The Death of God and the Problem of Nihilism

The proclamation 'God is dead' (Gott ist tot) appears most famously in Nietzsche's The Gay Science (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, 1882; expanded 1887), in aphorism 125, 'The Madman,' where a madman runs into a marketplace at morning carrying a lantern, crying that he seeks God, only to declare to the uncomprehending crowd of unbelievers that 'we have killed him — you and I,' and to lament that humanity has not yet grasped the enormity of this deed, comparing it to unchaining the earth from its sun. Nietzsche restates the proclamation in the parallel figure of Zarathustra in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Also sprach Zarathustra, 1883–1885), where Zarathustra descends from the mountains only to learn that 'God is dead' has not yet reached the old hermit he meets in the forest. The statement is not, for Nietzsche, primarily a metaphysical claim about the non-existence of a deity — Nietzsche is not chiefly interested in atheistic argument of the sort found in earlier materialist critics — but rather a sociological and historical diagnosis: European civilization's actual, lived belief in the Christian God and the entire structure of absolute values it underwrote have become culturally untenable, hollowed out by modern natural science, historical-critical biblical scholarship (associated with figures such as David Friedrich Strauss, whose Life of Jesus, Critically Examined appeared in 1835), and the general secularizing pressures of nineteenth-century European modernity.