of a Holy Church in an Era of Cynics

You can find cynicism everywhere these days. It is documented in countless articles and blog posts, it is the subject of office banter, and it is the native language of the very-online young men known as “edgelords.” While these figures were once mostly hidden from public view, concern about them has recently become more prominent in mainstream outlets as it has become obvious that they are giving voice to questions being pondered by many young men: What is the point of working toward a career only to exist as a consumer feeding the economic system? What is the point of voting or running for public office in a corrupt government? What is the point of dating when women want only the most attractive or powerful man available regardless of his intentions? What is the point of bringing children into a world of political strife and climate disaster?

 In this time of uncertainty and despair about a seemingly bleak future, many young men are self-medicating by embracing vices that have become easily accessible in our online age: gambling, pornography, and endless gaming. Many have sworn off dating altogether, deciding that women are yet another pernicious force bent on their destruction with talk of “toxic masculinity” and romantic rejection.

Earlier this year, Joe Carter examined this phenomenon in an article featured on The Gospel Coalition. More recently, Rod Dreher has been traveling the podcast circuit warning of the pervasiveness of these cynics in institutions of the American religious and political Right. Their compassionate portraits of restless souls in the grip of a sneering subculture, and their prescriptions for how to minister to them, are excellent. However, the reality of facing those who embody this persona can be intimidating, and it can be difficult to maintain hope in what feels like such a new and overwhelming fight against despair. 

Indeed, the seeming novelty of this subculture is both one of its biggest draws and one of the elements that make it difficult to know how to address. But it is also a misconception. As Ecclesiastes 1:9 tells us, “There is nothing new under the sun.” While social media may have changed his medium for communication, the “edgelord” is not a new character in history. He is the product of a particular kind of social dynamic, and examples from past generations can provide insight for those seeking to reach wayward young men as well as hope for those fighting their own battles against despondency.

Pre-digital Despair

In 1884, French novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans published a strange work entitled Á rebour (Against Nature or Against the Grain). It is the story of a rich young aristocrat with a taste for high culture who finds himself in a fight against time. Depressed by the weakening of the aristocracy in a society increasingly dominated by trade and appalled by the onslaught of American materialism engulfing Europe, he abandons society and goes on a quest to find meaning through solitary experience. On his journey, he describes his indulgences in all the pleasures available to him in elaborate detail, only to be left in despair upon their completion.

The novel was incredibly polarizing during Huysmans’s lifetime. Some read it as a warning against hedonism. Others used it as a how-to manual for their own journeys of debauchery. It has been partially credited with launching a literary genre in England known as “Decadence.” Works of this genre constituted dark graspings for meaning in the midst of uncertain times, bound in yellow covers and often circulated in secret. In them, young men who felt alienated from a society in flux rebelled by seeking satisfaction in what their elders viewed as grotesque and immoral. These works were the medium through which cynics traded morbid fantasies, demonized women, and elevated the profane a century before the dark corners of the internet.

The most lasting work of this genre is one of its tamer examples: Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. In it, the title character’s moral decline is hastened by reading Huysmans’s novel: “Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book. There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful” (p.150).  Á rebourwas so well-known by educated men of the 1920s and ‘30s that F. Scott Fitzgerald could use it to describe his friends’ raucous partying without actually naming it: “When bored, we took our city with a Huysmans-like perversity.” 

One of the elements that made these cynical works so dangerously seductive to younger generations was their frankness about the harsh realities of existence that societal elders too often glossed over. They expressed the fear and dread young men felt about their futures in a world no longer offering the consoling comforts they were raised to expect. But for one father of the English Decadent movement, cynicism did not have the last word.

A Turnabout

In 1892, eight years after writing Á rebour, Joris-Karl Huysmans converted to Catholicism. He spent the remaining fifteen years of his life writing about his salvation and his complicated path of sanctification. In his preface to the 1902 edition of Á rebour, he reflected on his journey from reliance on atheistic wisdom, like that of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, to submission before the cross:

I did not dream that from Schopenhauer, whom I admired beyond all reason, to Ecclesiastes and the Book of Job was only a step. The premises as to Pessimism are identical, only when it comes to action, the Philosopher shirks away. I like his ideas on the horror of existence, on the stupidity of the world, on the harshness of fate; I like them just as well in the Holy Books. But Schopenhauer's observations end in nothing; he leaves you, so to say, in the lurch…The Church for her part explains origins and causes, certifies results, offers remedies; she is not satisfied with giving you a spiritual consultation, she treats you and cures you, while the German quack, after clearly showing you that the complaint you suffer from is incurable, turns his back on you with a sardonic grin.

In books like Ecclesiastes, Huysmans found the same existential longings that were woven into his own works. Its author also sought to find meaning in the vast array of pleasures available to him. Like Huysmans’ protagonist, he concluded that these pursuits could not satisfy. However, he also concluded that there was more to life than counterfeit forms of beauty and the pursuit of selfish pleasure on demand. He concluded that God had offered more:

He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God’s gift to man. I perceived that whatever God does endures forever; nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it. God has done it, so that people fear before him (Ecc. 3:11–14).

According to the author of Ecclesiastes, joy is not found in hoarding material things, seeking hedonistic pleasures, or dominating those around us. It is found in accepting the fact that God alone fully understands the point of the creation of which we are only a part. For whatever reason, he has created times and seasons for a variety of phenomena that we are too limited to grasp in their totality. He alone knows the beginning and the end. For man, contentment is found in appreciating the simple pleasures of a life sustained by a God who grants daily provision and who has given us some sense that there is more going on than what we can perceive. Our task is to learn to rest in this reality, to trust that he can make everything in our lives beautiful in its time, and to believe that he will satisfy our longings for meaning and direction as we walk in his ways. 

The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil (12:13–14).

Hope For Today’s Cynics

When Joris-Karl Huysmans wrote Á rebour, he had no intention of turning to God. Curiously, his main character’s last exclamation—after realizing that he cannot resist the changing times by seeking pleasure that only hastens decay—is a prayer:

Lord, take pity on the Christian who doubts, on the unbeliever who would fain believe, on the galley-slave of life who puts out to sea alone, in the night, beneath a firmament no longer lit by the consoling beacon-fires of the ancient hope!

Whether this prayer was fashioned with a sincere longing for truth or from behind the mask of a sardonic grin, it was answered, as it also can be for the cynics of today. Just as in the case of Huysmans, the same gifts for communication that make such men dangerous foes of the church can—in sanctified form—make them powerful witnesses to hope. As we encounter these seemingly overly-confident young men, we can sympathize with their struggle and rest in the assurance that we are part of the same body which has delivered their brothers from darkness to light for two thousand years, making it possible for them to take up their roles as society’s leaders rather than its destroyers.