The End is The Beginning
Norse Mythology: Ragnarok
‘This is how we will know that the end times are upon us. It will be far from the age of the gods, in the time of men. It will happen when the gods all sleep, every god but all-seeing Heimdall. He will watch everything as it begins, although he will be powerless to prevent what he sees from happening.
It will begin with the winter.
This will not be a normal winter. The winter will begin, and it will continue, winter following winter.’
I once went to an evening where a panel of Quakers spoke about how they engaged with the word ‘God’ (with lots of silence in between, of course). It was rather brilliant. One particularly Viking-looking Quaker seemed to enjoy relating to ‘God’ as ultimate meaning. It makes sense. In this light, money, fame and power can be rightly named as gods. ‘Who’s your God?’ is a good question. And as I reflected on the Norse ‘end times’ myth, I found this philosophical definition of ‘God’ very helpful (although I am more on the mystical side of things). There is something about the loss of ‘God’, or ultimate meaning, that ushers in an apocalypse of sorts: ‘winter following winter.’
‘It will be far from the age of the gods, in the time of men.’
This myth brought to mind a conversation I had with a librarian who used to put up posters in her library as a way of evangelising her favourite expression of Christianity. Here is one of her favourites:
I politely pointed out that the poster completely misrepresented Nietzsche’s point. The poster assumes that Nietzsche was in some way making a triumphant meta-physical declaration of atheism. He wasn’t. He was actually pointing out something deeply spiritual, psychological and sociological. And not particularly optimistic.
Nietzsche announces the death of god in a famous aphorism in his book The Gay Science, called The Madman. In this passage he tells a tale of a madman who runs out onto the street screaming, “I seek God! I seek God!” Understandably, those on the street give him a strange look and continue on with their evening. But the madman does not cease. No indeed. He yells:
‘God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murderers… There was never a greater event - and on account of it, all who are born after us belong to a higher history than any history before this!’
Nietzsche understood that the death of god could potentially catapult a large majority of the human race into a state of nihilism. That is to say, a state of meaninglessness. In this way, I think Nietzsche was a Prophet. A crisis of meaning does seem to pervade our schools, workplaces and ultimate concerns. For Nietzsche, the decline of religion and the death of God left humanity swimming in a void-like abyss, with no myths, symbols and rituals to contain, support and inspire us. We replaced meaning with materialism. We replaced God with Science. And with it, a despairing sense of ‘what’s the point?’
Of course, Nietzsche was highly critical of institutional religion and Christianity in particular. He didn’t think the way forwards was to go back. But in one of his earlier works, Human, all too Human, Nietzsche expressed the tragic, nihilistic agony that follows such a death:
‘But the tragic thing is that we can no longer believe those dogmas of religion and metaphysics, once we have the rigorous method of truth in our hearts and heads, and yet on the other hand, the development of mankind has made us so delicate, sensitive, and ailing that we need the most potent kind of cures and comforts—hence arises the danger that man might bleed to death from the truth he has recognised. Byron expressed this in his immortal lines: Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth, the tree of knowledge is not that of life.’
Clearly Nietzsche isn’t very optimistic about the pursuit of scientific truth as the answer: ‘Man might bleed to death from truth he has recognised.’
Science is great. Studying the material world is important. But science cannot help us with meaning. Science cannot tell us how to live. Science cannot tell us what is morally right. ‘Happiness is the meaning of life’, ‘Discrimination is wrong’, ‘Beauty is good’, ‘Love is the answer’… are not empirically verifiable or falsifiable hypotheses. They cannot be proved right or wrong in a laboratory. Science might give us some important data to guide our decisions – but ultimately we are left with a question of meaning. And science cannot tell us why we are here. It can only explain how we got here, and how things work.
For Nietzsche the death of God marked the end of an age. It’s like the Norse folk said…
‘This is how we will know that the end times are upon us. It will be far from the age of the gods, in the time of men.’
But there is another part of the Norse ‘end times’ myth. It points to the other side of destruction: creation. It speaks of the flipside of death: new life.
‘That is the end. But there is also what will come after the end.
From the great waters of the ocean, the green earth will arise once more.’
And it is the same for us. The reality is, we don’t live in an age of collective mythology and meta-narratives. There is not one large story and language that holds us all together. I’m not entirely sure we can go back to such a society. ‘God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murderers…’. The temptation of course is to live in denial. To not grieve the loss of meaning. To regress back to things that seemed to work in the past. But just as the Norse myth reminds us, ‘there is also what will come after the end.’
Later in his life, Nietzsche reached the opinion that the loss of faith in collective religion was an opportunity for a ‘new dawn’. In his book, The Gay Science, he wrote:
“In fact, we philosophers and “free spirits” feel as if we are illumined by a new dawn, on receiving the news that “the old God is dead”; our hearts overflow with gratitude, wonder, premonition, anticipation. At last the horizon seems to us open again…the sea, our sea again lies open before us; perhaps there has never yet been such an “open sea.”
Gods do die. Symbols do die. One day, even our God of Consumerism will die. And in such ‘end times’, a crisis of meaning always ensues; and with it the possibility of resurrection, rebirth and renewal. But it seems that the task of finding meaning is now ours. Scary. Daunting. But also possibly quite exciting. And tempting as it is to project this huge responsibility onto an external, outer ‘God’, I believe our true vocation is to find meaning in our own lives and in the lives of others, ‘answering that of God in everyone’, as the famous Quaker, George Fox, put it. Or as Jesus reminds us: ‘you are the gods’ and ‘the kingdom of God is within.’ Perhaps Nietzsche wasn’t such an Antichrist after all.