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God is dead
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== Early usage == Discourses of a "death of God" in [[German culture]] appear as early as the 17th century and originally referred to [[Lutheran]] theories of [[Atonement in Christianity|atonement]]. The phrase "God is dead" appears in the [[hymn]] "Ein Trauriger Grabgesang" ("A mournful dirge") by [[Johann von Rist]].<ref name=":0" /> Before Nietzsche, the phrase '''Dieu est mort!''<nowiki/>' ('God is dead') was written in [[Gérard de Nerval]]'s 1854 poem "[[The Chimeras|Le Christ aux oliviers]]" ("Christ at the olive trees").<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.gerard-de-nerval.net/lechristauxoliva.html|title=Le Christ aux oliviers|website=www.gerard-de-nerval.net|access-date=2019-08-02|archive-date=2021-02-08|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210208191909/http://www.gerard-de-nerval.net/lechristauxoliva.html|url-status=dead}}</ref> 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'.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Richter|first=Jean Paul Friedrich|url=https://www.gutenberg.org/files/36164/36164-h/36164-h.htm#div1Ref_flower1|title=The Dead Christ Proclaims That There Is No God|publisher=George Bell and Sons|year=1897|location=London|translator-last=Ewing|translator-first=Alexander}}</ref> 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.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Steiner|first=George|date=Nov 1987|title=Some Black Holes|url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/3822663|journal=Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences|volume=41,2| issue=2 |pages=17| doi=10.2307/3822663 | jstor=3822663 |url-access=subscription}}</ref> The phrase is also found in a passage expressed by a narrator in [[Victor Hugo]]'s 1862 novel ''[[Les Misérables]]'':<ref>Hugo, Victor. Hapgood, Elizabeth (translator). ''Les Miserables''. Volume V – Book First, The War Between Four Walls – [http://www.online-literature.com/victor_hugo/les_miserables/318/ Chapter 20]. {{ISBN|978-1420953268}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|url=https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Hugo_-_Les_Mis%C3%A9rables_Tome_V_(1890).djvu/119|title=Page:Hugo – Les Misérables Tome V (1890).djvu/119 – Wikisource|website=fr.wikisource.org}}</ref> {{Blockquote|"God is dead, perhaps," said Gerard de Nerval one day to the writer of these lines, confounding progress with God, and taking the interruption of movement for the death of Being.}} [[Buddhist]] philosopher [[K. Satchidananda Murty]] wrote in 1973 that, coming across in a hymn of [[Martin Luther]] what [[Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel|Hegel]] described as "the cruel words", "the harsh utterance", namely, "God is dead", developed the theme of God's death according to whom, to one form of experience, God is dead. Murty continued that commenting on [[Immanuel Kant|Kant]]'s first ''Critique'', [[Heinrich Heine]] who had purportedly influenced Nietzsche spoke of a dying God. Since Heine and Nietzsche the phrase ''Death of God'' became popular.<ref> [[K. Satchidananda Murty]] wrote in ''The Realm of Between'', [[Indian Institute of Advanced Study]], 1973</ref> === German philosophy === ==== Hegel ==== Contemporary historians believe that 19th-century [[German idealism|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 theory|sociological theories]].<ref name=":0">{{Cite book |last=Josephson-Storm |first=Jason |url= |title=[[The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences]] |date=2017 |publisher=University of Chicago Press |isbn=978-0-226-40336-6 |location=Chicago |pages=67–9}}</ref> 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".<ref>{{cite journal |first1=Eric |last1=von der Luft |title=Sources of Nietzsche's "God is Dead!" and its Meaning for Heidegger |journal=Journal of the History of Ideas |date=Apr–Jun 1984 |issue=2 |pages=263–276}} See page 265.</ref> Later on Hegel writes about the great pain of knowing that God is dead: {{quote|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 [[Blaise Pascal|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."<ref>{{cite book |last1=Hegel |first1=Georg Wilhelm Friedrich |title=Philosophische Abhandlungen |date=1845 |page=153 }}</ref>}} 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]].<ref name=":02">{{Cite book |last=Josephson-Storm |first=Jason |url= |title=[[The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences]] |date=2017 |publisher=University of Chicago Press |isbn=978-0-226-40336-6 |location=Chicago |pages=75–6}}</ref> ==== Stirner ==== German philosopher [[Max Stirner]], [[Relationship between Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Stirner|whose influence on Nietzsche is debated]], writes in his 1844 book ''[[The Ego and its Own]]'' that "the work of the [[Age of Enlightenment|Enlightenment]], the vanquishing of God: they did not notice that man has killed God in order to become now – 'sole God on high{{' "}}.<ref>"At the entrance of 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 did not think of this question, and thought they were finished 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 outside us is indeed brushed away, and the great undertaking of the men of the Enlightenment completed; but the other world in 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. How can you believe that the God-man is dead before the man in him, besides the God, is dead?" [https://archive.org/stream/StirnerTheEgoAndItsOwn/Stirner%20-%20The%20Ego%20and%20Its%20Own_djvu.txt Max Stirner: The Ego and its Own – Introduction of part II]</ref> ==== Mainländer ==== Before Nietzsche, the concept was popularized in philosophy by the German philosopher [[Philipp Mainländer]].<ref>{{Cite book|title=Weltschmerz, Pessimism in German Philosophy, 1860–1900.|last=Beiser|first=Frederick C.|publisher=Oxford University Press|year=2008|isbn=978-0198768715|location=Oxford|pages=202|quote=Batz introduces a very modern and redolent theme: the death of God. He popularized the theme before Nietzsche.}}</ref> It was while reading Mainländer that Nietzsche explicitly writes to have parted ways with [[Schopenhauer]].<ref>{{Cite book|title=Nietzsche's Philosophical Context: An Intellectual Biography|last=Brobjer|first=Thomas H.|publisher=University Of Illinois Press|year=2008|isbn=9780252032455|pages=149|quote=Decher emphasizes the importance of the fact that Mainländer reinterpreted Schopenhauer's metaphysical and single will to a multiplicity of wills (always in struggle) and the importance of this for Nietzsche's will to power. It was in a letter to Cosima Wagner, December 19, 1876, that is, while reading Mainländer, that Nietzsche for the first time explicitly claimed to have parted ways with Schopenhauer.}}</ref> 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.<ref>{{Cite book|title=Philosophie der Erlösung. Zweiter Band. Zwölf philosophische Essays.|last=Mainländer|first=Philipp|year=1886|pages=533, 534|quote=Was überhaupt zu einer solchen Einheit führt, ist der nicht abzuleugnende dynamische Zusammenhang der Dinge und ihre einheitliche Bewegung.}}</ref> 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. {{Quote|Now we have the right to give this being the well-known name that always designates what no power of imagination, no flight of the boldest fantasy, no intently devout heart, no abstract thinking however profound, no enraptured and transported spirit has ever attained: ''God''. But this basic unity ''is of the past''; it no longer ''is''. It has, by changing its being, totally and completely shattered itself. ''God has died and his death was the life of the world.''{{efn|{{lang|de|Jetzt haben wir auch das Recht, diesem Wesen den bekannten Namen zu geben, der von jeher Das bezeichnete, was keine Vorstellungskraft, kein Flug der kühnsten Phantasie, kein abstraktes noch so tiefes Denken, kein gesammeltes, andachtsvolles Gemüth, kein entzückter, erdentrückter Geist je erreicht hat: '''Gott'''. Sie hat sich, ihr Wesen verändernd, voll und ganz zu einer Welt der Vielheit zersplittert. Aber diese einfache Einheit '''ist gewesen'''; sie '''ist''' nicht mehr. Gott ist gestorben und sein Tod war das Leben der Welt.}}<ref>Philipp Mainländer: ''Die Philosophie der Erlösung. Erster Band.'' Berlin 1876.</ref>|group=note}}|Mainländer, ''Die Philosophie der Erlösung''}}
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