God Is Dead (and No One Cares)

“We have killed him–you and I.”[1]

There is little in Nietzsche’s vast oeuvres that has been discussed more than this aphorism. I spend the effort of writing this, now, because of the confusion this oft-quoted passage has caused. Will I be saying anything groundbreaking? Earth-shattering? No, no–only reporting what I have heard said. If repetition bores you to tears, spare yourself the pain of reading any further.

So, what was Nietzsche on about, anyways? Most people find it difficult to understand, since their only exposure to the aphorism is when it is quoted to them out of its original context. The problem, then, seems to be that there is no information–no grounding–that illuminates the death of God. As a result, it is extremely difficult to see Nietzsche as very much different to the angry, fist-thumping atheist-rhetorician (a character we have all become quite well-acquainted with, thanks to the “New Atheism”). Let us, then, restore the death of God to its proper sphere by focusing on the aphorisms leading to it, exploring their relations.

Nietzsche’s discussion of the death of God is, in reality, a book-long venture, which has its clearest expression and climax in the section bookended by aphorisms 108 and 125. As Eliot said, “In my end is my beginning”[2]–these two aphorisms are one point on a circle, around which Nietzsche’s discussion travels until it reaches the place whence it began. The beginning is then newly illumined by the experience gained by voyaging forward to the end.

We begin, then, by hearing merely that God is dead, and that, despite this, some fools still try to look upon him. All that is left of God is his shadow–a thing insubstantial and meaningless–preserved by those too weak to endure God’s total absence, even if this shadow is only manifest in the Romantic’s deification of nature.

From this proclamation, Nietzsche delves towards a more primal point in the mental history of Western man: the birth of rationalism.

Knowledge and logic are examined right down to their roots. Mankind develops certain knowledges in response to environmental and practical pressures–such knowledge is the human assertion of power against the world around him. Thus, the world-place in which the human finds himself shapes his intellect, in what it can grasp and in the direction it reaches. Intuitions about life were born in this way–the very intuitions forming the basis of modern argumentation, all born of a process unconcerned with truth.

The beginning of logic is even more dubious. As Nietzsche writes:

How did logic come into existence in man’s head? Certainly out of illogic, whose realm originally must have been immense. Innumerable beings who made inferences in a way different from ours perished; for all that, their ways might have been truer.[3]

Logical argumentation itself, then, is based upon foundations inherently unable to support it, should the argument reach too high, and, due to its illogical birthright, it will often draw conclusions that are untrue and unjust.

To close the circle, then, we look again upon the death of God, this time with the terror and urgency of the madman. It is a shock, one for which most are never ready. What do the events described between our viewings of God’s casket mean?

Nietzsche has described two blind spots in Western philosophy, in spite of which Scholastic theology, and the Modern theology which was in dialectical response to it, built God’s edifice. Logic, in the West, took on the role of master architect, despite the fact that it was only suited to gaze upon the structures of the ancients. To worsen this, Logic took as its foundations and raw materials those rotten intuitions that had been shaped by a world in which God is unknowable. Knowledge, then, had nothing to properly offer the builder of Western theology, but still he passed his meager materials to the architect–out of prideful embarrassment, no doubt. The ineptness of Logic as a builder and the weakness of Knowledge as material resulted in a massively compromised structure, waiting only for the right wolf to blow it down. And then along came Nietzsche, telling of God’s death, and making us wonder–was this God ever alive?

As was noted above, the Western churches have not given up worshiping this shadow–and neither have the atheists, whose thought is based upon a dialectical opposition to Western theism, rather than a transcendence or primacy. Western philosophy as a project is undermined by the announcement of God’s death, for which reason Heidegger saw in Nietzsche “the end of metaphysics”. It should be especially poignant, then, that on this day–Great and Holy Friday–Eastern Christians are also announcing the death of God, reminding all that in the end is also the beginning . . .

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As a general note, I kind of vaguely have Christos Yannaras’s On the Absence and Unknowability of God: Heidegger and the Areopagite in the back of my mind as I write this. I guess one might cull from this that I am following a somewhat Heideggerian reading of Nietzsche.
[1] Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Gay Science, trans. Kaufmann, (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 125.
[2] If I remember correctly, Eliot is quoting a saying of Mary, Queen of Scots.
[3] Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Gay Science, trans. Kaufmann, (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 111.