Unexposed to the priestly whetting of pagan teeth with blood, few recognise the urgency of the Gospels. Bewilderment and condescension follows each mention of the collective murder of God. Per Nietzsche:
“…God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murderers? The holiest and mightiest that the world has hitherto possessed, has bled to death under our knife – who will wipe the blood from us? With what water could we cleanse ourselves? What lustrums, what sacred games shall we have to devise? Is not the magnitude of this deed to great for us? Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of it? There never was a greater event – and on account of it, all who are born after us belong to a higher history than any history hitherto!” - Here the madman was silent and looked again at his hearers; they also were silent and looked at him surprise. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, so that it broke in pieces and was extinguished. “I come too early,” he then said, “I am not yet at the right time. This prodigious event is still on its way, and is travelling – it has not yet reached men’s ears. Lightning and thunder need time, the light of the stars needs time, even after they are done, to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars – and yet they have done it themselves.”
The expression here is contaminated across several layers, yet still logically distinguishable. At its most obvious, Nietzsche is writing on the modern disappearance of the deification consequent to the collective murder of a real victim. The second level follows, the realisation that the victims of collective murder are the pagan gods. The highest level is the realisation that the Passion of Christ is not the death of the Christian God but the death of all other gods.
Like his fellow idealists, Nietzsche felt that the death of an exhausted religion – the Biblical religion – would allow the birth of some new god, a birth unrooted in the death of the resented Biblical God. Idealists are unable to apprehend the reality, rendered intelligible by Christianity, of collective violence, and see it only as a cure for the fermenting pandemonium – the ressentiment – of their, and our, time. The caustic trickle fills the cup of every “intellectual” nihilist, i.e., the psychologists.
Despite its enshrinement in the modern canon, the dramatic insights of Nietzsche have been buried under the rhetorical ornaments and milquetoast analyses necessary to avoid the dreadful guilt of collective violence.
These men – these pagans – exemplify the heights of ressentiment; their vomits plaster every theatre and brothel. They know but one thing: to fill their belly and be drunk, to be wounded whilst fighting for their favourite charioteer, to live like goats and pigs. Here the slayers of Christ gather together, here the Cross is driven out, here God is blasphemed, here the Father is ignored, the Son is outraged, here the grace of the Spirit is rejected. The response to the God Question is as it was in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: You are free to think as you will, and everything of yours shall remain yours, but from this day on, you are one apart from the many.
Yet where nineteenth-century nihilism quietly seethed, modern annihilism flares, with pagan intensity, for real violence. And as Christ said: Every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste, and no city or house divided against itself will stand. And if Satan casts out Satan, he is divided against himself. How then will his kingdom stand?
Few are ready for the answer of Christ: The stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.