THE DEATH OF GOD

1. NIETZSCHE AS PROPHET

When Nietzsche announced the death of God, very few people were listening. He was an obscure professor of classics at the University of Basle. Basle was a mercantile town with fewer than 50,000 inhabitants, situated on the bend of the Rhine where Germany, France, and Switzerland converge. Its ancient university had fallen on hard times, having had its budget cut by the wealthy yet parsimonious city fathers. When Nietzsche accepted the Chair of Greek in 1869 (at the age of 24!), there were barely 100 students in the University. But precisely because it was poor and small, the University had to take risks with its appointments. And that is how Nietzsche and other innovative young scholars got jobs there. Although he sought a large audience and developed a brilliant aphoristic style to present his views, only about twenty thousand copies of his books sold during his lifetime. One of the books for which he is best known today, The Genealogy of Morals, sold only 600 copies. But he was nothing if not prophetic, and his message struck a chord among educated people in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The message was simple and disturbing: the morality, the values, the standards of truth and rationality which we have inherited are based in origin on belief in a God or gods who have given them to us and who judge us by our success or failure in living up to them. But we have lost our literal belief in those gods, and in religion generally, and that means we have lost belief in the foundations of our system of values. Yet so far we have failed to face up to the consequences.

Here was a shock for the educated conscience. The Christian sense of sin and belief in judgment, the assumption of personal immortality, with its accompanying appreciation of the world as a moral order, and hence of the eternal significance of each act and each individual life, were still very strong in the Victorian age. Nietzsche only asserted what many educated people had begun to suspect: that if religion had lost its anchorage, then what was the basis of morality? But even those who never heard of Nietzsche were troubled by a series of contradictions: how could the Victorians "believe in the teaching of Jesus and brutally beat their own children; idealize their wives as angels in the house yet tolerate, and often use, the prostitutes who made up a sizeable proportion of city populations; speak proudly of vast industrial wealth... while the poor were dying in the streets; boast of the progress of the nation when few children had access to any education that took them beyond the barest literacy?" (Peter Keating). To be sure, these questions did not loom large in Nietzsche's mind, since he regarded Christian values with disdain in any case. But the crisis of faith is one of the great themes of mid-nineteenth-century European intellectual history, and it sets the stage for the modernist experiments of the latter part of the century.

Romanticism had been, among other things, an effort to compensate for the disappearance of God. The Romantic poets and thinkers had celebrated the diffusion of the divine in the natural world, or they had tried to bring God back to earth as a benign power inherent in the self, in love, in children, in the poor, in the primitive, in history or in culture. Nietzsche rejected not only God but all of those surrogates for God. For him, nature was not beneficent, nor did it have any inherent meaning or tendency, except perhaps the struggle for power. Nietzsche (1844-1900) lived not in the age of Wordsworth, but in that of Darwin.

2. DARWIN'S CENTURY

If Nietzsche was little known in his lifetime, Darwin was one of the most famous men of the age. The theory of natural selection explained the diversity of life without recourse to a beneficent intelligence: biological order could be generated without divine fiat. And Darwin himself did not believe in God: he says somewhere that even if we are willing (as he was not) to accept the traditional Christian view that all evils suffered by humanity can be discounted either as mysteries beyond our understanding or as opportunities for spiritual improvement, the pain experienced by animals would remain an unanswerable reproach to any deity who presided over it. In other words, Darwinism was a challenge to theodicy, the view that evil is a local phenomenon, that in a broader perspective and in the long run the universe is orderly and good. But if Darwin was right and endless species had perished we could no longer find satisfaction in contemplating the perfect order of creation as readers of Genesis had done for so long; even man might be transient, doomed to become someday a fossil in the rocks.

And Darwin was not alone among scientists in disturbing the peace. The geologist Charles Lyell showed that not even the seas and the coastlines and mountains had been created completely and permanently as Genesis suggested. The English coastline, for instance, was rising slowly in some places, sinking in others; the limestone cliffs of Dover were formed of deposits of long-extinct marine life; and slow, unplanned, arbitrary, natural causes–erosion by water and ice, and redistribution of sand and dust by rivers and winds over eons of time–could account entirely for the present surface features of the earth. And while geologists showed that the world was far older than people had thought, astronomers broke up the traditional order of space, which became vaster, and more infinite in the objects it contained.

The new sense of time and space and nature was captured in the melancholy poetry of Tennyson:

There rolls the deep where grew the tree.

O earth, what changes hast thou seen!

There, where the long street roars hath been

The stillness of the central sea.

The hills are shadows, and they flow

From form to form, and nothing stands;

They melt like mist, the solid lands,

Like clouds they shape themselves and go.

Darwin was so famous that his views became the target of parody. In poetry: "There once was an Ape in times that were earlier/ Centuries passed and his hair became curlier/ Centuries more and his thumb gave a twist, / And he was a Man and a Positivist." And in fiction: a character in Disraeli's novel Tancred urges her friends to read a Darwinian tract, in which "what is most interesting is the way in which man has developed. You know, all is development. The principle is perpetually going on. First, there was nothing, then there was something; then, I forget the next, I think there were shells, then fishes; then we came: let me see, did we come next? Never mind that; we came at last. And with the next change there will be something very superior to us, something with wings. Ah! that's it, we were fishes and I believe we shall be crows. But you must read it." Or as a German Darwinian, Haeckel, argued in The Riddle of the Universe (1899): the "highest faculties of the human mind are but the properties of brain cells evolved automatically from unicellular protozoa and thence spontaneously from inorganic compounds." Not a very comforting vision for those who believed that man was created in God's image.

3. THE VIRGIN AND THE DYNAMO

If biology and geology now seemed to be in perpetual flux, physics offered an equally disturbing view based on perpetual stasis. A German scientist, Ludwig Buchner, wrote in 1855: " How can anyone deny the axiom that out of nothing, nothing can arise? An atom of oxygen, of nitrogen, or of iron, is everywhere and under all circumstances the same thing, endowed with the same immanent qualities, and can never in all eternity become anything else. Be it wheresoever it will, it must remain the same: from every combination, however heterogeneous, it must emerge the self-same atom. But never can an atom arise anew or disappear; it can only change its combinations. For these reasons, matter is immortal." The soul may not be immortal; indeed it may not exist at all, but atoms are immortal and the universe is a great machine: "so orderly and compact that we can reckon its past and gauge its future with almost as much certitude as that of a dynamo or a water wheel. In its motions there is no uncertainty, no mystery."

Meanwhile, of course, the development of machine industry and the triumphs of capitalism made the marvels of technology seem greater and more useful than those of religion. They promised to assure human comfort and happiness without recourse to prayer or creed. They produced new forms of entertainment and diversion, including the cinema. Traditional moralists saw the urban masses as deracinated, their faculties numbed by the requirements of mechanical labor, their tastes degraded by cheap liquor and other opiates. The churches meanwhile seemed to align themselves with the most reactionary forces, while the state was taking over the their traditional functions in education, welfare, and even faith (as nationalism became a surrogate religion).

The great American historian, Henry Adams, illuminated the modern condition with a suggestive comparison: if medieval civilization took the Virgin Mary as its central symbol, modern civilization worships the machine. The Virgin was a symbol of faith and love; the machine is about power and energy. Medieval civilization offered the coherence of a uniform creed; modern civilization forfeits coherence in a relentless drive for perpetual expansion.

Nietzsche predicted that most people would be unable to accept the erosion of their faith: "Rather than cope with the unbearable loneliness of their condition men will continue to seek their shattered God, and for His sake they will love the very serpents that dwell among His ruins."

4. HOW TO PHILOSOPHIZE WITH A HAMMER

"'How to Philosophize with a Hammer' is the subtitle of Nietzsche's late philosophical masterpiece The Twilight of the Idols, but the activity it describes turns out to be wittier and less Teutonic than it sounds. Nietzsche slyly identifies the hammer with the kind used by piano tuners, and the image he conveys is that of an iconoclast who does not so much smash idols as tap them, in order to evoke the flatulent noises that reveal their inner corruption" (Arthur Danto).

The death of God, for Nietzsche, implies the loss of any sort of common assumption about the meaning and structure of the world. Even our language, according to Nietzsche, is shot through with dead metaphors, of which the concept of God is for him a notable example. We assume that our words and grammar reflect the nature of reality, the structure of the world, but the world is flux and our language imposes a false fixity on that flux. Nietzsche's universe is random, indifferent, amorphous. If nature offers no answers, religion no consolation or authority, language no purchase on truth, then we must invent ourselves anew. Nietzsche became the prophet of psychological and moral liberation, of the self-designed life as personal salvation. His message: not know thyself, but be thyself, become what you are, establish your autonomy in the teeth of social convention and internal repression. This is the project of existentialism, and it becomes one of the major themes of modern intellectual history.

And in the aftermath of the death of God, Nietzsche also looked to art for meanings that we ourselves create: "It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that the being of man and the world are eternally justified." The insistence on the autonomy of art became the recipe for modernism, the movement (or sequence of movements) which broke with centuries-old conventions of representation and disconnected art from traditional morality. As we'll see next time, this insistence on the aesthetic as the only possible source of redemption looks back to Nietzsche's principal mentor, Schopenhauer, but it also looks forward to the great literary modernists: Conrad, Joyce, Rilke, and Woolf.