Stefan Bolea,
Babes-Bolyai University
ACADEMIA
Letters
1. Deaths of God
In The Essence of Christianity (1841), Feuerbach argues that theology is disguised anthropology, claiming that the human being has created God in his own image and likeness. He notes, however, that there are circumstances where the existence of God is no longer “a living truth” (Feuerbach 1841/ 1989, 203): “Where … the fire of the religious imagination is extinct …there the existence [of God] becomes a dead, self-contradictory existence” (Feuerbach 1841/ 1989, 203).
Secularization brings along the death of God, which probably hides the death of the human being: the end of theology highlights the end of anthropology. We no longer believe (we only believe we believe) in the divinity (and the humanity) of the human being. We have “retired” from numinosity like Nietzsche’s last pope.
Feuerbach seems to think that the construction of anthropology is still possible upon the ruins of theology. One can see the human being either as an enemy and vanquisher of God, or as an ally of Him, a consubstantial entity, who shares his creative traits and attributes. In the latter case, the human being is an anointed “mini-God”, the authorized servant of a powerful master. In the former instance, the godless nihilist desires to become something else entirely, perhaps a Nietzschean “superman” or a Cioranian “not-man”.
Max Stirner seems to prefigure this line of thought in The Ego and Its Own (1844): “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’…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?” (Stirner1844/ 1995, 139)
Man has killed God in order to become God (a satanic complex, if we read nihilism though the lenses of religious psychology): “God is dead, therefore I am God”/Deus est mortuus, ergo ego sum Deus. But if we understand Stirner correctly, this is only part of the story: the God-man will only have died after the combined deaths of God and the human being.
"God has died and his death was the life of the world”/ Gottistgestorben und sein Todwar das Lebender Welt, enigmatically wrote the post-Schopenhauerian philosopher Philipp Mainländer in his Die Philosophie der Erlösung (1876/ 1996, 108). He also argued that although "we have existed in God” (1876/ 1996, 108), we “no longer are in God”, because we have moved from the world of destroyed “unity” [Einheit] to a universe of multiplicity [Vielheit].The passage from transcendent unity to immanent multiplicity is, in Mainländer’s vision, the secret of the creation of the world.
Leaving these aside, Feuerbach argued that when the religious “Fire” is extinct, the existence of God becomes “dead”, and Stirner imagined that the death of God is a prequel to the God of man (what if Stiner's Ego also dies after the death of the “God-man”?). Furthermore, Mainländer is not mainly interested in cosmogony: in the macabre ending of Die Philosophie der Erlösung he changes the focus from God (and I include the human being in the definition/constitution of God) to death. Therefore, the question of divinity (and mankind) becomes insignificant in the context of the absolute hegemony of death, Schopenhauer’s nihil negativum reaching its nuclear point: “Nothing will be anymore, Nothing, Nothing, Nothing! – O, this glance in the absolute emptiness! –”/
Nichts mehr wird sein,
Nichts, Nichts, Nichts! –
O dieser Blick in die absolute Leere!
– (1886/ 1996, 511).
Nichts, Nichts, Nichts! –
O dieser Blick in die absolute Leere!
– (1886/ 1996, 511).
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