Come to think of it, Nietzsche’s famous phrase: God is dead, has a peculiar ring to it. It is not an unqualified statement of atheism, a simple denial of the existence of God; it is rather the announcement that someone who was alive at some time has died. God existed, he exists no more. A straight atheism would have tried to prove that God is not, does not exist, cannot exist. Not so Nietzsche: for him God has died. The one who is acclaimed by a long tradition as the Immortal, has disappeared from the scene, his time is over. God is dead.

It would be too easy an answer if we decided that, in any case, Nietzsche is dead. We can perhaps qualify Nietzsche’s statement and say that in view of the faith of ever so many theists, God is not really dead yet. But, somehow, we have to agree that something is wrong with God. It would be accurate to say, resuming Nietzsche’s imagery, that if God is not really dead, he is at any rate sick. If he has not disappeared yet, it is at least clear that his appearance is not quite what it should be. And it seems timely to ask: what is the matter with God? Or, again more closely to Nietzsche’s language: what has become of God ?

I think we can dispense with arguing the actuality of the problem. Ever since the Bishop of Woolwich wrote his Honest to God, it has been clear that God has become a problem generally, also within the fold of the Christian churches. Bonhoeffer’s program of a life in a world come of age ‘as if God did not exist’ also finds a rather amazing following.

Those of us who are anxious to implement as fully and as quickly as possible the Constitutions and Decrees of the Second Vatican Council have enough and more than enough to inspire, encourage and occupy us. So much to be done, and each of us has only a life-time in which to do our utmost — so that the less obvious and less exciting things, which will apparently have little immediate result, are liable to pass unnoticed. For example, since 1936 there have been numerous pronouncements concerning vocations to the priestly and religious life. It is only in the past year or so, in England at any rate, that it has ceased to be bad form to refer to the appalling shortage of vocations, so that now there is no need to speak of it in veiled and polite terms, and we can face it for what it is, a rapidly accelerating process which will take all our prayer, determination and ingenuity to arrest. The first necessity of course is that we should want to do something about it, and not, as living members of the Church, exempt ourselves from the responsibility.

On April 26th, last year, speaking on Good Shepherd Sunday, which is the annual World Prayer Day for Vocations, Paul VI said:

The problems involved in human communication in the complex and complexifying modern world, stretching as they do from the cybernetical sciences of ‘communication theory’ on the one hand across to the re-iteration of the modern cinema, theatre and novel that communication is well-nigh impossible on the other, are so complicated and so apparently insoluble, that one might be inclined either to pretend that they do not exist, or to deny their importance, or even to make derogatory reference to the ‘fashionableness’ of the theme of non-communication. To do all of these three things, but especially the last, is to ignore the human moral duty to comprehend and to extend our communicational relations. In considering the subject of indirect communication in these articles, those forms of communication that is to say which are fundamental to any adequate understanding of human intercourse, we have not to pretend that immense problems do not exist, nor simply to decry the popularity of the modern stress upon non-communication, but bravely to make a few inroads. The problems we sketch here are like those mirrors to which Kierkegaard compared his own works; if an ape looks in, no saint can be seen looking out.

In the present articles I want to consider indirect communication from five different points of view. They come from thinkers as different from each other as it is possible to imagine. We shall consider communication in the philosophies of Hegel, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Claude Levi-Strauss. It will at once be noticed that we have to deal with an idealist, two ‘existentialists’, a phenomenologist and a ‘structural’ anthropologist.