Schelling and the death of God

I The philosophical category death of God is typically attributed to the thought of Nietzsche. In the present communication, it will be my purpose to argue that this concept can be chanced upon in the philosophy of Schelling, albeit with a rather distinct meaning from, and perhaps even opposed to, the one we find in Nietzsches world view. Let us begin by considering how that category is dealt with in Nietzsche. Death of God is a metaphoric term used by him to account for a civilizational phenomenon, or process, Nietzsche feels to be the herald, the messenger, of. The issue of Gods death features prominently in two of his first autonomous works, viz., The Gay Science (1882) and Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85). Heidegger points out in his 1943 essay The Word of Nietzsche: God is dead(included in Off the beaten track) that the question had already been set in an 1870s note, written two years prior to Nietzsches youth work, The Birth of Tragedy. Quoting Nietzsche: I believe in the ancient German saying: All gods must die. Although Nietzsche never made any secret of his atheism, his stating the death of God intended here an altogether different purpose. If there were a conceptual equivalence between death of God and atheism, one would merely acquiesce that the issue has been addressed time and again throughout the entire history of philosophical thought. It suffices to call to mind Ciceros work on the nature of gods, De Natura Deorum, quite rightly considered by Voltaire to probably be the best book in all Antiquity, where arguments concerning atheism are debated without any kind of subterfuge. Nietzsches purpose was, however, an altogether different one. Simply put, he wished to show that, in Western Culture, the Christian representation of God had been erased from the spirit of men. Paragraph 343 of The Gay Science reads: The greatest recent event that God is dead, that the belief in the Christian God has lost credence is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe (343). Such shadow is ambiguously felt by the philosopher. On the one hand, it is associated with a feeling of liberation, for, as he puts it, we (...) feel () as if a new dawn shone on us; our heart

overflows with gratitude, amazement, premonitions, expectation (idem). On the other hand, though, that cultural event is still felt by the philosopher as pertaining to his own era and, as such, likely to bring about a negative nihilism, linked to the proliferation of anthropocentric values, i.e., values which cannot but be human, all too human. There is, thus, according to Nietzsche, a somber aspect to the death of God one which, in his view, must be overcome. To make his point, Nietzsche produces an interesting comparison with Eastern thought. After Buddha was dead, his shadow a tremendous, gruesome shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave. God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. And we, we, too, have yet to vanquish his shadow (108). Concisely put, Nietzsche was afraid that, at an early stage, theological values would be but metamorphosed into human values, to a point where the human being would merely occupy the place left vacant by the death of God. Hence the key to understand the anguish reflected in The Gay Science, patent in the emotional speech of someone deemed insane, an object of collective mockery, who contemplates the meaning of such death. I am here obviously recalling the well-known 125: Whither is God? () We have killed him you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? () Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? The herald in The Gay Science actually asks himself, in a strange prophecy, whether we are not doomed to hear but the noise of the undertakers who have buried God, and then comes to the following conclusion: God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him! How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives who will wipe this blood off us? The philosophical and cultural scrutiny on the death of God has been studied by authors as distinct as Gilles Deleuze or George Steiner. Naturally enough, given the theme of the present communication, it is not on the Nietzschean sense of the notion that I wish to dwell; if for no other reason, because the issue is, as I will attempt to show, far more ancient than Nietzsche suspected it to be. As rightly pointed out by Heidegger in the essay mentioned earlier (The Word of Nietzsche: God is dead), the question remains whether the aforesaid word of Nietzsche [i.e., on the death of God] is merely an extravagant view of a thinker about whom the correct assertion is readily at hand: he finally went mad. And it remains to ask whether Nietzsche does not rather pronounce here the word that always, within the

metaphysically determined history of the West, is already being spoken by implication [196/247]. To prove his point, Heidegger quotes from the young Hegels conclusion in Faith and Knowledge (Glauben und Wissen, 1802), and the celebrated dictum of Plutarch, taken by Pascal: Le grand Pan est mort [Great Pan in dead] (Penses, 694). Heidegger cautions thus: Hegels pronouncement carries a thought different from that contained in the word of Nietzsche. Still, there exists between the two an essential connection that conceals itself in the essence of all metaphysics (197-8/248). In order to understand the meaning of the death of God in Schelling, let us cast our attention, not upon the Heideggerian reflection on nihilism and the issue of values, rather in this unexpected connection between Pascal and Hegel Schellings companion in the famous seminar in Tbingen (Tbinger Stift), with regard to which Nietzsche would have voiced the ironical verdict: One need merely say Tbinger Stift to understand what German philosophy is at bottom an insidious theology. In the concluding paragraphs of Faith and Knowledge, Hegel will in fact take the dominant feeling of the Modern period to be the perception of loss of the divine in Nature. In fact, the feeling upon which modern religion rests the feeling that God himself is dead (Gott selbst ist tot) (98) lends itself, according to the German philosopher, to clear paraphrase in Pascals words Nature is such that she points at every turn to a lost God [un Dieu perdu] (B:441:L:471]. Following Pascal, Nature, in the modern world, is perceived as bereft of divine character; this is but the logic corollary of the radical separation between the divine and the natural world, for the latters only claim to the divine lies in the fact that it was created by God. The argument is clearcut and, as I will endeavour to show later on, a crucial one to our view on Schellings death of God. If the pagan and animistic view of the natural world, inhabited by spirits and sacred powers and still conspicuously present nowadays; e.g., in the kami-no michi [path of the Gods] found in Japanese traditional culture loses its meaning within the Christian view of reality, then the world becomes instead an inhospitable, hollow universe, divested of essence, the natural grounds of a lost God. Who ignores the famous cry from Pascal The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me [Le silence ternel de ces espaces infinis meffraie] (B:206/L:201)? A thought that is nothing more than the logical consequence of Pascals significant reflection known as disproportion of man (B:72:L:199), where he describes the status of the human condition as that of one who stands between two abysses infinity and nothingness.

Later, in his Berlin Lectures on the philosophy of religion, Hegel will pick up that Pascalian intuition, this time in association with the passion and the death of Jesus Christ. Hegel tells us that, in that instant, nature is agonizingly felt as being, for ever, bereft of the eternal and the divine. Quoting Hegel: God died, God is dead [Gott ist gestorben, Got is tot] this is the most terrifying thought, that everything eternal and true does not exist, that negation itself is in God; the utmost agony, the feeling of complete and utter loss, the nullification of the highest is, therefore, associated to it (TWA 17:290). This Hegelian view on the death of God, clear and unequivocal heir to the Pascalian meditation, remains alive today in the sphere of the so-called death of god theology, or atheist theology, of Thomas Altizer and Don Cuppitt (the author of After God). It, in turn, bears a clear correspondence with the desacralisation of the world, as proposed by the above-suspicion Catholic theologian Joseph Moingt, when he says, e.g., In the trial and death of Jesus, I see God exiting from religion and entering into the profane world of men () This I hold as the Good News: God leaves the precinct of the sacred where he had been closeted. He is no longer confined to places (the mountain, the temple). God frees us from the burden of religion and the sacred, with all the terrors and all the servitudes resulting therefrom () The best way of worshiping Him is paying assistance to your neighbour, loving one another, bringing justice for all (123/124). II Schellings reflection on the death of God takes place in a rather different plane. The well-known rivalry between Schelling and Hegel in the German academic and university milieus explains much of the vast distance that the former assumes towards the Hegelian dramatisation of crucifixion. Human death, and therefore that of Jesus, is seen as emphasising the essence of a being; death is considered, not so much as tragic separation, rather as the somewhat paradoxical process, already mentioned by Pindar in his poetry (P:2/72), of becoming that which one is. After death, Schelling writes in Philosophy of Revelations 32nd lesson, a being appears just as he is, in his essence, in himself [207]. In his Erlangen Lectures (1820/21), Shelling does not hesitate in defining the goal of philosophy thus: He who wishes to effectively place himself within a genuinely free philosophy must abandon God. For it is in this regard that one should say: he who keeps God will lose Him, and he who renounces to Him will find Him. Schelling goes on offering us one of the most beautiful definitions of philosophical gesture: Only he

who has reached the bottom of himself and therein recognised the entire depth of life; he who one day abandoned everything and was abandoned by everything; he for whom everything sunk, and who found himself alone in face of infinity behold here a decisive step that Plato has compared to death. Dantes inscription above the gates of Hell "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here" should be likewise inscribed when one steps into philosophy. He who truly wishes to pursue philosophy should abandon all hope, all demands and desires; he must yearn for nothing, know nothing, feel absolutely naked and destitute; he must sacrifice everything so as to obtain everything. It is difficult to embark on this journey; it is difficult to, say, leave the margin behind (217/218). The Schellingian notion of death of God can also be traced back to Pascal, particularly to the dictum chosen by Heidegger to characterise the death of God. I am here referring to the earlier mentioned reiteration of the enigmatic phrase of Plutarch Great Pan in dead (B:695;L343]. The expression pertains to an ancient legend, told by the classical writer in his Moralia [419 b-c]. He narrates the tale of a ships crew that heard an excruciating cry, which origin they were never able to pinpoint, that announced to them the death of the god Pan. Pascals intention in repeating that myth can be said to be apologetic, for the French philosopher sees it as a prophecy that foretells the death of the pagan worldview. Incidentally, it should be noted that Nietzsche was not indifferent to this legend; he, too, tells its story in The Birth of Tragedy: Just as the Greek sailors at the time of Tiberius once heard from some isolated island the shattering cry Great Pan is dead, so now, like a painful lament, rang throughout the Greek world, Tragedy is dead! (64; 11). Both Pascal and Nietzsche had here in mind the disintegration of the tragic and pagan view of the world; in Pascal, that notion is symbolised in the irruption of Christianity; in Nietzsche, in the emergence of the Socratic worldview. According to Schelling, the sad and anguishing lament is not nostalgia for something lost, rather the very pagan manifestation of conceiving the divine. It is the fragmentation of god Pan that embodies and gives life to paganism itself. The fact that it remains nowadays uncertain whether Pan personified one or several deities lends credence to the idea that his death is not merely the death of an individual god. As deity of fertility and nature, Pan is intimately connected with the figure of Dionysus a god typically interpreted by Schelling as a proto-Christ. Pans dual aspect as both bucolic and terrifying manifestation and we will find in the latter feature the explanatory reason for the word panic renders this deity the incarnation par

excellence of the tension inherent to the sacred. That being so, the cry Great Pan is dead gains, even in the Nietzschean context, a new meaning. If we look into the etymology of tragedy, we will recall that this word used to literally mean the song of suffering before the death of the animal that incarnates the god Dionysus [odos + tragos]. The death of God, as discerned by Schelling, and shown by anthropology and history of contemporary religions, constitutes the vital character of the pagan worldview. What we are dealing with here should not in any way be construed as a minor issue in the Schellingian system. As I will venture to show, if we succeed in understanding the meaning Schelling attributes to the concept of death of God, it will become possible to recreate the rational logical of his philosophical thought. In other words, it is possible to obtain a complete overview of Schellings philosophy by combining his steady interest in philosophy of mythology with his metaphysical doctrine, substantiated in the theory he developed around the concept of potency. We shall see that it is in the sphere that brings together his theory of potencies within the mythological process that we may chance upon the crux, not only of the death of God, but also of the internal logic of his philosophy. Before moving onto Schellings novel philosophical way of conceiving the notion of potency, allow me to show the role played by the meaning of mythology (and not so much that of myth) in his philosophical system. Without neglecting Schellings permanent re-elaboration of his concepts and ideas (in stark contrast with, e.g., Schopenhauers philosophy, whose entire work can be seen as a metamorphosis of one single idea), we sustain the following thesis: that the philosophy of mythology is paganisms inherent and necessary process, and that this should in turn be seen, in Schellings metaphorical expression, as an odyssey of consciousness (an image made popular by Janklvitch, in his excellent study on Schellings philosophy of mythology). Just as Ulysses returns to Ithaca, to his beloved Penelope and to his faithful dog Argos, so is mythology itself conceived as a necessary process whereby human consciousness totally reconstitutes itself; and it does so to a point where it allows reason to be instituted as that court which has the ability to acknowledge, albeit not that of establishing, its own groundwork. As noted by Walter Schulz (1955) in his capital exegesis of Schellings philosophy, it is the very history of reason that is at stake, in that rationality itself requires its own alterity. Philosophy of mythology is thus, in itself, the inverted image, the specular reflection, of one same discovery, to wit, the reasons own inadequacy to sustain itself. The inspiration for this notion is ultimately

drawn from Kant, particularly if we consider his thesis, found in the Critique of Pure Reason, that apprehending the necessary being, or eternity, of ones being is human reasons true abyss. Hence the critical proximity between the two authors (Kant and Schelling) concerning the ontological argument. Schelling will argue in his 1930s Munich Lectures [1835-7] which are, essentially, his history of modern philosophy that the ontological argument can only reach the following conclusion: either God does not exist at all, or, if He exists, He exists always, or He exists necessarily, i.e., not contingently; but it is clear withal that His existence is not proved [X:16]. The argument shows, not that God does not exist, rather that the notion we have of God is that of a necessary existence. Schellings philosophy of mythology is never, therefore, an ontological proof of the existence of God, but instead evidence of the following question: if the divine is to exist, how is His manifestation processed by the human consciousness? It is to this process, intrinsic to ones self-awareness, that Schelling gives the name of mythology, and the goal of philosophy of mythology is that of apprehending the underlying principles, or potencies, of that process. Among them, as we will see, is the idea of Gods death. The perception of the important role played by philosophy of mythology in Schellings thought is, in fact, indicated by the philosopher himself, in his Historical-critical Introduction, when he highlights the deep relation that exists between his own research and the spirit of his age. What first led me [to mythology], he writes, was the natural relation that links the research on this object with the most characteristic demands of our times, and its deepest desires, for even if [our age] does not fully know itself or its task, it nevertheless feels them quite acutely (XII:141). One of the most distinct characteristics of Romanticism was, in fact, that of having deeply reformulated the dominant mentality of the Enlightenment, to whom myths were no more than a collection of nave fables, the product of an infantile representation of humanity, capable of arousing interest only as more or less exotic objects of scientific or intellectual curiosity. German Romanticism interest in mythology stems from a combination of factors, and it is worth pointing out the most significant among them. While it is true that, in the past, the study of myths could be seen as pertaining to philology or exegetic critique, the late 18th century saw the flourishing of a group of academic subjects (e.g., archaeology, epigraphy, linguistics) which provided a new intelligibility to humanitys mythological creations. That was not, however, all there was to it. What strikes me as the decisive factor, that which explains that periods interest in mythology, owes something to the

notion that a compared history of religions would rend it possible to bridge distances between cultures and civilisations otherwise rather apart from one another. Creuzers insight, expounded in his monumental Symbolism and Mythology of the Ancient Peoples, of unifying the different myth-related materials so as to bring to light the original revelation, hitherto dispersed across the different cultures, coupled with a fascination towards Eastern wisdom, particularly that of India easily attested by August Schlegels edition of Bhagavadgt, and Friedrich Schlegels essay On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians (1808) did create a new horizon where the study of the myth, far from being an intellectual curiosity, now assumed a crucial import. After all, if different mythologies proved to be, not antagonistic, but instead variations on a common theme, then the task presenting itself to human thought, particularly to philosophical thought, is that of succeeding in bringing to light the original system concealed within a multiform collection of representations. Philosophy would abandon its strictly conceptual and dialectic status and become the act of reflection and awareness of the unconscious activity of the human spirit.

This idea will be especially cherished by Schelling, in his venture to reconcile philosophical speculation with the historical-cultural narration of consciousness; only thus, Schelling claimed, would we, not only chance upon the original system, as also be able to reveal how subjectivity can achieve its plenitude and freedom. Now, such genuine freedom could never proffer itself to a reason devoid of sensitivity and imagination; were it to be the case, we would be left with nothing more than a formal and empty faculty. Hence Schellings well-known call for a mythology of reason; anything short of a reconciliation of sensitivity with reason would fail to enable the full expression of human rationality itself.

As already noted, what is at stake in mythology conceived as a whole is the very history of the emergence of consciousness in the world. Each deity translates, in their own fashion, the form in which human consciousness becomes itself progressively selfaware. Shelling names each of those forms potencies or, in simpler terms, fundamental attributes of consciousness relation to the world. Hence the complete lack of sense of allegorical readings of mythology, for allegory always supposes a conscious and conceptual domain prior to representation. The symbolic interpretation of myths proposed by Schelling pursues the fundamental goal of showing the absurd in allegorical readings of the origin of myths. If mythological figures were but thoughts in disguise, mere allusions, then all that is experienced by human consciousness in face

of those rites and myths that embodied it would be utterly incomprehensible. One would be hard put to explain consciousness emotional adherence to its cultural configurations, particularly religious and mythological ones, within the framework of an allegorical view of culture. How would one explain self-sacrifice or the sacrifice of ones children in the name of a deity, if such deity were, as claimed by the allegorical view, no more than an illusory disguise of an idea?

Schellings goal is to show how the history of mythologies is the history of selfawareness of the world, the way consciousness positions itself temporally, but also culturally as self-consciousness. Just as Jung will tell us of a series of archetypes that animate our imaginary (notably, dual static and dynamic archetypes, simultaneously masculine and feminine), and just as Gilbert Durand will propose two regimes (diurnal and nocturnal) in our imaginary, so does Schelling presents to us a triadic scheme for the relation between consciousness and world. He begins by what he establishes to be the first potency, i.e., the first attribute in consciousness self-constitution. His interest in physics and mathematics ridiculed by Hegel as philosophical primitivism or Pythagorism lead him to symbolise that first potency as A or A1. The difference in notation, between minus and exponent conveys a conceptual distinction: minus indicates potency itself, statically considered, whereas exponent denotes the same principle, but in a dynamic context. The former expresses pure possibility of being (XI:289). Insofar as neither includes all forms of being, i.e., every possibility, they discriminate none. In its voluntarism we should keep in mind that Schelling, long before Schopenhauer, asserted will (der Will) as the original being the first potency manifests a will that wills nothing (der nicht wollende Will). In mythological representations, that first potency typically occurs associated to the gods in Heaven, deus otiosus; they are not objects of worship, and their sole function is to guarantee the undifferentiated unity of all possibilities of being. Brahmans Upaniadss intuition qua undifferentiated and unifying principle of all modes of being is a typical example, another example being the heavenly gods invoked in the ancient Chinese civilisation from Di in the Shang dynasty, to Tian in Zhou dynasty, frequently invoked by Confucius. In Greek mythology, dear to Schelling, the figure of Uranus similar, one would say, to the Vedic dyad represented by Varuna and Mitra is a paradigmatic case. The death of Uranus, often portrayed in violent terms, designates the very cosmogonic beginning, for it is from its undifferentiated nature that cosmic order is established. The death of God is, thus, in Schellings view, the mythological condition to the genesis of the world.

The death of God is not just the beginning of a creative process; the body of the divine also becomes the body of the world. Let us take a look into a few paradigmatic instances, upon which the foundation of several civilisations rest. In ancient India, the sacrificial death of the primordial being, Purusha (X:90), represents the beginning of the cosmogonic process. Purusha literally, man is, in the first Vedic hymns, a gargantuan giant, with a thousand heads, whose body covers the entire universe. The gods sacrifice him and, from his fragmented body, all beings emerge; his dismemberment generated animals (stanzas 8 and 10), liturgy (9), the four castes, or vara (12), and the celestial bodies. The moon was born of his consciousness; from his gaze emerged the sun; from his mouth, Indra and Agni; from his breath, the wind(X, 90:13). In traditional China, a similar narrative is found in one their most significant cosmogonic myths that of Pangu (Wade-Giles: P'an ku), told by Xu Zheng (220-265 AD) (Birrell 1993:25, 29-31; 33, 190-191). Pangu is generated in an egg that contains, in undifferentiated state, all the worlds possibilities. After 18.000 years, Pangu emerges from the egg, creating heaven and earth metaphorical forms of representation of the principles yin and yang. At that time, though, those two principles, while already differentiated, remained united. Pangu is thus forced to use his body to separate them once and for all. Upon completing this scission, he feels tired, goes to sleep and dies. With his death, the second stage of creation begins. Following the myth, his body dismembers itself and each of its parts is transfigured in one element of the world: his breathing transmutes into clouds and wind; his eyes, into Sun and Moon; his voice, into thunder; the flies and parasites that covered his body become human beings. Now, this universal mytheme the death of God qua cosmogonic principle, mentioned by Schelling can be found at the genesis of Western culture. Indirectly, we can detect it in the reference framework of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. In fact, the origin of the vast majority of mythical themes read in the Bible can be traced back to Babylonic culture, which is in turn rooted on the myth of Tiamat (B/K: 602). Goddess Tiamat, the primordial mother of all beings, whose name probably means sea, was killed and dismembered by Babylonias hero-God Marduk. In New Years festivities, Marduks victory over the goddess, a triumph that enabled the creation of the universe, was cyclically celebrated. In the epic poem Enma Elish we are told how Marduk built the world from Tiamats corpse. Firmament, stars and earth were created from the

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goddess blood and bones. Now, it is likewise said in the Book of Genesis that the Wind of God hovered over the waters of the earth. And the earth was empty and without form; and darkness covered the face of the deep, and the Wind of God was hovering over the waters. Next, God made the heavens and the dry land by parting the waters (Gn 1:6). From the waters of the great deep (tehom) will irrupt the deluge that will cover the earth in the time of Noah (Gn 7:11). The Hebrew word tehom is a cognate for the name Tiamat. Evidently enough, what we have here is an indirect influence of the goddess death in the biblical ministerial narrative of creation. In all these cases we can see that the first potency in Schellings philosophy of mythology is not just pure possibility; it can also be thought of under a dynamic model. Thus, in A1, first potency becomes pure desire (A=B), relentless search of itself, but wishing for nothing in particular. Schelling considers Persephones description (in the version of Narcissus myth told in the Homeric Hymns) as a perfect example of that notion. The second potency, +A or A2, conveys, as counterpoint, the notion of order, always associated to analytical and objective specification, but also to organised hierarchy. The almost oceanic, or nirvanic, fluidity of A1 gives way to the image of pure entity (das rein Seiende). Schelling does not hesitate in resorting to Aristotles etiologic, or causal, model to render the relation between A and +A intelligible: the former denotes the material cause, the potentia pura; the latter, +A, conveys the idea of formal cause, or pure act. Now, if the first potency is an infinite will that wishes nothing, the second potency can be the expression of a being that corresponds, in an act of absolute generosity, to the wishes of all other beings. Schellings preferred example is, here, Dionysus, especially the version described in the orphic myths: an eternal child whose body is dilacerated by the infinite desire of another, whether this other appears as titans or bacchantes; beyond Dionysus, Schelling recalls the figures of Osiris (from Egyptian mythology), whose body, fragmented by Set, is put back together by her sister and lover Isis, or Shiva in the Hindu mythology. Lastly, we find the third potency A or A3, actual being; like A1, it comprehends all possibilities, but it differs from A 1 in that it possesses the additional power of A2, i.e., the power of self-limitation. The third potency is thus self-consciousness incarnate in the world; one can find it, following Schelling, symbolised in the figure of Hermes, the god of connection and mediation. The figures of Horus, in Egyptian mythology, and Viu (particularly as creator, as Nryaa), in Hindu mythology, and even that of lacchus, in the mysteries of Eleusis, provide, in Schellings opinion, further paradigmatic examples.

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The A1, A2, A3 scheme faces the likelihood of being excessively formal and rigid. There is no question that this intuition of potencies runs deep and permeates the length and breath of Schellings thought, from its youth to the Berlin Lectures of the 1940s. A like principle, often notated by Schelling with A0, can manifest in multiple forms. Reality is one and the same in all its forms of expression, in all its potencies, but it is differently subsumed in each of them. For instance, art is, for Schelling, the expression of one same and unique reality, now reproduced under a different form that difference is what constitutes the artistic universe. The same can be said of mythology or philosophy. What is true of those subjects that make up the scientific system also obtains in the different personifications of divinity. There is, however, a risk of immobility, and that of a failure to bring about a real and effective process resulting in consciousness manifesting in the world. Hence Schellings need to introduce in his scheme that which, in contemporary philosophy of mythology, is known as trickster the mythological figure of irony and abyss, of the eternal generation of being a universal figure in the human culture that Schelling will notate with B. Its presence is universal and it conveys the notion of an abyssal and chaotic (Abgrund) principle without which no system could be free and organically alive. Its manifestations are well-known: Set, in Egyptian mythology; Cybele, in Phrygian mythology; Moloch, in Phoenician mythology; Loki, in German mythology. Its role is that of processing an inversion on the two first potencies, transforming pure possibility into blind desire, transforming ordering into rigid indifference. Hence our sustaining the thesis that, in Schelling, death of God bears two distinct, albeit complementary, meanings. On the one hand, it stands for the evanescence of primitive monotheism, thus allowing for the cosmogonic process. On the other hand, the assumed and willing death of the second potency e.g., in the death of Dionysus, or Shiva drinking all the poison and avoiding the destruction of the worlds is the inclusion of the blind and abyssal principle (B) in A2s process of self-destruction. Tolkiens tale of Frodo Baggins immediately springs to mind: his carrying the One Ring to the abysses, so that, with his (Frodos) death, the ring itself may be destroyed. For Schelling, the death of God is, ultimately, nothing more that restoring B to its status as foundation of being and, thus, to its nullification as actual being. That said, Schelling will struggle with a particular enigma throughout his work: the issue of self-consciousness. In his view, any genuine concept of self, of Selbst, must show us how is it that consciousness, that is to say, ones consciousness of him/herself, finds

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itself detached and split, not only from all other consciousnesses, but also from the world that appears before our eyes as Other. Far from being true that man and his activity render the world intelligible, Schelling writes, man is, in actual fact, the most unintelligible () Indeed it is man that leads me to ask the last desperate question: Why is there being? Why not nothingness? [XIII:7]. The issue of self-consciousness privacy is, for Schelling, a dreadful puzzle, for he flatly refuses to compromise with any kind of dualism. In his thought, spirit and nature, body and soul, life and matter, are one and the same thing. He often reiterates that nature is the visible aspect of spirit and spirit the invisible aspect of nature. How, then, are we to feel ourselves as different from others, with our own private and unique self-consciousness, objectifying an external nature? In face of this puzzling question, Schellings answer will be, from Munich onwards, constant: it is not possible to rationally understand this condition, for life is not a system; it is not entirely reason; it is, too, desire, at times violent and brutal desire, as manifest in potency B. That, however, does not entail that the process by which consciousness reveals itself is irrational, only that there always is a residue, something unfathomable in our life, in our existence, that cannot be fully systematised. The only prospect we are left with is to carry out the history of reason through those mythic and symbolic narratives that embody the history of self-consciousness in the world; they are the expression of the dramas, tensions, treasons, and desires that give true meaning to life. I will thus conclude by saying that, without Schellings intuition on the death of God, we could hardly understand current studies in history of religions or philosophy of mythology. In the words of the Spanish philosopher Eugenio Tras, every major religion is always a fragment of Great Pan. Men of old cried in dismay Great Pan is dead; modern men () amended that cry to God is dead. Such death is not, however, a recent event of late Modernity, rather the very inaugural act of human condition and its ingress in the symbolic domain. The Great God, the Great Whole, is dead and, by virtue of such dysfunction, the regime of death was established, permanently leaving the door open to the possibility of restoring and safeguarding some fragment of the shattered Truth. Each religion achieves the justification for its existence in that collage, intended as symbolic conjugation aimed at restituting meaning (against the harassment of a generalised sans meaning). All religion is, therefore, fragmentary. There is no true religion. That said, all major historical and contemporary religions are, each and every one of them, true religions (123-124).

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