Coming in from the COld
How two atheist philosophers led me to grace, and back to the home I’d never left.
By Alexander Pyles
I have always stood on the outside of faith, looking in. You’d think that being a cradle Catholic would buy some sense of belonging, but instead it has mostly given me angst and frustration. Still, through this place on the “outside,” my faith has taken on shape and meaning. It is as real to me as if I had found it where I was supposed to—yet I have found grace in strange places, and perhaps some of the strangest are the writings of atheists Friedrich Nietzsche and Karl Marx.
I grew up a block or so from the beach, and I always found the Spirit there, rather than in any church building. The still, perfectly measured bricks were dead things to me. Yet, in the sandy narthex of the beach with the rising tide of a cathedral of spray, I whispered prayers into the sea breeze. His responses were in the crashing waves and the shrill call of the seagulls. A deep peace always settled on me there. I found comfort in being seen by one who cannot be seen. It was very different than the God of rubrics I found in the weekly religion classes. Grace wasn’t present to me in those lessons. They proffered God as a cold object to be studied.
Fast forward a few years, and now a college freshman at a Catholic university, I was floundering in a sea of undergraduates who seemed to swell with assurance in their view of God. Lacking such confidence (or any notion of how to achieve it through the channels offered to me), I turned to philosophy and picked up Nietzsche for the first time. I can admit, now, that I did this more out of a contrarian mode rather than true curiosity. What I found—to my own surprise—was a dynamic, passionate writer. And the most startling feature of all was that I couldn’t find any reason why he was “scary” to my peers and even some of my professors.
Nietzsche was, moreover, not the prophet of atheism that had been promised by my fellows. He defended bodily experience and championed artistic expression and the cultivation of taste. Most importantly, he defended the mastery of the self. Critics often misconstrue Nietzsche by saying that self-mastery is about having the freedom to “do as you like,” which of course runs afoul of Christian teachings. But fellow writers, like Walter Kaufmann, were able to translate this better. The idea of self-mastery in Nietzsche can be better understood to mean having “control” over your impulses, passions, and virtues. The crass reduction to “do as you like” is still true in a way, but it takes on a much more mature and firm reality through this reading. Since the Christian life was to me about the ongoing struggle to master those passions and impulses, so virtue could be cultivated in their place, Nietzsche as I read him was not an enemy to the Christian way of life. Instead, he offered similar—if not the same—views of how to live in grace, but stated in more robust language that resonated with me. My faith was something to be excited about, as much as Nietzsche was galvanized by a life fully dedicated to aesthete pursuits. I could make sense of those parallels as opposed to the culture-war-driven arguments that swept up my peers.
Marx gave me the words I desperately needed to describe these systems that were oppressive, not just in the abstract, but in my actual life and in the life of my family.
This isn’t to say other views and experiences of faith were wrong, but they were of a different temperament and spirituality than my own, which was shaped by suffering, a lack of resources, and a life on the margins. I couldn’t relate to a triumphalist faith, because that is not where I found grace. I couldn’t embody joy, because it rang hollow. Grace was always in the shadows, in the dirt, and in the hardship. The pervading senses of faith on campus kept bouncing off me. I wasn’t feeling the Spirit whenever I prayed in the chapel, despite the incense and the crowd of pious students. Despite the relative ease and simplicity of dorm life, despite being in charge only of myself for the first time in my life, I wasn’t feeling anything close to grace, but rather a deep sense of unease. I couldn’t echo my peers during praise and worship, and as time went by, I became more unsettled with the dichotomy between what was practiced in the worship spaces and what was said in social spaces. The pleading for God’s grace one moment, but then scorn for the “townies” in the next. The tension was unbearable. Was this the Christianity that I had been raised and formed in?
Enter Karl Marx and the 1844 Manuscripts. Introduced in a history of philosophy class as another of the “scary” philosophers, Marx affirmed some of the deeply held values I had cultivated and made a part of my faith. His work in the 1844 Manuscripts, a series of notes compiled and published after his death, focuses on the alienation experienced by industrial workers: the commodification not only of work, but of the workers themselves. Commodities are the things produced through work, such as bread or a table. Industrialization and early capitalism took this a step further, turning workers into “resources” similar to the ore they mined or lumber they milled, rather than individual persons. The assembly line made work a series of tasks repeated ad nauseum. Marx explained that the worker never experienced the satisfaction of seeing their finished product. The labor workers were asked to do changed from a craft into a way to earn, which would then allow them to buy necessities to live on. Work became divorced from the home as industrialization forced migration to cities and families no longer dedicated their days to growing their own crops or raising their own meat, that is, producing the necessities of life for themselves.
Coming from a single income, working class household, I saw the direct toll this very same alienation that Marx had identified centuries before had on my own family. My father managed the pressure of supporting a chronically ill wife and two children by working increasingly long hours. The goal was not to thrive, but simply to survive. The divide between my father’s home life and work life was stark, since he rarely cooked when at home, though that was his trade. Even now, with an empty nest, he does nothing but work. I almost think it’s the only thing he knows how to do now. We only talk two or three times a year, and our conversations still only contain rough summaries of our careers—without any interest on his part to get to know his grandkids or me. The alienation he has from his family seems total, and moreover, it mirrors the kind of absence I’ve felt from the Church in its concern (or lack thereof) for my own struggles and the struggles of those that I love.
Marx gave me the words I desperately needed to describe these systems that were oppressive, not just in the abstract, but in my actual life and in the life of my family. And the grace of Christ offered a way out—a means to freedom. The return of centering the worker in the role of creating capital is a natural conclusion from reading Marx’s work through the lens of Christianity, especially when each person is an imago dei—uniquely created in the image of God. When our system of labor prioritizes prices over persons, it does not value the imago dei. Once I had read Marx, I understood both the problem that existed and that the Christian life could provide an authentic alternative to the issues Marx highlighted, if approached and lived honestly. Nietzsche may have given me comfort and shown me a new angle to understand faith, but Marx offered comfort that I was not alone in this struggle of understanding faith, alienation, and the movement of grace. I just needed to look harder for the friends and allies who were already there.
I wish, at times, that my experience of faith had been more “normal”—or at least less fraught with conflict and shy justifications.
Thanks to another contemporary writer, Jon Greenaway, I recently became aware of another German philosopher, Ernst Bloch, and his theories on utopia, hope, and struggle. And despite the sharp, atheistic angle to these theories, I am, again, finding myself pulled along by grace.
The way Greenaway describes Bloch’s theory of hope, also termed the “not yet,” offers in many ways the clearest explanations for Christian hope (as I understand it) that I’ve come across. As described by Greenaway, “[Bloch] wants to bring us to a remembrance of the future in the past and, at the same time, place his central concepts of the ‘not yet’ as a philosophical and metaphysical fulcrum for all human existence.” Similarly to my initial fascination with Nietzsche and Marx, I’m drawn in by the creative but often confusing philosophical prose that breaks the rubrics and rules of analytical systems. Everything that I’ve learned about God and faith said that we can’t pin any of it down. Yes, there are prayers and rituals we do in order to “support” our spiritual lives, but God wouldn’t be God if we could singularly define him, and I find comfort in that. Grace is found in the “mess” of life, much like how I re-discovered and continue to rediscover God and his grace—in the mess, not the clear-cut lines; among the atheists and in the wildness of nature, not within the established inspirational modes and places.
I wish, at times, that my experience of faith had been more “normal”—or at least less fraught with conflict and shy justifications. I wish, sometimes, for certainty. But I suspect that in that case, I wouldn’t have been able to find my faith amid all of the noise. Quiet moments at the beach will always ground me—I’m not alone there—but so does turning the pages in Thus Spake Zarathustra or Das Kapital. Grace finds a way to me, one way or another, and maybe that is enough and what I have needed. The search has always been more interesting to me, rather than what I hope to find, because, in all honesty, I’m still not sure what I’m looking for when it comes to faith. But that doesn’t mean I’ll stop searching.
Illustrations by Sarah Clark, from photos by Hennie Stander on Unsplash (chapel), Joe Borek on Unpslash (beach), Hennie Stander on Unsplash (Marx), public domain via Wikimedia Commons (Nietzsche), and Mariia Zakatiura on Unsplash (library)
Alexander Pyles is a writer, editor, and reviewer based in the Chicago area. Originally from Virginia Beach, VA, he finds himself stranded in the Midwest among the corn. He holds an MA in Philosophy and an MFA in Writing Popular Fiction. His chapbook MILO was published by Radix Media as part of their Futures series. His nonfiction has appeared in the Chicago Review of Books, atmospheric quarterly, Full Stop Magazine, Analog Science Fact & Fiction Magazine, Ancillary Review of Books, On the Seawall, and others. When not writing or reading, he is attempting to cook or garden, when his kiddos allow it.
Loved this. Would love seeing more content like this in the future!
Would also be interesting to get a follow-up essay from this author about how his views have evolved since college.
This article is a much needed testament to the power of reading widely as a means to understanding yourself and God. This is the kind of Catholic perspective on philosophy and literature that is missing from most of the current discourse. We need more of this voice here and in other spaces. Lovely article!