Rorate welcomes once again a guest article by Vigilius, a traditional priest in Germany. The Anglophone reader will instantly conjure up the "Feiges" within his own local hierarchy... –PAK
The Church of the Nihilists
Vigilius
Magdeburg Bishop Gerhard Feige, along with his colleagues Bätzing and Marx, is one of those figures in whom the spirit of the German Church is particularly evident. More precisely: the spirit of that ecclesiastical establishment that has been at the helm of power for decades and firmly controls all ecclesiastical or church-related institutions, such as ordinariates, seminaries, faculties, educational institutions, and publications. It is remarkable how closely the psychological characteristics, as well as the activity and linguistic profiles, of the relevant officials—whether full-time or honorary—mirror their ideological outlook. To get a sense of their core beliefs, one need only take a look at any of the various religious magazines, such as Christ in der Gegenwart, Herder-Korrespondenz, Stimmen der Zeit, Publik-Forum, or katholisch.de [these would be like America, National Catholic Reporter, Commonweal, Crux, U.S. Catholic - ed.]; if one is familiar with just one issue of any of these magazines, one is familiar with the entire intellectual cosmos of this well-nourished, hermetically self-contained milieu.
What essentially defines this type of personality is the nihilism that Nietzsche defines as “the devaluation of the supreme values of the past”. Nietzsche himself in fact associates these “supreme values” with the Christian religion.
According to Nietzsche, the “greatest recent event” consists in our having “killed” God, which, according to Nietzsche, means that “belief in the Christian God has become implausible.” One might interpret this as though Nietzsche, with his “God is dead” declaration, does not intend to make an objective statement about the existence or non-existence of God, but only about the state of our faith. In fact, however, the context is more complex. One must understand it in order to grasp the essence of the nihilism that has gripped European—indeed, the entire Western—civilization, and with it the Roman Catholic Church.
According to Nietzsche, the “greatest recent event” consists in our having “killed” God, which, according to Nietzsche, means that “belief in the Christian God has become implausible.” One might interpret this as though Nietzsche, with his “God is dead” declaration, does not intend to make an objective statement about the existence or non-existence of God, but only about the state of our faith. In fact, however, the context is more complex. One must understand it in order to grasp the essence of the nihilism that has gripped European—indeed, the entire Western—civilization, and with it the Roman Catholic Church.
At the beginning of his text on “The Madman,” Nietzsche himself raises the question of how it was possible for us to become God’s murderers and “unchain the earth from its sun”: “How did we do this? How were we able to drink up the sea?” To arrive at an answer to this question, it is important to carefully examine Nietzsche’s concept of nihilism. The relevant context has been brilliantly elucidated by Martin Heidegger. For Nietzsche, as a matter of course, designates the “super-sensible world” as the sphere of “supreme values.” In doing so, Nietzsche places himself within the context of modernity, which he otherwise thoroughly despised. The description of all things and relationships in terms of value can indeed be regarded as one of the defining characteristics of modern consciousness. Since the 19th century, this discourse has also become increasingly widespread throughout culture as a whole and is ubiquitous today.
It would never have occurred to people in antiquity or even in the High Middle Ages to formulate the being of beings within the coordinate system of value-based thinking. For “value” is a functional category of assessment that measures a thing according to purposes that are not inherent in the thing itself, but are established by the valuing subject and imposed upon the object. Francis Bacon already interpreted knowing a thing as the knowledge of “what I can do with the thing once I have it.” This way of thinking in terms of value is radical. The theologian Eberhard Jüngel calls it “ontologically aggressive.” It does not merely describe the self-evident fact that a thing can also be more or less valuable for different purposes. Rather, it asserts that value is the very being of the thing itself, such that it gains—or loses—its being through the processes of valuation and devaluation. These processes emanate from the valuing subject and direct back toward it. That which has been de-valued then ceases to be; it is no longer considered to be.
Insofar as the beingness of the beings is determined by the identity of being and value, it becomes understandable why, for Nietzsche, the “death of God” and the loss of credibility of the Christian faith coincide. If God is, in any case, merely a value—one that has always been established by human subjectivity—then the devaluation of this hitherto supreme value is equivalent to its annihilation. Just as we—the great engineers of all things—were already God’s inventors, so, according to Nietzsche, we have now also become his deconstructors, his murderers.
Of course, the diagnosis of nihilism then applies, in principle, already to the phase of construction. And that is precisely how Nietzsche sees it as well. The absence of an all-encompassing ultimate “for-the-sake-of” from which the world derives an objective meaning for its existence and history is precisely what gives rise to the necessity of inventing systems of meaning and moral codes for the sake of self-preservation and self-enhancement. Value-positings are always positings of the “will to power,” and the weight of values is measured by their suitability for the purposes of the will to power. These purposes, ultimately, always aim at the self-realization of power as such. For Nietzsche, there is nothing left outside of power; there is only a single strategic goal, and that is the “powering of power” (Heidegger). Insofar as power no longer possesses any purpose outside itself, the world as a whole is meaningless; the power serves no purpose. For this reason, incidentally, a God who were reduced to the dimension of power would be identical with mere facticity; he would be a meaningless word. Only an almighty God who is at the same time love possesses an infinitely meaningful being.
But according to Nietzsche, this being is merely the invented product of a nihilistic operation of human consciousness—namely, a self-referential positing of the will to power, and a rather sophisticated one at that. Ultimately, however, this tactic of power (i.e., the invention of the super-sensible world) has proven counterproductive in light of its strategic goal; while it has produced many great things—subtle intellectual concepts and brilliant works of art—it has simultaneously threatened the forces of life.
This hostility toward life is, in a complex sense, another meaning that the word “nihilism” possesses in Nietzsche’s thought. And so the will to power, for its own sake, devalues the “super-sensible world” and the moral codes associated with it, in order to replace them with the purely secular mysticism of the Übermensch, who affirms from within the “eternal recurrence of the same”—which is nothing other than the absolute persistence of the will to power.
For Nietzsche, the Übermensch is the nihilist in his noblest form as the conscious and unadulterated affirmation of the world’s meaninglessness—that is, the conscious and unadulterated self-affirmation of the will to power. That is why Nietzsche describes himself as the “Antichrist.” For through the killing of God and the overcoming of life-denying Christian morality, a “morality for the highest demands” is to emerge; a morality that, without decadence or cowardly escapism—that is, without hopes for the afterlife or conceptions of salvation—celebrates life with humility, as it were, as the will to power and affirms it in all its cruel aesthetics. “Amor fati” is the name of this nihilistic-anti-nihilistic program.
I return to Feige from Magdeburg and, through him, to the whole plight of the Church in our day. At first glance, it appears as though he and the ecclesiastical social milieu he represents are by no means promoting the “devaluation of the supreme values of the past.” They still speak of God and Christ. For example, in an interview with the magazine Herder-Korrespondenz, Feige says that “Christ himself is the one and true shepherd” and that “faith is a living relationship with God.”[1]
Nevertheless, this interview emblematically reveals a nihilism-induced tectonic shift in the entire intellectual framework. This shift is articulated in statements such as these: “Of course it would be nice to have more members, but that is not our primary concern. The Church’s task is to be selflessly there for society.”
This is a revolutionary assertion. Let us begin with the first sentence. For “having more members” means nothing other than converting people who do not yet believe in Jesus as the Christ and in sacramental communion with him in the mystical Body of Christ, which is the Church, to this very faith and thus to admission into the supernatural union with Christ.[2] To speak here merely of “nice” in the sense of something secondary is completely contrary to the nature of the matter. For the Gospel, this very question is a matter of primary importance. The Gospel formulates an imperative of conversion and mission that is no longer open to negotiation for Christ’s disciples, because at this point the success or failure of human existence as a whole is at stake. It is the preeminent sacred duty of the Church to seek to make all people disciples of Christ.
The Great Commission, in its unconditional nature, can be justified only in terms of a theory of truth. And only a faith that makes universal claims to truth can bring about salvific effects at all. In fact, the mission is justified in the New Testament in this very way: “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (John 14:6) From this, one must conclude: Disregard for the Great Commission is an inner consequence of disregarding the claim to truth underlying this imperative. In turn, this disregard for the claim to truth is unmistakably indicated by the disregard for the Great Commission.
Feige explicitly states that it is “not a matter of imposing the Gospel on people.” This is rhetoric similar to Jorge Bergoglio’s constant scolding about “proselytism”. It is easy to see that this is merely the silly construction of a straw man, intended to conceal the fact that the very idea of mission—and the claim to truth upon which it is based—has been abandoned altogether. How, after all, could Christians in radically secularized Germany possibly “impose” the Gospel on any non-believers? By threatening them with the arrival of the Swiss Guard?
It is human nature itself that brings a charge against Feige who presents himself in such a humanitarian light. For man cannot achieve self-fulfillment within himself. He is more dependent than any other living being, and it is precisely this dependence that also constitutes his specific greatness. For man is, by his very nature, oriented toward a goal outside himself in order to achieve self-fulfillment. We call this goal God. St. Augustine already speaks of the “restlessness of the heart,” which can find peace only in God. In scholastic terminology, this restlessness is called “desiderium naturale in visionem beatificam.” It is also part of man’s specific dependence that he can attain this goal outside himself—which alone brings him to himself—only if this goal bestows itself, and does so freely and without any merit on the part of man. We call this “grace.” Since man is not the creator of himself and does not belong to himself, he has no claim to grace and thus to the actual attainment of his essential fulfillment.
Man therefore needs God for his own sake, and he needs Christ, who is God’s free self-giving. But—and here lies the crux of the matter in the context of this essay’s considerations—man needs God as the one who, for his part, is not defined by his—undoubted—function or by his value to man. In this sense, God is “valueless”; he is self-sufficient and exists for his own sake. Therefore, the true theological purpose of the world’s salvation lies in God’s self-glorification, in which man participates through faith and in communion with Christ, so that—precisely by blissfully losing himself in the worship of God—he may find the fulfillment of his being. Selflessness and selfhood are, as in God himself, one and the same.
The mission of the Church, therefore, aims at Christ’s mediation, so that through this, God the Father may be given glory for God’s own sake by the creature for the creature’s own salvation. Conversely, this means that neglecting the mission amounts to nothing less than the bitter reality of denying man the most precious of all gifts. For only the truth, who is Christ himself as a person, grants us the freedom of the children of God and thereby liberates us from the dominion of the world—and thus from the “tyranny of values” (Nicolai Hartmann).
It is precisely this connection that is entirely absent in Feige’s statements. This becomes fully evident in the fact that, in the following sentence, Feige defines “our primary concern” as being “selflessly there for society.” In this way, the Church is stripped of its supernatural character as a source and mediator of salvation—which consists in the glorification of God as an end in himself—and transformed into a sociological function immanent to the world. The devaluation of the former faith and, with it, the redefinition of the Church’s essence occur for the sake of this socially functional value-positing.
It is no exaggeration to describe this new value-positing as the fundamental ideological axis of the ecclesiastical establishment mentioned at the outset, which sees itself as enlightened and modern and has now produced figures such as Feige, Bätzing, Marx, and Koch as bishops, who once again enslave the faithful to the “form of this world that is passing away” (1 Cor 7:31).
Feige himself illustrates what it means to be selflessly there for society. For one thing, this means for him “being a diaconal church.” Not least, this gives the institutional operations of faith-based social services the ecclesiological weight of a “primary concern.” Feige, however, is a big-picture thinker. For according to him, the sphere of Christian social ministry also includes “cultural ministry”: The Church “is called upon when people need guidance—during major disasters just as much as in everyday life, and wherever they are searching. In the Diocese of Magdeburg, nearly 1,000 young people take advantage of the opportunity of a coming-of-age ceremony[3] in some years.”
On the other hand, in Feige’s view, selfless service to society means political engagement—specifically, against the right wing. Feige has devoted himself fervently to the fight against the AfD, and many of his colleagues share this fervor. Just how much the political fight against the AfD has become part of these people’s religious identity can be seen, for example, in the fact that Bishop Koch of Berlin—who once directly associated Greta Thunberg with Jesus Christ himself—stated that he was willing to accept the loss of AfD Catholics, who were active in the Church and are now leaving the official Church due to the anti-AfD bashing.[4]
Here it is clear that the bishops in question see their primary purpose in this political activism as fulfilling their role as bishops. Mass democracy—as merely one of several possible models of social self-organization—and thus the efforts to preserve this specific model have become, for the liberal church establishment, the “articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae”.
Why, however, people who are so religiously enthusiastic about this model speak at length about the AfD’s alleged potential to threaten democracy, yet say not a single word about the increasingly brazen campaigns waged by the established parties against the foundations of liberal democracy and the rule of law—such as freedom of speech and the separation of powers—is a topic in its own right. For now, it suffices to note that the Feige circle views the Church’s agenda as an institution designed to satisfy needs—such as those for ritual forms or humanitarian engagement—that are brought to it from the outside, whether by politics, secular culture, or individuals. Here, the functional external perspective seamlessly becomes the internal perspective.
If one believes in the God of Jesus Christ, it is logically impossible for the Church to simultaneously define itself—in the core of its self-concept—in socio-functional terms. What, then, does it mean when the establishment still speaks of “God” and “Christ”? This discourse does not mean that, alongside an otherwise intact theology, a socio-functionalist perspective is also introduced—so to speak, in a schizophrenic manner. Rather, the nihilism that has come to dominate in every respect manifests itself in the fact that even discourse on God has already been fundamentally transformed into anthropocentric concepts of value—without this transformation having been identified as unbelief. On the contrary: this transformation has always been presented as a means of bringing faith closer to people.
But if God—as is the case in one way or another in all liberal theological conceptions—is defined in his divinity by human needs and is determined as the one whose essence consists in “being there for man,” then God is deprived of his being-in-himself and his being an end in himself. God is here conceived within the category of a “value,” and this is precisely the core of nihilism. And from this foundation, the Church’s radically socio-functional self-definition appears to be nothing more than a logical step. The God who has long since been made useful fits perfectly into this definition, in that, through him, all the value-positings intended from the outset—such as the passionate support for Merkel’s migration policy—can be spiritually elevated and seemingly legitimized as genuinely religious. One of the most repulsive characteristics of the “Feige church”, as it were, is that it uses the name of God to promote the “tyranny of values,” which has become the hallmark of our irrational age.
However: If it has come to this, “the gods and God have fled” (as Martin Heidegger put it, referring to Friedrich Hölderlin). For they refuse to be threaded through the eye of the needle of human subjectivity’s value-positings. They insist on their ontological autonomy. At the same time, man himself—insofar as he is by nature inclined toward the worship of the Godhead as an end in itself—is turning away from the “Feige church” out of boredom.
Both of these phenomena are particularly evident in liturgical discourse. For decades, both the Bugninian construction of the liturgy and the subsequent ad hoc liturgical changes have been justified on the basis of ecumenical, interreligious, and “pastoral considerations.” This functionalism has turned the Mass into a constantly changing performance that must always obey value-positings other than the glorification of God through the Church’s re-presentation of Christ’s self-sacrifice, which the Divine Son offered to the Father for the Father’s glory.
It is hardly an exaggeration to claim that the decisive conviction regarding the latreutic nature of Christ’s sacrifice has almost completely vanished from post-conciliar ecclesial consciousness. This disappearance is directly linked to the trivialization of liturgical consciousness, in which everything revolves around modern man, who has made himself the measure of all things[5] and thus also conceives the liturgy in terms of his own purposes. The liturgy has lost its character as an epiphany of the Holy. But to the extent that, in these performances that instrumentalize the divine, the Godhead can no longer appear as itself out of its own volition, it inevitably becomes boring to man.
The ecclesiastical self-concept in terms of socio-functional value categories means, in principle, viewing itself as replaceable by equivalents—such as alternative providers of religious rites or humanitarian institutions. That is why sociology has become the leading discipline in the “Feige church”. For this church must continually identify newly emerging needs under the guidance of sociological expertise, in order to then rush from one pastoral concept to the next and create new, exciting “services.” Within the socio-functional framework, it can only construct short-term experiential services, since these services quickly lose their value for fickle consumers. In any case, even the slightest irritation causes consumers to immediately start looking for more suitable alternatives.
Against this backdrop, it becomes understandable that the “Feige church” has become extremely nervous and—in stark contradiction to its rhetoric of selflessness—is by no means a “serving” church. Unlike the authentic Church of Christ, which is at peace with itself, the “Feige church”—due to the fusion of external and internal perspectives—cannot help but constantly grapple with itself and with the justification of its right to exist, which has become precarious within its own self-concept. Its very existence depends on being valued, and so it must ceaselessly make itself valuable.
Nietzsche calls nihilism the “uncanniest of all guests.” It is so because, like fog, it slowly seeps in silently and unnoticed through tiny openings, eventually filling the entire space. And even the long-established, ubiquitous dominion of nihilism can, as Nietzsche also admits with regard to himself, remain unnoticed for a long time. “That I have been a nihilist to the core all along—I have only recently admitted this to myself…” Nietzsche’s greatness lies precisely in this admission and in his willingness to gaze into the abyss of nihilism.
The “Madman”—that is, Nietzsche—asks himself in the face of the dead God: “Whither are we moving? Are we not plunging continually? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Does not the breath of empty space touch us? Has it not become colder? Is not night and more night coming on all the time?” And he despairs of those whom the news of God’s death—and the fact that they themselves have killed him—leaves indifferent, because they fail to grasp what this “greatest recent event” truly means and what terrible consequences it will unleash. The “Last Man,” of whom Zarathustra speaks, is perhaps the worst consequence of the death of God, and it can now be observed everywhere, even within the Catholic Church. That is why what one of the newly ordained bishops of the SSPX said is quite true: Everything the modernist Church touches turns to a desert. Or, to quote Nietzsche again: The Church of the nihilists is nothing other than a tomb of the decomposing God.
The many “Feiges” among the current clergy could expect to be respected again only if they, too, were to identify their own nihilism and their pseudo-religious constructs as veiled unbelief—and then either convert or hang up their cassocks. The latter is also respectable if it implies a willingness to endure the coldness of that “empty space” from which Christ has fled. Then the nihilists would also leave the Church to be the Church of Christ once again.
Of course, this is not to be expected.
Nevertheless, there is reason for hope. For the decomposing God is, in fact, the anthropocentric God of the modernist Church. He was a stillborn entity from the very beginning. With him, as we can already see, his tomb is also decaying. This may already be a foreshadowing of grace. For only when this tomb has decayed will the Holy be able to bestow itself once more. Perhaps it will once again open up the space of its epiphany over the ruins of the “Feige church”.
NOTES
[1] https://www.herder.de/hk/hefte/archiv/2026/9-2026/jede-zeit-kann-bewaehrungszeit-und-heilszeit-sein-ein-gespraech-mit-magdeburgs-dioezesanbischof-gerhard-feige/
[2] See https://einsprueche.substack.com/p/the-great-loss-or-the-pontificate
[3] a non-confessional alternative to confirmation offered by the Church (translator’s note)
[4] https://de.catholicnewsagency.com/news/25679/erzbischof-koch-zu-verlust-von-afd-wahlern-in-gemeinden-wir-mussen-dieses-risiko-eingehen
[5] See https://einsprueche.substack.com/p/the-performative-contradiction-of for the modern interpretation of the Protagoras statement
