Nitzche's "God is Dead:" A Thunderbolt Through History

 The document in question is a section from The Gay Science authored by Friedrich Nietzsche in 1882 subtitled “God Is Dead” and translated into English by Walter Kaufmann 100 years later. This is a philosophical document that uses the style of dramatization to poetically make its points – a style for which Nietzsche is well known and which leads to some difficulty in interpreting him. This document is profoundly relevant today, as Nietzsche’s ideas have greatly influenced contemporary religious, psychological, and political thought. Analyzing this text helps frame the historical precedence that has culminated in our contemporary “meaning crisis”.

Nitzsche was a complicated person who was often at odds with himself. A man devoted to strength, willpower, and competition, who became very unwell beyond his control and who never found success in marriage, financially, or with his ideas until after he died prematurely in 1900 from pneumonia in a state of stroke-induced dementia. Audiences have had great difficulty interpreting his work precisely because he utilizes such an emphatic style that can seem absolute, and yet the poetics do not lend themselves to systematic understanding. Thus, scholars are inclined to interpret Nietzsche on his own terms: philologically and with skepticism toward theological and linguistic dogmas. Nietzsche was a radical individualist and saw humanity as requiring liberation from the herd. He sought to inspire others towards a similar isolated virtue in response to what he saw as the most momentous event of human history: the death of God.

What is meant by the death of God is not a simple matter of analogy. Nietzsche saw the murder unfolding over a large span of history and likewise understood the consequences to be felt globally much later. The statement comes as a reaction to several processes that eroded the Western basis for morality, metaphysics, and onto theology dating back to the Book of Genesis and Plato and extending through 19th-century Europe. The plotting of the murder began with the Greek philosophers and their God of the good; absolute truth, worshipped by the relentless search for knowledge. This mode planted the seeds that would flower in Christianity with the desire to emulate God through Jesus Christ. Whose life offers the second pre-echo to Nietzsche’s famous pronouncement through the crucifixion; that God would die the humiliating death of a slave was famously called blasphemy to the Jews and foolishness to the Romans. Next in the murder investigation, we turn to the case of Renaissance humanism in the 15th century which sought to move beyond the failed attempts to define God (either positively or negatively). The humanists, to their credit, were attempting to avoid the sin of reducing God to the finite world and so turned their focus to a study of humanity and its excellence. This inflation of the human spirit posed another spiritual risk closely related to the tower of Babel – that we might be able to build ourselves a ladder to heaven and dethrone God. Perhaps despite this, God maintained the advantage until the next major religious convulsion: the Protestant Reformation a’ la Martin Luther. Ironically, by seeking to preserve the Christianity of the church fathers, Luther provoked a deep skepticism towards the church and Her remedies for the soul. Once the priest was dispensed with as a barrier to Christ, all the meaning-making apparatus came to be seen as superstition and a means of control. It is no accident of history that Nietzsche comes from a family of Lutheran pastors and is particularly sensitive to this theological conflict. Next, we may look at the secularizing of Christianity through the Enlightenment and the increasing progress of technology as motives for the murder. Again the irony is apparent that two distinctly human traits that were often thought to make us most like God (Often used to prove His existence) led to our overtaking Him: Science (the ability to seek knowledge and understand the world), and Techne (the ability to create). Finally, there was the realization that we had, through our pursuit of knowledge and the proliferation of life-easing technology, so abstracted God out of our lives that He no longer performed His function as the foundation of causes (formal to final and those in between).

Nietzsche was reacting against the God of pure Spirit proposed by Hegel in his dialectical theory on the inevitable progress of history. If one can simply sit out from the action of life and allow the Spirit to drive the progressive arc of history, then we are left with an impotent nihilism. A way of life which is ultimately life-denying. Understanding the historical precedence can illuminate the question of the intended audience which was initially obscured. Nietzsche was writing for the person, whoever they may be, who is willing to take up his challenge: now that we have killed God, we have the responsibility to become gods; to fulfill the functions formerly performed by this massive, world-shaping idea; to take on the responsibility of such a heavy historical burden. The horrifying gravity of such a call is precisely why Nietzsche writes in such a mercurial style. He does not wish to trouble those who cannot understand the premature madman. Let them continue to be with the herd, patience for the superman is to be expected. Nietzsche is noted to have written as much in a letter to his friend. He suggests that the world will not be ready for his ideas until 1901, which is curiously a year after his premature death.

Nietzsche was interested in developing a new mythology, not to be worshiped by yet another herd, but to, once and for all, liberate the individual from the herd. To this end, he developed his “gay science:” a poetic style of inquiry from which he developed his most influential ideas. Nietzsche could already see that people were beginning to replace God with science and technology; that they were claiming to see the world for what it was, objectively, but were instead hoodwinked yet again by an institution that required faith and dogmatic adherence (else you should suffer guilt and fear still). Thus, Nietzsche prophylactically developed his mythology of liberation. At its foundation was the nightmare of the eternal recurrence, meant to provoke a profound sense of meaning in every action as a shock against nihilism. At its center, or peak, is the superman, a being capable of transcending mere humanity to achieve individual godhood without any relation to the herd. Nietzsche envisioned a future for humanity that embraced these two ideas and would lead to acceptance of the natural state. A Hobbsian war of all against all in an environment of fertility and death; a natural economy of “Malthusian rigor.” In other words, endless competition for finite resources where the life embracing are rewarded with a more full life. However, before this (u/dis)topia could emerge, Nietzsche proposed four consequences would directly follow from the death of God:

1) “[the removal of] the universal foundations of morality.” Moral relativism reigns by interpretation of history and social dominance.

2) “We will continue to live under the shadow of a dead God. All things will be turned towards a religious nostalgia such that even science and technology will mimic the traditional religions.

3) “We enter an age of ambiguity and transition… an impending age of breakdown, destruction, ruin, and cataclysm”. But this breakdown creates an opportunity for a true adventure to be had by the brave encounter with knowledge using the gay science.

4) “The recognition of man's birth”. This is the ascension of man to godhood. To createmaximal significance out of every moment.

So then what of these consequences? At what point do we find ourselves? Nietzsche's thoughts have led to many interpretations in the last 125 years. Examples include the Nazi’s understanding of the superman combined with social Darwinism to try to instantiate a perfect race through endless combat; the post-modern philosophy which has spawned the critical studies movement and takes up Nietzsche’s call to radically deconstruct everything; and the psychoanalytic thinkers such as Freud and Jung who took up the myth-building project and investigated the unconscious forces within humanity. What we are left with today is little agreement between those who come after Nietzsche. Rather we see a set of complex and societally threatening crises otherwise referred to as a meta-crisis, or “the meaning crisis” (as coined by University of Toronto professor, John Vervaeke) This is to say we live in an existential struggle defined by radical skepticism of epistemology, a confusion of ontology, metaphysics, and ethics, a growing isolation and a fragmenting of identity, and lastly, a reactionary political discourse that threatens the return of both fascism and anarchism. The spirit of Nietzsche is still very much with us and how we interpret him is of crucial significance for how we choose to move forward. Yes, God is dead. And yes, we did kill Him, but perhaps Nietzsche had forgotten that Christianity began with a recognition of the death of God, and from this followed the faith that His resurrection would be a return of the ultimate sword of Damocles.