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NIETZSCHE,GOD,AND DOOMSDAY:THE CONSEQUENCES OF ATHEISM
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Reason divorced of knowledge of thedivine burns into itself,like acid.
—Seyyed Hossein Nasr
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Do you know what fear and loneliness mean? ...You will seenothing in that expanse of eternal emptiness,you will not hear your own step,you will find nothing solid for you to rest upon.
—Mephistopheles
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In the Mouth of Madness
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ietzsche saw it coming. “The story I have to tell,” he wrote, “isthe history of the next two centuries. . . . For a long time now ourwhole civilization has been driving, with a tortured intensitygrowing from decade to decade, as if towards a catastrophe: rest-lessly, violently, tempestuously, like a mighty river desiring theend of its journey, without pausing to reflect, indeed fearful of reflection. . . . Where we live, soon nobody will be able to exist.”
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Nietzsche’s was a mind that thought so deeply and with suchintensity that it threw off sparks and crackled like a high-voltagegenerator. Poised on the brink of the twentieth century, in whichso many grand ideals were shattered, he saw it all in the crystalball of his mind, and the abyss he beheld was so horrifying thathe desperately tugged at the emergency brakes, vainly trying tostop the runaway train. “There will be wars,” he prophesied,“such as have never been waged on earth.” And again: “I fore-see something terrible, Chaos everywhere. Nothing left which isof any value; nothing which commands: Thou shalt!”
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Nietzsche was no stranger to paradox and contradiction. Hewas simultaneously the opponent, proponent, and victim of thenihilism he foresaw. His was a mind at war against his soul, aspirit locked in titanic struggle with the intellect. A student of Sufipsychology might observe that his ego—his “Me,” his egotisticalself—gained control over his mind, and the latter thwarted allattempts of his spirit to elevate itself by placing before it a self-defeating intellectual obstacle around which it could find no way.One observation, one singular realization was the motivatingforce behind all his struggles, driving him on feverishly until hismind burned itself out trying to devise an escape. This was a for-mula, simply stated in three monosyllabic words, yet earth-shak-ing in its implications: “God is dead.”
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Nowadays, of course, lots of people believe in this notion with-out giving it a second thought. Yet the genius of Nietzsche wasable to foresee all it implied, to draw most, if not indeed all, of theconclusions that would follow from the notion’s acceptance. It isfor this reason that we must inspect it more closely, and in orderto do this we must begin with what Nietzsche actually said.The formula “God is dead” appears, to be sure, in
ThusSpoke Zarathustra,
but it makes its first appearance in Section108 of
The Joyous Science
(1882),
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written two years before
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The Station o
f
No Station
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Zarathustra
during Nietzsche’s so-called positivist period. Notonly is God dead, he says, but we must banish even his shadowfrom the caves of our minds. There follow aphorisms extollingscience and a “naturalistic” world-view. And then, suddenly, theconcept appears full-blown in Section 125, under the title of “theMadman.” The madman is actually Nietzsche himself, who caststhe former in the image of a new Diogenes. The followingextract contains the gist of it.Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lanternin the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, andcried incessantly: “I seek God! I seek God!” . . .The madman jumped into their midst and piercedthem with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tellyou.
We have killed him
—you and I. All of us are his mur-derers. But how did we do this? How could we drink upthe sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entirehorizon? What were we doing when we unchained theearth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither arewe moving? Away from all suns?”The madman asks questions which imply that we are contin-ually plunging, backward, sideward, forward, in all directions.There is no longer any up or down. We are straying as throughan infinite nothing. We feel the breath of empty space; it hasbecome colder. The night is continually closing in on us—weneed to light lanterns in the morning. Then he continues:“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.“How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of allmurderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that theworld has yet owned has bled to death under our knives:who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us
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Nietzsche, God, and Doomsday: The Consequences of Atheism - Henry Bayman
Nietzsche saw it coming. "The story I have to tell," he wrote, "is the history of the next two centuries... For a long time now our whole civilization has been driving, with a tortured intensity growing…
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