Divine Murder: A Nietzschian Apology for Atheism?

Divine Murder: A Nietzschian Apology for Atheism?

Paper given at the Ockham Society, Corpus Christi College, Oxford
Trinity Term 2011

ABSTRACT: Within the modern European consciousness, few figures have exerted as indelible an influence as Friedrich Nietzsche. Though what is arguably his most notable dictum, ‘God is dead’, voiced in The Gay Science (1882), has yielded a myriad of interpretations, it has, more than anything else, seen him held up as the paradigmatic secularist, the harbinger of a fertile yet altogether crude Enlightenment. My paper, far from sustaining the view that this sobering parable fosters an energetic assault on theological values, fronts a reading of divine murder that locates within its dense prose a palpable Christian ethos, and a lament for rather than vitriolic glorification of the decline of fundamental tenets and of a curiously Western societal fabric. Within its abjectly Orwellian sentiments is to be found a sympathetic, instructive manifesto that vindicates a seminal thinker from the protests that have overshadowed his creativity amid popular stereotype and coarse misrepresentation.

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Have you not heard of that madman who in the bright morning lit a lantern and ran around the marketplace crying incessantly “I’m looking for God! I’m looking for God!”? (2001: 119)

Upon reading the opening to this passage, arguably the most notable in the Nietzschian canon, two generic elements immediately come to mind, the first we might want to call “journalistic”, and the second “historical”. It resembles a work of journalism in that Nietzsche plainly anticipates a prior awareness on our part of the scenario presented, “Have you not heard?” almost a rhetorical question that cites what should already be a culturally-inherited story, the significance and ramifications of which we intuitively and accordingly acknowledge as key to our evolved social outlook. The “historical” quality, meanwhile, could scarcely be more flagrant, the marketplace setting for the action a direct allusion to Socratic discourse, to the intellectual and conversational prerogative of Plato’s mentor interacting in the agora with the Athenian everyman. Nietzsche continues –

Since many of those who did not believe in God were standing around together just then, he caused great laughter (ibid.)

In spite of the crowd’s ridicule of the Madman, though, it is telling that they can only conceive of God as real, as one who is described as “getting lost” or “losing his way”, as this image of such a Being as a conscious and physical construct is reminiscent of Nietzsche’s later, seemingly literal evocation of a ‘dead God’, his own descriptive method of portraying an actualised instance of divine mortality. Thus, although it is precisely the crowd’s dogmatic materialism that defines their atheism, an ability to think in purely and clinically humanistic terms – namely, of God as a wholly constituent property, or else not to exist at all – it is this mentality itself that, ironically, is likewise Nietzsche’s way of illustrating the full and demonstrable tragedy of divine murder, to speak of God as necessary and manifest.

Here, though, it is the crowd’s flat, unthinking dismissal of the madman’s frenzied, didactic rhetoric that elicits Nietzsche’s frustration, his sympathy with the reflective urgency of the madman rather than with the atheism of the majority all too apparent. To that observational end, though, we should note that it is not the madman’s pathos but his reason that procures Nietzsche’s authorial support. Nietzsche, in rejecting atheism’s godless philosophy as an obstructive ethos amid the madman’s frantic appeal for a Divine Being, cites the oddly sound judgment of the madman and the crude impiety of a non-believing crowd. Indeed, by analogous turns, the contrasting views here of the madman and the people starkly recall Nietzsche’s claim in an earlier work, Human, All Too Human (1878) –

…that something is irrational is no argument against its existence, but rather a condition for it (1994: 238)

What the crowd take to be the unreason of any “quest for God” is, for the madman, a moral and existential criterion. In ‘The Madman’, we do not find a Nietzsche defiantly bemoaning the transition from superstition to verification, the primary goal and principle of the Enlightenment – far from it – but we do find a Nietzsche profoundly cynical about the spontaneous, dogmatic advance of an anarchic rationalism that privileges modernity over tradition, portrays past beliefs as baseless idealism, and construes the new for the progressive. Nietzsche continues –

The Madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes.  ‘Where is God?’, he cried; ‘I’ll tell you! We have killed him – you and I! We are all his murderers (2001: 119)

Though, throughout the passage, Nietzsche describes what ‘we’ have done, effectively allotting collective responsibility, it is perhaps here that Nietzsche is most openly repentant. A tangibly autobiographical moment in the drama, Nietzsche condemns himself and the populace, a telling stylistic forerunner to his statement in Beyond Good and Evil (1886) that –

It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy has hitherto been: a confession on the part of its author… (1973: 14)

Nietzsche holds himself to account, accepts a share of the blame, and casts himself among the guilty masses. Moreover, in his memoir Ecce Homo, Nietzsche writes that –

I contradict as has never been contradicted before and am nevertheless the opposite of a no-saying spirit (1992: 96)

Divine murder is the ultimate countering of traditional conceptions of an existing God, yet only for the sake of illuminating the tragedy of His loss rather than to diverge from any established doctrinal line.

…how did we do this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving now? Where are we moving to? Away from all suns? Are we not continually falling….Is there still an up and a down? (2001: 120)

Positing questions, amid the death of God, that scrutinise such concepts, empirical or intuitive, as direction or linearity, evokes the burgeoning instability of natural and social geometry, respectively, the ordered makeup of Nature that embodies cosmological structure and sense, and a personalised symmetry that sees human existence united with the capacities of reason, consciousness or belief. Divine murder, as an intractable absolute, accordingly threatens notions of composition and status, those elements that enable and contextualise perception, and validate our sense of Self. The death of God, in creating so potently physical a sensation, renders man’s objects of motivation blurred, what he should aim or strive for unclear, any semblance of endeavour or purpose now effectively weightless. Man is reduced to unconscious subjectivity, to instincts and desires that have no source or qualification, convictions devoid of origin or basis. Nothing is static, everything is compromised. Only the coarse implacability of Aristotle’s dictum

For this alone is lacking even to God,

To make undone things that have once been done (1998: 139)

can adequately convey the Nietzschian muting of divine will.

Aren’t we straying as through an infinite nothing? Isn’t empty space breathing at us?
(2001: 120)

It is with Nietzsche’s image of an ‘infinite nothing’ that we see the metaphysical elements of ‘The Madman’ passage come to the fore. Initially, such a realm – or rather, its description – possesses an oddly Christian air, with the closure of bodily life followed by secondary existence in this, the ‘new world’. Instead, though, we see that, rather than representing the Judeo ideal of life sequelling death, such a metaphysical sphere is now impervious to the functioning of the experiential world, an ‘infinite nothing’ the barren alternative to a society rendered meaningful by a present God. ‘Empty space’ is the ‘nothing that is’, a region devoid of makeup, properties or structure.

Do we still hear nothing of the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we still smell nothing of the divine decomposition? – Gods, too, decompose! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him (ibid.)

It is these words, gothic and arresting by turns, that portray most strongly divine murder as both a social metaphor for the collapse of values and as a chilling literalism that advances the death of God from idea to reality. All potential for resurrection is disappointed amid Nietzsche’s image of a decaying God, the grim erosion of a Holy Body that has been corrupted. Not even God, the defining and fundamental emblem, is exempt from violation and disintegration. Whereas to quantify mortality may resemble a surreal and needless exercise, the notion that God ‘remains dead’ conjures the cold irreversibility of the act. Fate is absolute and brutally unequivocal in what is the clearest signal that Nietzsche views divine murder as a physical and perceptible event.

The holiest and the mightiest thing the world has ever possessed has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood from us? With what water could we clean ourselves? (2001: 120)

What has hitherto defined the sacred has been lost, His removal violent, no individual absolved from complicity in the crime. We all have blood on our hands, and cannot erase the evidence.

A little water clears us of this deed - II:II.68 (1990: 129)

Lady Macbeth assures her husband after Duncan’s murder. Indulging in a moment of gruesome idealism, Lady Macbeth equates the cleansing of the body with that of the conscience, as if her evil can somehow be subservient to fantasies of moral purity. Nietzsche, though, affords the crowd no such luxuries – no temporary appeal to illusion can pardon or undo the ultimate sin, the obligation to atone immediate and appalling. “With what water could we cleanse ourselves?”, Nietzsche asks – no natural or ethical agent will suffice in a bid to reverse the circumstance. God is dead, and with Him the hope of redemptive empiricism.

Authority forgets a dying king - 1.289 (2008: 350)

remarked Tennyson, mirroring not the arrogance of power but the presumptuousness of assumed power, Nietzsche indicting the crowd as Shakespeare does Lady Macbeth and her husband – as those who usurp the true leaders through a warped fallacy masquerading as ordained right. We have appointed ourselves successors to God, a morbid pomposity through which we have sacrificed essence, coherence and reality.

Though comparatively restrained, even unconscious, in their expression, the anti-Marxist sentiments of ‘The Madman’ are palpable. Marx held that the future lies with the masses, and while such recent commentators as American journalist James Surowiecki have convincingly shown that the value of collective judgment – what he calls “the wisdom of crowds” – may very often supplant that of the individual, and resolve political or economic challenges, such empirical antidotes do not satisfy those inherent in Nietzsche’s latent moral discourse, wherein he favours one man’s apprehension of a fundamental truth to which the many are blind.

Instead, Nietzsche portrays the crowd’s mentality as classic mob instinct, their bemused, mocking scepticism in the face of the madman’s protestations endemic in their failure to recognise divine murder for what it is – a horrific melding of the grotesque and the sacrilegious that constitutes the ultimate social atrocity, and which carries infinitely broad ramifications – rather than as an absurd or momentary revelation wholly peripheral to their own concerns.

Thus, we can see clearly that Nietzsche, far from employing the crowd as a vehicle for any “Right Wing agenda”, is identifying instead their own stifling conservatism as what diverts their attention from the madman’s liberalism, what would otherwise alert them to the unrest effected by divine murder.

At this stage of the paper, having considered the possibility that one may be mistaken in assuming Nietzsche’s claim that ‘God is dead’ to denote a particularly staunch brand of atheism on his part, it would be productive to explore the ways in which certain extracts from two pivotal figures, Kant and Hawking – though popularly taken to signify their respective belief in God, have lately been shown to potentially veil quite different facets of their thinking. Such comparisons with Nietzsche will, I think, draw us to ask why Kant and Hawking, in simply citing God, have consequently been identified as believers, whereas Nietzsche, likewise invoking this deity, albeit with regard to his demise, has been suspected and accused of non-belief.

Firstly, Kant. In a series of groundbreaking commentaries in the journal New Humanist, in 2006, A.C. Grayling convincingly argued that, contrary to the theological sympathies discernible in the first Critique (1781), through Kant’s contention that God, as the unity of the intelligible world, is effectively the aggregate of all reality, what Kant calls

the substratum of all possibility - A 581-2 (1929: 494)

Kant was really an atheist, his implied belief reflecting a dutiful conformity to the religious mood of his day, rather than a genuinely held conviction.

That second, and much more recent example of an author’s intimation of the divine being taken to represent their subscription to the existence of a deity, can be found in the latter stages of A Brief History of Time (1988) with Hawking arguing that any unification of the principles that explain and define cosmological origins and the state of Nature would constitute

…the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we would know the mind of God
(1988: 193)

With many readers taking Hawking to mean that any understanding of what underpins the universes’ spatial and temporal conditions would lead to a full appreciation of divine intention, such an interpretation has lately been disappointed, with, among others, Richard Dawkins holding that Hawking’s climactic reference to a Supreme Being was not so much scientific objectivity as a way of ensuring A Brief History’s marketability. Nor does it seem that Dawkins is manipulatively grinding his own sceptical axe, since, in Hawking’s later anthology of essays, Black Holes and Baby Universes, Hawking notes that he had not referenced God

…the sales might have been halved (1993: 33)

Thus, those readers who sought some concession to divine causality amid A Brief History’s overtly and iconographically mechanistic treatment of its themes must have thought these remarks offered them exactly that, only for the basis of their initial optimism to be lately exposed as little more than a key reason for the book’s commercial success. Moreover, Hawking remarked at a conference shortly after A Brief History’s release that he did not believe in “a personal God”, implying at least an unsentimental spiritual viewpoint.

Be that as it may. After all, it could feasibly be argued that our interpretations of a text are as much governed by our hopes or expectations of its content as by that writing itself. Indeed, if this is so, it is especially ironic that Nietzsche should be scorned for his perceived non-belief, when, as we are  perhaps beginning to see, it is he who is least guilty of this charge, particularly in view of Grayling and Dawkins’ potentially embarrassing detection of Kant and Hawking’s emergent pseudo-theology.

If we are perturbed that the death of God, in being described in physical terms, will dissolve both material and metaphorical conceptions of His existence, a state of Being we have hitherto valued as a given, we should be concerned far more by the accounts of Kant and Hawking, who, though they speak about God in noticeably literal terms, additionally set down demanding proviso’s that, when also exposed as potential indicators of their cautiously masked scepticism, hardly bode well for our by now popular impression of their seemingly theistic credentials. Firstly, though Kant notes that the apprehension of a substance – God – when perceived fully, will draw us to all possible realities, he observes that this a “subjectively necessary hypothesis for our reason” – but does this not illuminate the perceptual limits of our rationality by presenting us with an idealised, purely notional, rather than wholly empirical, route to knowledge of God? Secondly, Hawking, though his proposition that the marriage of quantum mechanics and general relativity would lead us to a full comprehension of divine motivation is certainly tantalizing, it imposes an epistemic framework for arriving at that knowledge so rigorous as to defy the immediate capacities of intuition or of scientific enquiry.

Kant and Hawking set down stringent moral and technical criterions for the observation of God or of divine will that must precede any knowledge or view of Him. Thus, their allusions to God, allied so strongly to allegedly necessary deductive processes, cannot be implicitly taken as assertions of His existence – here, to reference is not to concur – and yet Nietzsche’s evocation of divine fate, through such powerful, immediate imagery, goes hand-in-hand with an innate and necessary supposition of the facticity of a formerly present, active agent. Thus, Nietzsche posits God’s Being as an existential imperative rather than a purely inherited-cum-romantic ideal. Moreover, while Kant and Hawking place dense analytical and observational criterions in our direct interpretive path, even Nietzsche’s illustration of a metaphysical sphere functions largely as the tragic synonym for our realm, now so devoid of content, rather than the viable alternative reality so desperately needed to substitute a world of experience starved of meaning and consequence by divine murder.

Indeed, Nietzsche’s metaphysics seems to function ably on two levels – either as an analogy peculiarly Christian in tone, by which creative virtue it is inevitably seen to harbour conspicuously Judeo-theistic sympathies; and even more powerfully independent of that Christian sensibility, as the death of God, rather than to lament a religion-specific deity, now typifies a cultural universal that marks the decline of the concept God, as opposed to a single and explicitly affiliated figurehead.

Tyler Durden’s oratorial diagnosis in Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999) of man’s dangerously possessive materialism, ‘Only after disaster can we be resurrected. It’s only after you’ve lost everything that you’re free to do anything’, starkly mirrors the nihilism at the heart of divine murder.

Yet even Tyler’s sobering determinism is the tip of the iceberg compared to the emptiness magnified by the death of God. Tyler critiques the appetite for wealth and the illusory contentment that follows, yet hints nonetheless that total loss engenders complete liberty, while, in the Nietzschian account, man is denied not just the trappings of capitalism or of experience, but his perceptual grasp of reality, freedoms sustained in the cited cinematic example by way of Tyler’s remedially Christian allusions to “resurrection”.

Indeed, we were reflecting earlier on the Christian resonance of “nothingness”, yet noted that, given the cessation of world order in the wake of divine murder, God is relegated from the status to Being to that of Concept. Tragically, then, any ideological affinity between God and Christianity is effectively dissolved, with the resurrection image, the defining signifier of man’s exorcism, now redundant. Far from glorifying atheism as a social aesthetic, as some new-fangled intellectualism of which man should be proud, Nietzsche could not be more troubled by the crowd’s stinging apathy when faced with a world reduced from entity to abstraction, God from agent to ideal. One senses, then, that, as author, Nietzsche has been forced to choose between the lesser of two evils. On the one hand, he knows that if he is to adequately illustrate the all-encompassing destruction embodied by divine murder, then, pragmatically, no value system, religious sensibility or social custom can be exempt from this picture of universal chaos; yet, on the other, if this totality is to be demonstrated, God, far from being spared, must be and is painted as the main casualty. Nietzsche could not be more obliged to write as he does, if he is to make clearly his point, and could not be less willing to do so, as one senses the retrieval of man’s dignity – what Tyler calls “resurrection”, and which embodies the Christian outlook to which “nothingness” seems uncannily sympathetic – is no longer a luxury afforded a humanity engulfed by the torment of divine murder. For Tyler, we have lost everything but can do anything. For Nietzsche, though, man is inseparable from the loss, and can do nothing. In his exasperation at man’s blindness to the meaning and implications of divine murder, Nietzsche could be no less atheistic – it is the crowd who “merit” this label, described by Nietzsche as “…those who did not believe in God…” – they revel and laugh. Friedrich Nietzsche, meanwhile, is the chief mourner, clad in scholarly black.

Thus, if we can see that atheism, what we may pre-suppose to lie at the attitudinal core of any proclamation of divine murder, or, more broadly, the immateriality of a deity, could not less accurately define Nietzsche’s agenda in making such a declaration, we can in turn recognise two further ideas – on the one hand, that even the least religious elements of ‘The Madman’ passage effectively reject non-belief, and, on the other, that if God is identified as a crucial and infinitely valuable emblem of belief that, for His expression, is dependent on linguistic, perceptual and intellectual tools, then these structures, too, are bereft of significance amid divine murder. God is the referential and futuristic lifeblood of existence – without God, society, structure, currency and potential evaporate.

I would like at this point to move towards the second and more important function of this paper, namely, to reflect on the passage’s religious qualities, sometimes neglected amid so deterministic an announcement as ‘God is dead’, and, in so doing, ask how balanced any popular impressions of its so-called “atheism” really are.

To begin with, we should remind ourselves of the series of questions that abound in the wake of divine murder, and their disorientating impact on our immediate environment and grasp of reality – “What were we doing when we unchained the earth from the sun?”, asks Nietzsche, “Don’t lanterns have to be lit in the morning?”. While, as we have seen, Nietzsche does not align himself with the God of a specific religion in this passage, references to light and to the need for that clarity strike us as distinctly Christian motifs, with, in the Biblical framework, God as the bringer of light, and, in the Nietzschian setting, God’s decline personified in the fading of light and the enveloping onset of darkness. Jill Marsden, in After Nietzsche, notes that, with divine murder, there is

…no horizon of overarching truth, no sun to navigate by (2002: 5)

her cultivation of the Christian analogy extremely apt, with intimations of “overarching truth” reflecting a God who traditionally constitutes a singular pragmatism, a present yet transcendent absolute.

What festivals of atonement, what holy games will we have to invent for ourselves? (2001: 120)

asks Nietzsche. As we have seen, divine murder negates not just a defining figurehead, but social structure and system. Not only must we now adapt to an existence starved of those spiritual and intellectual reference points hitherto embodied in God, but also rejuvenate traditions and customs that see religious duty and social hedonism merge. The aftermath of divine murder permits only what is secondary and reflective, rather than primary and creative. ‘Holy games’ is the moral epithet for ritualistic acknowledgements of our eternal shame, for what have become customary and obligatory acts of atonement. Whereas we associate “games” with enjoyment or pleasure, the sole satisfaction derived from the death of God will be the knowledge that we repent for the ultimate sin. Man may smile, and smile, yet is a villain. We must actively initiate a revisionist ethics, whereby the basis of morality and progress can be defined anew, and those values be permitted to function viably once more. Remorse is no longer a mere sensibility or emotion – it has become a state of Being.

Nietzsche continues –

Do we not ourselves have to become gods merely to appear worthy of it? (ibid.)

The author prescribes a morbid yet oddly defensible theological criterion for the death of God –that humanity must itself be divine to warrant the act. The imposed need to assume divine status to validate our crime is effectively to appoint a savage elite “qualified” to carry out the killing.

Nietzsche’s claim, though, that we must take on a ‘divine’ identity to justify our sin is not belated forgiveness on his part, but an extended critique of the arrogant imperialism through which the crowd believe themselves to be the sole existing species.

On their atheism is founded a dogmatic singularity that renders existence a meritocratic requirement for inclusion in the human value system. Yet in Nietzsche’s stipulation that we must ‘become gods’ to validate our removal of such an agent, we see only the banal, laughable inadequacy of man’s proud, demanding and overbearing scepticism. After all, to ‘become a god’ implies, literally, a state of Becoming, the germination of Divine Being from concept to pragmatism. Nietzsche writes of God almost in the spirit of Cartesian First Principles – begin our enquiry by identifying what we cannot refute – for Nietzsche’s purposes in this passage, the necessary fact of God’s existence, and develop an epistemic framework based not on theories of knowledge but on demonstrable truth. Nietzsche, throughout ‘The Madman’ passage, speaks of God in real terms, so it is wholly appropriate that Nietzsche should describe God as an evolving property.

…all that lives must die,

Passing through nature to eternity

- I:II.72-3 (2006: 171)

muses Gertrude to Hamlet, the Queen’s reflections on ‘nature’ and ‘eternity’ resonantly synonymous in notional and Christian terms with Nietzsche’s allusions to God as the bearer of existential meaning and to the metaphysical infinity that sequels divine murder.

Returning to ‘The Madman’ passage –

There was never a greater deed – and whoever is born after us will on account of this deed belong to a higher history than all history up to now! (2001: 120)

Divine murder is civilization’s defining circumstance, its transcendent and abiding moment. What lies ahead is not the future but history, the temporal subtraction of meaning and optimism rather than the advancement of progress. All that is promised are the symptoms of the past – we have not dispensed with the archaic, but are instead faced with its onset.

Finally he threw his lantern on the ground so that it broke into pieces and went out. ‘I come too early’, he then said, ‘my time is not yet. This tremendous is still on its way, wandering….deeds need time, even after they are done, in order to be seen and heard (ibid.)

We find the madman in an exasperated state of indecision, torn between warning the crowd further or letting the imminent event reveal its own and appalling story. Ultimately, the madman feels his words premature, and discontinues his breathless monologue, the dimming of the lantern extinguishing, in a tangibly Christian vein, the light of life.

That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts (1998: 149)

remarked Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols, the madman disconcerted that his candid, urgent words seem to fall on deaf ears. Yet if the madman believes that imparting to the crowd his candid, urgent words seem to fall on deaf ears. Yet if the madman believes that imparting to the crowd his revelation of divine murder and its significance is an ultimately fruitless endeavour, then philosopher Karl Popper’s contention that

…we may become the masters of our fate when we have

ceased to pose as its prophets” (2003: xx)

seems all the more tragically pertinent if we do not actively assume responsibility for ourselves and for the positive future of society.

Indeed, a possible consequence is to be found in the madman’s climactic question “What are these churches now if not the tombs and sepulchres of God?”. Through divine murder, we have grossly neglected reference, symbolism and ideology, with churches, once the safeguards of religious and spiritual belief, now the fading images of the encompassing and the representational.

The church is the grave of God and the final resting place of humanity.

If God is dead, the tragedy is ours.

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