God Is Dead - Nietzsche
Graffiti on a subway wall somewhere:
‘God is dead!’ Nietzsche
Someone scrawled underneath:
‘Nietzsche is dead!’ God
‘God is not dead, but alive and well
and working on a much less ambitious project.’
‘God is not dead and neither is Nietzsche.
Both are spirits and enjoying a full and healthy life,
always have done and forever will do.’
Aquarius
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, 15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900, was a German philologist, philosopher, cultural critic, poet and composer. He wrote several critical texts on religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy and science, displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony and aphorism. Trying to find the real Friedrich Nietzsche behind what little I knew of him, took me on a journey of discovery with many surprises. On closer inspection I found to my astonishment that he was by no means an atheist but a devout Christian.
For a very long time I had been intrigued by Nietzsche’s words and frequently wondered what he may originally have said and in what context the words ‘God is dead’ had appeared. To satisfy my curiosity, I bought three of his books:
• ‘Twilight of the Idols with The Antichrist and Ecce Homo’ (Wordsworth Classics of World Literature)
• ‘Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future’
• ‘Jenseits Von Gut Und Böse – Zur Genealogie der Moral’
I could have saved myself the trouble. The books were not really worth having and many of his quotes, including the one I was looking for, are freely available on the internet. Here it is: ‘God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become Gods simply to appear worthy of it?’ From ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’ first published 1883-1885
The above quote reveals that Nietzsche, being a devout Christian, unhappily carried the burden of a collective guilt complex. What else could one expect from someone of his background? His father as well as his grandfather had been pastors in the Protestant church. His father died early at the age of thirty-six, deeply loved and missed very much by his son. He hated his mother and sister. More about this in his view on women.
Nietzsche’s writings came across to me as unenlightened, earth-bound, wildly outdated and downright boring. What I had hoped to find was some kind of a statement that, in Nietzsche’s view, the old perception of the meaning of God was dead because the time had come for finding a new understanding of who and what God truly is. But then I became aware that during Nietzsche’s lifetime from the year 1844 to 1900 it would have been far too early to introduce the idea that the story of the life of the Master Jesus is just that, a story and a myth, a legend and no more.
I don’t think the time I did spend on the three books was wasted. It was not a great deal I have to admit, as there didn’t seem to be much point in immersing myself into what Nietzsche had to say. The one thing his writings showed me is the quantum leap in our spiritual evolution we and our world have made since his departure from the Earth plane. My inner teacher reminded me that the ones I had attempted to read had been written almost 120 years ago. At that stage it would have been far too early to disclose the whole of the life story of the Master Jesus is an allegory of the many initiations every human soul eventually has to undergo on its individual evolutionary pathway.
True to the principle that in the realm of the blind the one-eyed is king, Nietzsche was considered to be one of the foremost thinkers of his time. His statement about God reveals what a long way we have in our understanding of the meaning of God in comparatively short time. How much progress our world has made on its spiritual pathway! And yet, the latest developments in Turkey at the time of writing this in June 2016, an attempted coup d’état shows with what vigour the remainders of the patriarchy are resisting any kind of change in the stranglehold of masculine supremacy. I am convinced that, no matter how hard they try, in the long run these forces cannot win because it is part of God’s plan that they should go.
Let Angela Merkel, German chancellor for the past eleven years, have the last word about freedom in this part of my jottings. Having spent the first thirty-five years of her life in East Germany, she has first hand experience of what an oppressive government can do to human spirits and souls. She knows the power of humankind’s yearning for freedom and that’s why she has made it the leitmotiv of her political world view. In a meeting with President Obama and the Americans people several years ago she said: ‘History has often shown how strong the longing for freedom can be. It has inspired people to overcome their fears and oppose dictatorships. In the end, there is no chain of dictatorship, no fetter of oppression that can withstand the strength of freedom. That is my firm belief, and it will continue to guide me.’
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This article is a chapter from ‘War And Peace Between Nations.
If it has whetted your appetite to read more, please follow the link below:
‘War And Peace Between Nations’
