Friedrich Nietzsche: Unchaining the Earth from the Sun

By Carl Trueman

Dec 21, 2020

Friedrich Nietzsche’s thought, given both its frequently aphoristic form of expression and the fact that it underwent some considerable development over his short but remarkably productive professional life, is complicated and subject to a variety of interpretations. As with Freud, some of his terminology—“the will to power,” “the Overman,” “beyond good and evil,” “the genealogy of morality”—has become common currency in the jargon of popular philosophy; yet as with Freud’s vocabulary, many of these terms are often used by those who do not know precisely what they mean. Nevertheless, one point on which Nietzsche scholarship is agreed is that he is the man who really calls the bluff of the Enlightenment and challenges those who have sloughed off the shackles of traditional Christianity to have the courage to take the full measure of what they have done.

The most dramatic example of this call is the famous madman passage in book 3 of The Gay Science (or, The Joyful Wisdom):

The madman.—Have you not 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. Has he got lost? Asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? Asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? Emigrated?—Thus they yelled and laughed.
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.
“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.”

Met with initial mockery and then the astonished silence of his listeners, the madman throws his lantern to the ground, shattering it, and muses that he has come too early, that his audience is not yet ready to under stand his message. Later that day, Nietzsche says, the madman enters a number of churches to repeat his message, only to be thrown out. His response is to declare these churches to be nothing other than the tombs of God.[1]

To quote Stephen Williams on this same section of The Gay Science, “This is one of those purple passages whose impact is virtually deadened by comment.”[2] Yet its compact nature means that its underlying implications are too rich and wide ranging—especially for the arguments of this book—not to be made explicit.

The passage is perhaps most famous for the phrase “God is dead.” This is intended as a far more powerful statement than the more matter-of-fact claim that God simply does not exist, because Nietzsche is here imputing a conscious intentionality to the matter of atheism. The underlying idea is that Enlightenment philosophy has quite purposefully rendered God implausible or unnecessary. It has done away with him. But here is the rub: Enlightenment philosophers have failed to draw the necessary, broader metaphysical and moral conclusions from this notion. In fact, we might say that they have had neither the intellectual acumen nor the courage to do so. It is thus polite atheists, not religious believers, whom the madman first engages in the town square, those who wish to have their comfortable, stable, secure lives even as they have removed any foundation on which they might build such. But the nonexistence of God is not like the nonexistence of unicorns or centaurs. Nothing significant has been built on the supposition that those mythological creatures are real. To dispense with God, however, is to destroy the very foundations on which a whole world of metaphysics and morality has been constructed and depends.

The madman passage is not the initial place where Nietzsche uses the phrase “God is dead.” It occurs for the first time in his writings at the very start of book 3 of The Gay Science. There he gives the following story:

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. And we—we still have to vanquish his shadow too.[3]

This passage sets the scene for the madman’s later intervention. The basic point is that the foundation of religion may have been exposed as false, but the influence of religion, the systems of life and thought built on it, continue to live on, up until the present day. To use Charles Taylor’s term, God continues to inform the social imaginary, and Nietzsche wants to put an end to this. Indeed, in the aphorisms between Buddha’s shadow and the madman, Nietzsche raises a series of pungent questions about, and challenges to, science, logic, and morality, all of which he clearly regards as being in need of revision in light of the death of God.

For example, he attacks any notion that the universe considered in itself can have any intrinsic meaning. To think of it as a living being is a ridiculous—in fact, nauseating—anthropomorphism, and to regard it as a machine is really no better. In fact, one should not even talk of “laws” in nature, because that would imply a lawgiver and a universe somehow accountable to such.[4] Nietzsche then postulates that “knowledge” is simply a means of giving some kind of specious objective authority to ideas that both have proved useful in preserving humankind and have enjoyed longevity and general acceptance but that are really rooted in instinct and struggles for power.[5] When we claim to explain the universe, we are actually merely describing it and not really penetrating into any essence it may have at any deeper level than our ancestors did.[6] Nietzsche also applies the same critique to logic[7] and finally to morality. Indeed, he dismisses morality as “herd instinct in the individual,” a point that has affinities with Freud’s later notion of the relationship between the superego and the ego and also to Rousseau’s (and the Romantics’) notion of authentic humanity as being that exhibited by the least socialized and civilized.[8]

All this provides the background to the explosive madman passage. To kill God, either by denying his existence or at least the coherence of claims to knowledge of him (as David Hume arguably did) or by making him nothing more than a necessary presupposition for moral discourse, the Enlightenment effectively tore out the foundations from under the polite bourgeois morality that it wished to maintain. You cannot do this, says Nietzsche. You have unchained the earth from the sun, a move of incalculable significance. By doing so, you have taken away any basis for a metaphysics that might ground either knowledge or ethics. In killing God, you take on the responsibility—the terrifying responsibility— of being god yourself, of becoming the author of your own knowledge and your own ethics. You make yourself the creator of your world. Hence Nietzsche peppers the madman’s speech with dizzying, vertiginous imagery and the language of blood, murder, and decay. The cheerful and chipper atheism of a Richard Dawkins or a Daniel Dennett is not for Nietzsche because it fails to see the radical consequences of its rejection of God. To hope that, say, evolution will make us moral would be to assume a meaning and order to nature that can only really be justified on a prior metaphysical basis that itself transcends nature, or simply to declare by fiat and with no objective justification that certain things we like or of which we approve are intrinsically good.[9]

— Carl R. Trueman is professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College. He is an esteemed church historian and previously served as the William E. Simon Fellow in Religion and Public Life at Princeton University. Trueman has authored or edited more than a dozen books, including The Creedal Imperative; Luther on the Christian Life; and Histories and Fallacies.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Notes

[1] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), §125 (181–82). First published in German in 1887.

[2] Stephen N. Williams, The Shadow of the Antichrist: Nietzsche’s Critique of Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006), 119.

[3] Nietzsche, Gay Science, §108 (167).

[4] Nietzsche, Gay Science, §109 (167–68).

[5] Nietzsche, Gay Science, §110 (169–71).

[6] Nietzsche, Gay Science, §112 (172–73). It is worth noting that Nietzsche does allow here that the descriptions offered in his day may be better than those offered in earlier times, a point that calls into question interpretations of his thought that see him as a radical epistemological relativist, but the central point—that there is no metaphysics of essence that allows us to get beyond description to ultimate explanation—is nonetheless very significant.

[7] Nietzsche, Gay Science, §111 (171–72).

[8] Nietzsche, Gay Science, §§116–17 (174–75). For Rousseau and the Romantics, see chap. 3, and for Freud, see chap. 6.

[9] Earlier in The Gay Science, Nietzsche notes the connection between opinion and aesthetics: “The change in general taste is more powerful than that of opinions. Opinions, along with all proofs, refutations, and the whole intellectual masquerade, are merely symptoms of the change in taste and most certainly not what they are still often supposed to be, its causes.” Nietzsche, Gay Science, §39 (106).

Books and Resources

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From Peter S. Williams on Twitter: “Here's the first open access issue of the Nordic Journal 'Theofilos', a special Supplement issue on "Science, Natural Theology, and Christian Apologetics", to which I contributed several pieces and which I was privileged to guest edit.” https://theofilos.no/issues/theofilos-supplement-2020-1/

If you’re looking for good reading recommendations, David Dockery has published his annual roundup of the best books of the year.

Logos is running a Christmas sale with lots of great deals on the newest version of the software (Logos 9), commentaries, books, lectures, and other resources.

Look here for Faithlife’s free eBook of the Month. Visit here to get the Logos Free Book of the Month. You can download the free version of Logos which will allow you to access the monthly free books. Logos 9 is a great investment, though, and has tons of tools that make Bible study easier and richer.

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Recommended Resource

One of the key pillars of the Christian worldview is the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. As the apostle Paul wrote, “if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith” (1 Cor. 15:14). Thus, defending the resurrection has always been one of the chief tasks of apologetics, and one that requires ongoing development as new evidence, fields of study, and objections emerge.

Raised on the Third Day: Defending the Historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus brings together some of the most notable Christian scholars who have defended the resurrection, including J. P. Moreland, William Lane Craig, Craig Evans, and Darrell Bock. The essays are written in honor of Gary Habermas, one of the foremost defenders of the resurrection in our generation. With chapters on the minimal-facts argument, near-death experiences, the uniqueness of Christianity, historical epistemology, and lessons for apologists from Habermas’s ministry, these essays provide a snapshot of some of the best available scholarship on the resurrection.

The excerpt below is taken from Alex McFarland’s chapter “What Aspiring (and Veteran) Apologists May Learn from Gary Habermas.”

What Aspiring (and Veteran) Apologists May Learn from Gary Habermas

To be sure, Gary Habermas has shaped the lives of countless people, my own included. Habermas’s accomplishments as an academic, an apologist, and as a Christian public figure are notable. His scholarship about ancient evidence for the life of Christ, near-death experiences, dealing with doubt, or his “minimal facts” defense of the gospel are all significant. Equally compelling has been the Christ-honoring way in which he processed the loss of his wife, Debbie.

As pop-level atheism became a cottage industry in the early 2000s, the skeptic’s world was rocked when news broke that one of their champions, Antony Flew, affirmed theism. Habermas’s lengthy friendship and dialogues with Flew decisively contributed to this. And how many apologists get written into the scripts of theatrically released feature films? Factor in the significant role he has played in Lee Strobel’s journey, and it becomes clear that Habermas is one of the persons most used by God to raise awareness for apologetics over the last two decades.

But what I’ve learned about apologetics from Gary Habermas goes well beyond refutations of naturalistic theories about the resurrection.

So often, apologetics is assumed to be a pastime of intellectual jousting that takes place among bookish believers. Even many pastors and Christian educators (who would, presumably, be favorable toward apologetics) can be dismissive of this realm of study. “You will never need that C. S. Lewis stuff,” a senior denominational leader once said to me, “unless you are on the campus of Yale University. Islam, atheism, trying to prove the Bible—those issues the average believer will never deal with.”

That person’s low view of apologetics was especially ironic in light of the fact that issues he referenced (Islam, atheism, the authority of Scripture) are, in fact, exactly the topics Christians in the Western world must know how to address. Some complain, “You can’t argue someone into the kingdom of God,” or, “Apologetics may help reassure believers, but it doesn’t win the lost to Christ.” I am mindful of the fact that some in the church have not had unfavorable experiences with apologetics, but rather negative encounters with apologists.

Once, while encouraging a group of ministers to bring more apologetics and biblical worldview content before their people, one pastor shared a story that broke my heart. The pastor explained that a two-person apologetics team had come to the church to speak to their youth. During the Q&A time, a teen girl innocently asked a question about Jehovah’s Witness literature that had been coming to her house. She said she had been reading their Awake magazine, and to her it seemed to make sense. “What do you guys think?” she asked.

The two young men (perhaps well-meaning but misguided) launched into a rapid-fire rebuttal of everything related to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. As her youth group friends watched, the speakers did a five-minute “data dump” on the girl, critiquing both the publications and her for having read them. The pastor grew fairly emotional as he ended the story: “Alex, that teen girl was so embarrassed that she left the room crying. The worst part is that the two apologists seemed to show no concern, and they high-fived each other at the end of their talk.”

That encounter illustrates how the apologetics and life of Gary Habermas remains so exemplary. The pastor’s experience still makes me cringe whenever I think back on it. I agreed with him that the behavior described typifies a sort of apologetics that should never be encouraged. But Christian friend and ideological foe alike will agree that Gary Habermas, the man, is undeniably a credit to the worldview he represents. Habermas proclaims truth; better still, he lives it.

I am reminded of a time that Habermas presented his “minimal facts” argument before hundreds of students at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte.

The standing-room-only crowd listened intently as a long line formed for the Q&A period. In characteristic fashion, Habermas fielded comments, objections, and helped more than a few students who did not quite know how to frame their question. One young man came to the mic and made it clear that he did not like the conclusions Habermas drew from the implications of Christ’s physical resurrection.

“If I’m understanding you,” the student reasoned, “the resurrection would mean that Jesus is God, and the way of salvation.” The young man’s tone grew belligerent: “Is that what you’re saying?”

“You got it,” said Habermas. “You are tracking with me, yes.”

The college student appeared more and more agitated as it sunk in that the resurrection would, indeed, validate Christ’s messiahship. His volume rising, the student said, “I don’t like this! I don’t like this!” Half the audience seemed to want the aggrieved student to step aside, and half seemed bemused to watch the meltdown in process. Habermas offered, “I get it, you’re not comfortable with where this is going. But just to say that you don’t like it, well, that’s not an argument.”

Amazingly, the student waved his hands, as if to say, “Be gone!” to both Habermas and his content. Storming away, the young man growled into the mic, “AARRRGGHHH!” Some snickered at the exchange, and the program concluded. But I watched Gary Habermas seek out the young man, who clearly had no idea he was trying to argue the resurrection with the topic’s most astute scholar. It was a powerful sight to watch Habermas, like a gentle big brother, listen to the student, diffuse the young man’s anger, and minister the gospel. Apologetics comprises both scholarship and shepherding.

Find Raised on the Third Day: Defending the Historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus at Lexham Press or Amazon.

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