Catholicism [antikvár]

CHAPTER ONE The Absence of God Our time is as the passing of a shadow.1 "God is dead," cried Nietzsche. "Do we not wander through an endless nothingness?" In proclaiming the death of God for the modern world, Nietzsche foretold as well its fate. Destroy God and there opens before men a void of nothingness, an abyss upon which man must construct the vain structures of his meaningfulness. Religion begins in the anguish of a man who faces the abyss of nothingness and who wanders through a broken world made desolate in the absence of God. From the abstract reasonings of the metaphysicians and the nostalgic plea of the poet to the passionate logic of the absurd universe in a work by Sartre or Camus and the anxious questionings of twentieth-century Everyman about "the meaning of it all," we encounter the stark fact that the death of God can lead finally but to the anxiety of the godless or to a rebirth of the desire for God. Deprive man of his God, and he will either create one or die of meaninglessness. The roots of religion must be sought in a human need, its fruit in a personal response. It is only from the matrix of existential need that reason can move, as it is only in the waiting, thirsting spirit that revelation can find reply. The man who does not need God will not find God, and it is his vital need alone which can be transfigured into the response in which the essence of religion consists. Contingency is many-faced. Generally it is an absence 9