Thursday, April 14, 2022

But God Still Lives

Here is a discussion at the View From the Right on April 20, 2011 on Nietzsche, and his killing off of God, which I also posted at my Camera Lucida blog.
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Prophet, 1912


 There is a timely discussion going on at the View From the Right (VFR). The topic on Rand and conservatism weaves through race, Athena and Zeus, Christianity, American Protestantism, the nature of individuality, heroes, the objective good, God, and ends with this comment by Lawrence Auster quoting Nietzsche's madman from The Gay Science:

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him--you and I. All of us are his murderers....

"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?... Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?"
 
Nietzsche's ambiguous, ambivalent relationship with the God he perceives as greater than anything he can conceive of, yet deigns to have him killed to supplant him, is surely part of our Easter story.

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Here is the entry at VFR:

In the entry on “Rand and conservatism,” I pointed out how Ayn Rand’s hero John Galt not only denies God but becomes himself a god; certainly he is treated as a god by the other characters and by the author. Then, in order to back up the idea that the murderers of God become gods themselves, I quoted Nietzsche:

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers….

“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? … Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”

At her Camera Lucida blog, Kidist Paulos Asrat quotes that passage and adds:

Nietzsche’s ambiguous, ambivalent relationship with the God he perceives as greater than anything he can conceive of, yet deigns to have him killed to supplant him, is surely part of our Easter story.

I like that. Just as Jesus was crucified, dead, and buried, then rose into eternal life, the nihilistic modern world has (in its distorted imagination) killed and buried God. But God still lives.