Yet unlike Matthew Arnold, who saw the faith of the age retreating like an ocean current and was terrified by it, Nietzsche in a sense welcomes the abyss. He is, as he puts it, an “immoralist.” In his view, the abyss enables us for the first time to escape guilt. It vanquishes the dragon of obligation. It enables us to live “beyond good and evil.” Morality is no longer given to us from above; it now becomes something that we devise for ourselves. Morality requires a comprehensive remaking, what Nietzsche terms a “transvaluation.” The old codes of “thou shalt not” are now replaced by “I will.”
Therefore, in Nietzsche’s scheme it is not strictly accurate to say that God has died. Rather, man has killed God in order to win for himself the freedom to make his own morality. And the morality that Nietzsche celebrates is the morality of striving and self-assertion, “the deification of passion,” “splendid animality,” or in Nietzsche’s famous phrase, “the will to power.” Any goal, even one that imposes massive hardship or suffering on the human race, is legitimate if we pursue it with energy, resolution, and commitment.
There is a recklessness and savagery in Nietzsche’s rhetoric that thrills the heart of many modern atheists. We see it in the French existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre, who used Nietzsche as their foundation for a philosophy based on moral freedom. I also hear aNietzschean strain in Christopher Hitchens when he protests against the moral supervision of God, whom he portrays as a jealous tyrant. But most contemporary atheists—Hitchens included—aren’t willing to go as far as Nietzsche does in reviling the traditional norms of pity and Christian charity. Their rebellion is more confined. It is, one may say, a pelvic revolt against God.
It is chiefly because of sex that most contemporary atheists have chosen to break with Christianity. “The worst feature of the Christian religion.” Bertrand Russell wrote in Why I Am Not a Christian, “is its attitude toward sex.” Hitchens writes that “the divorce between the sexual life and fear… can now at last be attempted on the sole condition that we banish all religions from the discourse.”25 When an atheist gives elaborate justifications for why God does not exist and why traditional morality is an illusion, he is very likely thinking of his sex organs. It may well be that if it weren’t for that single commandment against adultery, Western man would still be Christian!
Malcolm Muggeridge, the noted commentator and convert to Catholicism, pointed out that eroticism is the mysticism of materialism. Oddly enough, this doctrine is set forth most clearly in the work of that apostle of sexual deviancy, the Marquis de Sade. His Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man features the dying man’s confession that abandoning a belief in God is the first step to unleashing the genitals and enjoying life. In Philosophy in the Bedroom, de Sade features a fifteen-year-old nun who has shed her faith in God and discovered in its place the delights of incest, sodomy, and sexual flagellation.
Most modern atheists find de Sade as excessive as Nietzsche, and they confine themselves to promiscuity, adultery, and other forms of illicit sex. I am not objecting to their passions here. These are completely understandable to every religious believer. Recall the newly converted Augustine, praying to God to make him chaste, “but not yet.” Augustine would not find it puzzling or mysterious that a whole generation of young people today rebel against Christianity because of its teachings on premarital sex, contraception, abortion, homosexuality, and divorce.
