Autor: Murray, John

Buch: The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today

Titel: The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today

Stichwort: Atheismus, Postmoderne (post-modern age); sechs gemeinsame Kennzeichen (Revolution - Theater)); Nietzsche

Kurzinhalt: ... the new atheism of the Revolution and of the Theater is a postulate. It does not even bother to clothe itself in the guise of a conclusion from argument; God is the enemy of man's freedom

Textausschnitt: 103b What follows is an essay in characterization of post-modern atheism in its two typical forms. I shall first set down the traits that the two post-modern godless men have in common despite their many differences. I shall then comment briefly on the proper characteristics of each. (Fs)

103c There are six characteristics that the man of the Revolution and the man of the Theater share. Singly and together, they identify these men as belonging to an age-or a climate of soul-that is not modern, though it exhibits a certain continuity with modernity. (Fs)

103d In the first place, the two men share a common problematic. I said above that the Hebraic and Christian affirmation, God-and-the-world, gives rise to two problems. The metaphysical problem, which the medieval mind had wrought out into a philosophical mode of statement and resolution, chiefly preoccupied modernity. It was the problem of the coexistence and coagency of Creator and creature. The second problem, which has always claimed anguished attention, has now come into the foreground for a variety of historical and theoretical reasons over which we cannot delay. It is the moral problem. If God is, and if he is what he is, not only the Creator but the Pantokrator, how can the world be what it is, a place of manifold evil, an arena of human misery? (Fs) (notabene)

104a No man escapes this problem. It is put as a test to every man as it was put to the Israelites at Massah or Meribah amid the misery of a desert thirst. The test is not put to man's intelligence, for, unlike the metaphysical problem, which admits a manner of philosophical resolution, the problem of evil utterly defeats philosophy. The test is put to man's freedom. The temptation is to reject the reality of God's presence in the world as its benevolent and provident ruler in the rejection of the evil that is present with such dreadful reality. Man's questions here are not philosophical but historical-existential: "Where is my God? Is he the living God, or not?" This is the problem which the man of the Revolution and the man of the Theater confront, each in his own mode and mood. (Fs)

104b In the second place, and in consequence, both men accept the myth of the death of God. It is a nice question to ask just why Nietzsche announced what he called his "dreadful news" and just what he meant by the news: "This old God is really no longer alive; he is thoroughly dead" (thus in one of many texts, this one from Also sprach Zarathustra). In any case, the myth is not a coinage of the modern age. In those days men were content to say, under comfortable pretense of rationality, that God does not exist, that is, his existence is not a truth of reason and therefore never was a truth at all but only a fantasy. The universe of reason, which is man's decisive universe, can do without it. In contrast, the myth announces a fact of history, a change in the whole course of events, a new direction for man's destiny. The myth is therefore fraught with passion, whether flaming rage, icy despair, or mad rejoicing. Therefore, too, it is a summons to decision. Whatever reason or faith may say or refuse to say about God's existence, the fact is that he is gone from history, and history is man's decisive universe, an arena of action. In his myth, Nietzsche consciously brought to terrible explicitness the question that the modern age had been able to avoid, though in bad faith. You may say, if only because men have said, that the world does not need a Creator to explain it, but you cannot say, because no one dares to say, that the world does not need a Ruler to govern it. If God is dead, who is the Pantokrator? Not even through bad faith can you avoid this question. It is the question that the man of the Revolution and the man of the Theater squarely confront, each in his own way, both standing on the common ground of God's death. (Fs)

105a In the third place, and again in consequence, the new atheism of the Revolution and of the Theater is a postulate. It does not even bother to clothe itself in the guise of a conclusion from argument. In this respect it is more honest than the modern Academy ever was. Moreover, by its frank appearance as a postulate, an original free decision that is not disguised as a dialectical necessity, the new atheism reversed the positions of the forces in the field. The men of the Academy felt themselves obliged to make the case against God, against belief in him, against the ancient reasons for believing. The tradition was still in possession; it was thesis, the consensus. Atheism was innovation, antithesis, the dissent. The Enlightenment admitted as much by its contrast between les prejudices and les lumieres. The positions hitherto prevailing are now reversed. Atheism becomes the postulate. The myth of the death of God is in possession; it is the thesis. If the antithesis is to validate itself, it is up to the Christian to bring God back to life, if he can. It falls to belief to make the case for itself. (Fs) (notabene)

[...]

106a In the fourth place, the man of the Revolution and the man of the Theater agree in considering God to be not simply a needless superfluity to be dispensed with and disregarded but a positive to be actively combatted and done away with. God is a pernicious fantasy, not a harmless one. These two men are not content to be god-less; both are God-opposed. They hold, not for a-theism but for anti-theism. To each of them, God, Creator and Pantokrator, is the enemy. Hence the will to the suppression of God or to the absence of God. (Fs)

107a In the sixth place, the Revolution and the Theater have in common, however much they differ in its description, a highly concrete concept of freedom. Neither of them is concerned with what modernity called freedom, the so-called modern liberties, the rights of man and citizen, the civil liberties that law can guarantee. Not by these paltry legal means is man's true liberation to be accomplished. They fail even to touch the problem of freedom. Endowed though he may be with the full panoply of the modern liberties, man is still a slave. To what? To his nature, say the two new men in chorus, though each uses the word in his own special sense. Man must be freed from his inorganic, still unorganized body through its organization in the communist society, says the Revolution. Man must be freed from his essence through an existence (in the transitive sense) into absurdity, says the Theater. In both cases the freedom is not a thing of ideas or laws; it is a thing of action and history. In neither case is it a matter of guaranteeing a freedom that is somehow given. In both cases it is a matter of creating a freedom that is not yet given. When they aim, as they do, at the liberation of man, both the Revolution and the Theater are aiming at the creation of man, a new creation whose condition is the suppression of God or the absence of God. (Fs) (notabene)