November2015FinalWeb

Orthodox Christianity
FR. SERAPHIM ROSE,
PART II - THE VALLEY OF DEATH
There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.
Freidrich Nietzsche
There is an old illusion. It is called good and evil.
Freidrich Nietzsche
The world is beautiful but has a disease called man.
Freidrich Nietzsche
I was in hell. I know what hell is.
Fr. Seraphim Rose
During these years in San Francisco, Eugene Rose studied with Alan Watts and Gi-ming Shien at
the Institute of Asian Studies. And he earned a master’s degree in Oriental languages at UC Berkley,
gaining fluency in ancient Chinese, and studying Japanese, Latin, and Classical Greek. In addition,
during this time he learned Sanskrit on his own. Eugene supported himself by working as a busboy
and as a janitor.
It was during this period that Eugene’s existential and personal anguish became overwhelming. His
desperation became so acute that at times he felt he was losing his sanity. Lacking any unifying
worldview, having long before rejected the insipid, humanized western Protestantism of his childhood,
he abandoned himself into a wasteland of alcohol abuse and sexual debauchery.
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Still, through this darkness he groped doggedly after some coherent, tenable understanding of the life
he felt swirling about him. In addition to his explorations of ancient Chinese and Hindu spirituality,
he inquired among various pseudo-religions and New Age movements and the gurus who were flocking
to San Francisco in those days.
Pursuing philosophical humanism to its logical endpoint, Eugene became absorbed in the existential
writers of nihilism and absurdism—Nietzsche, Kafka, and others. One evening, after having immersed
himself for hours in Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra in the original German, Eugene took
a walk in the city. The sun was setting “and the sky became blood red...He heard Nietzsche’s poetry
resonating inside him. He felt that ‘Zarathustra’ had actually come alive and was speaking to him,
breathing words into him.”*
Thus it was thus that the infernal nature of nihilism and its suzerainty over the Mind of the Time was
revealed to Eugene. From this profound experience sprang, much later, his incisive published works
denouncing modernism and its devastating effect upon the soul of contemporary man.
*Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works. Heiromonk Damascene. St. Herman Press, 2003
NEXT MONTH: FR. SERAPHIM, PART III: FINDING ORTHODOXY
Inquiries to
St. George’s Orthodox Church,
Edenton, NC.
Telephone 482-2006
All chapters copyright © 2015
by author Nick Martone, c/o
St. George’s Church
P.O. Box 38, Edenton, NC.
8 Albemarle Tradewinds November 2015 albemarletradewinds.com