Modern Literature and the Death of God

Abstract

The growing realization in the twentieth century that God is dead was bound to bring about a transformation in consciousness, sensibility, and ontological values more revolutionary than that which took place when Copernicus overthrew the Ptolemaic system or when Newtonian physics triumphed and the laws of Nature supplanted the laws of God. In the pre-Copernican view of the universe, man was accorded a central place; all the spheres revolved around the earth. What made this planet important was not the central position it occupied but the fact that it was inhabited by rational creatures whose destiny hung in the balance, that it was the object of Heavenly solicitude. God might dwell in solitary and self-sufficient splendor up above, but he was not unmindful of man and his affairs. But the astronomical systems of Copernicus and Kepler pushed back the boundaries of the medieval universe so that the physical universe was infinite in space, infinite in the number of solar systems it contained. In the light of these discoveries Christian theology would in some of its details have to be revised and brought up to date.¹ And now the twentieth century ushered in an age which acknowledged the death of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the end of the moving myth of the Incarnation and Redemption.