Edit: The Death of God is a philosophical construct that stands for secularism. One can be a theist and still believe in the death of God (I’m one of those) because, well, secularism is the air we breathe, and as this series will argue, it’s hard to deny what’s in front of us.
The Death of God: Introduction
In the 19th century, Fredrick Nietzsche lamented the death of God.
Do we not hear the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we not smell the divine putrefaction? —for even Gods putrefy! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murderers?
Most Christians find this passage from Nietzsche deplorable, and indeed unbearable. That’s okay. Nietzsche found the death of God intolerable, too. But what Nietzsche did understand — and what many Christians deny — is that just because the death of God is disastrous to meaning, transcendence, and stability does not mean that God isn’t dead. In this series, which will be 2-3 parts, I will defend Nietzsche, and argue that God is dead (and likewise, I will maintain with Nietzsche that we are the ones who killed him). I will further argue that Christian attempts to revive God have actually reinforced the death of God.
My argument is as follows. (1) In the premodern world, the law was external to us, deriving from the gods, who gave us transcendence, meaning, and order. (2) In the modern times, all meaning and transcendence shifted to the individual, who now makes the laws and rules of society. As a result, God died on a societal level. (3) Because Christians have attempted to revive God on a purely individualistic level (e.g. “God is alive in my heart”), there is nothing they can do to reverse the death of God – that by individualizing the personal side of God as a specific response to the death of God, God remains dead on a societal level. I think that any viable “solution” to the death of God — if there is a solution — is convoluted because it would require reigniting aspects of premodernism again; my series will discuss this too.
In this post, I discuss premodernism, as I think it’s really important to understand premodernism in order to understand why God died.
When was the Premodern period?
The premodern world represents the periods that came before the Renaissance. I say the Renaissance purposefully, because the Renaissance saw man beginning to disrupt the order to set by the gods (see Michael Angelo’s paintings, for example). However, by no means is there consensus on when the premodern period ended. Certainly, much, perhaps most, premodern ideas persisted until the birth of the Enlightenment in the 15th and 16th centuries. In other words, the premodern world ended slowly, not over night.
What is the definition of premodern?
While there is no “official” definition of premodernism, I think the French philosopher Gauchet describes it best, when he argues that premodernism can be characterized by the “underlying belief . . . that we owe everything we have, our way of living, our rules, our costumes, and what we know, to beings of a different nature — to Ancestors, Heroes, or Gods.” (Metamorphoses of the Divine, pg. 27)
In other words, Gauchet argues, and I think correctly, that premodernism is fueled by the belief that everything governing us was handed down to us by the gods.
In premodernism, we are members of plays in which we were thrown into roles that were already caste for us. These divine entities that the premodern thinkers postulated as the original author of the divine cosmos are largely characterized as both good and just. Because of the perfection and greatness of the gods and the cosmos, we are demanded to live in harmony with nature and the world.
Several huge implications can be derived from this basic belief.
First, the implications of the gods suggest that the world is created by an outside force. The world, according to this pervading worldview, is not, is not, created by us, which means that laws aren’t created by us. This is a marked contrast to the modern world that says that we write our stories; we write the laws of the lands; and we will our own happiness.
Secondly, the implications of the gods suggest that we owe everything to that which is outside us, that which isn’t even human or part of the natural world. We are indebted to the gods. We see this, for example, in Christianity that maintains that we are indebted to Christ, who died to for our sins.
Thirdly, the implications of the gods suggest that everything is ordered and destined. Aristotle, for example, argues that almost all properties require a substantial form or a soul to explain their unity and order — unity and order are supposed. The book of Genesis in the Bible maintains that God just spoke, that the earth is good, and orderly. The point is that everything is ordered and structured by the gods.
Fourthly, the implications of the gods suggest that even our lives and roles are predetermined. For centuries, people operated under the “great chain of being,” which argues that there are gods, followed by heavenly creatures, followed by leaders, followed by men, followed by women and children, then animals who walk on four feet, and finally animals who crawl. No one questions this hierarchy because our roles are predetermined.
Fifthly, the implications of the gods suggest that our society is imposed from the outside. Community is given to us by the outside. Society does not derive from the human hand; society is not that which we control.
Sixth, the implications of the gods suggest that we participate in the goodness of the universe. We are participators in this good universe. Life is celebrated because everything is a gift from the universe. Every life is part of that gift, even down to a man’s seed. Thus, to question “why God” is to do the unthinkable. Authoritative and wise people, then, are people who have tapped into this good universe and captured something of this goodness for us. For this reason, oral traditions and texts that reflect the goodness of the universe are passed down for generations, memorized, recited, and cherished.
Seventh, Gauchet argues that premodernism left us turned towards a past in which we owe everything, even when we cannot articulate what that past is. In other words, if we are an being indepted to the gods, we owe ourselves to a past. And thus, Gauchet argues that premodernism does not have a present; premoderns just live in the past, worshiping and celebrating gods who we have never seen or touched. So for example, Christians proclaim, “Take eat, this is my body, do this in remembrance of me.” We celebrate the past in its enigma. We live in the past.
And that, my reader, is premodernism in a snippet. Premodernism is living in the shadow of the past, the shadow of the gods, celebrating the order that came before us, participating in the order of the universe, and living in spaces that were designated for each one of us specifically. In this worldview, the world is laden and enchanted with meaning and transcendence, although it is also rigid and confining in other ways.
All was well, until the death of God and birth of modernism. I’ll write my next post next week.
I’ll leave you this with this beautiful hymn that captures a bit of the premodern world for us.
