Review from “Millennial Fever or Millennial Denial: Are these Our only Options?” by Author Michael D. O’Brien

In his prescient 1949 essay, "The Terrors of the Year 2000," Etienne Gilson warns that the brave new man is dominated by the spirit of "Anti-Christus." Having abandoned belief or trust in the God who became man and suffers with us in order to raise us up, we would make ourselves into God, for man cannot live long without a god and a spirituality. Positing the "demoniac grandeur of Nietzsche" as the forerunner and articulator of this spiritual condition, Gilson warns that his influence is great because in our time he bears no resemblance to the fantastic beast of the Apocalypse: “The entire human order totters on its base. Anti christ is still the only one who knows this, the only one who foresees the appalling cataclysm of the "reversal of values" which is in the making, for if the totality of the human past depended on the certitude that God exists, the totality of the future must needs depend on the contrary certitude, that God does not exist. . . .Have we understood at last? That is not certain, because the announcement of a cataclysm of such magnitude ordinarily leaves but a single escape: to disbelieve it, and in order not to believe, to refuse to understand it. If Nietzsche speaks truly, it is the very foundations of human life which are to be overthrown . He who would be a creator, both in good and evil, must first of all know how to destroy and wreck values" [Nietzsche writes]. They are, in fact, being wrecked around us, and under our very feet, everywhere. We have stopped counting the unheard of theories thrown at us under names as various as their methods of thought, each the harbinger of a new truth which it promises to create shortly, joyously busy preparing the brave new world of tomorrow by first annihilating the world of today.. . . Since men have refused to serve God, there is no longer an arbiter between them and the State which dominates them. It is no longer God but the State which judges them. But who, then, will judge the State?