Surely God died in more ways than one in our western culture. It would make a far too extensive obituary for me to consider all kinds of ‘ars moriendi’ here in the case of the Supreme Being. So I will focus this text on the ‘suicidal’ aspect that Christianity carries in its womb like a poisonous apple waiting to be bitten and that ultimately seamed to let the bell toll for the Christian God: negation, the negative.[1] I know that this text doesn’t give a full and complete account, maybe not even on my chosen perspective. But then again all texts are fundamentally incomplete.
What does this dying of God look like? It is in any case not a sudden, violent death. It appears in stages from this account (though it still remains but one possible account). First I will consider the spiritual turning away from the outer experience towards the inner experience in Christian thinking during the Middle Ages. Then I will focus more extensively on the turning point of the late Middle Ages where negative theology through nominalism and the popularity of mysticism, combined with the Black Death set the tone for the crisis of spiritual experience and religion in the later modern period (in Dutch: Moderne Tijden/Nieuwe Tijden). Next stop is a focus on this modern period and the working of the negative/negation from Protestantism to the Enlightenment and French Revolution. Finally this text wil consider the death of God. Nietzsche gave western man various perspectives on the death of God (like this text he claims that there is no one way of putting it…). I will contrast two perspectives on the death of God : Friedrich Nietzsche (who has by himself more than one view) and Georges Bataille (who criticizes the Nietzschean perspective ).
1) The problem of ‘emptiness’: avoiding the void
In his book on evil R. Safranski points to the crucial role that disobedience and transgression play in the face of divine prohibition (story of Adam and Eve). The liberty of man begins with saying ‘no’. Like the ‘no’ of Caesar in the ‘Rise of the Planet of the Apes’ means the beginning of the liberation of apes. And there is even more to it than that, he suggests. For man to comprehend the command to not eat from the tree of knowledge of good and bad, he needs to already have knowledge of the difference between good and bad in advance. So if the God of Christianity wanted man to be free, he gave him the power of negation in advance to obtain freedom through acts of negation, transgression (i.e. negation of the command, prohibition or rule). Freedom has the appearance of a synthetic outcome of a Hegelian dialectic between the prohibition/rule (thesis) and its negation (antithesis) or transgression. This because both concepts (prohibition and transgression) are inherent in the notion of freedom and it fully depends on both notions.
But if the Christian God has given man the power to be free, the following spectacle makes clear that this is according to Christianity itself a poisonous apple. The aspect of negation in its transgression of prohibitions lays bare an emptiness, a void. That wich Sartre would call a ‘néant’. Man can bring a ‘nothing’ into this world by saying ‘no’, by using the power of negation given to him. Apparently it scares the living daylights out of God for he throws Adam and Eve out of paradise. This learns that according to Christianity this gift of negation is no longer a blessing. Its gift is the fact that from now on man will be constantly chasing himself from paradises (ones given to him as well as created by him). No rest…perpetual homelessness. This aspect of man (negation, transgression) is forever the accursed share. ‘La part maudite’ as Georges Bataille put it. And from the beginning woman is blamed for opening up this void, this emptiness of negation in man. She is linked to transgression and exces . Setting her on a long journey through Christian thought of evil.
When we look closely at the religious practice and spiritual experience of the early Middle Ages we see a similar pattern. In the 4th and 5th century the phenomenon of hermits took flight. In the Egyptian desert they took shelter in caves to withdraw themselves from ordinary life. To live life without minding the useful, without the burden of everyday necessities and trivialities. Just contemplating their faith. This way ‘out of the world’ was considered too dangerous by one of those hermits: Benedictus (or is it Benedict?) of Nursia. He considered the dangers of shallowness of emptiness in ‘not doing anything’. So he wrote down rules for monks (hermits that lived together in ‘claustri’ as remote places) in cloisters. These rules are typical for the spiritual experience of the early Middle Ages. Faith and spiritual experience are things that need to be trained by outward experience (labour, reciting prayers,…). And the meaning of the act lies in the fulfilling of the act. Saying the prayer or doing the act is the worship. It is enough. When man is busy his thoughts can’t linger off into idleness. This trains the outward posture of the religious believer (‘habitus’). Soon the whole of Europe was covered with monasteries applying this rule of Benedictus.
2) Religious experience in the Middle Ages: from inward experience to resurfacing of the void
A) Inner religious experience
Around the 11th century this outward orientated spiritual practice changed. The accent shifted from the outward practice to the inner ‘habitus’, the inner state of the soul. This shift is especially clear in the writings of Bernardus of Clairvaux. It was from now on not enough for the believer to perform the ritual. His thought had to find union with God, with his tender mercy and love. This gave rise to all sorts of mystical practices and writings in the later Middle Ages. Whereby the poignant hard times of the 14th and 15th century made people want to look for God on the inside, in their heart, and search unity with God in a sort of ecstatic state. This means that from the 11th century on spiritual practice took on a much more emotional, inward form compared to the first part of the Middle Ages.
This evolution coincided with the plague of the Black Death in Europe. This was not only a social crisis, but also a religious and spiritual one. How could God be good and all powerful and the principle of creation if he unleashed this disease on all humanity? The result was a rethinking of God. This new position of God was exemplified in nominalism.
B) Nominalism: the resurfacing of the negative
Nominalism revitalized the negative or negation by adjusting the position of God through negative theology. And here the negative arose once again from Christianity to let Christianity bite its own poisonous apple. For God, according to nominalism, was the Supreme Being. And it was for man impossible to know this Being its will. Unknowable, ungraspable, unpredictable….the only possible statements on God were the negative ones. So for the believer all that remained was a question of putting your faith and confidence in an unreachable God that remained quite a mystery for imperfect mankind. This ‘negation’ in theology put God on great distance of mankind. He was literally in absolute transcendence of mankind. This made the inward turn of the spiritual experience all the more pressing. Since God was a mystery and nature didn’t give a direct intelligible account of his presence and work, the best that people could do was to focus on the inner life and cultivate a posture that modeled itself on Christ (hence the popularity of Thomas a Kempis’ ‘Imitatio Christi’ in the late Middle Ages). People sought inner unity with God, sometimes through ecstatic mysticism that tried to elevate the soul to spiritual unity with God. God was becoming quite distant, certainly compared to the view before the Black Death that looked at creation as the trace of God in which he was very near to man. Since Gods plan with man became an increasingly complicated puzzle after the crisis of the Black Death, man started to turn towards the here and now. Emphasizing the need to ‘make the best of it’ in the here and now. This lay the foundation for the Renaissance and for utopian modern thought. The idea took form that man had to just bite the apple and shape for himself the paradise on earth from which he was chased by God for his disobedience, his capacity to open up the negative by saying ‘no’ to the law.
3) The birth of the Modern Age: individualism and science as burials of the negative, of the void
Martin Luther was absolutely terrified by the posture of a strict, judging God that was omnipresent in his days. One of the most widely spread themes of painting in the late Middle Ages was the Final Judgment. This, combined with travelling preachers of penitence that passed from town to town created a climate wherein anxiety for the soul could flourish. Martin Luther turned inward to find a personal relation with God. A God that he conceived in terms of late medieval nominalism. Each individual believer needs only to believe to be redeemed (Pauls letter to the Romans) in a God that is beyond comprehension of man. God is in this way a mystery to the mind of man. So the view of the distant God was now increasingly becoming combined with upcoming modern individualism.
This individualism, combined with the growing attention for the improvability of the ‘here and now’ (since Gods creationplan looked quite a mystery or puzzle) fueled the aspirations and ascent of the sciences. Creating a scientific revolution in the 17th century (Galilei, Newton). Thus bringing the utopian thought to greater hights. ‘Paradise now’ seemed attainable, especially in the ‘New World’ of the Americas where man could start from scratch to fill the ‘empty’ space with thoughts of paradisiacal civilization. When we look at these utopian constructions they betray the same anxiety of the emptiness that man can open up. Labour, calculation, use, possession,….all elements central to utopian construction, took on the secular form of avoiding the void. They are mans attempts for a negation of the negative, inspired by Christian thoughts on the dangers of idleness.
4) The retirement of the old God of Christianity
But just when things were going so well scientifically for man, the thought crept in that this far away and unknowable God whose work in the creation can’t clearly be grasped or understood wasn’t really needed any more. Deism stated that God was the Supreme Being and Creator, but has now retired from work. Leaving his creation for man to handle. This was a new transformation of the negative inherent in Christianity. The apple had fallen from the Godtree and had rolled pretty far from its root. From this position on it was a small step to take to abolish God from the universe completely. To wipe the slate clean with a sponge entirely. No more focal point for man. From then on atheism surfaced as Christianity’s ultimate negation. But it is an atheism that could only surface over time by the evolution of the negative principle that was inherent in Christianity’s conception of creation and man from the beginning and so in Christianity as a whole.
Though the first atheïst thoughts began to emerge during the 18th century, it was only during the 19th century that atheïsm started to obtain more succes in society. During the French Revolution another interesting phenomenon occured. When dismissing with religion and the traditional God of Christianity, Maximilian Robespierre tried to fill in the gap, the void with a replacement. There was the creation of 'la Déesse Raison' (the goddess of Reason) to which a grand ceremony was held in Paris. All this to close the empty space that God had left, once abolished. Western culture again confirmed its 'horror vacui' (anxiety or horror for the empty space).
Only at the end of the 19th century Friedrich Nietzsche staged the 'death of God' in various settings/perspectives. Christianity's own negative force/principle seemed to turn against itself in a decisive manner.
5) The Death of God: Friedrich Nietzsche versus Georges Bataille
Nietzsche staged various scènes of the death of God and his dying in western culture. It would take this text to far to discuss them all. But in general he considered the death of God as the beginning of nihilism in Christianity. The death of God left a vacuum in Christianity. The place of God was now empty. The 'higher people' (phrase used in 'Thus spoke Zarathustra') morn the loss of God. They still cling to the remnants of their religion. They search for the shadows of God in the caves. This is for Nietzsche not the way to overcome nihilism. For Nietzsche nihilism must be overcome by the 'Übermensch'. This is the type of man that is capable of saying 'yes' to his destiny. He lives by 'amor fati' (love of destiny) and takes the world as it is, as his playground for the spectacle of life. To Bataille Nietzsche filled the void that the death of God opened up with the 'Übermensch' as a kind of ideal. Georges Bataille stated that he wrote his texts partially to keep open the void that the death of God left behind in western culture. The death of God for Nietzsche and Bataille refers to the death of the old God. But is also means an attempt to regain the sacred from reason. So the death of God is in a sense also a sacrifice of reason. It is the last sacred cruelty that man inflicts on himself: sacrifizing himself as God to the emptiness and nothingness. To Georges Bataille with the death of God man enters not a humanist universe, but an empty space. An empty space in which he can no longer find or trust in God. But he can no longer find or trust in man neither. Like the mystic, man is in a 'dark night of the soul'. Bataille noticed in this void or emptiness that was opened up by the death of God a new, modern form of the sacred. But Bataille goes even further. It is not we that killed of God. God exists in the form of a sacrifice, an unconditional gift of himself. He is 'nothing'. He says 'nothing'. He is absent. Because in this sense God is nothing more than emptiness as a borderexperience, God is lowered down and becomes human. God and man share the lowness, a state of being scandalized, of loss of self. This is the true communication of the sacred according to Bataille. A revealing and rethinking of the force of the negation and negative from the root of Christianity and the Christian God itself.
[1] I draw inspiration from the readings on the subject of ‘evil’ with a readinggroup of pupils in high school, my own readings on the evolution of Christian thought, my readings of the work of Georges Bataille (who also devotes attention to mysticism and John of the Cross and is, to me, the most radical thinker of emptiness and void) and Friedrich Nietzsche, from the reading of Derrida in a phd-readinggroup.
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