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The Death of God and the Dissolution of Humanity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
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1 In France, for instance, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the humanist mantle was taken up by Catholics, Marxists and existentialists alike as a means of galvanizing public opinion and censuring rival ideologies. Thus, in 1945, the French Socialist Party (SFIO) adopted the epithet in an attempt to unite to itself the most extreme wings of the Catholic Social Democrats (MRP) and the Communist Party (PCF) (see Baring, Edward, “Humanist Pretensions: Catholics, Communists, and Sartre's Struggle for Existentialism in Postwar France,” Modern Intellectual History 7, 3 [2010]: 582–585CrossRefGoogle Scholar).
2 “On Maurice Blanchot,” in Proper Names, trans. Smith, Michael B. (London: The Athlone Press, 1996), 127–128Google Scholar.
3 Thus, according to Levinas: “The unburied dead of wars and death camps accredit the idea of a death with no future, making tragic-comic the care for one's self and illusory the pretensions of the rational animal to a privileged place in the cosmos, capable of dominating and integrating the totality of being in a consciousness of self” (Humanism of the Other [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006], 45Google Scholar).
4 Geroulanos, Stefanos, An Atheism that is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 12Google Scholar. Geroulanos provides an excellent introduction to the emergence and development of anti-humanism in twentieth century French thought.
5 “Introduction to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right,” in Tucker, Robert C., ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 65Google Scholar.
6 The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970), 386–387Google Scholar, emphasis added.
7 See for example Barth's introductory essay to Feuerbach in The Essence of Christianity (New York: Harper & Row, 1957Google Scholar).
8 Levinas, Humanism of the Other, 48.
9 Sartre, , Existentialism and Humanism (London: Methuen & Co., 1968), 28Google Scholar.
10 The Drama of Atheist Humanism (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), 65Google Scholar.
11 Ibid, 23.
12 Ibid, 24–25.
13 Ibid, 25. According to Maritain, negative atheism entails “a merely negative or destructive process of casting aside the idea of God, which is replaced only by a void.” Positive atheism, meanwhile, entails “an active struggle against everything that reminds us of God—that is to say, antitheism rather than atheism—and at the same time a desperate, I would say heroic, effort to recast and reconstruct the whole human universe of thought and the whole human scale of values in accordance with the state of war against God” (The Range of Reason [London: Geoffrey Bles, 1953], 104Google Scholar).
14 The Drama of Atheist Humanism, 12.
15 “Foreword to Thesis: The Difference Between the Natural Philosophy of Democritus and the Natural Philosophy of Epicus,” in Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, On Religion (New York: Shocken Books, 1964), 15Google Scholar.
16 The Essence of Christianity (New York: Prometheus Books, 1989), 14Google Scholar.
17 According to Feuerbach, “Religion is the disuniting of man from himself; he sets God before him as the antithesis of himself. God is not what man is—man is not what God is. God is the infinite, man the finite being; God is perfect, man imperfect; God eternal, man temporal; God almighty, man weak; God holy, man sinful. God and man are extremes: God is the absolutely positive, the sum of all realities; man the absolutely negative, comprehending all negations” (Ibid, 33).
18 Ibid, 26.
19 The Drama of Atheist Humanism, 32.
20 Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Will to Power (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 86–87Google Scholar. As de Lubac notes, “God, according to Nietzsche, is nothing more than the mirror of man, who, in certain intense, exceptional states, becomes aware of the power that is in him or of the love that exalts him… Man, not daring to ascribe such power or love to himself, makes them the attributes of a superhuman being who is a stranger to him. He accordingly divides the two aspects of his own nature between two spheres, the ordinary weak and pitiable aspect appertaining to the sphere he calls ‘man’, while the rare, strong and surprising aspect belongs to the sphere he calls ‘God’. Thus by his own action he is defrauded of what is best in him” (The Drama of Atheist Humanism, 44).
21 Thus Spoke Zarathustra (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 65Google Scholar
22 The Will to Power, 145.
23 The Gay Science, quoted in Henri de Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism, 59.
24 See especially the section devoted to the work of Auguste Comte (215–261).
25 Athéisme et sens de l'homme (Vienne: Cerf, 1968). While this text has not yet been translated into English, portions of the second chapter (“Sens total de l'homme et du mode”) have been published as “The Total Meaning of Man and the World” in Communio 36 (Winter 2008), 613–641.
26 Athéisme et sens de l'homme, 24.
27 The Drama of Atheist Humanism, 422; see also Athéisme et sens de l'homme, 29. On the relation between the “Old and New Testaments” in the theology of Origen, see Lubac, Henri de, History and Spirit: The Understanding of Scripture according to Origen (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007)Google Scholar.
28 Athéisme et sens de l'homme, 29.
29 Ibid, 24.
30 Hegel, , Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, ed. Hodgson, Peter C., 3 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, 1985, 1987), 1:84Google Scholar.
31 Ibid, 1:186–187.
32 Ibid, 1:318.
33 Ibid, 3:233. Thus, in the Hotho transcript of the 1824 lectures, Hegel asserts: “Religion is therefore the relation of [finite] spirit to absolute spirit. But, as knowing, spirit is thus what is known or absolute spirit itself, and religion is the self-consciousness of absolute spirit—its relation to itself as the object of its knowing, which is self-knowing… Religion is also consciousness, and has therefore finite consciousness within it, though sublated as finite because absolute spirit is itself the other that it knows, and it is only by knowing itself that it becomes absolute spirit. Consequently, however, it is only mediated through consciousness or finite spirit, so that it has to finitize itself in order by this finitization to come to know itself” (Ibid, 1:318).
34 The Essence of Christianity, 2–3, emphasis added.
35 Stanislas Breton, La Passion du Christ et les philosophes; cited in Henri de Lubac, Athéisme et sens de l'homme, 28.
36 The Essence of Christianity, 14.
37 Of particular importance to Feuerbach's psychological overtaking of the Christian faith is the doctrine of the Incarnation. As a morally perfect being, Feuerbach explains, God is nothing other than the moral nature of man posited as an absolute. But consciousness of the absolutely perfect moral nature entails with it a consciousness of one's own moral ineptitude. It is therefore “a dispiriting consciousness, for it is the consciousness of our personal nothingness, and of the kind which is the most acutely felt—moral nothingness” (Ibid, 46–47). Man is placed in a state of disunion with himself, a sinner in contradiction to a just and angry God. It is thus only insofar as he is conscious of love as the highest truth—only insofar as he regards God as not merely a moral law but a personal, loving being—that man is ultimately delivered from this state of disunion. Love is therefore the principle of reconciliation between God and man and the essential truth behind the idea of the Incarnation. For according to Feuerbach,
Love determined God to the renunciation of his divinity. Not because of his Godhead as such, according to which he is the subject in the proposition, God is love, but because of his love, of the predicate, is it that he renounced his Godhead; thus love is a higher power and truth than deity. Love conquers God. It was love to which God sacrificed his divine majesty (Ibid, 53).
The Christian idea of the Incarnation, therefore, is not merely subjected to Feuerbach's projectionist hermeneutic as one doctrine among others, but rather contains within itself the very justification of such an anthropological overtaking. For “as God has renounced himself out of love, so we, out of love, should renounce God; for if we do not sacrifice God to love, we sacrifice love to God” (Ibid).
38 See “Positive Transpositions,” in Henri de Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism, 215–261.
39 The Drama of Atheist Humanism, 29.
40 Athèisme et sens de l'homme, 30.
41 The Drama of Atheist Humanism, 14.
42 According to de Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism was originally composed during the Second World War as “several disparate articles coming principally from semi-clandestine conferences with an anti-Nazi point” (At the Service of the Church: Henri de Lubac Reflects on the Circumstances that Occasioned His Writings [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993], 40Google Scholar.
43 As is well known, Nietzsche had predicted just such catastrophic repercussions as the legacy of his own philosophy. “Some day,” wrote Nietzsche, “my name will be linked to the memory of something monstrous, of a crisis as yet unprecedented on earth, the most profound collision of consciences, a decision conjured up against everything hitherto believed, demanded, hallowed.” Nietzsche thus saw himself as the man of impending disaster. “For when the truth squares up to the lie of millennia, we will have upheavals, a spasm of earthquakes, a removal of mountain and valley such as have never been dreamed of… there will be wars such as there have never yet been on earth” (Ecce Homo [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007], 88–89Google Scholar).
44 The Drama of Atheist Humanism, 67–68.
45 Catholicism (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 359Google Scholar.
46 See, for example, “The Mystery of the Supernatural,” in Theology in History (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996), 314Google Scholar; and “The Total Meaning of Man and the World,” Communio 35 (Winter 2008): 626–627Google Scholar.
47 The Drama of Atheist Humanism, 67.
48 “The Human Person,” in The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 219Google Scholar.
49 Acts 17:28.
50 This particular reading of The Drama of Atheist Humanism was unfortunately adopted by a large number of de Lubac's initial readers. Thus, according to a recent historian of post-war France, the book was initially “presented as arguing that while atheistic forms of humanism were inadequate, a Christian humanism could remedy their insufficiency by providing the transcendental dimension” Kelly, (Michael, The Cultural and Intellectual Rebuilding of France after the Second World War [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004], 149)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
51 Speaking of God: Theology, Language, and Truth (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009), 43Google Scholar.
52 See Jüngel, Eberhard, God as the Mystery of the World (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1983), 19–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
53 Translated from Affrontments mystiques and appended to The Drama of Atheist Humanism as “The Search for a New Man,” 399.
54 Lubac, Henri de, The Discovery of God (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1996), 193Google Scholar.
55 Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names, 127–128.
56 Existentialism and Humanism, 55.
57 As Geroulanos notes, Sartre's essay is at once “an accomplishment for antihumanism” and, paradoxically, an attempt to maintain the moniker of humanism for his own existentialist project (An Atheism that is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought, 223).
58 Thus, in considering Sartre's claim that existence precedes essence (Existentialism and Humanism, 28), Heidegger writes: “In this statement [Sartre] is taking existentia and essentia according to their metaphysical meaning, which from Plato's time on has said that essentia precedes existentia. Sartre reverses this statement. But the reversal of a metaphysical statement remains a metaphysical statement. With it he stays with metaphysics in oblivion of the truth of being (“Letter on Humanism,” in McNeill, William, ed., Pathmarks [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999], 250)Google Scholar.
59 Thus, according to Derrida, “in the Letter on Humanism and beyond, the attraction of the ‘proper man’ will not cease to direct all the itineraries of thought… It is in the play of a certain proximity, proximity to oneself and proximity to Being, that we will see constituted, against metaphysical humanism and anthropologism, another insistence of man, one which relays, relieves, supplements that which it destroys” (“Ends of Man,” in Margins of Philosophy [Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982], 124)Google Scholar.
60 “On Nietzsche's Side,” in The Work of Fire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 292Google Scholar.
61 Ibid, 296.
62 Geroulanos, An Atheism that is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought, 256.
63 “On Nietzsche's Side,” 296, emphasis added.
64 Ibid, 293.
65 Existentialism and Humanism, 33–34. According to Sartre, “The existentialist… finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven. There can no longer be any good à priori, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. It is nowhere written that ‘the good’ exists, that one must be honest or must not lie, since we are now upon the plane where there are only men. Dostoevsky once wrote ‘If God did not exist, everything would be permitted’; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point” (Ibid, 33).
66 Psalm 8: 4.
67 Confessions, bk. 1, c. 1.
68 See Henri de Lubac, Catholicism, 368.
69 1 John 3:2.