When in the 1880s Nietzsche appointed himself coroner to divinity and pronounced God was dead, he was writing reportage, not prophecy.
The idea that God was dead or at least redundant had been bandied about by the likes of Condorcet a hundred years before Nietzsche, and, closer to his time, by Hegel, Marx, Compte and others, whose name is legion.
However, all those undoubtedly clever men were committing a category error. For God can’t die by definition – if he dies, he isn’t God but something else. What exactly?
All those Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thinkers agree: it’s not God who created man, but the other way around. And if man created the myth of God, man is free to kill that myth – it’s his to do what he will with. This, however, raises a question: if God is merely a creature of man’s imagination, then whose creature is man?
When this question is posed, all those undoubtedly clever men prove my observation that even undoubtedly clever men lose their logical faculties when trying to prove God’s non-existence. Even though they all use different words, the underlying paradox is the same: man created himself.
How can they prove that parthenogenesis? Simple. If man didn’t create himself, then those gentlemen’s philosophy is meaningless. But, as true Gnostics, they know for a fact their philosophy is the ultimate truth. Ergo, man created himself.
How many logical fallacies do you detect there? One is obvious: petitio principii (begging the question), assuming the argument’s desired conclusion as its premise.
Thus Marx: “A man who lives by the grace of another considers himself a dependent being. But I live by the grace of another completely if I owe him not only the maintenance of my life but also its creation: if he is the source of my life; and my life necessarily has such a cause outside itself if it is not my own creation.” And that just won’t do.
Also, in the same vein: “Philosophy makes no secret of it. The confession of Prometheus, ‘In a word, I hate all the gods’, is its own confession, its own verdict against all gods heavenly and earthly who do not acknowledge human self-consciousness as the supreme deity.”
Here Marx plays fast and loose with Aeschylus: the Greek considered hatred of all the gods to be a sign of madness. Prometheus is thus co-opted to the cause also championed by Adam, Eve, Cain and the serpent: man’s liberation from the power of tyrannical God.
Nietzsche, being a better writer than Marx, expressed himself more lucidly: “Alas, my brothers, that God whom I created was human work and human madness, like all gods.”
And, “Let will to truth mean this to you: that everything be changed into the humanly conceivable, the humanly visible, the humanly sensible… What you called ‘the world’ shall be created only by you: it shall be your reason, your image, your will, your love.”
Then comes my absolute favourite: “If there were gods, how could I endure not being a god? Therefore, there are no gods.” Man as God is both the premise and the conclusion. A bit circuitous, don’t you think?
Hegel spoke of a dead God long before Nietzsche. To Hegel, the death of God meant the death of a man-made abstraction: “This death is the unhappy consciousness’s painful feeling that God himself has died… science alone is the spirit’s true knowledge of itself.”
The progression is unmistakable. The Reformation declared every man to be his own priest. Then the Enlightenment went a step further by declaring every man to be his own God, consigning the outdated deity to the knacker’s yard. That other God of old, explained Condorcet, was nothing but a despot invented by tyrannical priests and their masters to control the populace and nip human progress in the bud.
Condorcet was quite forthright about that, presaging Hegel’s belief in science as the sole dialectical unfolding of the spirit. All human ills, explained Condorcet, come from insufficient knowledge, a gap that only science can fill. Scientific progress assured, moral, social and cultural progress would follow ineluctably. Well, it hasn’t quite worked out that way, has it?
If Condorcet believed that heaven on earth would arrive if everyone became an intellectual, Hegel thought that advent would occur if everyone became a Gnostic:
“The true form in which truth exists can only be the scientific system of it. To contribute to bringing philosophy closer to the form of science – the goal of being able to cast off the name love of knowledge and become actual knowledge.”
Here Hegel plays with words by translating into German – and distorting – the terms that in the original Greek were philosophia and gnosis. According to Plato, the Oracle of Delphi called Socrates ‘the one who knows’. But Socrates rejected the honour. Only God, he explained, possesses gnosis, what Hegel called ‘actual knowledge’. A mortal man can only aspire to be the philosophus, the lover of knowledge and wisdom. He thereby also becomes the theophilus, the lover of God.
As Hegel stated at the beginning of his Phenomenology, in effect if not in so many words, his task was to replace philosophical inquiry with Gnosticism. We can thus grasp the full depth of Erik Voegelin’s insights (see my article of 5 February). He went Ortega y Gasset one better by showing the Gnostic nature of what Ortega in his eponymous book called The Revolt of the Masses.
Ortega brilliantly showed what kind of cultural, social and intellectual nightmare would be, already had been, produced by that revolt. But he missed its Gnostic, anti-Christian nature, although correctly identifying the ‘masses’ not as the proletariat but as bourgeois intellectuals.
Real masses, that great wad of humanity, are but putty in the hands of the Gnostic intellectual who murders God in order to take his place and rule as the anti-Christian, nihilist Superman: Scientific Superman of Condorcet and his French contemporaries, Positivist Superman of Compte, Proletarian Superman of Marx, Dionysian Superman of Nietzsche, Communist Superman of Lenin, Racial Superman of Hitler, Economic Superman of Ayn Rand.
However, history shows that, having murdered God, man doesn’t become one himself. He doesn’t even become the Superman – he becomes a mass murderer. Gnostics preaching deicide inspire revolutionaries practising homicide.
The much-vaunted Age of Reason was in fact the age of reason debauched. Men inspired by the Gnostic belief in heaven on earth only succeeded in creating hell on earth – it’s not for nothing that the atheist-Gnostic 20th century claimed more victims than probably all the previous centuries of human history combined.
It would be simplistic to explain modernity as strictly a victorious Gnostic rebellion against Christendom. But this interpretation isn’t far from the truth, even though Voegelin himself refrained from making such sweeping statements. He just led his readers to the edge of that argument, leaving them to make the final leap themselves.
P.S. Writing in the early 1950s, Voegelin predicted that one day Russian communism would be replaced with Russian nationalist messianism, which would present an even greater danger to the West. Not many thinkers saw the future with such prophetic clarity.