Are we capable of a positive affirmation of life, with all its beauty and wonder, but also with all its suffering and unpredictability? Yes, says Friedrich Nietzsche, as long as we reject the metaphysical foundations on which our world has previously been built.

There cannot be any comparable sentence in the history of Western thought. Although it is exactly 148 years old, to this day some still interpret it in a manner contrary to its author’s intentions. Nor can one conceal the fact that it brought him an extremely bad reputation. But meanwhile its meaning – however ominous it may sound – is actually very simple.

The sentence is: “God is dead.”

It appeared for the first time in 1882, in The Gay Science by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the most important philosophers of modern times. But the world is familiar with it mainly from another of Nietzsche’s works, perhaps his most famous, written a year later, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. This very strange, poeti