Now the Green Blade Riseth

In 1882, Nietzsche wrote that we had killed god. This is one of the most quoted lines in philosophy but, or perhaps because, it raises a number of immediate questions, the most salient of which is, perhaps, what should we do now? Nietzsche’s text went on to imply that drastic consequences awaited us, and we did not yet appreciate the significance of what we had done: “the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves”. Arguably the consequences did arrive with the two world wars in the first half of the 20th century, or arguably they are yet to arrive.

What we do know is that Christian metaphysics and morality, which had underpinned the European worldview for many centuries, has steadily dwindled since the time of the industrial revolution, especially in the 20th century. Today, the extent of secularism in global western culture (the descendant of past Europe) is unique or nearly unique in history. Religion has been completely stripped from all the major institutions - medicine, law, finance, politics, the corporate world - and so has no direct influence anymore on the corridors of power.

Another point we do know is that there is something not right in the world today. There is much that is beautiful, true and good, but there is also a sickness whose tendrils appear to extend deeply, and this sickness is connected with whatever process drove us to kill god. The connection is complicated, however, because religion means several things of varying shades of goodness and badness, and there are data points that do not fit the simple assertion that our problem is lack of religion: the two world wars and madness of the cold war occurred before the substantial drop in religiosity among the public; the US is the most religious among the western countries but also the most morally lost; and many of the most harmful people in the world, including Trump, Hegseth and Netanyahu, claim to be religious.

There is, however, one aspect of religion that does explain some of our predicament. It is an abstract idea - abstract enough to be, I dare to say, a part of everything that has called itself a religion - and its magnitude cannot be overstated. The idea is, simply put, that what you do matters, and matters in a way beyond what you can calculate its effects to be. Whether you do the right thing or the wrong thing, whether you follow your heart or your fear or greed, it matters. Even if it seems like it doesn’t, even if it seems impossible that it would make any difference, in fact especially then, it matters.

John M.C Crum, an Anglican minister in at the start of the 20th century, expressed the idea in the following hymn text:

Now the green blade riseth, from the buried grain,
Wheat that in dark earth many days has lain;
Love lives again, that with the dead has been:
Love is come again, like wheat that springeth green.

In the grave they laid Him, Love whom we had slain,
Thinking that He never would awake again,
Laid in the earth like grain that sleeps unseen:
Love is come again, like wheat that springeth green.

Forth He came at Easter, like the risen grain,
He that for three dark days in the grave had lain;
Quick from the dead the risen One is seen:
Love is come again, like wheat that springeth green.

When our hearts are wintry, grieving, or in pain,
Then thy touch can call us back to life again,
Fields of our hearts that dead and bare have been:
Love is come again, like wheat that springeth green.

Beginning as a boy, I have sung this text many times set, as it is, to a beautiful French folk tune. Recently, it occurred to me again having not seen it for years, and I looked more closely at its meaning. The parallel between sowed seeds coming to bloom and Jesus’s resurrection is not chosen arbitrarily or because both happen in the spring time. It is chosen because the pattern they share is a cornerstone of the Christian story: a good deed seems to come to naught, it feels as though the effort was in vain because it ended in failure, but then, as you sit with that despair, the fruit of the good deed emerges and you realise that it did matter after all.

In the Passion, a man who was as kind and wise as you could imagine, meets one of the worst fates possible. When he was judged by the masses to be a criminal, captured, scorned, tortured and killed, it must have seemed to his followers evidence that the world was cruel and meaningless. What was the point, they would have felt, in following this man? Why should we try to be good if this is what happens to those who do? That period of darkness is part of the emotional effect of the Passiontide, and makes the moment when he does return all the more powerful a vanquishing of that doubt, because it expresses that even when goodness seems not to have mattered, in truth it has.

The same feeling is evoked when you have worked many hundreds of hours to prepare the earth and sow the seed, you then endure a dark Winter where your work appears to have amounted to absolutely nothing.¹ The fields look, at first, just as they would if they were completely dead, but the effect of what you did is there, and eventually it will become visible.

Other religions have other ways of expressing this belief - Buddhism, Hinduism and related Indian religions have the concept of Karma, and those that includs a Final Judgement, such as the Abrahamic religions, have it as part of their theology - but it is hard to find any that centre it as much as Christianity does with the Passion. That makes the shift at the death of god so stark. Europe, which was once so utterly Christian, and so deeply connected with significance of good actions, has now, along with its descendant cultures in the global west, become one with no institutional place for this idea. I am not saying we want the church to be involved again in running our governments - especially being Irish, I know how badly that can turn out, and everyone knows that Europe did plenty of bad things in its Christian past - but we have to acknowledge what it gave us that we now lack. It contained not only an ethical code, but a metaphysics and set of community practices to support it, built up over centuries and expressed in countless beautiful pieces of poetry, art, architecture and music. Yes some of the ethical ideas are questionable and the metaphysics is contradictory, but by and large it worked to facilitate the belief that what you do matters. Now in its place, we have nothing.

More precisely, what we have is mechanistic materialism - the belief that the universe consists of material whose behaviour can be measured and quantified. Everything that exists depends ultimately on the the material that makes it up, and the behaviour of this material follows predictable laws discoverable by science. There is nothing in this worldview that gives a meaning to life or a reason to act ethicially - what about one material configuration makes it better than another? Of course, we need some basis for preferring one state of affairs over another, so we do end up judging one as better, but without any accommodation by the underlying metaphysics, this judgement ends up ad hoc and semi-conscious, often defaulting to shallow qualities like pleasure, convenience or, at best, the vague ‘happiness’.

Even worse, the emphasis on prediction by science seems to promise that we don’t need to have faith in the significance of our actions, because we can just calculate what is going to work out best. This means that even if you find a value system that goes beyond immediate self interest, when it comes to using values to guide your decision making, you’re almost forced to ignore any that aren’t measurable and predictable, which pulls you back towards materialism.

For institutions, decision-making has fallen largely the use of metrics: GDP for economics, attendance and employment for education, life expectancy for medicine, and GHGs and global temperatures for environmentalism. All of these usual suspects have more sophisticated alternatives, but those alternatives are harder to compute and predict, so they fit more awkwardly into the mechanistic framework where you determine the right thing to do by gathering scientific evidence as to what its effect will be. More importantly, there is little space for saying “I can’t guarantee what the effects of this action will be, I’ve been doing it for a while already and nothing good seems to have come of it yet, but I still believe it’s the right thing to do”.

Mechanistic materialism, far from making space for this idea, is waiting poised to debunk it. This, it would say, is the just world fallacy, the belief that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. There’s an entire psychological literature on cognitive biases like victim-blaming, guilt avoidance etc, and these are sometimes said to stem from belief in a naive sort of justice.² There is value to these psychological results themselves, but the just world fallacy debunks only a straw man version of what we are talking about here. The significance of what you do does not come from a future material reward that you will get for it, and neither does karma mean that if you act well then you will be met with good fortune.³ It simply means that there is some import to your actions - that could be something in an afterlife, an effect on other beings in this life, on some abstract principle that has inherent self-worth - depending on your metaphysics, it could be almost anything. In fact, the equation of value with a tangible material reward is a consequence of mechanistic materialism itself. The just world fallacy is the result of our intuition that a good deed will always have a positive effect, coupled with the metaphysical belief that all positive effects must be material and quantifiable.

Many people still find a way to justify morality without challenging the background metaphysics, but this is fighting an uphill battle. You have to resist the constant invitation to think along the following lines: I’m going to die some day and that will be the end of me, so I might as well just do what makes me happy right now,⁴ it doesn’t matter if I harm other beings because they’ll die too and then there’ll be no difference either way, anything I create will also be destroyed when the Earth succumbs to entropy or the Universe collapses or suffers heat death, I can make myself feel good right now, and there’s no reason not to, I can think of people who are kind but live lives filled with misfortune, or people who are selfish and nasty but have everything work out for them - they’re going to die happy, so maybe I should aim to do the same.

This way of thinking is a dark force in the world, and, societally, we don’t have a proper response to it. The best we can do is ignore it or sidestep it somehow, but many fall into its seductions—obvious examples are Trump and much of his base, the manosphere and large swathes of the corporate world, but there are countless others, and almost everyone falls prey to some extent. Religion had a proper response to give - whatever other problems it may have caused, it protected us from this one, and allowed us to believe that the green blade will always rise.

I don’t know if there will or should be a Christian revival, there are some weak signs but also obstacles. It would probably require a significant internal change in the religious bodies, as they have become significantly corrupted from within by forces similar to the one they were supposed to protect us from without, especially in the US where, for example, Trump can comprehensively win the Christian vote despite having a character as far from Jesus’ as one could imagine. Another possibility is that a new religion will emerge, as in Octavia E. Butler’s The Parable of the Sower, which takes its name from another harvest analogy, this one from the New Testament. In it, a teenage girl tries to found a new religion, seeing it as the only way to rescue the collapsing society around them - a collapse, incidentally, that includes the election of a demagogue president with the same slogan as Trump. Or, if not quite a religion, there could be a more decentralised movement - a loose collection of philosophers, mystics and activists, drawing on both new ideas and various existing religions - that is able to fundamentally shift the way we see the world, but the difficulty there is that it would need to turn into a complete belief system, as Christianity was, not just a set of specific ideas.

Though unsure of the solution, I am sure that something needs fixing. Nietzsche was right not only that we killed god, but that we did not grasp the magnitude of what we had done. Like light from a distant star, or a seed germinating underground, the change in our beliefs has changed the shape of the world today, and in the same way, what we do now will make a difference to the future. Even without returning to Christianity, that is a message we can take from the Passion, from Karma, or from wherever else it is expressed. What you do matters. Even if its effects can’t be predicted or measured or quantified, even if seems to have come to nothing, it matters. I do not feel this is a belief I can take or leave by choice, nor do I feel it has been proven by argument or established by experience, and yet I believe it. I believe it because I have to believe it, because we have to believe it, and I believe it because it is true.

1. In reality, the emergence normally actually happens in the Autumn, and then growth near pauses until the end of Winter, but some years, with late sowing and early Winter, it may well have only emerged in the Spring.

2. Normally, this is presented so as to suggest a more general claim that we can’t trust our intuition, we can only trust science.

3. For some people it may mean that, and perhaps such a meaning is worth debunking, but there are more sophisticated things it could mean, and that is what I am arguing for the importance of.

4. Reading this line a second time, I was remined, amusingly and chillingly, of the implicit message in much consumer advertising, and I pictured some fuzzy combination of ads for banks loans, air travel and tourism.