The Blasphemy of Europe/The Europe of Blasphemy

Abstract

n this paper, I consider the utterance of Friedrich Nietzsche’s madman that “God is dead”1 as the “first” European blasphemy which transgresses the sacred in an attempt to recapture a meaning of life without any reference to God. The madman, after announcing the death of God, asks the following questions: “What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”2 The questioning by the madman points to an apprehension that mortals can utilise the power taken from God to invent new games of power. This paper focuses on what I see as a deification of the human, and I politicize its blasphemous character. Though today’s politics appears to be grounded in the “temporal world, the temporal aspect of reality”3 of our secular age, the metaphor of God is still at work. For secularism implies an “understanding in which our moral, spiritual or religious experience and search takes place,”4 one which still seeks to express the secular in terms of “what was once theologically thought as realization, fulfilment and plenitude.”5