God is dead
"God is dead" (German: ; also known as the death of God) is a widely quoted statement made by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche used the phrase to express his idea that the Enlightenment had eliminated the possibility of the existence of God. However, proponents of the strongest form of the Death of God theology have used the phrase in a literal sense, meaning that the Christian God, who had existed at one point, has ceased to exist. Nietzsche's complete statement is: The phrase first appeared in Nietzsche's 1882 collection "The Gay Science" (, also translated  as "The Joyful Pursuit of Knowledge and Understanding"). However, it is most famously associated with Nietzsche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" (), which is most responsible for making the phrase popular. Other philosophers had previously discussed the concept, including Philipp Mainländer and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Early usage. Before Nietzsche, the phrase 'Dieu est mort!' can be found in Gérard de Nerval's 1854 Poem "Le Christ aux oliviers" ("Christ at the olive trees"). The poem is an adaptation into a verse of a dream-vision that appears in Jean Paul's 1797 novel Siebenkäs under the chapter title of 'The Dead  Christ Proclaims That There Is No God'. In an address he gave in 1987 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the literary scholar George Steiner claims that Nietzsche's formulation 'God is dead' is indebted to the aforementioned 'Dead Christ' dream-vision of Jean Paul, but he offers no concrete evidence that Nietzsche ever read Jean Paul. The phrase is also found in a passage expressed by a narrator in Victor Hugo's 1862 novel "Les Misérables": German philosophy. Hegel. Discourses of a "death of God" in German culture appear as early as the 17th century and originally  referred to Lutheran theories of atonement. The phrase "God is dead" appears in the hymn "Ein Trauriger Grabgesang" ("A mournful dirge") by Johann von Rist. Contemporary historians believe that 19th-century German idealist philosophers, especially those associated with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, are responsible for removing the specifically Christian resonance of the phrase relating to the death of Jesus Christ and associating it with secular philosophical and sociological theories. Although the statement and its meaning are attributed to Nietzsche, Hegel had discussed the concept of the death of God in his "Phenomenology of Spirit", where he considers the death of  God to "Not be seen as anything but an easily recognized part of the usual Christian cycle of redemption". Later on Hegel writes about the great pain of knowing that God is dead "The pure concept, however, or infinity, as the abyss of nothingness in which all being sinks, must characterize the infinite pain, which previously was only in culture historically and as the feeling on which rests modern religion, the feeling that God Himself is dead, (the feeling which was uttered by Pascal, though only empirically, in his saying: Nature is such that it marks everywhere, both in and  outside of man, a lost God), purely as a phase, but also as no more than just a phase, of the highest idea." Hegel's student Richard Rothe, in his 1837 theological text "Die Anfänge der christlichen Kirche und ihrer Verfassung", appears to be one of the first philosophers to associate the idea of a death of God with the sociological theory of secularization. German philosopher Max Stirner writes in 1844 about the death of God and about the killing of God by humans during the Enlightenment in his book "The Ego and its Own". In philosophic literature there is  a discussion of the possible influence of Max Stirner on Nietzsche. Mainländer. Before Nietzsche, the concept was popularized in philosophy by the German philosopher Philipp Mainländer. It was while reading Mainländer that Nietzsche explicitly writes to have parted ways with Schopenhauer. In Mainländer's more than 200 pages long criticism of Schopenhauer's metaphysics, he argues against one cosmic unity behind the world, and champions a real multiplicity of wills struggling with each other for existence. Yet, the interconnection and the unitary movement of the world, which are the reasons that lead philosophers to pantheism, are undeniable. They do indeed  lead to a unity, but this may not be at the expense of a unity "in" the world that undermines the empirical reality of the world. It is therefore declared to be dead. Nietzsche. Nietzsche used the phrase to sum up the effect and consequence that the Age of Enlightenment had had on the centrality of the concept of God within Western European civilization, which had been essentially Christian in character since the later Roman Empire. The Enlightenment had brought about the triumph of scientific rationality over sacred revelation; the rise of philosophical materialism and Naturalism that to all intents  and purposes had dispensed with the belief in or role of God in human affairs and the destiny of the world. The idea is stated in "The Madman" as follows: But the best-known passage is at the end of part 2 of "Zarathustra's Prolog", where after beginning his allegorical journey Zarathustra encounters an aged ascetic who expresses misanthropy and love of God: Nietzsche recognized the crisis that this "Death of God" represented for existing moral assumptions in Europe as they existed within the context of traditional Christian belief. "When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the  right to Christian morality out from under one's feet. This morality is by no means self-evident ... By breaking one main concept out of Christianity, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one's hands." This is why in "The Madman", a passage which primarily addresses nontheists (especially atheists), the problem is to retain any system of values in the absence of a divine order. The Enlightenment's conclusion of the "Death of God" gave rise to the proposition that humans – and Western Civilization as a whole – could no longer believe in a divinely  ordained moral order. This death of God will lead, Nietzsche said, not only to the rejection of a belief of cosmic or physical order but also to a rejection of absolute values themselves – to the rejection of belief in an objective and universal moral law, binding upon all individuals. In this manner, the loss of an absolute basis for morality leads to nihilism. This nihilism is that for which Nietzsche worked to find a solution by re-evaluating the foundations of human values. Nietzsche believed that the majority of people did not recognize this death out of the deepest-seated  fear or angst. Therefore, when the death did begin to become widely acknowledged, people would despair and nihilism would become rampant. Although Nietzsche puts the statement "God is dead" into the mouth of a "madman" in "The Gay Science", he also uses the phrase in his own voice in sections 108 and 343 of the same book. In the madman passage, the man is described as running through a marketplace shouting, "I seek God! I seek God!" He arouses some amusement; no one takes him seriously. Maybe he took an ocean voyage? Lost his way like a little child? Maybe  he's afraid of us (non-believers) and is hiding? – much laughter. Frustrated, the madman smashes his lantern on the ground, crying out that "God is dead, and we have killed him, you and I!" "But I have come too soon," he immediately realizes, as his detractors of a minute before stare in astonishment: people cannot yet see that they have killed God. He goes on to say: Earlier in the book (section 108), Nietzsche wrote: "God is dead, but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will  be shown. And we – we still have to vanquish his shadow, too." The protagonist in "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" also speaks the words, commenting to himself after visiting a hermit who, every day, sings songs and lives to glorify his god as noted above. What is more, Zarathustra later not only refers to the death of God but states: "Dead are all the Gods." It is not just one morality that has died, but all of them, to be replaced by the life of the , the super man: Nietzsche believed there could be positive new possibilities for humans without God. Relinquishing  the belief in God opens the way for human creative abilities to fully develop. The Christian God, he wrote, would no longer stand in the way, so human beings might stop turning their eyes toward a supernatural realm and begin to acknowledge the value of this world. Nietzsche uses the metaphor of an open sea, which can be both exhilarating and terrifying. The people who eventually learn to create their lives anew will represent a new stage in human existence, the – i.e., the personal archetype who, through the conquest of their own nihilism, themselves become a sort of mythical hero . The "death of God" is the motivation for Nietzsche's last (uncompleted) philosophical project, the "revaluation of all values". Martin Heidegger understood this aspect of Nietzsche's philosophy by looking at it as the death of metaphysics. In his view, Nietzsche's words can only be understood as referring not to a particular theological or anthropological view but rather to the end of philosophy itself. Philosophy has, in Heidegger's words, reached its maximum potential as metaphysics and Nietzsche's words warn of its demise and the end of any metaphysical worldview. If metaphysics is dead, Heidegger warns, that is  because from its inception that was its fate. Death of God theology. Although theologians since Nietzsche had occasionally used the phrase "God is dead" to reflect increasing unbelief in God, the concept rose to prominence in the late 1950s and 1960s, subsiding in the early 1970s. The German-born theologian Paul Tillich, for instance, was influenced by the writings of Nietzsche, especially his phrase "God is dead." The October 22, 1965, issue of "Time" magazine contained an article in the "Religion" section, entitled "Theology: The God Is Dead Movement", that addressed a movement among American theologians who openly embraced the  notion of the death of God. Then six months later the controversial Easter issue of "Time" appeared on April 8, 1966, shocking the public with the provocative question—in huge red type against a black background—"Is God Dead?" The main proponents of this theology in the mid-to-late 1960s included Christian theologians John Robinson, Thomas J. J. Altizer, William Hamilton, Gabriel Vahanian, Paul van Buren, and the Jewish theologian and rabbi Richard L. Rubenstein. William Hamilton wrote the following about American radical theologian Thomas J. J. Altizer's redeployment of Nietzsche's view: