Where Has God Gone?

If Europeans do not overly mourn the God they have lost, they have certainly experienced the void predicted by Nietzsche's madman. Human beings are so constructed that they need ecstasy and transcendence, which give them a conviction that, despite depressing evidence to the contrary, life has ultimate value. Without this transcendent insight, humans fall into despair in a way that other animals do not. The compassionate ethic, which is held to be crucial in all the great world religions, also helps us cultivate an ideal of the sacredness of every single individual. Modern secular culture has been liberating and exciting, but the history of 20th-century Europe shows that we abandon this type of spirituality at our peril. Shortly before Nietzsche made his prophecy, the new nation-states of Europe had embarked upon an arms race that led directly to the catastrophe of World War I--the collective suicide of Europe. This has been a century of genocide: between 1900 and 1945, some 70 million Europeans died in the course of political conflict. In the inferno of Auschwitz and in the mass graves that are now being uncovered in Kosovo, we have a frightening vision of life in which all sense of sacredness has been lost.

But to cultivate an experience of the sacred, we do not need to believe in a supernatural deity. For more than 400 years, Jews, Christians and Muslims have constantly revised and altered their image of what they call "god," often quite drastically. If the God of classical Western theism is dead for a large proportion of the population, this simply means that, once again, we are undergoing a period of religious transition. Even in post-Christian Europe, the quest for ecstasy continues, with or without God. We are so constituted that when one source of transcendent experience dries up, we simply seek it elsewhere. Many Europeans now find such transcendence only in art, but the quest is not confined to high culture. Rock music can give the young an ecstatic experience, and the drug culture also shows a widespread yearning for another dimension of existence. An occasion like Britain's Glastonbury Festival can work on its participants in a way that is not dissimilar to the Christian revivalist rallies in the United States. Sport is becoming a national religion of sorts; the passion for "our side" bears witness to a longing for community once cultivated by religion. Even interactive videogames provide a narrative that is not unlike the old religious myths--for it is experienced contemporaneously and entered into personally.

Of course, all these enthusiasms are potentially dangerous, but so is much religion. Lethal drugs or football hooliganism or the solipsism of computer culture are just as perilous as a self-centered, aggressive or deluded religiosity. That is why the world faiths have all insisted that compassionate action is the only valid test of true spirituality; and people in post-Christian Europe are keenly aware of this insight. Many have left the conventional church because they are repelled by the uncharitable behavior of the devout; crusades, inquisitions and persecutions, past and present, have discredited faith. Much liberal humanism, with its strong sense of the sacred inviolability of the individual, can be seen as a religion without God--one that, in going beyond ourselves, gives us genuine transcendence. The deification of Diana, Princess of Wales, in the extraordinary days after her death was a religious event, due, at least in part, to the fact that Diana had become an icon of compassion in a depersonalized world.

Within the last decade, I have become aware of a great change in Europe. People are interested in religious questions once again. But to survive in its next millennium, Christianity will have to change in ways that we cannot now envisage. Any major faith has had to undergo constant transformation, in order to speak to the peculiarities of each new modernity. Christianity has come this far because it had this flexibility. We should not recognize the faith as it existed in Europe a thousand years ago; still less would we recognize the essentially Jewish piety of the very first Christians.

But Nietzsche's question persists--where has God gone? Can religion really be a matter of drugs and rock and roll? Until some of these new enthusiasms acquire an ethical dimension, they cannot constitute faith, but they do show us some of the components of spirituality. The most perceptive theologians have always insisted that "God" exists beyond any of our doctrinal formulations. For centuries, European mystics have spoken of a "cloud of unknowing" in which we must wait for an apprehension of the divine. Perhaps after the catastrophes of our century, Europeans have to endure a period of similar obscurity and agnosticism before they can formulate their sense of the sacred in the postmodern world.

Armstrong is the author of "A History of God."

© 1999