NIETZSCHE IS DEAD:

The sentence is: "God is dead."

It appeared for the first time in 1882, in The Gay Science by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the most important philosophers of modern times. But the world is familiar with it mainly from another of Nietzsche's works, perhaps his most famous, written a year later, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. This very strange, poetic text, full of unusual metaphors and lyrical inspiration, predicts the coming of a new era. Its prophet is to be the eponymous Zarathustra, a figure whose name Nietzsche took from an ancient Persian priest, the creator of Zoroastrianism, one of the world's oldest monotheistic religions. But despite the mystical aura that Zarathustra radiates, his message has nothing to do with conventional religious ideas. Quite the contrary - for he announces the death of God. And consequently challenges people to conduct a thorough revaluation of everything they think about the world and about themselves.

But what does 'the death of God' mean? Certainly not death in the literal sense - it is not that after aeons of existence a divine being, an old man with a long grey beard who resides in heaven, suddenly ceases to be. Nothing of the kind. The 'death of God' is simply a metaphor for the historical moment whose advent Nietzsche sensed perfectly in advance. The moment when religion - both as a prospect from which to perceive reality, and as a specific doctrine, in particular Christianity - was bound to undergo irrevocable disintegration.

In Nietzsche's view, these were the ultimate consequences of processes that were set off within Western culture by the age of enlightenment. The new independence of human reason that came about at this time, the creation of the framework of modern science, the departure from the stage of self-incurred immaturity - as Immanuel Kant expressed it - led to the erosion of the great edifice of the religious view of the world. Humanity had finally produced tools that allowed it to distinguish mythology from knowledge, and by this token to unmask the claims of religious institutions and high priests. Finally it was possible to see that the power and social status they had enjoyed until now was entirely built on phantasmal foundations.

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