The most widely known words of Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th-century German philosopher, are, “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” What did Nietzsche mean by such a statement, and what relevance do those jarring words have for us today?
What Nietzsche Wrote
Friedrich Nietzsche was born in 1844 in Leipzig,
(now) in the eastern German state of Saxony. His father was a Lutheran pastor,
and before his 20th birthday, Friedrich began studying theology at the
University of Bonn with the intention of following in his father’s footsteps.
After one semester, however, Nietzsche lost
his faith and stopped his theological studies. He wrote to his deeply-religious
sister Elisabeth (b. 1846), ”. . . if you wish to strive for peace of soul and
pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire.”
(Sadly, Nietzsche was seemingly unable to
grasp the fact that believing and inquiring are not mutually exclusive.)
Many years later, 140 years ago in 1882,
Nietzsche authored a book published under the title Die fröhliche Wissenschaft,
first translated into English as The Joyful Wisdom, but now, unfortunately, it is generally known by the title The Gay Science.
In that book, the “madman” spoke the above-cited
words about God being dead. (They can be read in context on this website.)
Later in Thus Spake Zarathustra (which
Nietzsche published in parts over several years, beginning in 1883), the
central character exclaims the same words, “God is dead!”
But what did Nietzsche mean by having the “madman”
and Zarathustra utter that shocking (at that time, if not now) expression?
What Nietzsche Meant
It seems quite clear that Nietzsche was not writing
about the ontological existence (or lack thereof) of a supernatural being commonly
called God in Western society.
Rather, Nietzsche was expressing his
observation that the Age of Enlightenment had ended the centrality of the concept
of God in Western European civilization and that the belief in the pivotal role
of God in human affairs had ceased to exist (=been killed).
In other words, we might say that Nietzsche was
one of the earliest thinkers to assert that secularism had become victorious
over the Christian religion.
He was also a primary progenitor of
postmodernism. Since God was now “dead,” he thought that there is no longer any
basis for believing in a divinely ordained moral order. There are no absolute
moral values. There is no objective truth.
Thus, Nietzsche’s thought led to nihilism, which
he sought to counter with an emphasis on the importance of the subjectivity of
individual persons. This is why he is also considered one of the most significant
early proponents of what came to be called existentialism.
Why Nietzsche was Right/Wrong
In many ways, in his day as well as in this
present day, God as the ultimate Being and ultimate concern seems to be “dead”
to so many people who were reared in Christian homes and/or in an ostensibly
Christian society.
There are many today, as in Nietzsche’s day,
who give intellectual assent to the idea of God’s reality, but who live as if
God does not exist. So in that sense, God is “dead” to them. This situation is what
is sometimes called practical atheism.
There are distinct similarities—and vast
differences—between Nietzsche and Søren Kierkegaard. (Some refer to the two
seminal thinkers as if they were contemporaries, but Nietzsche was born the
year Kierkegaard published one of his most important books, Philosophical Fragments.)
“Practical atheism” was certainly an apt description
for many Danes in the 1840s and Germans in the 1880s—but perhaps no more so
than for many North Americans and Western Europeans now. For many, there is religious
form with little or no substance.
In the midst of rampant practical atheism,
people can choose to follow Nietzsche’s proposal for creation of the Übermensch (Overman), who creates their own future without reference to traditional
religious and/or moral beliefs.
Or we can choose, as
one scholar wisely wrote, to see the “problem of religious downfall as . .
. a chance to embrace the New Testament’s original teaching and return to a dynamic
and living faith.”
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