06/24/04

The Death of God-Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a German philologist and philosopher who became well known for his iconoclastic style, aphoristic writings, and harsh critique of religion and contemporary ideas about morality. Nietzsche's sister, a virulent anti-semite, ended up with control over his papers after he died and she worked to ensure that his legacy would be used to support anti-semitic politics and the Nazi regime, albeit in an edited form.

 The famous “God is dead” quote

“Have you heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly, "I seek God! I seek God!" As many of those who do not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter...

Whither is God," he cried. "I shall tell you. We have killed him - you and I. All of us are murderers.... God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him...” -Friedrich Nietzsche. The Gay Science (1882), section 126

What does Nietzsche's madman really mean? He can't merely mean to say that there are atheists in the world - that's nothing new. He can't mean to say that God has literally died because that wouldn't make any sense. If God were really dead, then God must have been alive at one point - but if the God of orthodox European Christianity were alive then it would be eternal and could never die.

So apparently, this madman can't be talking about the literal God believed in by so many theists. Instead, he's talking about what this god represented for European culture, the shared cultural belief in God which had once been its defining and uniting characteristic.

Europe Without God

1887, in the second edition of The Gay Science, Nietzsche added Book Five to the original, which begins with Section 343 and the statement: "The greatest recent event—that God is dead, that the belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable..."

As translator and eminent Nietzsche scholar Walter Kaufmann points out: "This clause is clearly offered as an explanation of 'God is dead.'" In The Antichrist (1888), Nietzsche is more specific:

“The Christian conception of God... is one of the most corrupt conceptions of God arrived at on earth...” And, when Nietzche was already close to insanity, he called himself "the Anti-Christ.

We may now pause here and think. Nietzsche obviously means that the Christian notion of God is dead, that this notion has become unbelievable. At the time of Nietzsche's writing in the latter half of the nineteenth century, this shared belief was waning. Science, art, and politics were all moving beyond the religiosity of the past.

Why had most intellectuals and writers in Europe abandoned traditional Christianity by the end of the nineteenth century? Was it a result of industrial and scientific progress? Was it Charles Darwin and his insightful writing on evolution? As A.N. Wilson (this guys would later write a controversial biography of C. S. Lewis) writes in his book God's Funeral, the sources of this skepticism and disbelief were many and varied.

Where God had once stood alone - at the center of knowledge, meaning and life - a cacophony of voices was now being heard and God was being pushed aside. For many, particularly those who might be counted among the cultural and intellectual elite, God was gone entirely.

And far from replacing God, that cacophony of voices merely created a void. They did not unite and they did not offer the same certainty and solace that God once managed to provide. This created not simply a crisis of faith, but also a crisis of culture. As science and philosophy and politics treated God as irrelevant, humanity once again became the measure of all things - but no one seemed prepared to accept the value of that sort of standard.

*most of this material is taken from About.com