"Organized Christianity has always represented immortality as a sort of common heritage; but I never could see why spiritual life should not be conditioned on the same terms as all life, i. e., correspondence with environment"
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Nock needles Christianity where it’s most socially useful: its promise that immortality comes as a kind of citizenship benefit. “Common heritage” sounds deliberately bureaucratic, like salvation is a birthright passed down with the family silver. The jab isn’t at spirituality itself but at an institution that, in his view, democratizes eternity the way modern states democratize entitlement: broadly, automatically, and with minimal attention to fitness.
His alternative is pointedly Darwinian. By insisting that “spiritual life” should be “conditioned on the same terms as all life,” Nock drags the soul out of the sanctuary and into the ecological arena. Life persists only when it matches its conditions; why should the inner life be exempt? Under the surface is an elitist, or at least anti-mass, sensibility: spiritual survival is not a collective guarantee but an achieved correspondence, a discipline. “Environment” here isn’t just nature; it’s the moral and intellectual climate one can actually inhabit without self-deception.
The context matters. Nock wrote as a skeptical anti-statist in an America where mainline Protestantism often functioned as cultural glue and moral credentialing. His suspicion of “organized” religion parallels his suspicion of organized politics: both trade in consolations that keep institutions stable and individuals complacent. The line lands because it reframes immortality not as comfort but as consequence, stripping away the church’s insurance-policy rhetoric and replacing it with a harsher, unsettling standard: adapt inwardly, or don’t expect to last.
His alternative is pointedly Darwinian. By insisting that “spiritual life” should be “conditioned on the same terms as all life,” Nock drags the soul out of the sanctuary and into the ecological arena. Life persists only when it matches its conditions; why should the inner life be exempt? Under the surface is an elitist, or at least anti-mass, sensibility: spiritual survival is not a collective guarantee but an achieved correspondence, a discipline. “Environment” here isn’t just nature; it’s the moral and intellectual climate one can actually inhabit without self-deception.
The context matters. Nock wrote as a skeptical anti-statist in an America where mainline Protestantism often functioned as cultural glue and moral credentialing. His suspicion of “organized” religion parallels his suspicion of organized politics: both trade in consolations that keep institutions stable and individuals complacent. The line lands because it reframes immortality not as comfort but as consequence, stripping away the church’s insurance-policy rhetoric and replacing it with a harsher, unsettling standard: adapt inwardly, or don’t expect to last.
Quote Details
| Topic | Faith |
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