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GOD IS DEAD

 RELIGION


This legendary statement, which heralds the arrival of the secular age in Western history, appears in Friedrich Nietzsche’s book of 1882, The Gay Science. It can sound triumphant, but Nietzsche didn’t mean it that way. He felt that the death of God was going to be very difficult for humanity. He feared that we would too quickly reject a great many good things that religion had, at its best, promoted. He predicted a loss of emphasis on community, charity and compassion, a decline in a sense of awe and a new faith in two of what were in his eyes unreliable sources of meaning: romantic love and professional success. Nietzsche’s hope wasn’t to get rid of religion altogether; it was to replace it with a better sort of religion, one based on art, music and philosophy, a creed whose heroes would be the Stoic philosophers, Montaigne, Goethe and Wagner. God might have died, but we would – said Nietzsche – only create a good godless word if we kept in mind why we had invented him in the first place and appreciated how many of


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