We can no longer do without positive values. Where will we find them? We have
to look within ourselves, in the heart of our experience, namely in the interior of
rebellious thought, for the values we need (A/II, 80).

"God is dead," proclaims Nietzsche's madman, and we have killed Him. The
Christian God is no longer believable. Yet this cosmic deed remains light
years away from being understood. It is a frightful, portentous event. For
when the belief in God evaporates, the entire structure of Western beliefs
must come tumbling down. Is this not a cataclysmic event? Does it not
threaten to wrench from the West the root structure of the meaningful drama
by which we live? But we do not yet know that we no longer believe. We
still go through the rituals, say the right words on the right occasions, and
act as if our life had cosmic significance. But our belief lacks coherence and
substance, its shell is cracking, and our civilization totters on the brink of the
cataclysm.

Such was Nietzsche's vision in the 1880s when, "philosophizing with
a hammer," he touched his tuning fork to the most elusive and yet pro-
found resonances of the experience of the West. Nietzsche did not kill God,
writes Camus; he found Him dead in the hearts of his contemporaries and
proclaimed this fact aloud. But he came too soon. The civilized, who were
amused and amazed, viewed him only as a madman, remaining secure in their
sense of cosmic importance.

But the deed had been done, and its reality was beginning to gnaw at
the vitals of our civilization like a cancer in the body politic. Nihilism was
the emerging legacy of this deed: the systematized belief in nothing, the
sense that without God our lives are devoid of significance. Morality loses its
foundation; everything is permitted but nothing makes any difference. We
are adrift in a Newtonian world of matter in motion following purposeless
natural laws, which during the course of Darwinian evolution has given birth

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