Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Evangelical
Materialists Hell Bent to Become Magicians in the Age of Antichrist

Materialists Hell Bent to Become Magicians in the Age of Antichrist

Last updated on: May 1, 2019 at 11:33 am by John Mark N. Reynolds

Materialists Hell Bent to Become Magicians in the Age of Antichrist 2019-05-01T11:33:28-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

My favorite pub (Richmond Arms) doesn’t, but some pubs will give you salty food hoping for more drink orders. Salty snacks spur thirst, thirst drinking, and in a pub, perhaps more alcohol than a man should have. Dry a man out, have him eat salt, and a pub crawler might run up a tab quenching a fierce thirst.

Atheism and materialism are salty snacks for humankind. They deny reality: ideas, numbers, God, and the mind. The denial sets up a craving in most people, those starved of beauty beyond personal taste and meaning not manufactured by men. These longings can cause people to poke into the metaphysical world looking for something, anything. This is foolish, like sating a desire for physics by blindly messing with a reactor. In physics and metaphysics, the result is more often bad than good.

Or so Arthur Machen, a father of modern horror (ask Lovecraft and Stephen King) believed. He saw the British Empire, ugly and bloated on injustice, sliding into decadence and doubt. The decadence numbed the guilt and the doubt softened the conscience. Machen was there as Oscar Wilde and a lost generation explored libertine morality. As Wilde returned to the Church, so did Machen, both too intellectually honest to confuse desire with truth.

Machen, fundamentally, hated the clockwork universe of HG Wells and the simplistic reductionist philosophy of the naturalists. He was tempted by the salty philosophy of materialism to drink too much supernaturalism, looking in every cultural rubbish bin for discarded supernaturalism. Machen found only darkness and devils and so returned to God and God’s people. He drank too much, perhaps, and never quite recovered. Like Charles Williams, he is both brilliant and a caution.

Yet Machen knew the sin of our age: the thirst for storming heaven illegitimately. We forget that “science” may be a mere body of knowledge, but the knowledge is used by men. Science applied is always a power that some men can use over other men. Science, as Machen saw, can become a denial of what ought to be in an attempt to make our desires what is.

Machen saw this as sorcery: man looking for a power to be God. This always fails, but the desire from all the salt remains. Sin for Machen was desire for the miraculous that settled for magic. His short story “The White People” suggested that the great sinners, the sorcerers, were rare, but out there. Machen knew this by personal experience, occultism by the reaction of atheism.

Machen discusses “sin” and refuses to call societal sins the great sins:

But are you a Catholic?’ said Cotgrave.

‘Yes; I am a member of the persecuted Anglican Church.’

‘Then, how about those texts which seem to reckon as sin that which you would set down as a mere trivial dereliction?’

‘Yes; but in one place the word “sorcerers” comes in the same sentence, doesn’t it? That seems to me to give the key-note. Consider: can you imagine for a moment that a false statement which saves an innocent man’s life is a sin? No; very good, then, it is not the mere liar who is excluded by those words; it is, above all, the “sorcerers” who use the material life, who use the failings incidental to material life as instruments to obtain their infinitely wicked ends. And let me tell you this: our higher senses are so blunted, we are so drenched with materialism, that we should probably fail to recognize real wickedness if we encountered it.’

Machen believed, and history has tended to confirm, that atheist culture will be blind to real wickedness. It will set up a gulag and call it progress. Yet that very materialism will breed in many people a craving for sorcery, supernaturalism on the cheap. Look at Stalinist art and you can see the saltiness that would produce occultism all over the Soviet Union. Go to China and look underground and see what Machen prophesied: kill true religion and a nation gets devilish religion. A few people will eat the pretzels and not order a drink, but most will.

The desperation to quench spiritual thirst will cause great evils to be ignored:

‘But shouldn’t we experience a certain horror—a terror such as you hinted we would experience if a rose tree sang—in the mere presence of an evil man?’

‘We should if we were natural: children and women feel this horror you speak of, even animals experience it. But with most of us convention and civilization and education have blinded and deafened and obscured the natural reason. No, sometimes we may recognize evil by its hatred of the good—one doesn’t need much penetration to guess at the influence which dictated, quite unconsciously, the “Blackwood” review of Keats—but this is purely incidental; and, as a rule, I suspect that the Hierarchs of Tophet pass quite unnoticed, or, perhaps, in certain cases, as good but mistaken men.’

For Machen materialism warps us, cutting us off from our natural reason. The simplistic materialism that dismisses anything that cannot be reduced to matter and energy in mindless motion comes with a price. Such a culture becomes blind to any infernal action. While proclaiming the death of God, who persists in not dying in any case, the materialist becomes unable to detect or block the diabolical.

God came as a man: Jesus Christ. The materialist denies this truth, but the result is not (for the most part) merely reasonable. Instead, the denial of truth makes a man thirsty for something. He denies God came in the flesh, how contrary to materialism! If we will not see God in Christ, then we must look for new visions of God. These turn out to be like a short story by HP Lovecraft: full of writing and vision that is deeply horrid.

The antichrist denies that Jesus comes in the flesh, but this antichrist spirit usually ends in rootless religiosity. Doctrines of demons inevitably fill the place of goodness, truth, and beauty. The materialist will say he worships devils “ironically,” but devils know nothing of humor or irony. They take us at our word.

We live in an age of antichrists.

Little children, it is the last time: and as ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even now are there many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last time.

‘

————————————————————

The White People in The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories (Oxford World Classics) Arthur Machen (Pages 261-66).

Culture

On Books

Spiritual Reflections

Previous Post

April 30, 2019

The Shield of Quintus I (Guest Voice James Harrington)

Next Post

May 2, 2019 The Comfy Chair to Damnation: Horror Literature (Arthur Machen!) and the Antichrist is on the Other Channel

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Apologetics Art Culture Education On Books On Education Philosophy Politics Pop Culture Spiritual Reflections Uncategorized

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 July 2025 June 2025 September 2024 July 2024 June 2024 December 2023 June 2023 September 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

Which couple taught Apollos more accurately about Jesus in Ephesus?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Lydia and Titus Ananias and Sapphira Mary and Joseph Priscilla and Aquila

Books by This Author John Mark Reynolds

See All Titles »