The Metamorphosis of Finitude: An Essay on Birth and Resurrection

3. Is There a Drama of Atheist Humanism?

  Is There a Drama of Atheist Humanism? Atheist humanism in its time was famously stigmatized as a “drama” by one of the great theologians of the twentieth century (Henri de Lubac). This was not simply a conservative reaction—to suggest that would be to misunderstand both the man and his writings—but first of all it was done out of a concern for understanding: “I have tried here to bring into the open the double character [of the rejection of God and the crushing of the human individual], considering that simply to offer an account of it would be the most efficacious of refutations.” And so, although it was expressed in the guise of a precaution, not to speak of a real taking into account of differences, the claim was nonetheless clear: Christians, who were called on to read and study Auguste Comte (positivism), Marx (communism), and Nietzsche (nihilism), had to enter into a “full awareness of the spiritual situation of the world with which they are engaged.” Behind the analysis, in short, rests a judgment that makes atheism into a “drama” in the plainest sense of the term—that is to say, it makes it “a kind of immense deviation .” The exegesis depends, it seems to me, on the sense that was given in the past, and that one can give today to the repeated cry of the madman in Nietzsche’s work: “God is dead! God remains dead!”§. The Death of God, or the Death of Christianity? Heidegger’s interpretation of “the phrase of Nietzsche ‘God is dead’” is well known and much celebrated. The death of God is directly identi- Is There a Drama of Atheist Humanism? ■  fied by Heidegger (as indeed by Nietzsche himself) with “the Christian belief which was also the belief of Plato that God is truth, and that truth is divine.” In other words, as Jean-Luc Marion says, taking up Heidegger’s statement, the “death of God” is that of a “conceptual idol,” or is a principle that we construct rather than receive, springing as much from Platonism as from Christianity: “‘Idol’: product of god/God (Plato/Christianity) from truth, from the will to truth as a form of the will to power.” But Marion does not stop here. As a Christian philosopher this time, and thus against Heidegger, he opposes the idol, as the concept of a “God” who is dead, to the icon of the cross—because the God “without inverted commas,” the God of Christians, precisely dies, and so fulfils in a sense through his life the conceptual gap opened up by Nietzsche’s phrase “God is dead.” “Provisional thesis: Jesus, as the Christ, who dies on the cross, offers perhaps the unavoidable figure, even for Nietzsche—or above all for him—of the inescapable challenge that man faces in his encounter with the divine.” That God is dead is then not, or is no longer, a simple profession of atheism, but it is the highest truth in a Christianity properly understood—that is to say, in one centered on the mystery of the death and the resurrection of Christ. Some people, however, will see this recycling of the famous phrase as a kind of trick. Against Heidegger first of all: Nietzsche was a convinced, not to say a militant, atheist. Could he really have been content with the murder of a “concept” in his mad cry? Only “living things” are killed, not “ideas”: They are always already essentially dead. Next, with regard to Jean-Luc Marion: How can we actually justify that “even for Nietzsche,” and “especially for him,” Jesus dying on the cross “offers perhaps the unavoidable figure.” But this is not, after all, the essential question. Recycling or no recycling, the strength of the hypothesis (from idol to icon) gives us at least food for thought, in that the question of the “death of God” remains decisive for the atheist as for the believer. And the atheist can at once connect his own atheism with that of his contemporaries, which is no small benefit. But the debate shifts ground, or rather gets a boost, once one is truly attentive to the double echo of the mad cry of Nietzsche. Not only “God is dead”—the formula that confirms the truth both of conceptual atheism (Heidegger) and Christian theism (Marion)—but also “God remains dead.” What does this mean? How can God, supposed in Christianity to overcome death through...