Commonweal HT Dreher

Friedrich Nietzsche has a strong claim to being the first real atheist. Of course there had been unbelievers in abundance before him, but it is Nietzsche above all who confronts the terrifying, exhilarating consequences of “the death of God.” As long as God’s shoes have been filled by Reason, art, culture, Geist, imagination, the nation, humanity, the state, the People, society, morality, or some other such specious surrogate, the Supreme Being is not quite dead. He may be mortally sick, but he has delegated his affairs to one envoy or another, part of whose task is to convince men and women that there is no cause for alarm, that business will be conducted as usual despite the absence of the proprietor.

In an age in which the concept of certainty smacks of the tyrant and technocrat, a certain agnosticism becomes a virtue.

The faithlessness of advanced capitalism is built into its routine practices. It is not primarily a question of the piety or skepticism of its citizens. The marketplace would continue to behave atheistically even if every one of its actors was a born-again Evangelical.