Death of God
신의 죽음
The state of affairs named by Friedrich Nietzsche's phrase "God is dead", written in section 125 of The Gay Science (1882) and in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It is neither a claim that a supernatural being has literally died nor an argument for atheism. It is a diagnosis of civilisation: the Christian faith that for centuries had underpinned Europe's morality and sense of meaning was no longer believable, and Nietzsche made overcoming the nihilism that would follow the task of his philosophy.
In depth
Who said "God is dead", and how?
Nietzsche first set out the phrase in section 125 of The Gay Science (1882), "The Madman". A man lights a lantern in the bright morning, runs to the market place and cries incessantly, "I seek God! I seek God!" The people gathered there do not believe in God, and they laugh: has God got lost, has he emigrated by ship? The madman jumps into their midst: "Whither is God? I will tell you. We have killed him, you and I! All of us are his murderers!"
Wir haben ihn getötet – ihr und ich! Wir alle sind seine Mörder!
Then comes the best-known passage: "God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!" At the end of the story the madman throws his lantern to the ground, where it breaks, and says: "I have come too early, my time has not come yet." The tremendous event is still on its way and has not yet reached people's ears. The unbelieving crowd has given up faith without grasping what that means; Nietzsche aims less at believers than at such complacent atheists.
Gott ist tot! Gott bleibt tot! Und wir haben ihn getötet!
Section 108 of the same book puts it briefly. After the Buddha died, people showed his shadow in a cave for centuries; "God is dead: but given the way people are, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown." And, Nietzsche adds, "we must still defeat his shadow too." In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, published from 1883, Zarathustra comes down from the mountain, parts from an old saint in the forest and says to himself: "Could it be possible! This old saint in his forest has not yet heard that God is dead!"
Gott ist tot: aber so wie die Art der Menschen ist, wird es vielleicht noch jahrtausendelang Höhlen geben, in denen man seinen Schatten zeigt.
Why did Nietzsche call it an "event"?
For Nietzsche the death of God was not a metaphysical fact but a historical event. Section 343, in the fifth book he added to The Gay Science in 1887, begins: "The greatest recent event, that 'God is dead', that the belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable, is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe." With the progress of science and historical criticism, educated Europeans no longer took biblical miracles or divine providence literally. What troubled Nietzsche was what came next.
Das größte neuere Ereignis – daß »Gott tot ist«, daß der Glaube an den christlichen Gott unglaubwürdig geworden ist – beginnt bereits seine ersten Schatten über Europa zu werfen.
The Christian God had not been just one object of belief in European civilisation. The standards of good and evil, the stories that gave suffering a meaning, the conviction that there is truth, the idea that all are equal before God: all of these rested on that faith. Once God is no longer believed in, the morality and values built on him lose their ground. Holding on to Christian morality without seeing this consequence was, for Nietzsche, worshipping God's shadow. He foresaw that Europe would soon live through nihilism, the collapse of its highest values, and beyond it he put forward the Übermensch as the type of human being who would create new values.
Nietzsche counted the secular ideals of modernity among God's shadows as well. Section 202 of Beyond Good and Evil (1886) states that "the democratic movement inherits the Christian one", and lumps democrats, anarchists and socialists, with their appeals to equality and pity, together as secular versions of Christian morality. Progressives who claimed to have done away with God were, on this view, carrying on his morality under another name. The claim became one of the sharpest points of conflict between Nietzsche and the Marxists.
die demokratische Bewegung macht die Erbschaft der christlichen.
How was the phrase used before and after Nietzsche?
"God himself is dead" is much older than Nietzsche. The line appears in a hymn by the seventeenth-century Lutheran Johann Rist, "A Mournful Funeral Song", as a confession about Christ dead on the cross. German idealism stripped the phrase of its specifically Christian sense. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel quoted the hymn in the Phenomenology of Spirit and his lectures on the philosophy of religion, treating the infinite grief of the feeling that "God himself is dead", which underlies modern religion, as one moment of absolute spirit. In The Ego and Its Own (1844) Max Stirner mocked the Enlightenment for vanquishing God without noticing that man had killed God in order to become "sole God on high" himself.
After Nietzsche turned the phrase into a diagnosis of civilisation, twentieth-century philosophy read it in many directions. Martin Heidegger, in "Nietzsche's Word: 'God is Dead'" (published 1950 from lectures of 1943), read it as a pronouncement on the end of Western metaphysics since Plato. The existentialists took it as their starting point: in a world without God, human beings must make meaning for themselves. In the late 1950s and the 1960s a "Death of God theology" appeared among some American Protestants, making the phrase a theme of theology inside the churches.
How did Marxism view the death of God?
The Marxist critique of religion came a generation before Nietzsche and went in another direction. Karl Marx opened the "Introduction to a Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right" (1844) with the sentence: "For Germany the criticism of religion is essentially completed, and the criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism." Ludwig Feuerbach had already shown that God was the human essence projected into heaven; what remained was to ask why people needed that illusion. Religion is "the sigh of the oppressed creature" and "the opium of the people", and so "the criticism of heaven turns into the criticism of the earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics."
Die Kritik des Himmels verwandelt sich damit in die Kritik der Erde, die Kritik der Religion in die Kritik des Rechts, die Kritik der Theologie in die Kritik der Politik.
The difference shows in what each puts where God used to be. For Marx, abolishing religion meant building a society that needs no illusions, that is, demanding people's real happiness. For Nietzsche, socialism with its banners of equality and emancipation was God's shadow, a continuation of Christian morality. The German Marxist Franz Mehring called Nietzsche "the social philosopher of capitalism" in 1891, and György Lukács, in The Destruction of Reason (1954), read Nietzsche's critique of religion as an attempt to create a godless myth, a new myth for the bourgeoisie of the imperialist age.
In Russia there were also attempts to fill the void left by God with socialism. After the defeat of the 1905 revolution Anatoly Lunacharsky and Maxim Gorky proposed god-building, making the collective power of humanity a new object of faith, and Vladimir Lenin attacked it fiercely, holding every kind of god-making to be reactionary. The death of God thus became the first place where Nietzsche and Marxism collided.