O savior of religion,
with all your sermons
you will never persuade religion
to turn away
from suicide.
You stroked
the cold corpse of God1,
hoping
the vanished spirit
might return.
But the corpse
did not move.
You blew your prayers
like spells
into the birth-blind eyes
of these people2.
And the people—
still blind—
ran after you
like a herd.
O savior of religion,
in hope of a miracle
you even slit
the throat of morality
with Abraham’s knife3.
But God was dead
And the dead
save no one.
Upon a straw heap
of myth and belief
you raised
a dazzling palace—
that the first sparks
of doubt
turned
to ash.
O savior of religion,
you sanctified faith
and nailed
the frame of thought
to the wall.
You spoke of reason—
a thing
that appears
only in dreams.
You spoke of wisdom—
yet in that very moment
it was crushed
beneath your foul-smelling
sandal.
From Poems of Madness
The phrase “God is dead” echoes Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous declaration, most notably in The Gay Science (§125) and later in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Nietzsche used the expression not as a literal statement about a deity, but as a diagnosis of the collapse of traditional religious belief and the moral framework built upon it in modern Europe.
The phrase “birth-blind eyes” alludes to the miracle in which Jesus restores sight to a man blind from birth, described in the Gospel of John 9:1–7. In the narrative, Jesus heals the man by making mud with saliva, placing it on his eyes, and instructing him to wash in the Pool of Siloam, after which the man gains sight.
“Abraham’s knife” refers to the story of Abraham’s attempted sacrifice of his son. In the Hebrew Bible this appears in Genesis 22:1–13, where Abraham raises a knife to sacrifice his son Isaac, but is stopped by divine intervention and a ram is provided instead. In Islamic tradition a parallel account appears in the Qur’an (37:99–113), where Abraham is commanded to sacrifice his son (commonly identified in Islamic exegesis as Ishmael), but the sacrifice is prevented by God. In the poem the image evokes a blade raised for sacrifice but halted before its cut.