Background: This article was originally written in 2020 as part of a master’s degree. I have decided to post it here as I think many of the themes addressed are applicable to my last post (concerning the so-called ‘extinction-drive’ within Man). I also want to clear up much of the confusion surrounding Nietzsche’s famous announcement that “God is dead”; which has become one of the most famous – and most misunderstood – lines in all of philosophy. As you will see, this was no triumphant declaration of an atheist happy that the God of the Bible had finally (if you’ll excuse the phrase) met his Maker. Indeed, Nietzsche’s cryptic statement is far more complex than most realize – being simultaneously a hopeful reflection and dire warning about the slow decline of religion in the West.
This is discussed below in what I hope are clear and accessible terms. The analogy I draw between Nietzsche’s theory and the Norse creation myth is also intended to clarify rather than complicate. (It was also an excuse to talk a little about Norse mythology – for that particular interest I have only Dr Jackson Crawford to thank).
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Introduction
This essay will evaluate Friedrich Nietzsche’s statement that ‘God is dead’ in the modern world, and that we are destined to wrestle with the ‘shadow’ of this dead god. This essay begins with an in-depth exploration of the ‘madman parable’ in The Gay Science, seeking to identify some of the messages of this passage, as well as its intended audience. This leads into a discussion of his notion that society in the West still exists under the ‘shadow’ of God, exploring whether modern man has succeeded in extricating himself from his religious past. This section will also identify the emancipatory aim that Nietzsche had in making this argument. Finally, Nietzsche’s own perspective on how man can step out of God’s shadow will be unpacked. The project he proposes will be evaluated according to what such an undertaking would involve in practice, highlighting both the opportunities and dangers inherent within it. It will be concluded that Nietzsche offers a powerful story for the modern world which can open us up to possibilities for a better future in a post-Christian landscape.
The ‘Death of God’
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” – Friedrich Nietzsche [1]
In his famous parable of the madman from which the above quote is taken, Nietzsche gives us a concise yet dense account of the phenomenon which he believed would come to define the modern era: the death of God. In this statement Nietzsche was not referring to the literal death of a divine entity. Rather, this ‘death’ was that of a particular “way of life” which had been characteristic of the West for centuries (Mulhall, 2005: 32). Grounded in the traditions and doctrines of Christianity, Nietzsche believed this way of life was built upon irreplaceably religious foundations, and thus with the widespread decline of belief in God since the Enlightenment, what was at risk was nothing less than “civilizational collapse” in Europe (Poppin, 1999: 498). Far from being a celebratory declaration, Nietzsche’s parable instead carries with it a grave warning for the future of the West. This is hinted at by the madman himself, who takes on the role of prophet of doom. In an apocalyptic frenzy he tells the tale of the death of God in the cadence of violence, murder and decay; a great historical deed in which we Westerners have murdered God and in the process destroyed the very grounds upon which our civilization once stood [2].
This act is announced by the madman with some degree of guilt: “who will wipe this blood off us?”, as well as with palpable fear that borders on panic: “is not night continually closing in on us?” (Nietzsche, 2010: 181). In contrast to the ravings of the madman, however, stands the uncomprehending audience in the marketplace around him, which we are told is made up largely of atheists. Implicit in this contrast can be located a core message of the parable: that the true meaning of the decline of religion is not yet fully understood by the secular world, and that it may have unexpected consequences which are “cosmic and catastrophic” in scope (Strong, 2012: 18). Indeed, this difference between the perspective of the madman and his audience is nowhere more striking than in the failure of the marketplace atheists to recognize any loss at all. Beginning with derision and mockery and ending with a bewildered stare, his message utterly eludes these denizens of the ‘enlightened’ world. For them, God was a mere “cognitive error” of the past, a superstition which has been triumphantly snuffed out by the “invigorating light” of reason and progress (Mulhall, 2005: 21).
Nietzsche’s message therefore seems to be directed at a common view which has proliferated in secular culture since the Enlightenment which sees religious belief as simply the unnecessary hangover of a superstitious age that can be easily scrapped in the modern world. Whilst there are a variety of potential origins of this view, one of its progenitors seems to have been Kant and his concept of ‘autonomy’. This notion essentially argues that men should have the courage to decide what is good or bad themselves, without reliance on any kind of authority to choose for them. Using a phrase from the ancient Roman poet Horace, Kant charges men to “dare to know, (or be wise)” (Strong, 2012: 25), thus claiming autonomy through the sheer act of thinking without external compulsion. Seeded in this concept was a fateful separation between God and morality, with moral values derived from religion being labelled as a product of mere ‘immaturity’. According to this Kantian view, the self-actualization of man can only emerge when he develops the courage to act on his own in the world, overcoming his fear of “falling” once the safety of moral authority evaporates (Strong, 2012: 26).
Returning to the madman parable, it can therefore be inferred that the contrast between Nietzsche’s messenger and his audience in fact embodies a clash of worldviews. The sunlight in which the marketplace atheists live symbolizes their belief that they have awoken into a bright clear day after the long night of religious superstition (Mulhall, 2005: 28). Their atheism, at least in their minds, is the final realization of Kantian maturity. For the madman however, and seemingly also for Nietzsche, this brash confidence that the Enlightenment has been successful is an illusion. What’s more, as subscribers to the worldview that has precipitated the decline of organized religion, the marketplace atheists have been unwitting accomplices in the killing of God without fully understanding the consequences of their own act. Perhaps this is because, as the madman says, the “greatness of the deed” is simply too large for the them to grasp (Nietzsche, 2010: 181). In adopting their view of religious belief as merely an unnecessary hurdle to overcome, the marketplace atheists hold a reductionist worldview which is blind to the impending consequences of the death of God. Indeed, they fail to see that a ‘death’ has occurred at all: the “living tissue” of an entire culture putrefying around them (Mulhall, 2005: 22), whilst they exist nestled in the divine corpse without a sense that anything of value has been lost.
The ‘Shadow’ of God
“And we are all Christians, even today; the most radical disbelief is still Christian atheism.” – Jean-Paul Sartre [3]
The point which this quote from Sartre alludes to, and which Nietzsche himself seeks to convey in his notion that Westerners now live in the ‘shadow’ of God, is that whilst literal belief in the divine may be declining, the culture built upon it in Europe is still yet to perish. This insight is Nietzsche’s core critique of the supposedly ‘secular’ world: that the mere rejection of the existence of God as an entity is not sufficient grounds to declare that religion has been overcome. Sartre goes on to point out that even secular thinkers in Europe employ certain “schemata” in their thinking that is notably Christian in origin, and that these patterns of inherited religious thought persist “whether we like it or not” (Sartre 1979 as cited in Glendinning, 2013: 45). Thus, whilst God is dead and religion is in decline, his posthumous influence can still be felt in the very tools that we use to interpret the world around us. Much like those who continued to display the shadow of Buddha in a cave for centuries after his death (Nietzsche, 2010: 167), Nietzsche implies that self-professed atheists remain complicit in the rehearsal and dissemination of ideas and practices which they themselves have purportedly abandoned.
However, if this observation were merely intended as an exposé of the hypocrisy of the secular world, Nietzsche’s argument would be of far less value that it actually is. Indeed, his act of highlighting the failure of European modernity seems to represent more of a ‘wake-up call’ than stern condemnation, offering both a warning for the future and a path to freedom for those who remain frozen in God’s shadow. For Nietzsche, it is only when we abandon the decaying strictures of religion by creatively forging a new culture that this shadow can be truly escaped (Burch, 2014: 198). In doing so, what will be ushered in will be a “higher history than all history hitherto” (Nietzsche, 2010: 181), whereby a fresh life-affirming spirit can be embraced that will animate man and enhance human life. This vision of rising above the spirit of Christianity, which Nietzsche denounced as life-negating and based in a “disgust at life itself” (Nietzsche, 2000: 9), would constitute a final break with the hangovers of the religious past.
In exposing the myth that European culture has managed to extricate itself from Christianity, Nietzsche therefore had an emancipatory aim. However, this proposed stepping out of God’s shadow was not simply the pursuit of a halcyon dream, but also a necessary avoidance of the darker consequences of the death of God which had yet to emerge. Indeed, such consequences may not have yet fully surfaced even in our own day, with Nietzsche predicting that it would take no less than 200 years for this historical change to reach its final stage (Strong, 2012: 18). It is important to note that the process of God’s “divine decomposition” was perceived as an ongoing development (Nietzsche, 2010: 181), implying that the culture of Christianity under-girding European civilization is in slow but inevitable decline. In failing to meet the challenge of constructing our own values in light of this gradual collapse, Nietzsche feared the “nihilistic devaluation of life” that may emerge when we Westerners are left languishing in a cultural vacuum of our own creation (Hollingdale, 1969: 26).
Stepping Out of the Shadow
“Just as coldness and all things grim came from Niflheim, the regions bordering on Muspell were warm and bright, and Ginnungagap was as mild as a windless sky” – Snorri Sturluson [4]
Now that Nietzsche’s emancipatory aim has been outlined, the question arises as to what such a project would actually involve in practice, and what might be some of the costs in enacting it? For instance, one criticism that could be leveled against Nietzsche’s approach is that it fails to recognize what is of genuine value in Christian culture, as well as the fact that certain aspects of it may be salvageable after the death of God. Whilst the old way of life cannot be preserved in its totality, some might contend that specific ideas and practices are worth preserving under the new secular paradigm. For instance, the Christian injunction to ‘love thy neighbor’ is a relatively uncontroversial aspect of the religion which seems easily transferable to any new system of social values. Some might therefore conclude that Nietzsche’s project of fundamentally reconstructing Western culture would result in the type of mistake that is described colloquially as ‘throwing the baby out with the bathwater’, with valuable ideas like love thy neighbor being abandoned forever.
However, this criticism stems from a common misunderstanding of Nietzsche which accuses him of attempting to eradicate all traditional forms of thinking. This is inaccurate in a couple of ways. Firstly, Nietzsche did not deny that important lessons could be learned from historical experience, such as when he spoke of the “rainbow-bridges” of concepts from Greek antiquity having much value today (Strong, 2012: 21). This allusion to Richard Wagner’s ‘Das Rheingold’, itself a retelling of ancient Norse mythology, demonstrates Nietzsche’s belief that the past can inform the present in many ways. This is not to say, of course, that past ways of life can be recreated fully. Rather, what the past offers is a range of intellectual tools in the (re)formulation of our present conditions. Secondly, Nietzsche himself often drew upon the ‘schemata’ of Christianity mentioned by Sartre, however in a notably transformative way. Nietzsche deploys a recognizably “Christian vocabulary”, re-using its language in what he considered to be a less life-denying project (Mulhall, 2005: 17). Furthermore, many of Nietzsche’s core ideas seem to have an origin in Lutheran Pietism, such as the concept of ‘eternal recurrence’ which is shares parallels with the Christian conception of ‘eternal life’ and the unchanging nature of God (Hollingdale, 1969: 28).
Indeed, eternal recurrence is particularly telling of Nietzsche’s intentions, as it embodies an attempt to substitute an alternative to the Christian vision of eternal life (Ridley, 1997: 21) that is in many ways explicitly anti-Christian, due to its focus on immanence and imperfection. This is all to say, the characterization of Nietzsche as attempting to sever the link between past and future is inaccurate. Instead, Nietzsche creatively adapts certain aspects of Christian thinking in order to emphasize immanence over transcendence, life-affirmation over life-negation, and the transitory process of “becoming” over the static condition of “Being” (Nietzsche, 2000: 30). These new values, embodied in a “Dionysian affirmation of the world as it is” (Nietzsche, 1968: 536), were envisaged as the basis for a new culture which would succeed in stepping out of God’s shadow. So long as Christian ideas and practices could serve this new framework, Nietzsche would likely not have minded them continuing on in some guise or another. However, care should be taken not to trivialize the radicalism of his project. Whilst certain aspects of the ‘old ways’ could be retained under the new paradigm, this does not mean that nothing of value in Christianity will be lost once the death of God reaches its final stage.
This understanding is what distinguishes Nietzsche from the marketplace atheists: he recognizes that the construction of a new way of life will necessarily involve the relinquishment of all our former certainties (which have already been proved illusory by the death of God in any case). The sacrificial aspect of this reappraisal of Western culture is thus not shrank away from by Nietzsche. Nonetheless, his belief in the necessity of such an undertaking remains firm, no doubt driven by his wariness of the encroaching influence of nihilism in European society. This nihilism, a direct product of the “God-vacuum” in which the West is now suspended (Glendinning, 2013: 40), can only be vanquished through a revitalizing embrace of the opportunities engendered by the decline of Christianity. What Nietzsche offers to the secular world is thus a powerful narrative of cultural regeneration, one which is far more hopeful than a preliminary reading of the madman parable first suggests.
To illustrate this narrative, it may be useful to employ an analogy from Norse mythology, as Nietzsche does above. In the Norse creation story, at the very beginning of the cosmos, there was little else but Ginnungagap, a primordial void akin to the ancient Greek vision of Chaos before the beginning of time (Sturluson, 2005: 13). To the north of this void was Niflheim, a realm of shadow and ice which for our purposes can embody the traditional Christian way of life, the revival of which for Nietzsche would subject the world to a static and life-denying orthodoxy. To the south was Muspelheim, a land of fire and light. This can embody both the destructive and creative power of modernity [5] which has led both to the emancipation of modern man, and also to his slide down into life-negating pessimism. In this picture, the situation of the West today is as if it is suspended in Ginnungagap, hanging in a foundationless vacuum with looming dangers on all sides. Despite this being a deeply perilous position, this also indicates a blank space in which modern man now can create something new.
This would not entirely be creatio ex nihilo, but rather a creative reappraisal of Western culture. Hence, as the fires of Muspell meet with the ice of Niflheim in the center of Ginnungagap, symbolizing the creative collision of old and new, what is produced is a fresh element: the water of life (Sturluson, 2005: 14). The thawing of icy tradition through the fiery power of modern skepticism will eventually lead to a new and dynamic substance dripping down into the void, starting the process that will ultimately generate all the life of the new cosmos. Nietzsche charges us with the task of enacting a similar process in the West, by re-engaging with the values that under-gird our civilization. In doing so, we have the opportunity to escape the limbo of Ginnungagap, create a better and more life-affirming philosophy, and thus ultimately to construct our own Asgard: a this-worldly alternative to the Heavenly City populated by the sparkling Overmen of the future.
This project, however, will not be the same as simply creating a new ‘Church’. The post-God world will be marked by the knowledge that any cultural constructions we achieve will be groundless and impermanent. Just as the distant whisper of Ragnarök hangs over the Norse cosmos, what will hang over our secular creations will be the knowledge of their provisional and fictitious nature (6). For Nietzsche, we must learn to live with all the “uncertainty, ambiguity and multiplicity” that creating our own values entails (Burch, 2014: 201). This essential quality of groundlessness is necessitated by a world which has lost all metaphysical certainty. After all, however secure Asgard may appear, it is still suspended above the bottomless void of Ginnungagap to which it must one day return.
Conclusion
In telling a tale of a civilization in decline, Nietzsche thus expresses the urgent need for the secular world to construct new cultural values beyond the confines of its theological heritage. This vital wakeup call is predominantly directed at those who assume that life in the West can continue as it always has without its former organizing principle; God. In short, Nietzsche warns us not to fiddle whilst Rome burns. Yet, with great danger and risk also comes an opportunity for something new to be born. How this task is taken on may ultimately define the modern world. Nietzsche, in flirting with the language of both apocalyptic frenzy and Utopian fervor, somehow succeeds in constructing a message which is deeply rational and pragmatic. He underlines with unparalleled intensity that God is dead, that we should not hope for his resuscitation, and that the West will remain petrified in His shadow until the day that it develops the courage to seize control of its own cultural reconstruction.
Additional Notes
[1] Nietzsche, 2010: 181
[2] This ‘ground’ includes the entire metaphysical realm, meaning that all transcendent truth/moral value has lost its anchor (Hollingdale: 1969, 26).
[3] Sartre 1979 as cited in Glendinning, 2013: 45
[4] Sturluson, 2005: 13
[5] This is to say, modern man is quite literally ‘playing with fire’.
(6) Another parallel that can illustrate the fictional nature of our ‘secular creations’ is the slaying of the giant Ymir by Odin and his siblings. From the body of this dead giant, Odin would construct the entire world (Sturluson, 2005: 16). This breaking-up of something supposedly ‘organic’, and using its raw material to build something crafted and artificial, exemplifies Nietzsche’s radical project.
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Bibliography:
Bibliography:
Burch, R. (2014). On Nietzsche’s Concept of ‘European Nihilism’. European Review, 22(2), 196-208.
Glendinning, S. (2013). Three cultures of atheism: on serious doubts about the existence of God. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion. Vol. 73(1), pp. 39–55.
Hollingdale, R. J. (1969). Introduction. In: Nietzsche, F. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. London: Penguin Books Ltd.
Mulhall, S. (2005). Philosophical Myths of the Fall. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Nietzsche, F. (1968). The Will to Power: A New Translation by Walter Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale. Vintage Books Edition. New York: Vintage Books.
Nietzsche, F. (2000). The Birth of Tragedy. Translated by Douglas Smith. Oxford World Classics Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nietzsche, F. (2010). The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. Translated by Walter Kaufman. New York: Vintage Books.
Poppin, R. B. (1999). Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: on the dissatisfactions of European High Culture. 2nd Ed. Oxford: Blackwell.
Ridley, A. (1997). Nietzsche’s Greatest Weight. Journal of Nietzsche Studies, (14), pp. 19-25.
Strong, T. B. (2012). Politics without Vision: Thinking without a banister in the twentieth century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sturluson, S. (2005). The Prose Edda. Translated by Jesse L. Byock. Penguin Classics Edition. London: Penguin Books Ltd.