In The Gay Science, Nietzsche wrote: God is dead! But what did he mean when he wrote those words? The main passage I will be using for this paper is from section 125 of Book Three in The Gay Science. I will also pull from select passages in Thus Spoke Zarathustra to search for what Nietzsche actually meant by that phrase. He says it again in Zarathustra here: “But when Zarathustra was alone he spoke thus to his heart: ‘Could it be possible? This old saint in the forest has not yet heard anything of this, that God is dead!’” (Z 124)
But what did he mean by saying it? Did we kill God, and if so, how?
This paper will focus on trying to understand the thoughts and ideas behind the phrase God is dead and what Nietzsche might have meant when he claimed we killed him. Who is ‘we’ in this? Is it the followers of Christianity? Monotheists? Or all of humanity in general? In Section 125, Nietsche writes: “The madman— Have you heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: ‘I seek God! I seek God!’ — As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter.” (GS 181)
Did the madman provoke laughter? Or did God provoke such laughter?
In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Zarathustra wanders into a neighboring town: “Zarathustra spoke thus to the people: ‘I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?’” (Z 124) So what is this ‘overman,’ and how does overcoming it relate to the idea that God is dead? The overman seems to be something that we can never overcome, because the idea of God is how we as people try to form our moral beliefs. Thus, we are unable to overcome ourselves which is something that needs to be overcome, but never can be, because people are set in their ways.
Is the ‘overman’ from Zarathustra comparable to the ‘madman’ in the Gay Science?
Is God the madman? Or the overman? Or are we those things–because we think that we can become God, or gods, by constructing God in our own image?
In section 108 of Book Three of The Gay Science, Nietzsche opens with: “God is dead; but given the way of people, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown.” (GS 167) What does this mean? The cave seems like a reference to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, the cave where people are blinded by reality because they only see the shadows cast in front of them on the wall, and not what is the truth of the world that they have placed behind them. Do these ideas have to do with that ‘overman?’ What is this overman? “The overman is the meaning of the earth.” (GS 125) What is the meaning of the earth? Later he warns: “Let us beware of thinking the world is a living being.” (Z 167) Is the meaning of the earth our own understanding and moral reasoning of what we think God truly is, or should be? Does any of this have to do with shadows on the walls of caves? The overman isn’t something we can achieve but something we should strive to be… that is why he says that: “Man is something that must be overcome; and therefore you shall love your virtues, for you will perish of them.” (Z 149) When we align our virtues or moralities to God or a deity we perish within our own understanding of what morality really is. What are our virtues when it comes to God or gods? Are we the madman striving to become the overman? Possibly, but the overman is something that we have to strive to become by overcoming the people we are. For example… humanity throughout all of time since the dawn of history has always given authority to some type of divine entity, thus giving power over ourselves to ourselves by claiming moral superiority based on religious ideologies. So ‘humanity’ has brought forth the death of God and gods in their entirety.
When we apply some type of meaning to God, or as other people do, such as claiming that God is a deity of things or some sort of creator—we invent the meaning for ourselves. But what is God…or at least the Christian God that the idea of God comes from? Just as when Nietzsche says: “after all, the Jews are the inventors of Christianity.” (GS 154)
So, we place this notion that God is some divine deity for us to worship and follow blindly. Why? Because some people told us what God is or was and how we should worship? Is this why God is truly dead?
Because we have mutilated what God truly stood for, if anything at all. In Zarathustra: “this cowardly devil urges you, “there is a God.” With this, however, you belong to the light-shunning
kind who cannot rest where there is light; now you must bury your head deeper in night and haze.” (Z 292) The devil is the one who tells us to believe in God? Is the devil other men?
In the Book of Revelation from the King James Version Bible, Chapter 13 verse 18 it says: “Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.” The number 666 is often interpreted as the ‘Mark of the Beast,’ the devil, Satan, Lucifer—that old snake that deceives the whole world. Nietzsche often makes a connection to the Bible and his writings, critiquing its impossibly illogical beliefs. However, this more specifically makes you think that he is saying that mankind (people) are the devil(s)—because it relates very closely to what he is saying when he makes specific claims, as I will show in the following pages.
Zarathustra spoke thus, saying: “That everyone may learn to read, in the long run corrupts not only writing but also thinking. Once the spirit was God, then he became man, and now he even becomes rabble.” (Z 152)
Nietzsche wrote Zarathustra as a fictional character of someone who actually lived, he was an Iranian religious leader who challenged the merits of ancient Iranian religion and became the founder of a new religious sect. But many believe that Nietzsche was speaking through Zarathustra as if it was his own voice and this is why he referred to particular writing as, “My Zarathustra,” many times.
What do passages like this actually mean? That man becomes, ‘God,’ or ‘god-like,’ in a sense that “we” (usually it is a male person), becomes enlightened by God or some spiritual deity that gives them power to influence other individuals, in order for the religious movement to gain a following. Even the fact that we refer to something we do not understand (such as God), using things we have been told to understand, as they are understood: such as, ‘he,’ ‘him,’ ‘Father,’ ‘God.’ We gave creation many names throughout history—all representations are associations of what we thought it should be. Prior knowledge of things predicts future understanding of things we think we are uncertain of.
So, why is God dead? And how did we kill ‘him?’ “Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God died, and these sinners died with him.” (Z 125)
Here again, “God is dead,” and if we are all sinners, then we all died with him. But why ‘him’? Why not just God, or creation of some sort?
Why does God have gender?
Is it because of Mother Nature?
Did God make mankind in His image – or did mankind imagine God in their image?
Were people the ones who constructed or created God in their image and imagine themselves to be like what they believed God would be? Or was it the other way around? The Book of Genesis says: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” (Gen. 1:26–27)
Who wrote the Bible?
Or, as Nietzsche puts it: “How should explanation be at all possible when we first turn everything into an image, our image!” (GS 172) Because here it would seem that God created
both man and woman in the likeness they imagined God to be, according to the Bible verse, at least. Did God write the Bible? Or did mankind write the Bible and ascribe it to what they believed to be God? Depicting God in our image instead. So, is God dead? Is this how we killed him, anyone? Could you possibly wonder why God is indeed dead? By creating ‘God’ to be as the likeness of various individuals of an olden time — or better yet! — for us to construct our own image of what God is: the likeness that we would want to see in the attributes of such a deity. People pretending that they are gods to justify their immorality.
The Bible verse points towards the creation story, which seems to be what caused the death of God in the first place. Highlighting the contextual passage of Nietzsche shows a connection to how we are the ones who have killed God. People gave birth to God through what they imagined themselves to be: “Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” (GS 181) Who are the gravediggers that buried God? Was it those from long ago who tried to tell us what God was? Was it the people who decided what stories were to be added to the King James Version Bible? Omitting the ones that they deemed unnecessary for the storytelling of what God is? Such as the ones that contradicted the Gospels of Matthew, John, Mark and Luke; or did not fit with the narrative they were selling? In The Gay Science, Nietzsche says, “after all, the Jews are the inventors of Christianity.” (GS 154) What does that mean?
The passage from The Gay Science seems to relate to this one: “At the gate of the town he met the gravediggers; they shone their torches in his face, recognized Zarathustra, and mocked him.” (Z 133) For this, it seems that Nietzsche is calling humanity or people in general
the ‘gravediggers.’ All Gods throughout history–over a long enough timeline move into fable, a mystic thing of the past yet to be revealed–a divine invention of something that could never last. From Zeus to Odin, Krishna to Allah, Horus and Apollo, there was even Ra and then again the Christian God or maybe even Buddha but as time went on they all became an illusion of past thoughts. But the Christian God commanded all people that there was no God, except the ‘one’ true God–same as Allah. But what is God? And how did we kill him? Is this what Nietzsche meant by even, “Gods, too, decompose.” Just like that they disappear into the past and ‘we’ are the ones to bury God. “God is dead! And we killed him.” So not only are we the ones who bury God but we are the murderers all along? “We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers.” (GS 181) Are people in general the madman? But further along it says it again, “How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?” (GS 181)
Do we comfort ourselves by inviting our own morality, conceiving our own individual rationality? “Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” (GS 181)
Is this how we justify any of it? “Is not the greatest of this deed too great for us?” (GS 181)
God is dead and we murdered him while digging the grave we would all bury him in. This happened because we were all making God seem like what mankind always was—a self-reflected image of something they could never truly be. It is easy to live life thinking that someday we will all die and pass on to something greater than the life we are living—missing all that is in front of us, only to hope we receive some eternal glory in the afterlife. Creating ourselves to be God, or some church deity—we sacrifice everything, even our moral integrity and individuality all for spiritual immortality, that we aren’t even certain exists. “What religion wants from the masses is no more than that they should keep still with their eyes, hands, legs, and other organs; that way they become more beautiful for a while and—look more like human beings.” (GS 185)
Is this what it means to kill God? To bury his image in our own self-reflected pity, but to claim moral superiority over others endlessly? It appears that Nietzsche is saying that religion keeps us oblivious to the truth of the world, at least in Section 125 of Book Three of The Gay Science. Such as when he states: “Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment.” (GS 182)
Staring at something in astonishment is to be almost oblivious as to what you are staring at.
Nietzsche entwines ideas, weaving them back and forth between passages, so that you have to move backwards as you move forward through his writing: “The greatest recent event—that God is dead; that the belief in the Christian god has become unbelievable—is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe.” (GS 279) Here we are over a century later and the shadows on the cave have cast themselves throughout the American people chaining them to an idea that they will be saved from their wrongdoings in the next life. A nation once founded on Christian theology has buried God faster than anybody. This is similar to how he speaks of Buddha’s death and the lingering shadow that would be cast on a wall for a thousand years, specifically in relation to God dying in the beginning of Book Three:“After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave—a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead, but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown.” (GS 167)
Nietzsche seemed to contest religious ways of thinking that convoluted the individual into believing that they could dissolve their moral wrongdoings simply by participating in the religious practice. However, Buddhism isn’t really a religion, and its followers do not worship Buddha as a God or deity, but rather see him as an enlightened individual who showed a different path towards alleviating suffering. Even though Nietzsche seemed to treat it the same as Christianity. Buddhism was more about liberating oneself through a process of eliminating the causes of suffering through the 8 fold path. The Buddha himself said that “existence was suffering,” this was the first noble truth which was very similar to how Christianity views an eternal afterlife. Life is suffering in the Christian worldview and when you die you will receive your reward in heaven. Life is suffering in Buddhism and you will liberate yourself from suffering by reaching a state of nirvana here on earth by ridding yourself from the causes of suffering.
Both ideas seem to contradict the purpose of existence itself, which is to experience life even if it causes suffering. “I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse.” (GS 223)
Now we start to see how we have killed God and what Nietzsche meant when he claimed God was dead: “But hours will come when you will realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity.” (GS 180) The idea of a Christian life, is to eventually exist in an infinite afterlife. Mainly because people who proclaimed to be the spokesperson for God told us that we should believe that ideology. Nietzsche would say: “’God himself cannot exist without wise people,’ said Luther with good reason. But ‘God can exist even less without unwise people’—that our good Luther did not say.’” (GS 185) Martin Luther is making a strategic claim and even in the Bible states in Ecclesiastes chapter 8 verse 1: “Who is the wise man? And who knoweth the interpretation of a thing? A man’s wisdom maketh his face to shine, and the boldness of his face shall be changed.”
It would seem that whoever these ‘wise’ people are, they are intentionally fooling humanity into believing in a deity, at least according to Nietzsche’s point of view. The idea that we have killed God is viewed by humanity as: “The event itself is far too great, too distant, too remote from the multitude’s capacity for comprehension even for the tidings of it to be thought of as having arrived as yet.” (GS 279) It is time for humanity to realize that we are alone in this life with nothing but our individual morality to determine what is right or wrong. That we have to let go of our past beliefs if we want to move forward as a whole and stop justifying our atrocities in the name of some distant deity.
In the final paragraph of section 125 in Book Three of The Gay Science, Nietzsche encapsulates his argument: “What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God.” (GS 182) The churches, he suggests, are the tombs of God, and the sepulchers are the vaults in which we have sealed Him. Burying God within the caves of our minds, casting the shadows of His image on the walls for centuries, clinging to the hope of an afterlife. But Nietzsche argues that life isn’t about waiting for an afterlife, it’s about living this life by transcending former beliefs and overcoming our own limitations.
Nietzsche, F. W., & Kaufmann, W. (1974). The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. Vintage Books.
Nietzsche, F. (1976). The Portable Nietzsche with new bibliographies selected and transl., with an introd., pref. and notes by Walter Kaufmann (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). Penguin Books.
