Nietzsche’s Prophecy and Finding the Holy in the Every Day (Without the Holy)
‘God is dead’ — but we’re alright!
Have you ever tried to believe in the unbelievable?
Miracles, resurrections, a celestial monarchy — go ahead, read any one of those Holy Books, and integrate their cosmology into your belief system.
If it works for you, that’s great. However, for many, the concept of traditional theism feels outdated, paradoxical, and incompatible with their fundamental nature.
So, when you can do nothing, what can you do?
Why the Almighty Ghosted Us
You’ve heard the tale — the father who steps out for a pack of cigarettes and vanishes into the ether.
In a similar vein, after millennia of collective worship, of erecting towering cathedrals, crafting exquisite art, and composing hymns in His honor, it appears our Father has left us. The Western world is in a state of spiritual orphanhood, scrambling for direction, purpose, and a solid foundation for its convictions.
While this may strike one as a tragic turn — and indeed, tragedies have unfolded in its shadow: genocides, suicides, homicides, a litany of ‘-cides’ — the evolution of belief is, in itself, an organic process within the human experience.
In 1882, Nietzsche proclaimed ‘God is dead’ — few took him seriously
In his famous parable, Nietzsche uses the character of the madman as the announcer of the seismic shift in values and beliefs.
The madman wanders into town in broad daylight, bearing a lantern, yelling, ‘I seek God! I seek God!’ The crowd of people only laughed. ‘Has he got lost?’ asked one. ‘Did he lose his way like a child?’ asked another.
‘The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. ‘Whither is God?’ he cried; ‘I will tell you. We have killed him — you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? 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.’
— Friedrich Nietzsche: The Gay Science, Aphorism 125, titled ‘The Madman’
‘God is dead’ is not an assertion about the demise of a deity but a commentary on the waning influence of religion in society.
Nietzsche noted a shift away from religion as the sole arbiter of truth, prompting a reevaluation of our moral compass. With the Enlightenment and scientific advances, and the traditional concept of God no longer fit for purpose, we’ve been left to rebuild our cultural foundation.
This leaves us with a question: what beliefs and values can take religion’s place now that it’s not at the center of our culture anymore?
Navigating the Meaning Market
The madman continues:
‘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? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us — for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto.’
— Friedrich Nietzsche: The Gay Science, Aphorism 125, titled ‘The Madman’
Since the death of God, humanity has been in free fall through history, with nothing to hold onto, and no wind to guide our wings. We’ve spent the last century stumbled from one destructive ideology to another — socialism, communism, Nazism, fascism — each marked by its own tragedies.
Many among us turn to politics as their new deity, demonising and waging holy war against the opposition; others fall at the altar of environmentalism, in some cases going to extremes, self-righteously advocating for human extinction; and some dedicate their lives to ‘social justice’, only to bastardise the corpse of Christian ethics, pulling it apart every which way into the acronym-ridden divisions of gender ideology and perceived racial inequities.
Then there’s the poorest dreg of society, whom Nietzsche dubbed ‘the last man’; he is one who believes in nothing at all, and whose life consists of little more than hedonistic indulgence of the senses.
But what’s the way forward for those who can’t believe?
Should we employ legions of social engineers to craft new religions and see what sticks; how can we, who flail and fight at every turn, give birth to new gods?
Nietzsche advocates the ‘reevaluation of all values’, urging us to actively embrace the creation of individualistic values that best affirm life and human flourishing. We must water the proverbial soil of our culture with art that transcends conventional ethics, through which we may emerge as the ‘overman’ or ‘Übermensch’ — an embodiment of self-mastery, vitality, and instinctive wisdom.
We are to grasp the ‘eternal recurrence’, to live with passion and authenticity, to meet suffering with stubborn resolve, and to relish life’s highest joys, as if every moment were to be lived again and again, forever.
A word of caution
I am approaching things from a Nietzschean perspective, but do not mistake my appraisal of his words as a devotional embrace. The last thing we want is a blind flock of men following his words as if they were gospel.
Apocalypse… Not Now
So now that it seems like God is not returning to right every wrong, and the hour of His divine judgment is not close at hand, what can we do to make the best of our lives?
The answer lies in embracing the ‘will to power’ — the intrinsic drive within nature to maximize one’s potential and assert one’s personal essence in the world. Embrace and fortify the pillars that would support your affirmation of life: the physical, the mental, and the spiritual. This ‘trinity’, though spoken of separately for the sake of simplicity, must be perceived holistically.
I will share with you the various strategies that I’ve adopted in my own life to help foster strength, meaning, and joy.
Physical
- Seek Vitality in the Natural World: Go into nature to draw strength from the earth and sky. Reconnect with the primordial forces that fuel your physical essence.
- Embrace the Walk: Walking not just for exercise, but as a time to think and reflect. Regular walks can strengthen the body and stimulate the mind.
- Celebrate the Body’s Power: Engage in vigorous physical activity to honour and enhance your body. Nourish yourself with a diet that provides stamina and strength. Minimise or quit alcohol.
- Sleep Well: Good sleep is essential for a keen intellect and sharp wit, as rest is the bedrock upon which a sturdy mind is built.
- Reconcile with Your Primal Self: Accept and integrate your sexual nature as a fundamental aspect of your physical being, a source of creation and an expression of vitality.
Mental
- Practice Yoga and Meditation: These disciplines will sharpen the mind and anchor it against existential strife.
- Embrace Arts and Creativity with Religious Fervour: Let the arts be an extension of your will to power, each creation a statement of your inner vitality.
- Build Strong Support Networks: Cultivate relationships with friends and family as a mental bulwark. Recognise that intellectual strength often draws from the communal well.
- Engage in Continuous Learning: Dedicate yourself to the pursuit of knowledge, even when uncomfortable or challenging to existing beliefs.
- Maintain a Flexible Mindset: Embrace adaptability as a mental virtue, ensuring that the psyche remains nimble and doesn’t cling to stupid ideas.
Spiritual
- Cultivate Master Morality: Your personal code of values that celebrate strength, vitality, and affirmation of life — these are the highest virtues.
- Be Excellent: Strive for personal excellence in all areas of life, asserting your will to power, for it is in the stretching of one’s limits that the soul finds its true measure.
- Practise Gift-Giving Virtue: Find spiritual enrichment in the principle of self-overcoming by sharing your abundance of spirit and creativity, thereby affirming your power and autonomy.
- Cultivate Noble Pride: Embrace the nobility of the spirit that arises from self-mastery and the creative assertion of your will.
- Love of Fate (‘Amor Fati’): Accept your fate with enthusiasm, and delve into life’s mysteries. It is in the unknown that your journey finds its purpose and the universe its narrative.
In doing so, we can navigate through life’s uncertainties with passion and power.
I Once Regarded the Death of God as a Tragedy
I often find myself grimacing at London’s skyline, with its colourless buildings rising like chipped teeth, and I wonder: will there ever be a time when we build with beauty in the name of God again?
Yet occasionally, I’m struck by the stark beauty of once-holy places: St. Paul’s Cathedral, Canterbury Cathedral, St. Vitus in Prague. Their grandeur brings tears to my eyes, a beauty so profound it’s tinged with the sadness that He, to whom these structures were dedicated, is no longer a part of our world.
I long to see the skyline of a modern city that values beauty over economic practicality.
We’ve uprooted an ancient tree
We dug for treasure but ended up with empty hands, leaving just a bare hole in the ground.
Now, the tree offers no shade, bears no fruit, and its leaves no longer shield us from the rain.
But perhaps this was inevitable; perhaps the tree was already past the point of revival when we first sunk our shovels into the ground.
What a project we’ve undertaken!
What’s sure is that we need to keep digging, in search of the vein of gold that would rejuvenate our culture, so that we may furnish our cities and nations with awe and glory.
Nietzsche foresaw no religion rising to fuel this cultural renaissance of the modern age; rather, he anticipated a caste of ‘free spirits’. These visionaries, who look to the eternal beauty of nature for inspiration and guidance, would be the builders of high culture akin to that of the ancient Greeks and the Romans at their mightiest.
Let’s be the visionaries! Let’s embrace the physical and the artistic as our true connection to reality, setting aside illusions of the afterlife and utopian notions of equality.
There Is No Finish Line — The Struggle Is Eternal, as Is Our Joy of Contest
There is no final judgment day to rest our hopes or fears upon. Our path is ours to carve, eternally winding, eternally ours.
In this godless world, the struggle itself becomes sacred. It is in the exertion, the strife, the ceaseless contest with ourselves and the world around us, that we find a joy that is ‘all too human’. We are not racing toward a paradise at the end; we assert ourselves in the here and now— through our toil, our passion, our creativity.
There is no final curtain call, no grand epilogue, just the pure, unbridled joy of contest.
And in that, we find life eternal.
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