Introduction
My thesis, in brief, is that the painful "God is dead" period of history we
are presently going through can best be understood as a necessary "transitional
period"— the immediate consequence of mankind’s intellectual advance, in
the preceding period, viz., the Modern or Age of Reason, beyond the Middle Ages, the Age
of Belief. With the apotheosis of the development of the principle of subjectivity
in Modern philosophy, i.e., with the attainmeUnprioritized— SDO meetingnt of
"absolute knowing," or Reason’s "knowing of the absolute,"
humanity had outgrown its former manner of relating to substance, the divine: — its
eyes opened, it could not go backwards but only forward. From the highest standpoint, it
can be said that the movement of history is from the God "outside" to the God
"inside"— an inversion process involving three distinct and
necessary phases: Premodernity, Modernity, and Postmodernity, to be correlated with Thomas
Aquinas, Hegel, and Nietzsche, respectively.
It appears that as a result of Modernity’s, i.e. Hegel’s, intellectual
achievement— in which religion was superseded by philosophy, i.e., Wissenschaft
or Science— religion had of necessity to undergo a major crisis. That is, a
"God is dead" period of (post-) history had to supervene. However this
"negative" period is in no way to be regarded as final or terminal, but instead
as the necessary precondition for a "positive," consummatory period of human
history, its finale, a period in which, in Schelling’s words, the unification of
philosophy, science, and religion will be realized. Simply expressed— and this is the
main point: For mankind to realize the "inside" God— what is demanded by
"absolute knowing" and Christian eschatology— the
"outside" transcendent God must disappear or "die." Furthermore, what
Hegel underwent in the Phenomenology as an individual, humanity is to undergo
collectively— namely, the inversion from "outside" to "inside"
God, from God as object of consciousness to God as object of self-consciousness, a process
entailing a loss or "death" of God moment. Accordingly, I will try to show that
Hegel and Nietzsche were both fully cognizant of the not one but two
phases of history to follow Modernity, which can be named "negative and
positive Postmodernity."
I will also contend that Nietzsche is to be regarded not only as the prophet of the
negative, "death of God" phase of history, but also and most significantly, as a
pioneer in the overcoming of the nihilistic stage of meaninglessness and thus as a major
contributor to the positive phase— as well as, ironically, to the third and
final period of Christianity, which Schelling refers to as the "Church of
John."— Indeed, it can be argued that the "God is dead" period is an essential
ingredient of Christian history and revelation itself. After a brief description of
Schelling’s eschatological account of the historical process I will discuss how first
Nietzsche’s and then Hegel’s remarkable teachings make a vital contribution to
the understanding of our present situation.
Schelling
According to Schelling’s Philosophy of Revelation one can distinguish
three periods in the history of the perfection of the Church, correlated with three levels
of Christian revelation: the Church of Peter, the Church of Paul, and the Church of John.
The Church of Peter is that of the Past, the period of Catholicism, the age of Aquinas,
which can be called Pre-Modernity. It is informed by the initial revelation that a special
human being alone is divine and He dwells in the beyond: "God is up there"
and, thus, "outside us"— this mandating a diesseits/jenseits division of
the Whole. The Church of Paul is that of the Present, the period of Protestantism,
beginning with Luther and Descartes and ending, officially, with Schelling-Hegel. This
period, known as Modernity, is informed by the higher revelation that "God is in
us"— a true union of all opposites, however, is yet to obtain. The
"Church of John" is Schelling’s term for the Church of the Future, the
completed Church or Kingdom Come, Heaven on Earth, a kind of synthesis and thus
transcendence of Catholicism and Protestantism, to be realized in the future as a task set
for humanity. This stage will be informed by the highest level of Christian revelation,
namely, "God as us," when God will be "all in all," and
divinity and humanity converge. This last stage, Postmodernity, has a "negative"
and "positive" phase. In a word, the period of history from Hegel and
Schelling’s time and the end of Protestantism to the present is to be understood as
the period of the ushering in of the Church of John, mankind’s greatest deed and
challenge. Since this perfected Church is characterized by a fusion of transcendence and
immanence, heaven and earth, it is necessary that this final positive state be preceded by
a negative "death of God/transcendence" phase.
In our view, this is precisely what the present global crisis with respect to values,
beliefs and institutions is all about: namely, humanity is collectively engaged in
the work of transforming "negative" into "positive" postmodernity, of
giving birth to the final stage of world history. This is a work which can be viewed as
the last stage in the education of our species. Moreover, this "new world" will
be founded on the twin pillars of absolute science— the knowledge of the whole
and the unity of the sciences— and a new Christianity or multicultural
world religion. Our greatest most difficult task it seems, is to realize these. I
believe both Nietzsche and Hegel devoted their best efforts solely to this end. If the
ideas presented in this paper are essentially correct, then our situation is far from
hopeless, the opinion of many commentators of today’s scene.
Nietzsche
"We of today stand between the no longer and the not yet. . . ."
"The universe seems ‘meaningless’— but that is only a transitional
stage."
The Will to Power and The Gay Science.
Nietzsche had an uncanny gift for throwing much light on a complex issue through a
well-honed aphorism. Indeed, he had a profound intuition, as well as diagnosis and prognosis,
of the "postmodern" human predicament. In my view, the heart of Nietzsche's
brilliant and largely correct analysis of the human condition as set forth in Zarathustra
and The Will to Power lies in his partitioning of human history into three
distinct periods— history, for Nietzsche, being not just the "history of
nihilism" but also the history of man's liberation. The first period is that of
"the no longer" or the Past; this is the naive, "happy" period of the
traditional, transcendent God. The next period is that of the Present, Nietzsche's and
ours, the painful period of the absence or "death" of God. Finally, there is the
period of "the not yet," the Future, the final golden period of the Superman, of
the Will to Power fully aware of itself, of nihilism overcome: the total Dionysian
affirmation of all things, of the world and of ourselves. It is implied that the third
stage is the goal of the whole process and thus that each stage is absolutely necessary, a
sine qua non with respect to history’s glorious finale.
Nietzsche is saying, in essence, that although it is true we are going through a bleak,
"dark night of the soul" period right now, one devoid of meaning— i.e. in
the wake of the collapse of the old system of values— nevertheless this nihilistic
period is not to be regarded as our final condition. This is made clear by his following
statements from the Will to Power:
[I am] the first perfect nihilist of Europe who, however, has even now lived
through the whole of nihilism, to the end, leaving it behind, outside himself (PP
3).
[There will be an] intermediary period of nihilism: before there is yet present
the strength to reverse values and to deify becoming and the apparent world as the
only world, and to call them good (PP 585 A).
Nihilism represents a pathological transitional stage (PP 13).
Thus nihilism as envisioned by Nietzsche is only an "intermediate" or
"transitional" stage, one to be followed by a fully sanctified or
"deified" world order. The period of nihilism can best be viewed as a catalyst
needed to raise us, in Schelling's language, to a higher potency (indeed our highest
potency), which Nietzsche cryptically refers to as "Superman"; a condition where
both God and man are aufgehoben (hence Nietzsche calls for the "death
of man" no less than for the "death of God"), a condition where the
opposition between the two has been abolished. Indeed a state of man— or
Superman— characterized by absolute meaning or meaningfulness of
existence, the opposite of the present state; an age, shall we say, of "gods and
goddesses."
The three stages are interpreted via three types of nihilism. Nietzsche characterizes
the first stage of history, the Past, as that of "religious nihilism,"—
or that of the "Camel," in the symbolism of Zarathustra; man as weighed
down under the burden of laws and commandments deriving from an external source. Simply
expressed— and I find this brilliant— religion is "nihilistic" in
that, by its act of affirming and valuing a world or Being (God, the Good, the
"Truth") beyond this world (the earth, diesseits) humanity
thereby, at the same time, negates and devalues the present world: it denies life, the
body, the senses and passions— it "nothings" the world. Further, in viewing
all meaning and purpose pertaining to the world as deriving from the transcendent God, it
thus declares the world as such to be without meaning, i.e., to be intrinsically
meaningless apart from relation to God. Hence, this stage is nihilistic in two
respects: it is both life-denying and meaning-denying. This stage embraces all past
history up till Nietzsche's own time, the mid-nineteenth century, and includes the ages of
both Aquinas and Hegel.
The second stage of man's liberation, the becoming of Superman, if you will, is that of
the Present, the "Lion": man becomes a lion in order to turn against the old
"legalistic" regime, in order to destroy it and break free from its oppressive
"ought." This leads to the stage of "radical nihilism." Once
humanity is no longer able to believe in the old God "upstairs" and the
Platonic-Christian-Moral value system it supported, when it is perceived that "God
has died," the world as such is perceived to be "meaningless." This is so
because the meaning it previously had was attached solely to the old transcendent God.
This is an important though widely ignored feature of Nietzsche's analysis. Nietzsche's
point is that the world all along was intrinsically meaningless, that is, throughout
the reign of the old God from above. However, only now, after belief in Him has
become untenable, is man first capable of becoming aware of this fact, of a situation
which had always obtained. Further, the death of God or transcendence can be said to have
come about with man's exit from the Middle Ages, the age of Aquinas and Faith, and entry
into the age of Reason, Enlightenment and Science— an event leading to the
progressive secularization of experience and eventual disappearance of the
"heavenly beyond," a result mainly of the influences of Hegel’s left-wing
disciples, scientism-Darwinism, and Schopenhauerian pessimism. This second stage of
history, the negation of the first, extends from Nietzsche's time up to the present.
The final stage, that of the Future, Nietzsche terms "completed Nihilism."
This will occur when nihilism will have been overcome, hence it can be called the stage of
Affirmation or Affirmatism, being the stage of the negation of the negation—
this is the "Child" who says "Yes" to everything and lives only in the
Present, beyond (repressive) time. It is a condition of total recovery of meaning, of
absolute meaning, where meaning, so to speak, "gushes out of every existential
pore."
What is important is that, according to Nietzsche, the solution for the conversion of
the period of meaninglessness into one of total meaningfulnness lies simply in letting
God die, and not resisting. That is, the world receives a negative valuation or is
meaningless, only if we hold on to the old valuational system and the old God above.
If we let it go, negate it, negate the negation, then the world does not have to be viewed
as value— or meaning-less. Let the old God die, Nietzsche insists, and the world
becomes meaningful. However, since the word "God," in the last analysis, is
equivalent to "absolute meaning," the "death of God" does not
entail the death of God as such— but the death only of the transcendent, far
away, objective God. Hence the final state, is not without God or God-less: God
remains— rather, the true meaning of "God" is realized for the first time.
God becomes the "all in all" of the Bible, or the only reality, i.e. with the
world taken up into Him and He into the world. Indeed, the Nietzschean "deification
of Becoming" is one and the same with "God’s Kingdom fully come."
Lastly, that Nietzsche attacks not Jesus and his teachings but rather what the Church
has made of them and him— and here Walter Kaufmann is completely misleading— is
well attested in his Antichrist (as Thomas J.J. Altizer has also pointed out):
Only we spirits who have become free, have the presuppositions for
understanding something that nineteen centuries have misunderstood. . . the
"Church" has pronounced holy precisely the opposite of what was the
meaning of the Evangel (PP 36). . . [For] Jesus had abolished the concepts of
"guilt" and "sin," denied any cleavage between God and man, and lived
this unity of God and man as his "glad tidings": and not as a prerogative
(PP 41, 33)!
Thus, in this way Nietzsche is reconciled to Christianity, i.e., to true
Christianity. In the end, he can be considered as not its destroyer but its fulfiller. He
was in the last analysis simply trying to heal the schizophrenia in Christian religious
consciousness, rooted in its insuperable dualisms (of God and man, the here and the
beyond), which simultaneously affirmed and negated the life/world:
"affirmed," since the Christian is bound to live in the
"corporeal" here and now, "negated," since his true home is not
here but elsewhere. Only by completely doing away with the Church, in its present
contradictory form, did Nietzsche believe it possible to realize the self-affirmatory,
celebratory, indeed, Dionysian superabundant life which its Founder promised, that is, to make
the earth, the body, and ourselves sacred, not the beyond. The irony of
ironies is that the goal of Christianity, Kingdom Come, could be realized only with
Christianity's disappearance! The Church was standing in its own way.— This
was Nietzsche's central insight.
Hegel
"[It] is the painful feeling that God Himself is dead."
The Phenomenology, Revealed Religion
Thus, the two-world system of the Middle Ages had necessarily to come to an end if
Christian eschatology was to be realized. Moreover, Protestantism could only do so much.
It appears that the Church as such is unable to overcome the dualisms involved in its form
or "letter" and bring about the profound healing and self-actualization which is
its purpose and raison d’etre. It is Reason which must intervene and assist Faith in
its final Work. This was the central task and meaning of the Modern Period— the
period from Descartes to Hegel. In fact it was Descartes’ discovery of subjectivity
and its consequences which led to the necessary demise of the Middle Age’s
"Other World," and to the necessary inversion of this Other World into the
Actual World and the merely divine into the merely human. Most
significantly, the great principle gradually dawned on Reason that one could not abstract
from one’s I, that one could not speak of an object— even God— apart from
relation to a subject or an I.
In this section, however, we shall restrict ourselves to a single question: What does
Hegel mean by the curious words, "God Himself is dead"— which appear here
in the penultimate chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit? It can be said that
the primary burden of this work is that of overcoming the subject-object split in
consciousness by collapsing every "in itself" into self-consciousness or
"Being for-itself," the result being a Self or Reason that knows itself
as all reality, as I = I, i.e., "absolute knowing." Now since the last
in-itself to be appropriated by the subject is the object of religious consciousness,
viz., God, with absolute knowledge we find ourselves subjected to the crucial
experience we spoke of above, determinative of the "negative" and
"positive" phases of "post" history to follow Modernity.— Namely,
the experience of, on the one hand, the "death of the old upstairs God" and, on
the other hand and at the same time, the re-location or "re-birth" of
God in and as ourselves (i.e., our true or universal Self/ves). This is the coincidence of
subjectivity and objectivity, which Hegel calls "The Concept," the selfsame
non-opposition or identity of God and man which Nietzsche strove to express and realize in
his own way.
The negative and positive moments and their necessary connection find expression at the
end of the chapter "Revealed Religion" (i.e., Christianity), to wit: "The
death of the [Mediator and the abstraction of the divine Being] is the painful feeling
that God Himself is dead." As to the meaning of this phrase, Hegel goes on to
tell us that, "This hard saying [that "God is dead"] is the expression of
innermost self-knowing, the return of consciousness [i.e. of an object] into the
depths of . . . "I = I," a night which no longer . . . knows anything outside
of itself. This [painful] feeling is, in truth, the loss of substance [God] and its
appearing over-against [cf. gegen-stand = object] consciousness. . ."
Thus, the first moment of the meaning of "God is dead" is the negative one
involving the "loss" or disappearance of God as a being standing over against
and outside of ourselves; since this is the common or traditional way of viewing God,
God’s negation is experienced by Christian consciousness as something extremely
painful, as an inconsolable loss.
But, as Hegel also says elsewhere, infinite loss is counter-balanced by infinite gain.
He continues: ". . . but this [feeling of loss] is at the same time the pure subjectivization
of substance [God]. . . This knowing is the inbreathing of the Spirit whereby Substance
becomes Subject. . . [that is] Self-consciousness." Thus, the negative moment
directly gives rise to a positive moment— "Substance has become
Subject." That is to say, the result of the loss of God as a being outside
of oneself is not sheer negation, nothingness, or pure atheism (the reading of Marx,
Kojeve, and Solomon), but instead the total recovery of God, i.e., the discovery
of God as a being inside oneself, indeed as oneself (i.e. one’s
universal, not particular, Self). As Hegel goes on to say: "the difference between
its Self and [God is overcome]; and just as [Christian consciousness] is Subject, so also
is it substance and hence it itself is Spirit [or "God"— albeit with
a new meaning]."
Thus the true meaning of the "death of God"— and by extension the
current "death of God" period of history— is the death of the abstract
God, of the objective (and "object-tionable") transcendent God in the
beyond and outside humanity, and at the same time its birth and re-appearance
("trans-substantiation"—of substance into subject) inside humanity,
in unity with ourselves (hence, Jesus’ saying "The Kingdom of God is within
you"): the coincidence or identity of subjectivity and objectivity, of God and
man— the foundation-stone for Schelling’s "Church of John," a.k.a.
"Kingdom Come."
This is precisely the meaning of "absolute knowing," viz., the knowledge that
the subject and object (i.e., God) are one, that the object of consciousness is, at the
same time, the object of self-consciousness. It also can be said that the
"curse" upon humanity is rooted in none else than its inability to grasp (by
Faith or Reason) the "identity of subjectivity and objectivity"
principle— whether by clinging one-sidedly to a subject or self which lacks
objectivity, or to an object (above all God) which is not at the same time
subject. Thus Hegel says, in full agreement with Nietzsche (and with Jesus Christ, one
should add), that "[The contemporary Church] is still burdened with an unreconciled split
into a here and a Beyond." What has to take place in order for Christian
consciousness to overcome its "divided state," its "schizophrenia,"
i.e., the schism between its "immediate consciousness and its religious
consciousness" and thereby advance to its complete consummation and goal (the Kingdom
of God on Earth), is precisely the conversion of object or substance into
subject, in other words, the completed experience of the death of God. As Hegel
succinctly states in the Encyclopedia Logic (194): "In Christ the human race
is redeemed and reconciled to God, . . . the antithesis of subjectivity and objectivity has
been implicitly overcome, and it is our business to participate in this redemption by
laying aside our immediate [one-sided] subjectivity . . . and learning to know God as
our true and essential Self."
In conclusion, our two physicians Hegel and Nietzsche both agree and strongly recommend
that humanity as a whole, to be fully liberated and cured, must let the old God
die—that the new God, the "gods and goddesses" (elohim), may live.
Nihilism and the death of God, therefore, turn out to be not our worst nightmare but
instead our greatest blessing: they are the necessary precondition and
"flip-side," so to speak, of Kingdom Come. It is precisely this, that is the
"final lesson" of mankind’s education. Our postmodern situation thus may
not be hopeless. There is a real possibility that we are today undergoing a kind of global
transformation or inversion and that humanity is indeed in the throes of giving birth to a
new order of things (a "novus ordo seclorum"), to be founded on a new
science and a new religion. This, I would like to submit, is the true meaning of the
present age.
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