The Death of God in the Nineteenth Century

The Death of God in the Nineteenth Century Lissa McCullough A contribution to Edinburgh Critical History of Nineteenth-Century Theology, edited by Daniel Whistler (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming in 2017). Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead. —William Blake, ‘Proverbs of Hell’ (1793) The comprehensive story of the death of God is almost too intricate, elaborate, ambitious, and ambiguous to be told. It is certainly presumptuous to try. If the referent God as redefined repeatedly in religious history offers a multitude of distinct meanings, the death of God layers in as many involutions of those meanings. In terms of the hermeneutic demanded to tell this tale, we must concede this to be as elusive a topic as can be raised, involving as it does not merely historical, metaphysical, or semiotic dimensions, but all these at once in fractious, unstable concert and dissonance. As soon as we get past the jingoism of the phrase ‘death of God’ that dates back to debates of the 1960s—a legacy interesting in its own right—we face a thousand decisions and indecisions, ironies and reversals. Symbols are born in human history, live out their meanings, and die carrying with them the most significant and portentous values under the sun. Who contributed more to ‘killing’ the God of Jesus: Clement of Alexandria, William of Ockham, or Friedrich Nietzsche? What contributed more to dooming modern faith: Descartes’s theism, Hume’s empiricism, or Kant’s ineffectual bid to make room for faith? When was God most alive in the first place? In the time of Jesus and his followers, before theology got hold of Him; in the golden age of Thomas Aquinas, when God was most majestically articulated but already sinking into the abyss of the nominalist challenge; or only today, released at last (in theory) from the delusory entrapments of ontotheology (Heidegger 1927)? Is the death of God essentially a revenge of Christian Aristotelianism on Christian Platonism? Or is it rather a victory to be celebrated of rising global Christianity over the dying star of imperial-colonial Christendom? ‘Then how should I begin?’ asks J. Alfred Prufrock wisely, ‘And how should I presume?’ [A] Unless the Seed Dies… In a sense, historical theology tells the history of thoughtful disavowal of a given God to make room for a God-reconception or God-idea more worthy and adequate, more actual in the Hegelian sense. The sociologist of religion, Jacob Taubes, posited this as a key principle when he wrote: ‘The progress in theological interpretation throughout history runs parallel with a gradual withdrawal of divine presence. Theological “re-presentation” and theological interpretation are driven deeper and deeper into the web of dialectics because the divine presence is more and more veiled’ (Taubes 1954: 25). Arguably—and Nietzsche’s lifelong friend Franz Overbeck did argue this—the fateful withdrawal of God occurred already at the dawn of nascent Christianity. Marcel Gauchet offers a complement to Taubes, arguing that with the death of God in western Christendom the system of religion—religiousness in its most robust original form—has selfdeclared the end of its dominion; we westerners today are inhabitants of a world that ‘at a certain point completely turned its back on the reign of the gods,’ not at the level of personal belief but at the level of effective social organization (Gauchet 1985: 199). For Gauchet, the French Revolution only completed this millennial process, which began during the Axial Age with the rise of the state. The end of religion’s dominion became possible 2 because religion reached the end of its power as a system built on collective denial or refusal—a response to something ‘unbearable’—because this dread has been gradually mitigated in the course of history precisely by the axial transformation (Gauchet 199, 22, 25-6). This unbearable actuality was, apparently, the terrifying freedom of facing an absolutely an-archic world of experience. If relative freedom is a blessing, absolute freedom has been forefended historically by religiousness as an intolerable abyss, an existential black hole. But according to Gauchet’s thesis, Christianity has proven to be ‘a religion for departing from religion’ (4); the gradual emancipation from and death of God has trained and conditioned us westerners to withstand the asphyxiating terror of freedom. Western Christendom is uniquely a civilization of apostates, per this interpretation. The import of Nietzsche’s famous madman passage in The Gay Science (§125) is that the ‘murder’ of God, though it has long since occurred, is ‘still on its way’ in the late nineteenth century, more distant from the murderers themselves ‘than the most distant stars.’ Cultured despisers in the marketplace mock the madman’s distress because none have awakened to the corrosive ramifications and consequences about to devastate their Enlightenment values, purported to be universal. The full terror qua loss, the abyssal implications have yet to be played out, indeed, to be abjectly suffered. Just as passengers on the Titanic continued to dine as the unsinkable ship took on water, so by analogy was the death of God a fait accompli long before the structures of civilization were able to absorb its absolute consequentiality. An omnipotent God of ultimate concern is invasive of every single relative concern and presupposition of a civilization. Even if an instant is sufficient to complete the thought-deed in an individual mind, the social-political-moral layers of society, habituated by vested interests and grounded ab origine in religious axioms, ensure that historically the deed can only be effected very slowly: 3 during that time the thought-deed will almost certainly be converted by the enchainments of tradition and entrenchments of the status quo into something fatefully resembling the old idea, and not merely once but again and again. To offer only one example, Kant’s religion ‘within the limits of reason alone’ drew all its key terms from the Bible: it consists in ‘a way of living with the Fall, according to the Law, in the Hope of attaining the Kingdom of Freedom’ (O’Neill 4). The point to be taken is, even if overt language of the death of God first occurred in the nineteenth century, the nineteenth century did not kill God. God was banished from this world virtually overnight as an epochal consequence of late medieval nominalism, commencing in the late thirteenth century, giving rise to the autonomous domain of modern natural science and its correlative philosophy, and undermining the conceptual foundations of the revealed God of sacra doctrina—a disjuncture that proved inexorable and irreparable (Knowles 265-306; Oberman; Huizinga; Fabro; Gillespie 1995, 2008; Depoortere). On the heels of this ‘exile’ of God from nature, the ‘death’ of God was effectively confirmed in the scientific-critical revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By the early nineteenth century God had been demoted to a deistic hypothesis at best—whether a helpful or harmful one remained open to polemical debate. The century’s most resolutely atheistic humanists and political thinkers (Feuerbach, Stirner, Proudhon, Marx, Bakunin) were already impatient to banish all residual vestiges of Christianity, even while the cultural-humanistic-pathetic implications of God’s banishment had hardly begun to be absorbed within religious, philosophical, and imaginativepoetic thought—that is, as a devastation of value to be responded to with creative energy and insight. What came to birth in Blake, Schelling, Hegel, and—most paradoxically—in Kierkegaard were newfound conceptions or envisionments of God as self-transfiguring in relation to nature and history rather than eternally impassible and immutable. 4 A complex either/or faced nineteenth-century post-theism: either reconstruct human relatedness to God on new philosophical-theological grounds (Schelling, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard) or prophesy a new creative vision to supplant the dead divinity (Blake, Nietzsche) or turn away from God toward a chaste atheistic skepticism (Overbeck) or define a bold transvaluation of material existence without God (Stirner, Feuerbach, Marx, Comte). Skepticaldeconstructive and creative-constructive dimensions of this mandate operated in tandem. Skeptical thinking worked to negate the outdated divine presuppositions, purging the received God of tradition from all equations. Constructive thinking advanced to posit a new hope: a new God or humanism or egoistic individualism conceived as better or truer or more vital and defensible than the defunct God whose time has passed. If the progress of modern philosophy under the relentless pressure of skepticism can be regarded as an ‘ingenuity of failures’ (Preuss vii), nineteenth-century philosophy’s importance consisted in the creative ways it confronted and prosecuted an already late moment in the deathof God historical process. With considerable degree of success it rescued, retrieved, and transfigured God, reviving and reconceiving the unique intentionality of that concept-word in ways that are experienced even today—more than a century later—as live options. It makes perfect sense, in retrospect, to pose our leading question in full irony: How did nineteenthcentury thinking rescue God from the death of God by means of death-of-God thinking? [A] Blake and Stirner Although Hegel and Nietzsche are first to be mentioned when explicit language of the death of God is broached, alternate forerunners deserve to be cited in the same breath. The English poet William Blake, in identifying God with human imagination and postulating divine-human 5 imagination as transcending Lockean sense perception, envisioned an intimate co-embodiment of human and divine, a God fully incarnate in humanity; expressed in Blake’s own words, ‘God is Man & exists in us & we in him,’ a coincidence that Blake names elsewhere as ‘The Eternal Great Humanity Divine’ (Frye 30; Erdman 96). Half a century before Feuerbach offered his theory of God as human projection in The Essence of Christianity (1841), this far more sophisticated alternative to Feuerbach shone in the darkness. Blake’s conception of the divine was inseparable from the ‘death’ or dissolution of God as traditionally conceived. Indeed, the contemporary death-of-God theologian Thomas Altizer consistently credits Blake with having been the first visionary to depict the death of God in his 1793 poem America: ‘The Heavens melted from north to south; and Urizen . . . emerg’d his leprous head / From out his holy shrine, his tears in deluge piteous / Falling into the deep sublime! . . . Weeping in dismal howling woe he dark descended howling’ (plate 16, lines 2-9). So momentous is Blake’s poetic vision of the ‘Self-Annihilation of God,’ melting away and emptying out his ‘stored snows’ and ‘icy magazines,’ that Altizer closely correlates Blake with Hegel on the basis of this parallelism: ‘The “Divine Image” dies in Jesus so as to abolish the solitary God who is the source of judgment and bring about an apocalyptic brotherhood that is a full coming together of God and man’ (Jerusalem, lines 23-28; Altizer 207). But the selfannihilation of Urizen, the abstract God of Enlightenment reason, cannot be understood as a simple nullification of divine presence; it is rather the self-transfiguration of God to become present in human form. Blake wrote quite earnestly, ‘I am in Gods presence night & day / And he never turns his face away’ (Blake 481). God is transmuted into creative-poetic spirit incarnate, or in terms of Blakean prophesy, the fiery Los. 6 A profoundly nihilistic counterpoint to Blake’s ‘Human Form Divine’ surfaces with Max Stirner, another who deserves mention when explicit language of the death of God is broached. Almost forty years before Nietzsche’s madman announced the death of God, Stirner professed his radical atheist position in The Ego and His Own (1844). It was Stirner’s conviction, against the highest hopes of naïve humanism, that the death of God means inexorably that the man in the God-man equation also must die: At the entrance to the modern time stands the ‘God-man.’ At its exit will only the God in the God-man evaporate? And can the God-man really die if only the God in him dies? They [Man] did not think of this question, and thought they were through when in our days they brought to a victorious end the work of the Enlightenment, the vanquishing of God: they did not notice that Man has killed God in order to become now—’sole God on high.’ The other world beyond us is indeed brushed away, and the great undertaking of the Enlighteners completed; but the other world within us has become a new heaven and calls us forth to renewed heaven-storming: God has had to give place, yet not to us but—to Man [nicht Uns, sondern—den Menschen]. How can you believe that the God-man is dead before the Man in him, besides the God, is dead? (Stirner 109; translation amended) For Blake, God is embodied in human imagination so as to live on in human form; thus both are saved. Neither true God nor true humanity is lost. For Stirner, in diametric contrast, it is not only God who must die but the humanity who loved and lived for him, and indeed who holds anything 7 sacred apart from the individual (der Einzige) since ‘everything sacred is a tie, a fetter’ (ibid.: 142). Homo religiosus must die. God is a fixed idea that has subjected the individual to itself; once you recognize this fixed idea to be a folly, you shut up its slaves in an asylum. God will only be truly dead when the last shadow of the sacred is foresworn in each individual heart and mind, and this includes every moral conceit since ‘moral people skimmed off the best fat from religion, and ate it themselves.’ Every nation-state holds itself sacred, higher than the individual, demanding patriotic self-sacrifice, tyrannical toward the one. For the state, every one in himself is indifferent, a nothing. But ‘when mankind is buried, I am my own, I am the laughing heir [der lachende Erbe]!’ (Ibid.: 59, 64, 142-43). With a Kierkegaard-like conviction that the individual is what counts above all else in the world, Stirner stands absolutely for the anarchistic an-arche of the existing individual: ‘Up with me!’ (ibid.: 143). Instead of making the leap of faith with Kierkegaard, he makes the resolute plunge to the dissolution of God without remainder. God and state are zeroed out and I am the laughing heir. [A] Political Implications The arc of ascending Christian Platonism (in the Greek Fathers, Augustine, Eriugena) vaunted and perfected the doctrine of God’s absoluteness, aseity, and essential immutability. As it reached systematic apogee, Aristotelian criticism pressed a descent into immanence (in Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Ockham). Aristotelian thinking was brought to bear in conceptualizing the implications of divine incarnation in relation to the world. The gradual collapse of God qua transcendent asserted pressure and opportunity to reinvent and reestablish God qua immanent. Thus the death of God is susceptible of being interpreted as the emergence, insistence, and 8 triumph of a commitment to incarnation, enacting the full actuality and palpability of incarnation in the material flesh of the world (Leahy 2003). The nineteenth century was to take up its portion of this task: God as immutable metaphysical transcendent was vanquished by God as empirical change. The century was to generate various this-worldly reformulations of God as selfmanifesting in time and history rather than as known speculatively and metaphysically as he is necessarily in himself. Descartes banished the biblical God by philosophizing a purely rational deity in relation to material nature (extensio) and the human mind (cogitatio) in an inquiry conducted entirely, he presumed, on natural, strictly nonbiblical grounds. In so doing, philosophy enacted an epochal liberation of thinking, fostering radical tabula rasa thought-projects that would restlessly reinvent and recast this material-spiritual dualism in new terms with extraordinary persistence, initiating a repetition-compulsion of sorts that ended only with Husserl. The radical Cartesian diremption between extensio and cogitatio meant that, after the close of the seventeenth century, natural science took charge of material nature and philosophy took charge of cogitating minds (Whitehead 145). The new cosmology unveiled a universe infinite in extension and duration in which eternal matter moves endlessly and aimlessly in eternal space in accordance with necessary and eternal laws (Brague; Funkenstein; Becker 33-70). This universe inherited all the ontological attributes of deity, but only those—’all the others the departed God took away with him’ (Koyré 276). The universe under the aspect of extensio was understood to embody the will of God, but blotted out all moral and spiritual values, the orienting divine teleology that gave human life purpose and meaning. Descartes’ famous contemporary Pascal witnesses in Pensées to the trembling dread of existing between two gaping abysses: infinity and nothingness. Having been charged with superabundant value 9 and meaning, God now had to be radically reconceived if this supreme value was not to perish in the mechanistic indifference of the new godless cosmos. The absolutely transcendent God vaunted by western monotheism, a deity who does not and cannot change, had to be transformed or perish of existential irrelevance. Human existence suddenly had too much of impassibility. God’s metaphysical scaffolding collapsed in the transition from late medieval to early modern with a swiftness comparable to the collapse of a speculative financial bubble—a telling analogy that merits elaboration (McCullough 2014). This collapse fomented not only spiritual and intellectual crises but also crises of political authority that played out in the wars and repressions of the Reformation and the modern European revolutions. Carl Schmitt’s often-cited claim that the authority of God is the basis of all authority became increasingly evident as divine authority began to erode and decay. Schmitt traces out how deism and the banishment of miracle arose in parallel with the modern constitutional state; a ‘battle against God’ by the likes of Proudhon, Comte, and Bakunin ensued. For Proudhon, ‘mankind had to be substituted for God’ (Schmitt 36, 50, 53). Proudhon and Bakunin excoriated God, the former inveighing that ‘God is hypocrisy and falsehood; God is tyranny and misery; God is evil’; the latter seconding, ‘we believe it our duty to recover from heaven the goods which it has stolen and return them to earth,’ for ‘God being master, man is the slave’ (Bakunin 36, 24, 25). Bakunin’s epigraph to his major work reverses Voltaire’s famous dictum, asserting: ‘If God really existed it would be necessary to abolish him’ (ibid.: 3). While pure anarchists like Stirner and Bakunin were single-mindedly coherent due to their ideological clarity, the liberal bourgeoisie was two-faced. Schmitt notes the dual front fought by the rising bourgeoisie: it was driven leftward by its hatred of monarchy and aristocracy, yet its fear of being divested of property drove it rightward toward monarchy backed 10 by military might—a ‘curious contradiction.’ In effect, it wanted ‘neither the sovereignty of the king nor the people.’ The bourgeoisie wanted a God, but its God could not become active; liberal constitutionalism permitted the king to remain on the throne, but sought to paralyze him through parliament. The conservative monarchist Donoso Cortés (d. 1853) compared this with the inconsistency committed by deism when it excluded God from the world but held onto his existence (Schmitt 59-60). Once victorious over the old regime, the bourgeoisie was happy to annex both clergy and nobility as soon as they accepted its political, economic, and moral direction; but hardly having come to power, it betrayed its allies in the very bottom strata of society by ‘shoving them back into the gulf’ (de Ligt 40). This theopolitical double-face— ‘authority is dead, long live authority!’—has predominated in western liberal societies ever since. [A] Maimon and Hegel The generation opening with Kant brought forth the German idealist movement in the universities, which Collins declares in his monumental study of the sociology of global philosophies to be ‘one of the most intense outpourings of philosophical creativity in world history.’ The movement’s ebullient creativity flew in the face of the dominant themes of the Enlightenment—the death of the supernatural, the termination of metaphysical speculation, and the replacement of philosophy by empirical science—and swooped in to wrest theology away from the churches into secular hands (Collins 613-8, 622). Kant’s response to Hume, in particular, provoked a renewal not only of epistemology but also of metaphysics. Despite his valiant effort to refute Hume’s skeptical demolition of causality—a refutation indispensable for making the world safe for natural science—Kant failed to convince. He did not succeed in 11 accounting for how two utterly heterogeneous faculties, understanding and sensibility, could cooperate with one another; his strenuous effort to do so ultimately begged the question: he did not have a criterion to determine when synthetic a priori concepts apply to a posteriori intuitions. He described what conditions would be needed (quid juris), but did not demonstrate whether or when it actually occurs (quid facti). This unbridgeable understanding–sensibility dualism in Kant was patterned on the intractable mind–body dualism in Descartes (Beiser 1987: 288-9, 291, 325; 1993, 11). In fact, far from curtailing Cartesian doubt, Kant ‘extends it infinitely along the new divide between all transcendental ideas [including God] and the possibility of their realization in time and space’ (Leahy 2003: 42; Franks 108). This failure of Kant’s transcendental deduction to bridge a priori and a posteriori knowledge was demonstrated most decisively by Kant’s obscure contemporary Solomon Maimon (d. 1800), who thereby raised one of the fundamental problems of post-Kantian idealism—as Beiser, Franks, and Socher separately argue—and who also proposed the most tenable solution. If the highest formal principle is maximally indeterminate, a maximally determining ‘lowest principle’ was needed to bridge the gap between form and matter (Franks 108). Maimon found the breakthrough in Spinoza, whose thought constituted an early-modern revolution unto itself, an utterly radical abolition of the Cartesian dichotomy; in a single stroke, at least when read monistically, Spinoza conflated extensio and cogitatio, God and world, and in so doing struck a fatal blow against the biblical-historical God and the transcendent-deistic God alike. Maimon’s breakthrough recuperated an aspect of Spinoza’s monism to defeat Kantian epistemological dualism, though whether with an intention to destroy or reconstruct Kant remains ambiguous (Socher 106; Beiser 1987: 286–87; Franks 109). Spinoza had already posited that mental and physical, subjective and objective, are different attributes of a single infinite 12 substance, and human thought, insofar as it arrives at adequate ideas, approximates the cogitatio of God qua natura naturans. It is in fact the same act of knowledge by which we and God know something; this means that the difference between divine and human knowledge is no longer qualitative, as previously thought, but only quantitative (Funkenstein 290-1). This co-knowing of God and human cogitatio made possible the main principle of Maimon’s theory: the idea of an infinite subjective understanding that is immanent in materiality, or in Beiser’s characterization: If synthetic a priori concepts are to apply to experience, then it is necessary to postulate Leibniz’s and Malebranche’s idea of an infinite understanding that is present within our finite understanding and that creates not only the form but also the content of experience. . . . Thanks to Maimon, the Kantian transcendental ego acquired a new metaphysical status: it became a single universal subject present within the consciousness of every individual, unifying the finite subject and object. Maimon’s infinite understanding is thus the forerunner of Fichte’s Ich and Hegel’s Geist (1987: 286-7). The immanent infinite understanding posited by Maimon made him ‘the great philosopher of immanence’ in the context of the critical tradition, in the judgment of Daniel W. Smith, since almost all Maimon’s critiques of Kant are aimed at eliminating the illegitimate vestiges of transcendence that still remain in Kant, the most vexing example of this being the thing-in-itself (Smith 125; Beiser 1987: 303). Construing insights from Spinoza, Leibniz, and Maimonides’s adaptation of Aristotle, Maimon posited a holistic solution to the Kantian impasse as to how a priori concepts can apply to experience, one that was accepted by all the key 13 thinkers of early German idealism: Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and perhaps the Kant of the Third Critique as well. (Kant admired Maimon, Fichte confessed a respect for him that ‘knows no bounds,’ Schelling clearly read him, and for Hegel indirect influence is established; Socher 104– 6.) All sought to resolve this irremediable dualism through development of the infinite intuitive intellect (intellectus archetypus) (Beiser 1993: 11; Socher 89-92). It would seem hard to overemphasize what happens in the metaphysical movement that takes place at this moment on the eve of the nineteenth century. From the status of being an essentially acosmic God a se—who nonetheless de facto created—a perilous crossing is achieved, an immanental passage, and from here forward it is not only that God’s laws or ideas imprint the world from outside as a consequence of creation; now, for the first time in mainstream western thought, divine understanding essentially bursts into, occupies, and indwells the world and the world becomes, in a qualified sense, God’s body. ‘Without Godhead the world cannot be thought,’ Maimon wrote, ‘but, without the world, the Godhead cannot be known’ (Franks 109). Spinoza’s rationalistic conflation of God and nature, Deus sive Natura, is transfigured from an acosmism (an insight that Hegel credited to Maimon) into an incarnationalism. The world, rather than merely depending on God, expresses materially the essential nature of God. God requires the substance of the world to become freely revealed to himself. God’s transcendence, independence, and invulnerability vis-à-vis the world is now breached absolutely—the old Christian God perishes in this transition—and God now becomes absolute Subject creatively imbuing all existence, the absolute inhabitant of historical time. This transition marks the historic eclipse or “death” of God conceived in terms of aseity and the advent of a modern new God-idea. 14 The God-thinking of Schelling and Hegel hinged on this immanental passage. They regarded their own new approach to metaphysics as a form of scientific naturalism, insisting that the metaphysical principles of their philosophies can and should be confirmed through experience. Both a priori and a posteriori are products of natural reason. All we need to know is nature; the sum total of human knowledge of God is encountered through experience in the thisworldly context of nature. Both young thinkers appreciated how Spinoza naturalized God, conceiving God as nothing other than natura naturans, the universe as a whole, making a religion out of nature itself. Nature is not a mere mechanism, nor is spirit (Geist) a ghost emanating from outside the machine, but a life sprung up within it. Since natural laws consist not only of the mechanistic physics of the seventeenth century but also the vitalistic biological science of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—concerned with generation, growth, stages of development, and death—the striving of an absolute subject realizing itself in and through nature became thinkable (Beiser 2003: 138-41). In his essay on freedom (1809), Schelling wants to put aside completely the concept of immanence that expresses a ‘dead conceptual inclusion of things in God’ in favor of seeing things as having their basis ‘in that within God which is not God himself’ but is God’s basis for becoming himself (Schelling 33-4). For Schelling, intellectual intuition is an experience-based form of perception that can provide the basis for a purely immanent metaphysics. The young Hegel absorbed and critically recast this Schellingian stance in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), which attempted an immanent metaphysics based on experience alone, but one that claimed to follow the path of rigorous science (Wissenschaft) (Beiser 1993: 15-6, 20; Harris 45). Although science at its first beginning was bound to have a visionary quality, ‘intuition’ must be resolved into a truly speculative method of rigorous discursive reasoning (Harris 44). His entire 15 philosophical career thereafter proposed a post-critical take on how the unconditioned truth of scientific reason can be achieved by, as Orrin F. Summerell puts it, propounding the complete conceivability of reason’s autonomy, and therewith its unconditional ground in and as the necessary movement of self-thinking thought: ‘Bearing itself in itself, self-thinking thought . . . supplies itself with its own Whence and Whither’ (Summerell 180–81). Adapting Maimon’s immanent infinite understanding, Hegel’s finite spirit (der endliche Geist) qua immanent within infinite Spirit (der unendliche Geist), is able to tap into the Absolute’s unconditioned contact with the world, which is identically its contact with itself (Leahy 2003: 54). Hegel was the first thinker to propose an organic philosophical interpretation of the global history of religions and to embark on a vast, painstaking scholarly documentation of the subject (Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 1821–31); Schelling made a similar effort in the same era. They were concerned not only with reconstructing the history of religions but with addressing the question of their relative truth (Pagano 53). Presumably, the ecumenical spirit of their research was subtended by the new metaphysics they embraced: religions evolve organically as the self-knowledge of God—Geist—emerges historically from the matrix of nature. Thus, rather ironically, after Descartes had purged from the domain of reason all adversion to the historically revealed God of the Bible, Hegel instituted a God who is essentially the self-revelation of reason in history, telling the old Christian story again but within a truly omni-comprehensive tale. History, indeed, becomes the universal theater of divine self-sacrifice in Hegel. This is because incarnation implies the assumption of finitude, and to achieve finitude to the furthest extreme implies—even necessitates—death; kenosis in the form of death is thus the climax of incarnation, wherein God’s divinity is accomplished (ibid.: 65). It is precisely by virtue of this 16 incarnational principle—which sources our life and our death—that we qua finite spirit are related to God (Yerkes 116-7, 136-7). And yet, despite the explicit pathos-laden language of the death of God in Hegel’s work (Carlson 22-49; Kosky), it is important to note that Hegel’s God cannot die in principio: given that the beginning of God is not essentially historical—not actual—the absolute cannot actually die (Leahy 1996: 596). In Hegel, death is sublated into the infinity of the divine life by God’s taking death upon himself, as William Franke notes, and thereby death is negated and overcome, achieving ‘the death of death’ (Franke 217). Hegel’s God renders the world intrinsically necessary for God’s free self-realization on de facto grounds, and in so doing Hegel’s God sacrifices absolutely the orthodox God of transcendent aseity. Yet Hegel’s God himself—der absolute Zombie—can never and will never die. As Alain Badiou expresses this infinite immanence of God, in Hegel ‘the infinite is merely the void in which the repetition of the finite operates’; hence ‘the bad infinity is bad due to the very same thing that makes it good in Hegelian terms: it does not break the ontological immanence of the one; better still, it derives from the latter. . . . The pure multiple detains in itself the count-as-one’ (Badiou 173, 169). The primordial privilege of the Infinite-cum-Totality is the raison d’etre of every particular. [A] Overbeck and Nietzsche In 1873, Nietzsche wrote to his Basel colleague, Franz Overbeck, ‘Two twins from the one house went bravely out into the world to tear the world’s paper-tigers [Welt-Drachen] to pieces,’ making reference to the boarding house they cohabited at the time (Overbeck 26). Odd twins in lifelong fellowship, their temperaments were a diametric contrast. While Nietzsche was empowered to thought by the bracing energy of detestation, Overbeck held close to the Spinozist 17 credo: non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere. He was intensely yet dispassionately curious, quietly but radically skeptical, a strictly scrupulous scholar, indeed, ‘a self-mortifying monk of scholarship,’ his Basel colleague attested, ‘an absolutely honest mind,’ in Löwith’s estimation (O’Neill 180; Löwith 388). An outsider with no clear religious conviction, he drifted into the study of theology where, among fellow theology students, he felt ‘like a Hottentot.’ He was appointed at Basel expressly to represent the liberal tendency in modern Protestant theology, to help the University of Basel keep current with the hottest new trends, and from then forward, on the grounds of a painstakingly scrutinized historical record, he worked with keen diligence to expose the critical untenability of that very liberal tendency. His work was not only a challenge to liberal theology but to all theology per se, and to the possibility of reconciling authentic Christianity with authentic modernity (Gossman 419-20). Overbeck’s methodological approach as church historian was to presuppose that scholarship and religion are mutually destructive (Overbeck 42); therefore, his only theological function as a professor of theology, he acknowledged in his memoir, was to pronounce the Last Judgment on Christianity (O’Neill 179). Having no positive theological agenda of his own, Overbeck demonstrated an extraordinary and rare fidelity to Christianity by means of the perfectly unbiased scrupulosity of his historical research. He came to view Christianity as a religion whose original expression was sealed in the past, an inaccessible enigma. He claimed that historical investigation reveals that Christianity in its original form was fundamentally apocalyptic in character, and he regarded all later centuries of Christian history as a betrayal of early Christianity. ‘Original Christianity no more expected to have a theology than it expected to have any kind of history on this earth,’ he wrote, ‘Indeed, Christianity entered this world announcing its imminent end’ (Overbeck 34; c.f. Law 224-5). Urchristentum has not existed, has 18 not been possible or retrievable, since the imminent apocalypticism of the original first-century communities—unrequited by God, let us say—was abandoned. Overbeck opined that the earliest testimonies of Christianity were created in a kind of literary vacuum for internal consumption within the community, not for a wider exoteric public; though drawing on Jewish traditions, these communities showed no tendency to grow into or fuse with the surrounding Roman-Hellenic culture. There was no call to codify the teachings or create institutions since there would be no future for the world as they knew it. But the actual contexts and themes of this Urliterutur were soon occluded in the process of canonization for the sake of transhistorical and universal applicability, and thenceforward they ceased to be understood. Thus, Overbeck considered Christianity a historically obsolete phenomenon, a religion of crisis and immediate decision; he pointed to the unrepeatability of its origins and the impossibility of extracting any timeless substance from them (Sommer 81, 102). Based on this view, Overbeck showed the inherent contradictions between the primitive Church and the manifold forms of its subsequent secularization in ancient and medieval worlds. A theology was elaborated only when it became necessary to take account of the fact that the world was not coming to an end, at least not immediately (Gossman 421). The struggle between faith and knowledge was fought out in the very cradle of Christianity, when Gnosticism destroyed all the historical presuppositions of early Christian faith, turning it into a metaphysical system instead of a popular religion, and doing so by quasi-violent means; rational theology was forced on the church by the earliest Alexandrians through an act of violence (Overbeck 34-5). Monasticism, by establishing an alternative to literal martyrdom in the form of the martyrium quotidianum, managed to ensure the church’s survival into the medieval period, saving Christianity from obsolescence, but only by changing it at the core (ibid.: 84). 19 This unbridgeable distance of Urchristentum held a fortiori for all modern manifestations of Christian faith (Sommer 88). Again, religious faith and the critical theology that seeks to construe it conceptually are mutually destructive in his eyes: While rational knowledge can no doubt destroy a religion, it can never restore it to what it was before. In the modern period [Christian theology proves this], though not so much by the devastation science has wrought in the area of Christian faith, as by the sterility of theology’s own attempt, undertaken in response, to reconstruct the Christian religion by means of pure, unfettered scholarship. . . . Of all people, it is the theologians who can turn Christianity into something which—whatever else it may be—is no longer Christianity. (Overbeck 45-6) Overbeck and Nietzsche shared the judgment that contemporaries in modern Christendom are actually incapable of grasping the true nature of Christianity (Henry xxxi), but the two differed between themselves on this very question. While Overbeck honored the limits of the historical record and the social-political communitarian nature of original Christianity, Nietzsche’s quest for transvaluation and his faith in the solitaire destiny of the super-creative individual skewed his perspective tendentiously beyond the limits of the historical record. Religiously speaking, Nietzsche shared with Hegel an impatience to transition from the unglückliche Bewußtsein, the alienated unhappy consciousness of Christian legacy, to what Nietzsche evokes as geistreicher und glückliche Übermut (Will to Power §1019), a happy spirited exuberance of post-Christian joyful wisdom (fröhliche Wissenschaft). Nietzsche sought 20 to define a double-edged nihilistic-creative praxis; what we find lauded in his work is not the will to believe, but ‘the will to create—the will to put meaning into the chaos of existence, and certainly not to find it there’ (Leahy 2003: xi). Nietzsche invented his own version of the historical Jesus: a quasi-Buddhist Jesus who liberated himself from ressentiment, who conquered suffering and achieved ‘blessedness’ by resisting nothing, reacting to nothing (Anti-Christ §2741; Will to Power §207), whose teachings exemplify a ‘way of life, not a system of beliefs’ (Will to Power §212). The life and teachings of Jesus exemplified a praxis of amor fati. Nietzsche did not embrace Jesus’s ‘blessedness’ as his own highest ideal because he considered it a decadent (passive) rather than a creative (active) form of this praxis. His Zarathustra, by contrast, embodies the creative form, exercising abundant strength rather than hypersensitivity, passivity, and withdrawal. Yet Nietzsche does admire Jesus for having lived a life free of ressentiment, likewise free of the illusion of a transcendent world or metaphysical final cause to justify life. Jesus taught a mode of existence that would render moot and useless everything that later Christianity came to propagate as ‘divine truth.’ There has been only one Christian, Nietzsche wrote famously, and he died on the cross (Anti-Christ §39). The way in which Nietzsche execrated Paul for turning Christianity into a religion (e.g., Anti-Christ §42) stems from his contact with Overbeck (as well as the source criticism of Julius Wellhausen, published in 1878), though Overbeck certainly cannot be held responsible for its crudity or its vehemence. The perishing of metaphysics and dogmatic theology, Nietzsche thought, makes possible a recovery of the Christian ideal that was exemplified in Jesus’s life, but then misconstrued and perverted by Paul into a metaphysical doctrine of Jesus’s death. Hence the pre-Pauline meaning and value of Jesus’s ideal, the actual witness of Jesus’s life, is available for the first time only in our era: Christianity has ‘only now attained to approximately the state of 21 culture in which it can fulfill its original vocation . . . in which it can show itself pure’ (Will to Power §219). For Nietzsche, ‘Christianity is still possible at any time’ (ibid.: §212). So then, long before Heidegger posited the possibility of a post-ontotheological Christianity, Nietzsche did so. An authentic Christianity ‘has absolutely no need of metaphysics’ (ibid.: §212). An original Christian ideal not only remains possible after the death of God, but the death of God actually opens up a post-dogmatic horizon in which Jesus’s life and teachings may at last receive a nonmetaphysical interpretation, viewed from a nonreligious perspective: ‘a Christianity is possible, but without the absurd dogmas,’ ‘not tied to any of the impudent dogmas that have adorned themselves with its name’ (ibid.: §§239, 212). Christian value judgments have not by any means been overcome by either modern natural sciences or modern values: ‘’Christ on the cross’ is the most sublime symbol even today’ (ibid.: §219). Anti-Christianity diatribes became Nietzsche’s spur to envision a new religious praxis, a passionate faith in overcoming a decadent, domesticated, declining humanity, whether in accordance with the creative self-sacrificial ideal of Zarathustra (‘abundant strength wants to create, suffer, go under,’ ibid.: §222), or another ideal. But let us take notice: these are ideals, highly individualist solitaire ideals. Nietzsche validated the heroic overcoming of the exceptional individual; Overbeck did not. Distrusting what he considered to be Nietzsche’s megalomaniac egoism, Overbeck regarded Nietzsche’s Übermensch as a residue of the very philosophical idealism Nietzsche so tirelessly lambasted. ‘What an idea cannot achieve,’ Overbeck wrote, ‘the idea of an idea is even less able to achieve.’ Humanity is marked by its solidarity, for Overbeck—‘humanity [Menschlichkeit] is still our highest title to glory’ (Gossman 435-6)—and humanity has far more use for the heroism of everyday acts than for superhuman drama. A quietly stoic knight of infinite resignation, Overbeck forged his career into a remarkable witness 22 to historical Christianity in the full range of its paradoxicality. Meanwhile, he wrote of the spiritual darkness he experienced as a modern: ‘Our defection from the old and our falling away from it are irreparable. . . . Having come so far, we have no option but to press on further. . . . If our falling away has truly extinguished all light for us, we can least expect to receive new illumination by turning back, and we can be sure that it can only lie ahead of us’ (ibid.: 422). [A] Schweitzer and Kierkegaard The more comprehensively the banishment of the metaphysical God registered in modern sensibility, the more the quest for the historical Jesus heated up. With God qua Father, first person of the Trinity, undergoing profound assault and radical reconceptualization, one of the burning questions of the day took shape: Can Jesus be retrieved as the Truth and the Way; can he, qua God incarnate, become the savoir of God, by means of whom God will be returned to us via history’s backdoor? The cherished bid was to get close to the God who once walked on earth, to carry his kerymatic message straight into the present, uncompromised by metaphysical interventions and undefiled by ‘the inventions of men’ (as Luther called all unbiblical sacerdotal hocus pocus). As John O’Neill wryly notes, ‘even German theologians who openly or covertly accepted that God was dead and the crucial events “mythical”—Semler, Eichhorn, David Friedrich Strauss, Ferdinand Christian Baur, above all Bultmann—showed that the Bible retained its authority by devoting the enormous scholarly energy of their lives to expounding it’ (O’Neill 3). Albert Schweitzer, in 1906, published the definitive book on the nineteenth century’s quest for the historical Jesus, ultimately pronouncing the quest a failure: ‘Those who are fond of talking about negative theology can find their account here. There is nothing more negative than 23 the result of the critical study of the life of Jesus’ (Schweitzer 398). Schweitzer’s explanation for the failure closely paralleled the critique of liberal Protestant theology set forth by Overbeck, though the latter is not mentioned. Through ‘forced and arbitrary interpretations’ of the life of Jesus, creating a ‘historical Jesus in its own image,’ using ‘artifice, art, artificiality, and violence,’ modern theology was determined to find its world-affirming ethic in the teaching of Jesus, and therein lay its weakness; but finally ‘it could not keep him in our time, but had to let him go’ (ibid.: 398-9, 402). The liberal questers, in their naïve self-satisfaction, sought to know Jesus after the flesh, Schweitzer judged, whereas his spirit lay hidden in his words. Jesus’s sayings, speaking as an apocalyptic prophet, were heterogeneous to the world, Schweitzer insisted, and all the religious force of Jesus lay precisely in this world-negation: ‘that which is eternal in the words of Jesus is due to the very fact that they are based on an eschatological worldview.’ The world-negating prophet ‘comes to us as One unknown’ (ibid.: 402–3). But while Schweitzer still believed that a radical eschatological faith can undergo conversion and choose to ‘follow’ the apocalyptic Jesus, Overbeck stood for an extreme pyrrhonist doubt with respect to the historical Jesus: he asked whether Jesus’s teachings were not only strange and unapproachable, or demanding and formidable, but utterly foreign and actually inapplicable—offering not an unearthly challenge to faith but a historical surd, an irrecoverable anachronism. Søren Kierkegaard’s position, as pseudonymously outlined by Johannes Climacus in Philosophical Fragments (1844) and Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), is remarkably like Schweitzer’s in retrospect. Schweitzer hoped that as a consequence of the failure of the quest for the historical Jesus, ‘history will force Christianity to find a way to transcend history’ (Schweitzer 401). For Kierkegaard, likewise, any expectation that historical grounds might help 24 to support or justify faith can only fall short and never arrive at the core groundlessness of faith; hence the need for a leap, an ultimately groundless history-independent decision of faith. On the one hand, the claim that God ‘has entered into time’ and become incarnate historically is an axiom of Christian faith; on the other hand, no historical fact—nothing in the eighteen hundred years of Christian history—can offer or constitute legitimate grounds for believing that the Jesus of history, who claimed he was God, was God. Far rather, for Kierkegaard, the eighteen hundred years have only confused the issue, falsifying the faith-conditions of authentic New Testament Christianity (the requirement of a strenuous spiritual metanoia), while establishing a pseudoChristianity and making a fool of God. Kierkegaard was confident that no historical fact or discovery could ever stand between the God who entered into time—making the simple claim on earth that he was God and asking others to follow him—and the faith of the individual follower that this man was indeed God. But Overbeck cast historical doubt exactly where Kierkegaard did not question: he denied that the historical Jesus ever claimed to be God, which shifts the core premise of Kierkegaard’s dialectical paradox off its foundation, leaving it in the lurch on historical grounds. Even now, today, a critical faith may experience this question as a living quandary: whether to honor a decisionist faith in line with Kierkegaard-Schweitzer or a pyrrhonist doubt in line with Overbeck, who believed that Christianity has long since had its day and should be left to die in peace (Law 238). Certainly, though, the apocalyptic Jesus professed by Schweitzer on the threshold of the First World War—the Unknown One who commands ‘Follow me!’— provides a closing bracket for the long nineteenth century of our present inquiry. 25 [A] Berlioz and Dostoevsky Besides the ‘historical’ Jesus depicted in the Bible, a wholly-other-than-historical Jesus—the God-man as figured in art—also reveals dimensions of the death of God. Jesus in art registers the death-of-God trauma profoundly, as we see in the dramatic legend The Damnation of Faust, with music and libretto composed by Hector Berlioz, first performed in 1846. When Part 2 opens, Faust is enveloped in the throes of a suicidal depression, alone and abandoned by the empty heavens: ‘Oh, how I suffer! And the starless night, which extends from afar its silence and veils, intensifies my oppressive sorrows.’ [‘Oh! je souffre! et la nuit sans étoiles, / Qui vient d’étendre au loin son silence et ses voiles, / Ajoute encore à mes sombres douleurs.’] Engulfed in melancholic despair, Faust hears the church bells of Easter sounding and a hymn being sung by the chorus as they anticipate Christ about to be raised from the tomb. The believers sing plangently of their sorrow as they watch Christ, their beloved master, leaving the tomb and advancing à grands pas toward heaven while his faithful disciples ‘remain languishing here below’: ‘Alas! He is leaving us behind under stinging barbs of misery. O divine master! Your joy is the cause of our sorrow. O divine master! You are leaving us behind under stinging barbs of misery’ [‘tu nous laisses sous les traits brûlants du malheur’]. Hearing the sacred liturgy as a chance bystander, Faust exclaims with anguish—Ô souvenirs!—overwhelmed by his nostalgia for the joy of Easter, now recalled as a distant memory of youth, inaccessible to him, locked away in a past he cannot recapture. In Faust’s keenest moment of anguish, Mephistopheles appears and snarks ironically on all this nostalgic piety. He makes an irresistible offer that Faust accepts, taking Faust on a journey ‘to learn about life.’ Their first stop is in a raucous tavern where they witness a ribald ‘Requiem for a Rat.’ The drinking song tells the story of a kitchen rat who, after living so high 26 on the hog ‘as to make fat Luther jealous,’ is poisoned and roasted, then solemnly laid to rest to the strains of a beautiful sacred requiem. The moving solemnity of the chorale gives way to Mephistopheles’s song about a flea who organizes an infestation of the royal court by his whole family. Faust interrupts the song and demands to leave the saloon, disgusted by the baseness of it all. The juxtaposition of genuine religious anguish and nostalgic longing for the sacred with blasphemous ribaldry and mockery of the sacred is the striking feature of Berlioz’s Faust. After the death of the rat, blessed are the fleas, for they shall inherit the royal court. If one dares the comparison, the second part of the opera may be set in parallel with Nietzsche’s madman passage of 1882, in which God, rich in substance (like the overfed rat), has ‘bled to death under our knives’ and is laid out to decompose, for ‘Gods, too, decompose’; now the churches are but sepulchers of God, a place to sing a requiem aeternam Deo. But it is notable that Berlioz, writing more than a generation earlier than Nietzsche, is if anything more acutely sacrilegious. Both, in effect, plunge the glib Voltairean embrace of God’s demise into the ominous pathos of authentic religious dread and remorse. If the mourning is ironic, the dread is not; the death of God has finally reached the human heart, provoking it to ask: Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Dostoevsky’s Russia—as ‘backward’ in the East as Berlioz’s France was an epicenter of zeitgeist in the West—received the impact of modern western atheist ideas in a highly compressed timeframe as an alien import from abroad rather than a force arising within. Dostoevsky visited Europe and became a sensitive bellwether of this moral-spiritual shock, which he expressed in sundry ways in each of his major novels—quintessentially in Ivan’s story of the Grand Inquisitor in Brothers Karamazov (1880), in which Christ returns to visit his flock 27 during the Inquisition but is sent away by his ecclesiastical lieutenant on earth, the Grand Inquisitor, and warned not to meddle again in human affairs or he will suffer a repetition of the fate he met long ago. When he viewed it in Basel, Dostoevsky was so shocked by Hans Holbein the Younger’s painting Dead Christ (1521) that he later incorporated it into his novel The Idiot (1869). The painting asserts an eerily quiet but aggressive power. In an elongated and compressed horizontal space, which appears to be the confines of a sarcophagus, a gaunt male body is depicted in greyish-green tones, frozen in the rigor of violent death. Art historians remark on the singularity of the painting not only within Holbein’s oeuvre but as a peculiarly horrific work of religious art. Although the Christ figure of Grünewald’s Crucifixion (1512) is more gruesome at first glance, with its sickening bodily sores and torturously twisted hands and feet, precisely these exaggerations, along with the massive size and spatial extension of the body, mark it out as a more-than-human sacred figure. No ordinary man’s suffering flesh is depicted in the Grünewald, but the God-man’s suffering flesh. By comparison, the ghastly corpse depicted by Holbein is more disturbing in that it ‘contains hardly any religious thought’ (Reinhardt 21-2). Offering no visible sign of God or spirit, this Christ is simply a lifeless body on a slab, a cold tortured flesh. It has seemingly nothing to do with God, or has to do with God only insofar as all organic nature animated by the ceaseless contest of life against death—with death eventually triumphant—has to do with God. Before us is a particular in which the facticity of death has won, leaving no room for the symbolic. ‘All is done with a horrible realistic power’ producing ‘altogether a most revolting effect’ (Wornum 131-2). And yet, far from being closed up in death, the face lies entirely open and exposed by invasive reverse lighting. The eyes that recently served for seeing are open and 28 turned upward. The mouth rests agape, as if having just uttered a cry. The head, neck, and shoulders retain the tension of upward supplication. It has been speculated that Holbein painted an anatomical study of a cadaver, then at some point converted it into Christ in the tomb by the addition of stigmata and a religious title. If so, an unidentified dead man was re-envisioned by the artist as Christ in the tomb—‘christening’ a corpse. Was this an act of sacrilege? One searches the length of the emaciated body, the extruding navel, the nasty gash in the hand and vacated green-gray face, passively imploring, for an interpretive clue. The painting seems to pose an antinomy or contradiction for which there is no possible resolution. It is the very picture of godlessness, the inconceivability of resurrection, the frankness of death everlasting. Three principal characters in The Idiot, Prince Myshkin, Rogozhin, and later Ippolit, reflect on the painting’s religious meaning as provoked by a copy that hangs over the door of one of Rogozhin’s rooms. Myshkin, who has seen the original while traveling abroad, unable to forget it, recognizes the copy. While Rogozhin and Myshkin hesitate before it, the reproduction induces a dark exchange concerning religious faith. Rogozhin asks Myshkin, ‘Tell me, Prince, I’ve long wanted to ask you, do you believe in God?’ then mutters offhandedly, ‘I like looking at that picture.’ Myshkin exclaims, ‘At that picture! Why, some people may lose their faith by looking at that picture!’ ‘Aye, that also may be lost,’ Rogozhin replies (Dostoevsky 236). The painting’s resonance in the novel extends far beyond explicit mentions of it, as the characters’ collective subconscious is gripped by its abysmal implications. Each finds himself haunted by the painting as an image and an idea. Only much later in the novel does a full exposition of these implications occur in the brooding confession of Ippolit, who has seen the painting hanging in Rogozhin’s place and is consumed with the Christ image as he prepares for his suicide. 29 In Rogozhin’s picture there was no trace of beauty. It was a faithful representation of the dead body of a man who has undergone unbearable torments. . . . Looking at that picture, you get the impression of nature . . . as some huge machine of the latest design, which has senselessly seized, crushed, and swallowed up— impassively and unfeelingly—a great and priceless Being, a Being worth the whole of nature and all its laws, worth the entire earth, which was perhaps created solely for the coming of that Being! . . . And if, on the eve of the crucifixion, the Master could have seen what He would look like when taken from the cross, would He have mounted the cross and died as He did? This question, too, you can’t help asking yourself as you look at the picture. (Ibid.: 418-20, translation amended) Ippolit espies in the painting a depiction of nature as an insensible force that cannot be personified because it is essentially machinelike. Applying Edwin Panofsky’s quip that ‘the man who is run over by an automobile is run over by mathematics, physics and chemistry’ (Panofsky 23), we might infer that what Ippolit sees in Dead Christ is a God who has been run over by mathematics, physics, and chemistry. Precisely as such, the painting is an incomparable icon for Dostoevsky of the God-man as reenvisioned by the apostate modern mind: a God crushed and conquered by the ‘nature’ of modern science in an anonymous dead body—a Christ-mask of absolute suffering behind which there is nothing. The shock value of the painting is that we are already participant in the symbolic reality depicted: a wholly ironic revelation in which graphic 30 realism is the only ‘symbol,’ or rather the naked sign, the positive mark of what is symbolically negated. [A] Emerson and the New World Ralph Waldo Emerson, surveying this intellectual-spiritual history from the New World in the early nineteenth century, confident in new beginnings, lamented that his age is retrospective; it writes histories, biographies, and criticism, thus building the ‘sepulchers of the fathers’: Foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? . . . There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship. (1982: 35) Why should we not enjoy an original relation to the universe, indeed? We are free to turn our faces forward, to seek the new, to pray for revelation and to prophesy new gods; but the past is nonetheless a momentously freighted train, making this easier said than done. The story of God in the twilight of Christendom—which takes the form of the death of God—is a millennial event still unfurling and still charged with unexpected depths of joy and woe. Denizens of the nineteenth century, chastened by three centuries of internecine religious wars, revolutions, and counterrevolutions, occupying a beleaguered post-Enlightenment climate, still harbored steadfast faith in progress at the level of society, a trust in gradual social amelioration through advancing humanism and scientific positivism—the paragon here being 31 Auguste Comte with his ‘religion of humanity’ in which sociology replaces theology as the queen of the sciences. In the latter half of the century, the Darwinian theory of evolution wrought a decisive coup de grâce, setting in place an alternative naturalistic account for the origin of life—including the latecomer Homo sapiens—and positing a vast new geologic time that consigned human presence to a miniscule fraction of Earth’s history. Initially the main impact of Darwin’s theory, however, was to catalyze the transition to a non-Darwinian evolutionism that preserved the old teleological view of things, a pseudo-Darwinism in continuity with Romantic and pre-Romantic Naturphilosophie (Moore 24-6). Once again, the impact of the death of God was mitigated by a far less radical, fall-breaking compromise or stopgap measure. The waves of transformation that were widely anticipated to bring human liberation and deliverance rolled out the battlegrounds, gulags, famines, and death factories of the twentieth century in which an estimated 262 million souls suffered democide worldwide (Rummel 2016; Koning 1987). The slow absorption of the demise of God into broader society—enacted through tumultuous waves of scientific-technological, social-political, economic-legal, spiritualpsychological, moral-religious transformation—has exposed the nerve values of the West and brought forth fierce reactions for and against, creating cognitive dissonance and societal conflicts. The Emersonian-Nietzschean will to innovate, armed with naive optimism, has faced down a Pandora’s box of conservative, nostalgic, and reactionary inclinations: white Christian imperial supremacism, schizophrenic bricolage belief systems, longing for ‘old time religion,’ anti-scientism, new age spiritualism, narrow-minded axiological faith, and moral-religious hypocrisies of all sorts. The unbridled nihilistic worship of quantum money and world-historical military hegemony beyond the reach of any symbolic value system also has its wellspring in the quest to fill this yawning God-void. 32 Considering the overwhelming seriousness of the task, we must admire how deliberately the creative minds of the nineteenth century ‘broke the new wood,’ as Ezra Pound wrote of Walt Whitman’s poetry (in ‘A Pact,’ 1916). They were compelled to daring new experiments in negating, unthinking, and rethinking God. Unthinking God, negating all the way down in order to reconstruct, became not only possible but an intellectual duty. This epochal thinking was boldly carried out primarily by secularizing philosophers in universities rather than theologians beholden to the church (Collins 618–63). Through them a new theological potency was opened up for secularizing theologians of the twentieth century, who built on the breakthroughs of these philosophical forerunners along lines that remain at least partially creative today: Barth the Kierkegaardian, Tillich the Schellingian, Bultmann the Schweitzerian, Altizer the HegelianNietzschean, John B. Cobb the process thinker, to name only a few. Although it was strictly inconceivable for fundamental Christian thinkers of earlier eras—from Athanasius to Augustine to Aquinas—to think in these terms, the nineteenth century deeply grasped that if God is Becoming and Life, then God is equally Negation and Death. 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