Revolt: In Light of the Resurrection

“So many today ask themselves: how can a physical man become a spiritual man? How can a sinner become a righteous one? How can the grace of God teach a man to supersede human reason and human will? How can the Holy Spirit illuminate the heart of man? How can water be transformed into wine?

“We know that when the Spirit of God descended on the apostles, the apostles became renewed, were born anew. And we know from thousands of examples, how the thoughts of human men and bodily life have generated spiritual men, men regenerated…

“It is enough to know that it does happen, and that we strive for it to happen also in ourselves… Usually, the most carnal men ask about the greatest divine mysteries. These do not inquire so as to know the way of their salvation, but in order to confound the faithful, to scorn the faith and to justify their sinful and passionate life.”[1]

“But until now the enemy has not ceased to cloud the Sun of Resurrection, hoping to overshadow it. Let none be troubled! He taught many of his minions to write entire books against the Resurrection… A believer does not need proof, because the Church of God is filled with the light of Resurrection,”[2]

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been taking a Theories of Religion class this semester. As we wrap up for finals, we were assigned Jesse Bering’s The Belief Instinct to read and summarize. It closed out the course’s turn toward cognitive science and affect theory. Typically, we’re assigned a thinker—Freud, Marx, William James, Geertz, Evans-Pritchard, etc.—read their theory of religion, summarize it, and then critique it. The class is a haven for nerds like me.

But this time, we ran out of time for critique. We were asked only to present a summary of Bering’s work. I took this as an aggression that could not stand. So, for fun, I started writing a critique. It took on a life of its own—this piece and its follow-up are the result.

You’ll notice Bering is mentioned briefly and then seemingly dropped. While I’d like to say it’s because he doesn’t deserve much attention, the truth is his work reminded me of others whose ideas pulled my focus away from cognitive science and toward philosophical pessimism. Bering’s atheistic secular humanism is not the pinnacle of intellect—it’s a gateway to despair. And wide is that gate.

We live in a time where large language models are not only threatening how we communicate with one another, but how we speak to ourselves. I’m no better than anyone—AI is convenient, a tool that condenses time, research, editing, and everything else. But its rise is symptomatic of something deeper: a civilizational shift where the value of human life is being reduced to nothing.

Marxist philosophy has nearly won, ironically, even in our capitalist society. Personhood is now equated with economic output and content creation. This isn’t a digital renaissance or an economic boom—we’re watching our humanity be stripped from us and bound to inhumane systems.

And so, following Sartrean existentialism, we place the burden of feeling human entirely on our own shoulders. We’ve become captains of our own ships, masters of our own castles. There’s nothing to admire in this defiant modern self, and the cost of getting here has been immense.

Nihilists might argue they’re distinct from pessimists—that they don’t moralize, don’t judge, don’t care. But when the premise is that life is meaningless, the outcome is the same: a flattened, formless wasteland where escape is the only thing left between now and death. That’s not life. It’s cowardice.

I used to be a philosophical pessimist. I burned with the fire of Doug Stanhope and Fight Club. That raw anger—that righteous rage—at being used by a consumerist culture felt like power. Tyler Durden says:

“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place… Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives.”

Yes, we’re pissed off. But have you noticed? None of that anti-corporate, anti-establishment rhetoric led to anything lasting. The rage of the Tyler Durdens, Stanhopes, and Carlins was defanged and sold back to us by the same corporations they fought. It became subversive entertainment, harmless, safe, and ultimately complicit.

The truth is: if your attention is fed only by nihilism and pessimism, then all you have to render is unto Caesar. For where there is no God, there is only the system. And no matter how loudly we shout at it, if we don’t live beyond it, we remain enslaved to it.

Implosion and despair are not revolts against modernity—they are its most concentrated expressions. Hostility toward the system is baked into the system. Real rebellion is not found in smoking cigarettes, drinking hard, or ranting about capitalism. That’s all been done. The world is already a Potemkin village, and we’ve known it for decades.

The question is no longer “wake up”—but wake up to what?

Fifteen years ago, I read Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. It furthered Peter Wessel Zapffe’s antinatalism and pessimism. It ruined me. I thought it was true. I thought despair was noble. I was wrong.

Pessimism and nihilism are not just false—they’re incoherent. Their justifications are solipsistic, their conclusions self-collapsing. They cannot render reality intelligibly, and so they make everything nothing. That’s not profound—it’s delusion.

Ligotti and David Benatar (whom I address later) aren’t revealing a hidden truth. They are the actual conspiracy: the slow erosion of the idea that human life is sacred. We are no longer told we’ll be millionaires or movie gods. We’re told something worse: that we don’t matter. That human life is a biological accident.

But we do matter. And the most counter-cultural act in our time is to treat life as if it means something.

Arise, O my soul! Awaken, O my glory!

For every Rust Cohle or Tyler Durden, there’s a corporate sponsor handing them a cigarette and a script. The house always wins, and yelling about our hand is just controlled opposition. Real rebellion isn’t about shouting at evil. That only makes us resemble it. We don’t become holy by railing against darkness, we become holy by loving in the light.

Love is self-forgetful. Love is generous. Love reflects the Trinity.
Meaning is communion. Being is communion. Revolution is communion.

The lie is that we don’t matter; the lie is that there is no meaning. But the Incarnation counters this modern fairytale. God thought man mattered so much that the eternal “Logos became flesh and tabernacled among us” (Jn. 1:14). Not as an abstract idea or passive presence among men, but hypostatically—uniting His divinity with our humanity. He suffered death, and by His death trampled down death, rising on the third day.

The Resurrection is the light shining in the darkness (cf. Jn. 1:5), the Cross confounding the logic of despair (cf. I Cor. 1:18). And though the darkness cannot overcome the Sun of Righteousness, the modern world cannot perceive the light of the Resurrection—the very Paschal light—because it has lost its symbolic and liturgical vision. The eyes of the heart have been darkened, making the truth unintelligible.

We have been told we are nothing more than evolved animals, a cosmic fluke of consciousness left to question why in a cold, uncaring universe that has no answers. But if Christ is risen—and He is—than we are more than matter. We are icons reflecting heavenly realities, bearing the image of God, and invited “to become children of God” (Jn. 1:12), not through self-destruction but transformation.   

I didn’t begin to understand this until suffering stripped me of my escape routes—pleasure, distraction, even clarity. My body was screaming in pain. I was losing my mind. And yet, in that wilderness, the world began to reveal itself—not as a trap, but as a gift.

Cosmic pessimists would call this a coping mechanism, a maladaptive cognitive glitch. They’re wrong. Life is not a glitch. It’s a miracle. And it took my life as I knew it being taken away for me to see that.

I’m finally getting help now. I have cervicogenic headaches, nervous system dysfunction, cortisol flooding my body day and night. It’s not fixed, but I have hope—and hope has given me perspective.

We are not meant to flee from pain. We are meant to go through it. We are found in that pain. We meet God there. We meet ourselves there. A life without suffering is no life at all.

As St. Thalassios the Libyan said:

“If you are not willing to repent through freely choosing to suffer, unsought sufferings will providentially be imposed on you.”[3]

Against Pessimism

Modern philosophies like philosophical pessimism, antinatalism, and materialism have forgotten that life and the world are gifts from God. The world is an icon, meant to direct us toward heavenly realities and allow us to participate in them. But when everything is reduced to a thing-in-itself, reality becomes fragmented, stilted, and ultimately meaningless—nothing participates in the divine. The transcendent grounding of existence is lost, and what remains is a flattened world of disenchanted things.

This collapse of meaning has been heavily shaped by the modern scientific worldview, deeply influenced by evolutionary and mechanistic assumptions. Within this framework, humanity is viewed as an emergent species—an accidental outgrowth of blind processes—whose consciousness is a kind of cosmic cognitive misfiring. Human reason is reduced to a biological byproduct; consciousness is seen not as a gift but as a glitch.

Philosophical pessimism—particularly in the thought of figures like Peter Wessel Zappfe—draws from this worldview. Zappfe argued that humanity’s capacity for self-awareness is a tragic mistake in a universe devoid of meaning. The very act of asking “why?” becomes, in his view, a burden, since the cosmos has no answer. Consciousness, then, is not a gift but a cruel evolutionary blunder.

Jesse Bering, building on the work of Daniel Dennett, offers a similar account of consciousness. For Bering, human beliefs—especially those concerning God—arise from an overactive “theory of mind,” a set of cognitive tools that evolved for social navigation. While Bering’s conclusions are not as bleak as Zappfe’s, they echo the same existential suspicion: that our impulse to assign meaning is a distortion, a byproduct of evolution rather than a discovery of truth.

But this form of naive empiricism is not an epistemic justification. Bering and Dennett, by grounding all cognition in contingent evolutionary processes, ultimately undermine the very possibility of rational thought. If everything is random and purposeless, then logic itself—being abstract, immaterial, and necessary—has no footing. If reasoning is merely adaptive and not truth-directed, then even their conclusions about the world, including the nonexistence of God, are not reliable but merely evolutionarily advantageous fictions.

Alvin Plantinga makes this point in his Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism: if our cognitive faculties are aimed at survival rather than truth, then we have no solid reason to trust any belief they produce—including the belief in naturalism itself.

Philosophical pessimism, like much of modern secular thought, stems from a materialist monism that has abandoned classical teleology—the idea that things have an end or purpose. Without a teleological metaphysics, reason, logic, and even morality become unmoored. Bering, in The Belief Instinct, invokes Sartre’s famous claim that “existence precedes essence,” divorcing human identity from any divine or cosmic order and making meaning entirely subjective.

Yet even Bering admits that humans are hardwired to perceive purpose in the world, a function he calls a “cognitive illusion.” From his vantage point, our tendency to see intention or design in nature—whether in a waterfall or a child’s birth—is an evolutionary fluke.

Still, Bering and others cannot remain consistent materialists. Antinatalism and philosophical pessimism retain moral judgments—often quite strong ones. Antinatalists, for instance, argue not merely that one should refrain from procreating, but that one ought not bring others into existence. They appeal to secular humanist principles such as consent and harm reduction.

But these claims are self-refuting. If non-existence is better than existence because existence entails suffering, we run into a contradiction: non-existence is, by definition, nothing—so how can anything be said about it, let alone attribute value like “better” or “worse”? Projecting concepts like “consent” into non-being turns nothing into something, which collapses the very distinction upon which the argument depends. This is similar to the limitations of cataphatic theology: we cannot predicate qualities of that which is wholly beyond being without contradiction.

Moreover, the claim that non-existence is preferable to existence presumes knowledge of what non-existence is like—a knowledge we cannot have. It’s conjecture masquerading as morality. Benatar’s argument in Better Never to Have Been hinges on an asymmetry:

(1) The presence of pain is bad.
(2) The presence of pleasure is good.
(3) The absence of pain is good, even if there is no one to enjoy it.
(4) The absence of pleasure is not bad, unless someone is deprived of it.[4]

This formulation allows Benatar to argue that even happy lives should not be brought into being. But again, this assumes moral relevance exists prior to existence—a paradox. If one does not exist, one is not a moral subject. The moral calculus cannot precede being.[5]

In this way, pessimism gains traction by smuggling in the very moral structures it ultimately denies. It relies on value judgments while rejecting the metaphysical conditions that make value possible. If human life is merely a byproduct of blind evolutionary processes, then concepts like “good,” “bad,” and “ought” have no ontological weight.

Even if you’ve never heard of philosophical pessimism, you’ve likely absorbed its assumptions. Much of modern thought treats life as mechanistic and identity as self-constructed. Personhood is flattened into a set of preferences or psychological traits, divorced from any higher telos. And the results are evident: a decline in childbirth, friendships, and in-person relationships, accompanied by rising rates of loneliness, despair, and digital escapism. We may not call ourselves pessimists, but we live in a culture steeped in pessimistic premises.

I speak from experience. I once championed antinatalism and devoured the writings of Ligotti, Cioran, and Stanhope. But that path didn’t lead to freedom—it led to despair. Hedonism becomes slavery. Avoiding pain doesn’t end suffering; it compounds it. When we reduce life to a pendulum of pleasure and pain with no ultimate meaning, we descend into nihilism with philosophical window dressing.

St. Maximus the Confessor offers a way through. He writes:

“All visible realities need the cross, that is, the state in which they are cut off from things acting upon them through the senses. All intelligible realities need burial.”[6]

To perceive rightly, everything must pass through the Cross. That is, our senses and thoughts must be crucified and raised in Christ. Only then do we see truly. The Christian doesn’t deny suffering but sees its transfiguration. St. Maximus affirms:

“God made us so that we might become ‘partakers of the divine nature’ (2 Pet. 1:4)… through deification by grace… It is for its sake that what is not is brought into being and given existence.”[7]

Philosophical pessimism lacks the metaphysical framework that Orthodox Christianity possesses—one that moves beyond materialism toward deification. While the two may share a recognition of life’s difficulty, particularly the cycle of pleasure and pain—their conclusions differ drastically.

The pessimist sees this pendulum as evidence of an uncaring cosmos and meaningless existence; the Christian sees in it a signpost toward eternity: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us” (Rom. 8:18).

St. Maximus the Confessor notes that pleasure and pain are intertwined: sensual pleasure always begetting pain, as observed even in childbirth (Gen. 3:16). This insight aligns, in part, with the pessimist’s observations. Yet, where the pessimist concludes that non-existence is preferable, they still seek to flee pain by pursuing pleasure, and thus remain trapped in the very pattern they lament.

The Christian seeks liberation from this cycle, bringing pleasure-seeking desires under the discipline of the cross: “casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5).

Both see the same problem, but only one carries the cross. The pessimist denies it—not out of malice, but because they have no paradigm to understand it: “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Cor. 1:18). The materialist isn’t evil for failing to comprehend the cross, but they are perishing under the weight of their own self-made identities, lost in the endless pursuit of pleasure and the fear of pain.

This comes down to paradigm. As Thomas Kuhn described, one cannot see what their worldview cannot permit. He called it incommensurability—but this is not merely a relativistic clash of frameworks. This is about life and death.

The pessimist dismisses the cross, yet the cross is the very answer to the problem they perceive. It confronts all of us, regardless of our preconceptions. As Fr. Dumitru Stăniloae writes,

“We feel the dissolution of the present world and of our own existence as a pain, a suffering; feel it as a sorrow because we have bound the affections which form part of our being to the image of the world which is passing away. This attachment to the things of this world is felt particularly strongly by those who do not believe that there is any future transformation of this world after the life which we know.”[8]

The materialist cannot conceive of life beyond itself. To the materialist, the world is merely a collection of things—objects to be used or scorned—never received as gifts. The human person is no longer an image-bearer of God, but a statistical accident caught in a tragic, meaningless cosmos.

Yet the Cross still stands. And it is in our response to the Cross that reveals or refuses our humanity. To embrace the human condition is to be in communion with God and neighbor; to reject it is to bear the weight of existence with no hope—only suffering, only isolation. Man then enters a pseudo-reality: the outer darkness.

It comes down to this: Will we take responsibility for ourselves and others, or will we reject the gift of reality itself?

The question demands an answer not just in thought, but in life. The Cross waits and in the next part, we’ll turn more fully to what it means to live not just against pessimism, but toward transfiguration.

Ο ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ ΕΝ ΤΩ ΜΕΣΩ ΗΜΩΝ! ΚΑΙ ΗΝ ΚΑΙ ΕΣΤΙ ΚΑΙ ΕΣΤΑΙ

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[1] St. Nikolaj Velimirović, The Prologue of Ohrid: Lives of Saints, Hymns, Reflections and Homilies for Every Day of the Year (Ashok Vihar, Delhi: Facsimile Publisher, n.d.), 700.

[2] St. Theophan the Recluse, Thoughts for Each Day of the Year, trans. Lisa Marie Baranov (Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2022), 85-86.

[3] St. Thalassios the Libyan, The Philokalia, Vol. 2, 317, St. Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St. Makarious of Corinth, eds., trans. G.E.H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware (New York: Faber and Faber, 1981).

[4] Benatar, David. Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 2006, 30

[5] Ibid. 25, 26

[6] St. Maximos the Confessor, The Philokalia, Vol. 2, 127, St. Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St. Makarious of Corinth, eds., trans. G.E.H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware (New York: Faber and Faber, 1981).

[7] Ibid. 173.

[8] Dumitru Stăniloae, The Victory of the Cross. (Oxford: SLG Press, 2001), 8.