God is dead

"God is dead" (German:  „Gott ist tot“ ; also known as the death of God) is a widely quoted statement by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. It first appears in Nietzsche's 1882 collection The Gay Science (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, also translated as "The science of joy") However, it is most famously associated with Nietzsche's classic work Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Also sprach Zarathustra), which is most responsible for making the phrase popular. The idea is stated in "The Madman" as follows:

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? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

But the best known passage is at the end of part 2 of Zarathustra's Prolog, where after beginning his allegorical journey Zarathustra encounters an aged ascetic who expresses misanthropy and love of God:

When Zarathustra heard these words, he saluted the saint and said "What should I have to give you! But let me go quickly that I take nothing from you!" And thus they parted from one another, the old man and Zarathustra, laughing as two boys laugh.

But when Zarathustra was alone, he spoke thus to his heart: "Could it be possible! This old saint has not heard in his forest that God is dead!"

Although the statement and its meaning is attributed to Nietzsche, this was not a unique position as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel pondered the death of God, first in his Phenomenology of Spirit where he considers the death of God to 'not [be] seen as anything but an easily recognized part of the usual Christian cycle of redemption'. Later on Hegel writes about the great pain of knowing that God is dead 'The pure concept, however, or infinity, as the abyss of nothingness in which all being sinks, must characterize the infinite pain, which previously was only in culture historically and as the feeling on which rests modern religion, the feeling that God Himself is dead, (the feeling which was uttered by Pascal, though only empirically, in his saying: Nature is such that it marks everywhere, both in and outside of man, a lost God), purely as a phase, but also as no more than just a phase, of the highest idea.' Of course the spirit in which it is intended is a verily Nietzsche manifestation, however it is important to consider the material that gave rise to this idea.

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Wikipedia