ABSTRACT
To ask about “Nietzsche and the divine” means to assume from the start (an assumption that remains to be verified) that the famous phrase “God is dead,” however one interprets it, does not put an end to questions about God, gods, or the divine, but rather raises anew the question of the very essence of divinity. It assumes that Nietzsche’s declared “atheism” is relative to a particular definition of God. His “atheism” is not concerned with the simple possibility of God, but rather asserts a distinction between a heavily conceptualized and domesticated God and a divinity free from the conceptual weight of metaphysical theology. Nietzsche initiates a questioning, which makes him, as Heidegger wrote, “the last German philosopher who was passionately in search of God.”2 As always with Heidegger, the expression “in search of God” is not an idle phrase but one rigorously coined in a specific context. The statement is not a psychological conjecture about Nietzsche, the man; nor is it an allusion to Dionysos (for in those contexts the god is not searched for but found-or about to be found); nor a reference to some of his famous sayings, such as “How many new Gods are still possible!”3 or “Two thousand years and not one new God!”4 Rather, the context is that of The Gay Science (Section 125), where for the first time, before Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the phrase “God is dead” is uttered by a strange character, the Madman (der tolle Mensch-a reference perhaps to Anselm’s “insipiens”?). For what does the Madman say, as he lights a lantern at high noon-or rather what does he shout, while running across the market place? He should, “I am looking for God, I am looking for God.” As for Zarathustra, his proclamation occurs at the beginning of a long inquiry during which the possibility of a God is not excluded at all. On the contrary, there are several allusions to the possibility of another god: “I like the one who chastises his God because he loves his God” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Preface, Section 4), “I would believe only in a God who could dance” (ibid., “To Read and Write”), and “Could you create a god?” (“On the Blessed Isles”). One of the so-called “Higher Men,” the Old Pope, makes an allusion to this other God that Zarathustra is searching for, when he says to him, “O Zarathustra, you are more pious than you imagine with such unbelief! There is some God present in you that is inspiring you in your impiety. Is it not your piety that prevents you from still believing in God?…You have eyes, hands, and lips made from all eternity for blessing.” (“Available,” “Out of Service”). Whatever Nietzsche’s position with regard to God and the divine, it is nothing like the dogmatic and easy atheism of the kind encountered in Diderot or in Sartre. To be sure, the atmosphere surrounding the announcement of the death of God in The Gay Science is one of anxiety and terror in the face of a catastrophe of cosmic proportions. It is most certainly not a happy event. For while-at least in Section 125 of the text-God does not simply die, the text does not insist on the fact that this is a crime, a murder. The emphasis is not on human responsibility, even though it is asserted: “God is dead; we killed him,” but rather on the terrifying and apocalyptic nature of the catastrophe. The ancient God was as sun to the earth. Man split them, tore one from the other and henceforth the earth, detached from the sun, is falling into an infinite night. The earth has no more center, neither intellectual nor sensible light. “What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun?…It is not night always, night closing in on us?” asked the Madman. This catastrophic event is represented as an unbearable crisis, whose continuance will result in our own death, the death of the human race. Nietzsche insists on the fact that this is a rupture, an event unique in history, but also that it is a transitory, incomplete phenomenon. This event will inevitably complete itself, introducing-after the crisis, after the schism, after the “caesura” (as he calls it) in universal history-a new form of time: “this tremendous event is still on its way,”5 and again: “the greatest recent event, that God is dead, that belief in the Christian God has become discredited, is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe.”6
