Deus defunctus

In this outstandingly godless and desacralized world of ours, blasphemy, I think, is no longer worthy of intellectual discussion. "God is dead", as was over a century ago, quite convincibly stated by Friedrich Nietzsche. Nominalism, congruous with secularism or nonreligiosity as it most certainly is, seems to have become the final (/last) word of philosophy - if not the the point where all philosophy comes to an end. Blasphemy means, or has previously meant, impious utterance or action concerning God or things sacred.

It is in history and not in the present world that examples of blasphemy as well as those of heresy are to be sought. In the sphere of religion, heresy (from Gr. haíresis, wrong choice) means an opinion at variance with or contrary to the doctrine of the orthodox church.

In his monumental work in four volumes Henry Charles Lea discusses the heyday and decline of the Spanish Inquisition. From the early modern era he provides stimulating specimina of more or less spontaneous sayings, for which some unfortunate people, by the mighty and energetic Holy Office or Inquisition, were prosecuted. Lea names such actually dangerous, and, to my mind, innovative sayings as "God cannot do me more harm" (meaning that God is not omnipotent since he is incapable of doing me more harm), and, "in this world you will not see me suffer". The latter expression implies the most unclean disbelief in the Final Judgment, or, in Latin, "Dies irae", the Day of Wrath (see Lea, iv, 332).

Ad maiorem Dei gloriam

From the third century AD on, the actual target of Neo-Platonist philosophers has been to reach personal understanding of and unification with the higher spheres of reality. In their metaphysics, no room is given to the principle of evil. For these thinkers, of whom Plotinus, Iamblichus and Proclus are regarded as the most important, neither matter nor evil is posited to be real.

If matter and evil were real, they, in Neo-Platonism, would deserve an equally independent reality as they do in Manichaeism, which, as far as I can see, is a more consistent philosophico-religious system than Neo-Platonism. According to Manichaeism, there are two ultimate principles of being. One is good; the other is evil. This means that both good (represented by God and the soul) and evil (represented by Satan and the body) are real, or really existent, in terms of metaphysical dualism.

In 415 AD, Hypatia, head of the Neo-Platonist school in Alexandria, is made a martyr of philosophy [never mentioned by name in Severinus Boethius' book 'De consolatione philosophiae' from 524/6 AD]. She is publicly tormented and murdered by the fanatical Christian mob; "the they", so to speak, were instigated by their equally fanatical or even more barbarous leaders, the bishop of Alexandria not excluded.

Hypatia, who never did anybody any harm, was murdered by having her skin stripped off with sharp sea-shells; what remained of her was consigned to the flames.



Let us say that evil really exists. Spectacular violence, as a form or manifestation of the primal evil, cannot be said to be non-existent. Crowd behaviour is unanimously described as being action-oriented. Characteristically, it lacks moral responsibility. "Anything goes."