On the death of God.

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

The foregoing is probably the most popular quote attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche the German philosopher who in the winter of his life lost his mind. I will admit ,I have never read the full text of the work from which this quote is taken but, a couple of years ago it did form the basis of a very spirited debate between myself and several friends from work. 

What occasioned this debate was a book I was reading at the time Night by Elie Wiesel Holocaust survivor and Nobel peace Laureate. The book essentially chronicles his time in the concentration camps and it in a way charts the death of God, his God anyway. It is a small book, one hundred and thirty pages long and in those one hundred and thirty pages, God is murdered.  But, how is that even possible?

Well, the argument is premised on the notion that God is an idea (not so radical thought).  Our view of God is formed formally, mainly through organized religion and formally sanctioned texts, and personally, through the interaction between our experiences in the real world and what we are taught God is.  For Wiesel, nurtured on the Torah the idea of God that was painted for him was the God of Abraham, Jacob and Isaac.  A God of kindness and compassion, a God of planning and vision,  a God who provided and protected, a God who was not above intervening directly in the lives of and on behalf of his chosen people, the Jews.

To this day the God of the patriarchs’ is still an idea that is propagated by formal religion even though the evidence in the real world is not entirely obvious.  Moving back to Wiesel’s story, when the signs of Hitler’s less than charitable intent were written on the wall, the Jews in his hometown fell back on their faith; their God whom they believed would protect them.  Hope can well and truly paralyze sometimes. 

The long and the short of it is the experiences of the concentration camps killed God. In his text he states ‘Never shall I forget that night, the first night in the camp, which turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke; Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things even if I am condemned to live as long as God himself. Never.

It is impossible to adequately capture the anguish that Wiesel had to deal with and is maybe still dealing with. For any of us, the loss of a key paradigm upon which our lives a built would be traumatic in the extreme.  And it was from this perspective, that I approached the discussion with my friends.

It goes without saying that the views differed, but the battle was split between two opposing forces, my idea of a God who changes as we get to know him and the other idea of a fixed and unchanging God who irrespective of all that is happening in the world today is still a kind and compassionate God even though the evidence of this is harder to see every day. I suppose I can say that for those that argued against a fluid definition of God, accepting this construct would be a paradigm shift, not in the line of Wiesel’s experiences but certainly one that would alter the way in which one sees the world.

As it is with matters of faith, our discussion was inconclusive with neither side landing a killer punch in a manner of speaking.  Every once in a while I go back and read that little book, it does and has given me some solace when I have needed an anchor through my crises of faith, when I have needed to know that the anger and the disappointment and the fear that God can and will let me down (from where I stand) is normal.