Only from faith can one get a true view of God. In the incarnation, God remained incognito. The infinite cannot be changed into something finite. When people saw Jesus on earth, they saw only a man. Yet for Kierkegaard God remained wholly other, and could never be identified with anything finite. Underlying all his writings is the conviction that God exists, and that God had become incarnate in Christ. Kierkegaard presented faith as a purely personal endeavor, and that institutionalized Christianity had become confused and irrelevant. It should be noted that most scholars trace the origins of existentialism to Christian thinker Søren Kierkegaard, who responded to what he perceived as the dead orthodoxy of Danish Lutheranism. These questions are central to philosophical existentialism at the beginning of the twentieth century. Many were beginning to question accepted values and philosophies and noted the absurdity of life and the quest for meaning in death. The rise of the naturalistic worldview and its consequent nihilism, in short, led many to become increasingly concerned with problems of human life in modern, secular mass societies. He also rejected the idea that everything is governed by reason. He rejected the idea that humans were bound by scientific laws and thus totally determined by physical factors. Whereas Nietzsche claims scientific justification for his views, Dostoevsky attacked the pretensions of scientific humanism and urged the necessity of God as the basis of human freedom. Dostoevsky observed the Russian bourgeois liberals and their revolutionary optimism and argued that it could open the door to unprecedented brutality and oppression, precisely because it removes any divine limitation to human actions. This revolt against God was also aptly described in the writings of Fyodor Dostoevsky, particularly in his The Brothers Karamazov(1880). If one is ever to rise above meaningless existence, they must choose a way of life that has dignity for them, though it might bring suffering to themselves and others. This Übermensch was compatible with scientific naturalism, but for Nietzsche he also transcended science, for life has no meaning other than what individuals give it. In place of Christianity, Nietzsche proclaimed the “superman” ( Übermensch), someone without fear of others, self, or death. Christian morality is a command its origin is transcendent it is beyond all criticism, all right to criticism it has truth only if God is the truth-it stands and falls with faith in God.” Christianity presupposes that man does not know, cannot know, what is good for him, what evil: he believes in God, who alone knows it. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one’s hands. Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. This morality is by no means self-evident: this point has to be exhibited again and again, despite the English flatheads. “When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This meant the reevaluation of all values, particularly those association with the Christian religion. But what are the implications? In his Joyful Science (1882), where he first declared that God is dead, Nietzsche argued that humankind must learn to live without him. Nietzsche recognized the simple fact that God had gradually been eliminated from modern Western culture. “What is now decisive against Christianity is our taste, no longer our reasons.” Camus had in fact clarified that Nietzsche had not tried to “kill God,” but rather that he had “found him dead in the soul of his contemporaries.” By the turn of the century, God had simply fell out of fashion. In the late nineteenth century Friedrich Nietzsche had already proclaimed that God was dead. Indeed, it was only five years after his tragic death that Time magazine, on 22 October 1965, highlighted a small group of theologians who all agreed that “God is dead.” This “death of God theology” is essential background for understanding Camus’ Plague. The silence of God-which was a constant theme throughout his writings-was deafening. He had lived through the travesty of two Great Wars and, like many of the time, felt that such bloodshed was absurd and meaningless. Albert Camus attempted to “transcend the nihilism” through literature, which he believed could more powerfully depict and analyze existence than any philosophical treatise.
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