God Is Not Dead

By Eugene Halliday

Chapter One

“God is dead” are words put into the mouth of Zarathustra by Nietzsche, the famous Ger­man poet-philosopher-prophet of the nineteenth century. These words have caused much perturb­ation amongst religious people, and have played into the hands of the irreligious, who have interpreted them as a licence for every kind of self-indulgence and irresponsible activity.

Why should the words of one man have pro­duced such violent responses? Who was Nietzsche, and what did his oft-quoted words mean?

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born on 15th October 1844 at Rocken, near Lützen, in the Prussian province of Saxony. On both sides of the family Nietzsche came from Protestant pastors. When he was born, his father wrote in the church register a quotation from the Gospel of Luke 1.66; "What manner of child shall this be?" When Friedrich died at the age of fifty six, the world had still failed to answer this question.

At the end of the year 1888, Friedrich broke down, overworked and inwardly deeply disturbed by what his profoundly religious soul felt most strongly that he must say to mankind. For another twelve years he lived, first with his mother, then, after her death, with his widowed sister Elizabeth. On the 28th August 1900, he died and was buried in Rocken churchyard.

To see this poet-philosopher in his true light, and to rescue his name from the numerous mis­understandings which have grown round him, we must examine his thought as revealed in his works and life. He was no merely orthodox thinker. He saw around him the evidence of dangerous wrong directions taken by many who believed them­selves orthodox. He loved mankind and saw that somehow man's evolution had strayed from its true path. He willed passionately to say something to his brother men that would bring them back again into the right orientation. During his illness he had written to his sister, "Get me a small circle of men who will listen to me and understand me - and I shall be cured". She was unable to find this small circle.

What was Nietzsche's doctrine? He had begun his philosophical thinking with Schopenauer, a pessimistic, gloomy man who finally came to be­lieve that life was not at all worth living. As Nietzsche's own thought developed, he came to view Schopenauer's chief writing as the work of youthful melancholy, out of which Schopenauer failed to grow.

Nietzsche himself saw that one must climb out of one's immature first thinkings. For his motto he chose,"Only he who alters remains unalterably mine". Childish thoughts are to be outgrown. St. Paul had spoken of a special doctrine too strong for children. This doctrine was one of full self-responsibility for one's life-course. Nietzsche's mind was full of religious teachings, given to him by his parents. But the more he saw the negative effect of these teachings on the people around him, the more uneasy he became. He decided to engage in an intense investigation of the basis of religious doctrines.

His research into the Greek philosophers who lived before Socrates changed his view of life. He began to weigh every idea in terms of its tendency to say "Yes" or "No" to life. The pre-Christian world of pagan times had given a decisive "Yes" to the process of living. Nietzsche found that a civilisation's attitude towards life depended upon what it most valued. He found that before Socrates the life values of the great thinkers were those of Power, and Love of life as an expression of Power. And he found that love of power was instinctive; that the joy in life which arose spontaneously from the depths of one's being arose instinctively. It did not come from consideration of fear-based moralities. Nietzsche asked himself how such moralities arose. He gazed into the history of mankind and emerged from his meditations with a strange statement.

The accepted civilised values of his day were those of slaves. These values originated among the Jews during their times of captivity in Egypt and elsewhere. Before their days of slavery, when the Jews were ruled by powerful kings, they had been wealthy, warlike, and victorious. In those days they used the words "good", "true", and "beautiful" to mean anything that was brave, vig­orous, self-reliant, joying in the power to perform great deeds of daring.

But when the Jews were defeated and taken in­to captivity and enslaved, their values changed. Being unable to throw off the yoke of their op­pressors, they invented a new view of the meaning of "goodness", "truth", and "beauty". Under the lash of their taskmasters, their joy in power waned, and their brave, vigorous self-reliance paled. Now it appeared that submission to their overlords was "good". Humility became less painful than open revolt. The old worship of proud power was displaced by a new morality, the mor­ality of slaves afraid to rebel.

Here Nietzsche found what he sought, the ex­planation of the weaknesses, moral and spiritual, of civilised man. They had come from a once vig­orous, healthy people, but a people dispirited by slavery.

Naturally enough, a people oppressed by powerful, alien rulers, seeing no immediate way out of their slavery, had to learn other ways of sur­vival than those of vigorous displays of strength. The Jews had lost by their defeats their old wor­ship of open displays of power, but they had not lost their will to live. A new technique of survival had to be found other than the use of extrovert violence. And here Nietzsche saw that Christian­ity had taken over the Jewish survival method. Jesus of Nazareth was a Jew, and in Him the new attitude of life developed by generations of Jews found its consummation.

"Turn the other cheek" became a key-word to the application of the new mode of effective re­sponse to oppressive violence. But Nietzsche saw a terrible danger in this key-word. It was possible that mankind might forget the original, instinctive love of life, the supreme joy that should spring up spontaneously from the very source of the life­force itself. Mankind might be trapped into seeing life as merely a process of gaining survival at any price, and making virtue out of the paying of this price. He saw that life might degenerate into a merely negative process, a mode of holding down all one's natural, instinctive tendencies to extend one's life, to improve it, to develop it to ever higher levels. Life might become, under the suppressive moralities of pseudo-humility, a mere shadow of its true self.

Looking around him in his own century, Nietzsche saw the evidence of the failure of neg­ative, false attitudes to life. He saw people at all levels of society paying lip-service to virtues they did not actually feel. He saw pretences of humil­ity, of love for one's neighbour, of forgiveness of trespasses committed by one against another. He saw mankind hypnotised by ideas that they could not, or would not, put into practice. He became ill with what he saw.

Nietzsche decided to put before the more in­telligent of mankind his findings. Somehow he had to wake them up to their terrible situation, to force them to realise that if they did not re-assess their position, human evolution would stop, and the whole purpose of the universe would come to nothing. How best to force men to open their eyes and ears to the realities of existence? He must de­vise something that would give a tremendous shock to mankind.

In a century where millions of people gave lip­-service to the idea that God exists, and perhaps, in their own little ways, even believe, Nietzsche decided on the nature of the shock he would give them. To all those millions of professing believers, at every social level from the poorest to the richest, he would cry out, "God is dead!" This exclamation would have two effects, one on those who believed in God, and the other on those who, even if they professed such belief, did not believe. The believers in God would be horrified; the non­believers would be relieved. The gauntlet thrown down to the believers would force them to wake up in order to defend their position. The non­believers would embrace Nietzsche as their Re­deemer. In his words they would find justification for every irresponsible deed they would commit. And Nietzsche foresaw these things. No wonder his health vanished. What he had to say, he knew that he had to say for the sake of evolving man­kind, and he said it.

A Redeemer is one who re-assesses or re-evaluates, or re-judges a matter. Before the Jewish captivity life had been judged by the strong to be their right. Might was right. After the captivity and years of painful, unavoidable slavery, life was re­assessed by the slaves as an occasion for the pract­ice of humility. The Good and the True and the Beautiful became equated with merely negative virtues, with those feelings which mankind acquired under inescapable slavery experiences. Self-pity grew in the heart of man and disguised itself as pity-for-others, as compassion, as love for the underdog. Nietzsche shuddered at the hidden implications, and cried out, "Beware of pity!" But this same man, when he saw a stupid fellow beat a horse in the street, flung his arms round the animal's neck and burst into tears.

Jesus of Nazareth redeemed, re-assessed the values of the ancient world. He saw how strong or cunning men struck at or cheated others less capable, and said, "Not one stone of your temple shall stand on another." The ancient pagan joy in physical strength and capabilities had somehow gone wrong. The strong had fallen into using their strength only for their own ends, They had lost all sense of human community. The powerful had en­slaved the weak, and worse still, they had devised methods of keeping them weak. "If we had not hewers of wood and drawers of water," said one philosopher, "we should not have time to think about philosophy." Slaves were to be the basis of the liberation of the powerful and cunning from repetitive, non-creative activities which were nevertheless needful for the comforts of civilised men. The freedom of Greek citizens rested on the slavery of other men.

Jesus travelled the world and saw its condition, and gave His new commandment. Nietzsche saw how people had reacted to the Jewish Redeemer, saw their increasing negativity to life arising from their slave's interpretation of His teaching and made his decision to redeem the Redeemer. Nietzsche's decision led to his breakdown and death. The weight of the responsibility for this decision was intolerable to Nietzsche's super-sensitive soul. If Nietzsche said "God is dead!", and people believed him, in effect he would have killed their belief in that God, and so metaphorically killed God. To what, then, would mankind look for its salvation? Nietzsche would have to find a substitute for the God he had killed. He found his substitute in the idea of the Superman, that being that man may eventually be­come, which is so far beyond present-day man that this man cannot even conceive his nature. Super-man is not just a superior man of the kind we now know, but a being so far beyond today's man that we cannot have any meaningful idea of his capacities. And this superman is placed by Nietzsche in the position, yes, on the throne of the dead God, for he is to represent to mankind all that previously had been summed up in that word. What then can the idea of Superman do for us that the idea of God cannot?

Nietzsche would reply, "It can make us realise that we ourselves are to take ourselves in hand and to make of ourselves that very worshippable being which previously we had been content to imagine outside ourselves and call "God".

Chapter Two

Nietzsche did not believe that the generality of mankind would realise his meaning. Only the few, of tremendous will power and great intel­lectual ability, would be able to dedicate them­selves to the hard task of attaining the high aim that he had defined for them, the Superhuman task of taking over the universal ruling function of the God who, Nietzsche declared, was dead. Men feel that they would like to gain the power to rule the world, but few have the self-possession necessary for the justification of holding such power; very, very few. To have power is unavoidably to have also the response-abilities of power, and also the responsibilities of power. Real power implies real ability to make correct responses to every sit­uation. The mere external appearance of power, the cock's comb, the military plume in the brass hat, these things are no proof of adequate capacity to deal with the heavy pressures of real and dangerous events.

Nietzsche distinguished between the few human beings who would be able to understand his doctrine, and the many who would not. The many he called the herd, the mob; but he did not believe that herd or mob mentality was confined to the lower income groups of human society. Mob mentality he saw wherever men were unable to bring themselves into a condition of individual self-response-ability, a state of being in which the individual would assume the full response-ability for all his own decisions and actions, and not try to unload these onto other members of the group with which he put himself in relation. Nietzsche saw that the man who relied on spreading the ef­fects of his actions over the group was a member of a herd, a mob-man, and this whatever his ap­parent position within the human social hierarchy.

What Nietzsche willed was the breeding of a new kind of being, one who did not shirk his world responsibilities, one who could assume the titanic task of creating his own being as if from scratch, a man who would be able to define for himself a Herculean goal and work unflaggingly to attain it, a man not to be deterred by any life-negating suggestions, a life-affirming man.

What then, was the real difference between the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, and the teaching of Friedrich Nietzsche? Both taught the affirmation of life.” I am come so that you might have life, and have it more abundantly,” said Jesus, who reassessed, re-deemed the life-attitude of the men of his day. Nietzsche promised no more; only his definition of the means of attaining this "more", this greater abundance of life, differed from that of Jesus.

In the midst of the most unintelligent divisions of human society, Nietzsche saw blindness, ignor­ance, and stupid distortions of Truth. He saw men whose positions in the social hierarchy were con­ferred upon them not by personal capabilities, but by the external trappings of inheritance and gross material wealth, falling upon men from the coffers of their dead parents, or by the chance fall of the dice in the money markets of the world.

Nietzsche, nearly nineteen hundred years after Jesus of Nazareth, like him called for a redemp­tion, a re-assessment of human values. But by the time Nietzsche came to make his impassioned ap­peal to mankind, his mind was no longer the open sensorium of a new baby. "Woe to you who are an inheritor," he cried. For how can one dismiss from one's protoplasm the impulses and tendencies of one's ancestors, and so become a new piece of parchment on which to write a new scripture? To wipe out from our minds what has been written in them by heredity is indeed hard, far too hard for the generality of mankind.

Nietzsche offered his poetic image of the need­ed metamorphoses, the deep changes in the soul of man which would carry him from the state of abject slavery to concepts received from our an­cestors, to a new condition of freedom. "One must first become a camel," he said, "then a lion, and then a child."

By "camel" he meant a conscious bearer of the weight of ancestral heredity. One must make con­scious to oneself precisely what has been imposed upon one's soul by thousands of years of human cultural experiments. One must see that to be­come a "camel" in this sense is to penetrate to the meaning of all previous human history, and to ac­cept this history as a burden not to be thrown off until its very essence has been assimilated. Then, and only then, is the "camel-man" ready for his next metamorphosis, the change into a "lion".

The "lion-man" is the man who, having accept­ed, affirmed and assimilated the full weight of his racial heredity, is thus made ready for the throw­ing off of this burden in the name of freedom, not to pseudo-freedom of the irresponsible man, but the freedom of the "lion-man" who is prepared, in the desert of his own unloaded soul, stripped of all past traditional evaluations, to declare himself free, not from his past burdens, but for the dis­covery of new values, so far utterly unknown to mankind. Then the "lion-man" is ready for the next metamorphosis, the change of "lion" into "child". "Except you become as a little child", said Jesus, "you shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven." The "child" is a metaphorical express­ion for a new beginning, a fresh start, a way of looking at total reality not conditioned by any previous formulations. The "lion-man", having assimilated the full meaning of human traditions, has now become a "child", a new being, untram­melled by the hereditaments of past human at­tempts at civilisation and culture. Of this "child­man" what are we to say?

The Nietzschean "child-man" is a wholly new start, a man, an evaluator, who is in the condition of a new-born baby, naked and exposed to the world-events around him, differing only in one re­spect from any ordinary new-born baby, and this is in the fact that, unlike the ordinary new baby, the "child-man" has a vocabulary wherewith to examine the phenomena of his world-experience, a vocabulary given to him in his "camel" state, and used in his "lion" stage for the attainment of his freedom. The ordinary new-born baby cannot speak, cannot form articulated sounds, cannot ex­press his responses to his environment in gram­matical sentences.The Nietzschean "child-man" has at his command a treasury of ideas, of con­cepts, embodied in well-formed words. He can talk to himself, capture his thoughts, and by so doing know himself reflexively.

A new baby, without words, cannot reflect upon himself. He has no terms wherewith to de­scribe to himself his pleasures and pains, his hopes and fears. He does not yet know he is "human". He is an open sensorium, a living being with all his senses exposed to the events of the world, having yet no adequate defences against the stimuli that strike continually at his organism.

But with the first establishment in the baby of a word, a name of a thing, his openness to reality begins to close. Through his five senses into his being enter the energies of the outer world. By words and indications the baby's awareness becomes trapped in verbal formulations. "closed by his senses five," His sensorium, his natural sensitivity, is no longer "open". Now he is closed, verbally conditioned to see, taste, smell, touch and hear only what his educators allow.

The process of closure of sensitivity is an un­avoidable pre-condition of the ability to live and interfunction within the confines of a human soc­iety. But this closure is justified only for a time. "We sacrifice, but not forever." When the closure of the sensorium has fulfilled its purpose, which is to stabilise consciousness within the soul, then it becomes needful to be prepared again for change. "Except you are born again," says Jesus, "you shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven."

The birth from one's physical mother, whereby one enters into the time-process and into human community, is called the "first birth", and is viewed as a birth from "water", because "water" was the ancient symbol for plastic material sub­stance. Before birth, while still in its mother's womb, the baby sits within a bag of water, the am­niotic sac. When the baby is born, this sac bursts and releases its water and the child into the external world of material things. This "first birth" is thus said to be a birth from water. At this birth the baby enters the world of time and matter.

But there is another birth. Jesus says, "Except you be born of water and of spirit, you shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven." We know what it means to be "born of water". What does it mean to be born of Spirit? Just as the ancients used "water" as a representation of material, plastic substance, so they used "fire" as representative of Spirit. the super-intelligent free power which we call "God". To be born of water meant to be born physically from a human mother. To be born of spirit meant to be born spiritually from the eternal power of Truth.

When Nietzsche wrote his great works, the world received them as a bomb-shell, not because his doctrine was totally new, for he had great pre­decessors whose ideas he had assimilated and in­corporated into his own meditations, men like the philosophers who taught before Socrates, Hera­cleitus and others.

Heracleitus, the philosopher of "fire", taught that reality is in perpetual change. "No man bathes twice in the same river." The word that Hera­cleitus used to express this idea was the same word that is used in our Gospel of St. John to ex­press the creative power that has produced the universe and everything in it. It is the Greek word "Logos", which in our English Bible we translate as the "Word". "In the beginning was the Word (the Logos), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

Are the words we speak in our everyday living the same as this Logos-word? No. Because these everyday words that we use are not powerful enough to create what they signify. When we utter the words "Rolls Royce", there does not at once magically appear before us that magnificent car which these words signify. There is an infinite dif­ference between our ordinary words and the Log­os-Word of the fourth Gospel and of Heracleitus. The Logos-Word is Power, creative power, intelligent power, which from itself brought and brings into existence everything in the whole uni­verse. "Without the Word was nothing made that was made."

The Logos-Word of Heracleitus and St. John is no ordinary word, no mere powerless sound uttered via the mouth of mortal mankind. To re­ceive and understand the mystery of this word, we must be "born" again", born a second time, and this of spirit, which is itself this Logos-Word.

To understand what meaning we are to attach to the Greek word "Logos", which in the Fourth Gospel is translated as the "Word", we are to re­member that to the philosopher who first used it, and to others who followed his way of thinking, the Logos-Word meant "Power", "Energy", "Force", the First Cause of everything that is, and that this "Power" or "Energy" was a formulating force, an energy that worked in such a manner that it produced all the forms of the things that we see in the universe around us.

We can thus see that we have justification for translating the opening statements in the Gospel of John with the words "In the Beginning of Creat­ion was a formulating or shaping Power, which belonged to God, and was itself God, the Creator and Former of the World, and nothing whatever has been made but by this Creative Power".

Chapter Three

No one today would deny that the universe is the product of the activity of power. We know that all matter is a behaviour of energy, for nuclear weapons have proved it so. What we now have to do is to grasp the fact that this power. the power that makes and sustains the universe, is not unin­telligent. Materialist scientists have tried to keep out of their theories the idea that power in itself might be intelligent, that it might actually know what it is doing, for if power is intelligent it might have purposes within itself which could cross and impede the purposes of the scientists.

The scientists seek knowledge in order to gain power over the things of the world. They are not satisfied merely to understand for the sake of un­derstanding. They seek, by means of understand­ing, to control world events, and to direct them in ways satisfactory to the scientists.

But materialist scientists tend to forget one thing: the fact that the intelligence they have is it­self a function of the energy that made the uni­verse they study. That a scientist has intelligence proves at least one thing, that is, that the energy which has produced the world has had from the beginning at least the potential of evolving the life-form which the scientist calls his own body, with all its processes, physical and psychological. Just as water does not spring higher than its source, so the intelligence of man does not rise higher than the Cosmic Power that caused it to arise. The brightest mind of mankind is not brighter than the power which evolved it.

But the moment that we fully grasp this great Truth, we put ourselves in the position of having to say that the vast power which has created, and now sustains the universe, is precisely the power that sensitive men have worshipped as God. Here we must face the plain truth that what mankind has worshipped from the beginning of time is Intelligent Power, the power that knows what is to be done, knows how to do it, and can do it. This power, and this power alone, is all that has ever been worshipped by any beings, anywhere, at any time. The short name for this power is "God".

Nietzsche knew this, and he knew also that this power is eternal. His whole doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence rests on this recognition. Thus when he made the statement "God is dead", he was using the word "God" in a special way. He did not believe that the Eternal Intelligent Power was dead. He did believe that the idea of God as ord­inarily understood was a dreadfully misleading notion which imposed on mankind a terrible limitation, an impedance which, if not removed, might totally halt the evolutionary march of the human race, and so cut off the possibility of the universe taking its next forward step.

Just as if the tip of a branch is cut off, the branch cannot grow further at that end, so, if the highest point of evolved intelligence is cut off from the universe, then intelligence cannot grow further at that point. Either it must create for itself another outlet, or remain undeveloped. This fact was the basis of Nietzsche's great fear for the future. This extremely intelligent and super-sensitive man trembled in his soul for the future of mankind, and took upon himself the titanic task of removing the impediments to future higher evolution. But un­fortunately this great task proved too heavy for his organism, and broke down his health.

When Nietzsche attacked what he called the "slave morality" of the defeated Jews, and the in­heritors of their religious ide as, the Christians, he did so because he was afraid that this "slave mor­ality" would lead humanity into the total abandon­ment of all ideas of heroism, of courage, of the will-to-power. His fear was not without found­ation. There is a possibility of a slave mentality becoming established in mankind. It is possible that peoples held too long in bondage to powerful overlords might lose spirit, might suffer a waning of courage and the will-to-freedom. It is possible that a diplomacy based on fear might result in the total loss of the ability to tell a newly discovered truth, in case it should prove unacceptable to the ruling powers of the State, or to the unruly mob.

Because of such possibilities, Nietzsche tried to formulate a concept that would smash the "slave morality" that he believed responsible for the possible future degradation of mankind. He would tell mankind that the God they worshipped was dead. This would throw men back on their own resources. Most of mankind, weakened by the slave-doctrine of Judaeo-Christianity, would be dismayed by the orientation. Few men are happy to have imposed on them the total respons­ibility for their own decisions and activities.

But to those few Nietzsche looked for the salv­ation of future humanity. From these few, he be­lieved, could be bred a new race of courageous, heroic beings whose nature would be so far be­yond that of present day mankind that we cannot think of such beings other than as beyond man as we know him. This"beyond-man" Nietzsche call­ed the Ubermensch, the Superman. To this Super­man would belong the future of the world. He and he alone would be the meaning of cosmic evol­ution and existence. The descendants of the many, weakened by the slave-morality of their ancest­ors, would be the slaves of the few Supermen. The many would have no meaning except in terms defined for them by the few.

Now we are to remember that Nietzsche had studied the Jews in the days of their great strength when under powerful kings they had placed their feet on the necks of their enemies. In those days the Jews had been proud and courageous, and had had a philosophy to match their pride. This philo­sophy Nietzsche saw as positive and life-affirm­ing. He did not too closely examine the causes of the downfall of such a strong and heroic people, but rather concentrated on the virtues they dis­played in the days of their ascendancy. These pos­itive virtues he contrasted with the negative at­titudes of their dispirited souls in the times of their overthrow and captivity, and saw in this negativity only a life-destroying abandonment of all positive and heroic values.

But in the heyday of their worldly greatness the Jewish people had become over-proud, suffered from hutzpah, hubris, tremendous pride. Believ­ing themselves the specially chosen people of God they had begun to think themselves somehow meritorious in their own right, as if their God had chosen them for their own innate virtue. They for­got that God's covenant with them was a unilateral one, made from His side, not theirs. Thus they had placed themselves in the position where they needed a terrible lesson which was to break their tribal unity and disperse them over the face of the earth and scatter them amongst the non-Jewish nations of the world. Captivity under harsh task­masters taught them what it was really like to be like to be slaves under merciless overlords, show­ed to them how others had suffered at their hands under their dominion. As Nietzsche saw, they learned sadly the condition of slaves, changed their haughty bearing for a more subservient mien, hid their damaged pride under obsequious external behaviour. Under their powerful over­lords they acquired a sense of humility they had never known before. They began to see in their God a quality they had before considered un­worthy of their attention, the quality of mercy, of compassion, a quality that in the days of their supreme over-lordship over others they had never contemplated. But all kinds of lessons have to be learned.

The once-victorious chosen people had to learn not only the ways of pride and intolerant cruelty, they had also to learn what is meant to suffer under such ways. The wholesome human life is possible only after experience of all the results of human activities. This is a terrible fact which the long history of human atrocities and responses to them demonstrate to us. "Sorrow must come: woe to him by whom." Most members of mankind learn only by experience. Very few yet have the capac­ity to think logically through a hypothetical situat­ion and reach by sheer thought a true conclusion. Very few have the refinement of feeling needed to enter into the emotional experiences of others. Therefore, for most people, only the facts of experience can teach the end results of human activities.

Being what we are at our present stage of evol­ution, we human beings lack the logic and the sensitivity to be able to enter into each other's joys and sorrows, hopes and fears. But we know enough about ourselves to be aware that we need to know more about human nature. Until our sensitivity is considerably increased we know that we shall make mistakes, and that we shall pay for our mistakes in some way, whether we like it or not. We know, therefore, that if we are to become able to get along together in anything like har­mony, we must make allowances for each other's errors. We must learn self-control, and self-con­trol is utterly contrary to the pleasure-drives which naturally rule our being.

Because Nietzsche saw Joy-in-life as a su­preme value, he saw sadness and misery as mere negations of life, which, if they were viewed in themselves without comprehending their origin, they would be. But sadness and misery arise from activities which result in reactions which cannot be sufficiently controlled. The strong, proud man may enslave another, weaker man, but this does not mean the weaker man will necessarily stay weaker or will not devise some subtle mode of retaliation.

Instead of seeing all the heroic, brave, cour­ageous, cruel acts of strong men as purely life affirming, as Nietzsche tended to see them, and all the careful, diplomatic, humble, obsequious acts as life-negating, we can view them all in a different way. The heroic acts of men proud of their strength, insofar as they negate or enslave other men, are themselves the very means where­by the enslaved are provoked to refine their perceptions and to develop their understanding of human nature, so that the insensitive strong men are finally forced to take cognizance of the subtle­ties of the weak. "The mountains shall be laid low, and the valleys be exalted."

Gradually the strong are compelled by the weak to consider the results of the injudicious use of their strength, and the weak of body become strong in their minds, until their efficiency in many things finally convinces the strong in body that the physically weak may be a force to be reck­oned with. The well-armoured nobility found the long-bows of the yeomen a serious threat to their supremacy.

Weakness of body, the limitations of merely physical strength, have given rise to many power­ful weapons, the sling, the bow, the gun, the cannon, the nuclear bomb and the international ballistic missile. The superman of the future will have much to contend with from the others he may view as inferior. For the man reduced by slavery to the level of a coward may by the forced use of his intelligence become the inventor of super-weapons which will give rise to the re-birth of his courage.

Not unfounded was Nietzsche's fear of the cun­ning which may compensate for weakness by inventing new weapons to extend man's power, for with this extension will go also the magnif­ication of his self-image, and with this may come a new and even greater conceit, the colossal pride of the man who, thinking himself equipped with all the nuclear technology he needs, will "strive to take the Kingdom of Heaven by storm".

But God has ready His response to this attempt.

Chapter Four

As we have seen, when Nietzsche declared that God is dead, he did not mean that intelligent power was dead, and infinite intelligent power is what we mean by the word "God". Nietzsche knew that the universe is a work of intelligent power, that all greatness in world history is the product of such power, directed by its own intelli­gence. What he was afraid of was that the leaders of mankind might forget this fact, might be overcome by the negative attitudes of the masses of enslaved people suffering terribly from the de­generation brought on by their enslavement. See­ing this mass suffering, he thought, might bring the leaders of mankind to a halt in their evolution­ary march, might cause them to cease to demand even from themselves the super-efforts which are a necessary pre-condition of the forward move­ment itself. "Beware of pity", said Nietzsche.

The example of ants and bees demonstrate to us the actuality of social systems established in a totally repetitive way, a way in which each in­dividual insect has no meaning other than as an entirely obedient unit in a social machine which has continued so for millions of years. It is not so impossible that mankind might fall into such a closed, repetitive system of social activities and forget all the higher possibilities of free activity open to it.

Let us imagine a society of men and women who have accepted as their goal the establishment of social institutions all based n mere politeness and civility, a society in which “nice manners” have become the meaning of existence, a society in which only “pleasant” truths are allowed expression, in case someone’s feelings should be hurt.  In such a society the hard facts of existence would be veiled over.  Death would become an unmentionable; pain and sickness would become only an occasion for polite condolence or pity, and pity itself but a covering-over of one’s fears of a possible painful future for oneself.

But there is something about this imaginary society which we do not like. Something in our souls speaks against it. There is something lacking in it, the element of genuineness.

We all like to think of ourselves as somehow genuine, that is, real, authentic, not false, spurious or fictitious.

We do not like to think of ourselves as of no account. But if we are to be genuine, real, we must become participators in our own creation. We must co-operate with the powers that rule in the universe; we must not be merely passive to their action upon us. We must take up the task of our own development; we must learn to swim in the ocean of life, and not only in calm weather. When the first man and woman decided to forsake their original innocence in order to gain knowledge of the difference between good and evil, they entered on an adventure which committed their children to a long and painful course of instruction. We, who are the children of their children, and so on, down to today, have suffered the consequence of their original decision. We have preferred to know good from evil. We have also preferred to believe that good is the pleasant and the unpleasant the evil. But it has not worked out so simply.

From believing that the good is the pleasant we have been led to pursue the pleasant and avoid the unpleasant, and in so doing we have divided our souls in two. For what is unpleasant we, insofar as we can, have suppressed and driven from our consciousness. In so doing we have created what the depth psychologists have named the "uncon­scious" mind, that zone of our being which in fact is like an internal private hell, a hell in which all our suppressed fears lurk and squirm in continual anxiety.

This fact of the unconscious, anxiety-turbulat­ed mind in us, drives us continuously to avoid investigating our own deepest contents. But we cannot be real, cannot be authentic, unless we thoroughly know ourselves, and for this thorough self-knowledge we must dare to face ourselves in our innermost being.

Knowing this fact of the unconscious mind, Nietzsche prophesied serious conflicts for future mankind, vandalism and wars which the simple­-minded evolutionists thought lay only in the past. Today, with world events as they are, we see Nietzsche's visions confirmed. The whole system of conscious control in the world is breaking down. We see literature advising us "What to do when the system breaks down".

When the system of conscious egotistic control breaks down, mankind will see the final results of its preference for the "knowing of good and evil", and the equating of the good with the pleasant and the evil with the unpleasant.

Mankind might possibly have continued in the innocent way of its original situation, in harmony with nature, but for whatever motive, knowledge was chosen in preference to spontaneous living in the presence of the divine spirit. This spontaneous spiritual living was symbolised in the "Tree of Life" in the centre of the Garden of Eden.

When our first ancestors chose knowledge of good and evil in preference to the spontaneous life of spirit, mankind was expelled from the place of spirit, and sent out into the world of matter to discover the knowledge preferred. But in the symbolism of the Bible Cherubim were placed to stop the return of mankind into the realm of spon­taneous spiritual living until the full lesson of the knowledge of good and evil had been learned. This lesson we are still in the process of learning, and the learning is not all pleasant. "God" is the short name for the infinitely intelligent Supreme Power by whose activity the universe has been allowed to come into being. Any strength or intel­ligence exhibited by any of the great men of world history has been but a local and temporary ex­pression of some of the power of that Infinite Being which the most intelligent men have wor­shipped as the Source of their own existence. Every act of intelligence of any creature is by per­mission of the Supreme Intelligence that rules the universe. This Supreme Intelligent Power could totally inhibit the activities of any of its creatures, but it has willed and still wills that man should be free to decide for himself what he shall do, and how he shall do it. Why has man been allowed this freedom?

God is love, and love is possible only in free­dom, and it is God's will that mankind shall love God, not that mankind shall obey God merely from fear of the reprisals possible for infinite power. If man is to love God, then man must be left to do so. Here is the source of the lengthening problem of mankind, for man does not like to be constrained. He prefers the freedom, which God allows him, more than he likes to worship the Creator who gave it to him.

We all know this tendency in the human race to prefer to be authentic, to be the author of our own being. We do not feel real to ourselves, faith­ful to our own self, unless we can make our own minds up, in our own ways. This is the conseq­uence of the spiritual freedom God has allowed us. In being free we are aware that we are to make up our own minds, that our freedom pre-supposes that we are in charge of ourselves, that freedom implies self-responsibility.

We love freedom, for it allows us to justify do­ing what we want. But freedom means that we, and we alone, are responsible for what we do. Freedom implies responsibility; but although we love freedom we tend not to like self-respons­ibility. Yet without self-responsibility we cannot be the authentic, real beings we desire to be.

God, the Supreme Infinite Intelligent Power which has created the universe and all creatures in it, is eternal. He is not limited merely to ex­pressions in Time, as physical man is. God, hav­ing eternity in Himself, can afford to be infinitely patient. He can wait without fear for man to go through all the time-experiences which he needs to complete his investigations of the knowledge of good and evil. And man, because physically he is bound by the laws of time and matter, tends to become tired of learning the same old lesson - that actions have effects, that freedom implies responsibility, that real authenticity demands that one shall accept that the condition of one's soul is the logical outcome of the totality of one's own decisions.

Finally, when a man comes to die, what his soul possesses is nothing but the memory of all his decisions and their effects upon him, and the pres­ent state of his soul at death. The dying man sees himself in the mirror of his own soul as he has become in the act of making the life-decisions that he has made. There is no escape from this. Even the man who disbelieves in a life after death will have to face finally the image of himself as he knows that he made himself. Freedom, that most loved of all attributes of man's soul, is unavoid­ably also self-responsibility. And God can afford to wait for man to realise this great fact.

When the philosophers and poets and scientists and statesmen of the world make their statements about the nature of reality, they do so in the free­dom their Creator has allowed them. Some of their statements approximate to the truth, some are blatantly false, some are ambiguous, and God allows all to gain publication, for what is present­ed to mankind is given to be the occasion of free choice.

When we hear a truth or a falsity we can will to agree or to disagree with it. When Nietzsche says "God is dead", we can be pleased to hear it, or disagree with it profoundly. Whether we agree or disagree depends upon our motive, our own intention to live in one way or another.

When Nietzsche said "God is dead" he did so from the freedom God gave him. He was not fight­ing against the Intelligence and Power which he knew moved in the world. He was fighting to put this Intelligence and Power into its rightful place in the soul of man, within the true perspective which centuries of misuse had misplaced. Seeing Nietzsche's terrible dilemma, we cannot hold against him what he said. His motive was right. The weight of ancestral contradictions in him broke him down. "Woe to you who are an inheritor."

The impact of Nietzsche's writings on the minds of men is not yet finished. The quick seiz­ure of his words in their most superficial sense by those who were pleased to hear "God is dead", will not halt the deeper minds who will seek the profounder meaning of his words. Just at the mo­ment when God-haters think they will triumph, they will see the rebirth once more of the ever-­resurrecting God.

We know that our freedom involves our self­-responsibility. We know that the future of the world has been left in our hands. We know that what we shall create in the future shall stand for a time as the kind of beings we have made of our­selves. We know that future generations shall judge us by our works. Add to this that Nietzsche believed in the Eternal Recurrence. All our deeds shall be done again and again, until in our freedom we have the will and the courage to change them in accord with the new view of reality which our long search for knowledge of good and evil shall unveil.

God allowed Nietzsche to speak, as He allows others of mankind to have their say, so that we can decide for ourselves what we prefer to believe. As we choose, so shall we become.

The End