In the previous three episodes we talked about the decisive influence of Greco-Latin thought—and of thinkers such as René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza—on the evolution of certain beliefs that, over time, replaced the classical spiritual foundations of the West. I call these beliefs pseudo-spiritual because, although they preserve an interior and symbolic language, they deny the existence of God as a living reality. They describe the inner life of the human being, but they no longer place it in relationship with its spiritual origin. The spiritual essence of our origin comes from God, who is Spirit. That is why there is no true spirituality without God: we were created for a spiritual relationship with the Creative Spirit.
To refuse to recognize—or to fail to understand—that origin is like walking without knowing where you come from or where you are going: there is motion, but there is no direction. That lack of recognition is the deepest problem of the human being when they try to deal with inner or “spiritual” matters without God.
We also spoke about some of the reasons why these two thinkers, among others, arrived at personal conclusions that led them away from belief in a God who relates to the human being and is interested in the human being. Their impressions moved them closer and closer to the idea that God was a human invention. These two—especially Spinoza—had considerable influence on one of the most well-known contemporary thinkers, Carl Jung, although they were not the only influences.
Jung rejected Cartesian rationalism, but he inherited its anthropocentrism. And Spinoza prepared the ground for a spirituality without a personal God—exactly the space where Jung settles. Once installed there, Jung inherits not only a spirituality without a personal God, but also the inevitable problem of evil, which can no longer be resolved through reconciliation, but only through management and integration.
When, for example, Spinoza defines the human task as controlling passions, the work is purely human. There is no intervention of God. Yet Spinoza—as many others—dismissed or discarded the words of the prophets when they spoke on God’s behalf and said that He would give them a new heart and a new spirit so they could fulfill His law. In other words, God Himself would free us from our own shadows. This is the central knot of the matter.
To accept those prophetic words is to accept that God does it for us—and not that we do it ourselves. That is where the voice of God, true spirituality, and the voice of man—pseudo-spiritual religion—collide. Because religion is created by man to occupy the place of God in the only domain where God alone can govern: the spiritual domain. Freedom from shadows—or from evil—is not something the human being can achieve without the spiritual help of God. The human being who wants to be free from their shadows should take the leap of faith and reconcile with the Creator. That is where the Covenant resumes, and where we become free from shadows.
The influencers of modern thought did not arise out of a vacuum, as if hanging from some random branch in a forest. They were born in the West, where Judeo-Christian culture and religion had already taken root. Put differently: they—and we—are heirs of a worldview shaped by the union of those two religions.
The problem is that these thinkers—beginning with René Descartes—began to observe incoherences and absurdities within their own religions, and they liked to think. From Descartes to Jung, all these men were influenced by the religion they lived inside of or knew intimately. The names that follow are the thinkers whose ideas became the foundation on which modern and contemporary thought was built. We will look at their relationship with religion and their key contribution to how people think about God today.
1. René Descartes (1596–1650)
His relationship with religion: He was Catholic and was educated by the Jesuits. He lived in a deeply Christian Europe where the arm of the Inquisition imposed itself and governed.
His key contribution: God is no longer the living Source but a logical guarantee, and the starting point is no longer God but the self (“I think, therefore I am”).
The decisive movement here is this: God becomes subordinate to the rational subject—the thinking mind. Descartes does not deny God, but he empties God of a personal relationship with the human being.
2. Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677)
His relationship with religion: He was born into a Jewish family and was excommunicated from his community. Spinoza rejected a personal God.
His key contribution: God = Nature (Deus sive Natura). God does not speak, does not love, does not judge, does not relate. And one of man’s functions is to tame his passions. These are what Jung later calls “shadows,” but here the shadows must be integrated, not liberated.
The decisive movement: God stops being someone and becomes an impersonal structure. Here God is no longer truly God.
3. David Hume (1711–1776)
His relationship with religion: Raised in a Protestant Christian context. A radical skeptic.
His key contribution: He denies that we can know God rationally—which is true. God is known through the spirit. He believes religion is born from human fear and human imagination.
The decisive movement: God is explained as a psychological and cultural product.
4. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)
His relationship with religion: Raised in a strict pietist Protestant home. He did not break with religious language.
His key contribution: God is an ethical postulate, not an active Being. Morality arises from human reason. In this he aligns with Spinoza. Moses gave moral law to the people as a man—as a legislator, not as a prophet or messenger of God.
The decisive movement: God is needed only as an idea, not as a relational reality. Here man becomes the moral legislator.
5. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
His relationship with religion: A Lutheran context. He studied religion and earned a theological certificate meant to train pastors, teachers, and church officials. He used Christian language.
His key contribution: God forms within human consciousness and develops through history.
The decisive movement: God is identified with a human process. He becomes a mental construction that accompanies humanity as it develops historically—like a teddy bear that comforts a child while the child grows.
6. Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872)
His relationship with religion: The son of a Protestant family. He explicitly breaks with Christianity.
His key contribution: God is a projection of human qualities. Man creates God in his own image—an ancient Sumerian idea, first practiced in the earliest known civilization through the worship of man: “God is galu,” God is man. In that respect, the philosopher was correct. But his thought reveals something else: Feuerbach saw the God he was taught as a man—that is, with human characteristics. I also saw the God religion taught me as having human characteristics. Because that God does. And I thought: it cannot be. This “God” looks like a man and is not the God I know. It is a wrong description, not God’s true nature.
God cannot be compared to a man or made to act like a man, because God is not man. That is the reason I began an investigation in the Scriptures that lasted more than a decade. If someone reads them without letting taught doctrines tell them what they must believe, they see something else. Because discernment—put to sleep by human doctrines—awakens and sees the intrusion of the human voice within them. And these doctrines can be both religious and philosophical. Philosophical doctrines work in the opposite direction from religious ones, but both put spiritual discernment to sleep because both are human.
Because Feuerbach was an atheist and had not reconciled with God, he could not see the difference between the voice of God and the voice of man.
The decisive movement: God is a psychological invention of man. Here what others only hinted at is stated openly.
7. Karl Marx (1818–1883)
His relationship with religion: Father of Jewish origin who converted to Protestantism for political reasons. Openly atheist.
His key contribution: Religion is the opium of the people, and God is an instrument of social control.
The decisive movement: God is an ideological creation used to dominate.
8. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
His relationship with religion: A Protestant pastor father and a deeply religious childhood.
His key contribution: “God is dead.” God is a moral construction, a human idea that collapsed.
The decisive movement: man must create values because God does not exist. Again, we see Spinoza’s logic here. Moses gave moral law as a man. Nietzsche says openly what others disguise.
9. Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
His relationship with religion: Born into a Jewish family and openly atheist.
His key contribution: God is a projection of the father and religion is an infantile illusion. Here we find Hegel’s idea in condensed form—Freud launches it and consolidates it. God is identified with a human process: a mental construction that accompanies the human being through historical development and functions like a psychological protector for the child while the child grows.
The decisive movement: God is born from a psychic need.
10. Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961)
His relationship with religion: Son of a Protestant pastor. A deep crisis with Christianity. He rejects doctrine but preserves religious language.
His key contribution: God as archetype, and the divine as content of the unconscious.
Like Spinoza, Jung recognized human malice, but he rejected the ancient response to it—its origin, its consequences, and its liberation. He did not accept being freed from those shadows because he did not believe in a God existing outside his own self. So he created his own “liberating” system. Spinoza’s passions—or Jung’s shadows—must be accepted and integrated. To accept liberation would have meant accepting God, and that proposition did not fit in Jung’s equation. Accepting or integrating the shadows meant that there is no salvation for man and nothing outside of him that can save him from his own shadows or from a desolate destiny.
Modernity, through thinkers like Descartes, Spinoza, and Voltaire, reformulated belief in God. In their time, the dominant affirmation was God’s existence and God’s relationship with man—although that relationship was not lived in practice. The bond with God was mediated by the Church, doctrine, and sacraments. In Spinoza’s religion, God was not conceived as close either, but mainly as transcendent and known through the Law. Yet God is living and real outside the human being. The reformulation these thinkers introduced led, in practical terms, to a different conclusion: there is no God outside man. Only man remains, and nothing but man.
Still, neither of them dared to deny God’s existence completely, as Ludwig Feuerbach and Friedrich Nietzsche would later do.
Descartes assigns God the role of guardian of the human mind, and Spinoza dissolves Him into nature.
However, between Feuerbach and Nietzsche there is a fundamental difference that must be mentioned. For Feuerbach, God does not exist. Period. The subject is closed.
For Nietzsche, by contrast, the phrase “God is dead” meant that the common man had been deprived of the teddy bear that gave him comfort—or as if belief in Santa Claus had been ripped away too early. This aligns with Sigmund Freud’s idea that God is an infantile illusion.
Nietzsche writes with a tragic feeling and with deep intellectual pain over what he believes is a fact. He writes in The Madman from The Gay Science:
Have you not heard of that madman
who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours,
ran to the marketplace and cried incessantly:
“I seek God! I seek God!”As many of those who did not believe in God
were standing around just then,
he provoked much laughter.
“Has he got lost?” asked one.
“Did he lose his way like a child?” asked another.
“Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us?
Has he gone on a voyage? Emigrated?”
—they yelled and laughed.The madman jumped into their midst
and pierced them with his eyes.
“Where is God?” he cried.
“I will tell you.
We have killed him—you and I.
All of us are his murderers.”“How did we do this?
How could we drink up the sea?
Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?
What were we doing when we unchained this earth
from its sun?”“Where is it moving now?
Where are we moving?
Away from all suns?
Are we not plunging continually?
Backward, sideways, forward, in all directions?
Is there still any up or down?”“Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing?
Do we not feel the breath of empty space?
Has it not become colder?
Is not night coming on continually, darker and darker?”“Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning?
Do we not hear anything yet of the gravediggers
who are burying God?”“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…”“Must we ourselves not become gods
simply to appear worthy of it?”The madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners.
They too were silent and stared at him in astonishment.
At last he threw his lantern on the ground,
and it broke and went out.
“I have come too early,” he said then.
“My time is not yet.”
It is a beautiful and profound piece, pierced through with sadness. That confession reveals something almost no one has highlighted until now, because it is strong and deeply uncomfortable.
The madman—Nietzsche’s character—does not accuse only those who do not believe in God. He includes himself among the murderers. In that “we” are both those who stopped believing and those who claim to believe and represent God. This character may be the only one still searching for God in a world where, supposedly, God no longer exists. And in a moment of lucidity he states a disturbing truth: religion itself has been complicit in God’s “murder.”
That is why he asks:
“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…”
Nietzsche does not write this as celebration or intellectual victory. He writes it from pain. For him, the death of God is tragic reality—something lost, whose loss leaves man without comfort. The poem shows clearly what Nietzsche saw. He knew his religion very well, and he knew that what modernity came to believe about God did not come only from those who never believed, but also from those who claimed to believe and speak in God’s name.
The thoughts and theories of Descartes and Spinoza formed the embryo of ideas that later developed and reverberated through contemporary philosophy. These ideas were built on the belief that religion and God were the same, because people were taught that those in charge of religion represented God.
The Western worldview is structurally Judeo-Christian, and what the secular world believes about God today has emerged, to a large extent, from the religion these men knew. That religion produced in them a deep disappointment toward those who claimed to believe and represent God. It is not that the thinking man did not want to find God. It is that religion itself blocks the way when it puts its voice on the level of God. When that happens, perceptive men notice it, turn around, and reject the character of the “god” being shown to them—because he looks too much like the man who claims to represent him.
Here the Old Man appears clearly.
The old man is not spiritual. He cannot be. He is earthly, and the human self is the center of his life. He wants to be god without God. He tries to save himself by integrating his shadows, managing his darkness, or accepting his shadow-destiny. But he cannot be liberated. He cannot be transformed. He can only accept that there is nothing in front of him but man himself.
The new man is different. The new man is truly spiritual because God is the center of his life. He is not born from religion or from philosophy. He is taught by God Himself. And it is God—by His Spirit within—that has the power to free him from shadows and wounds and lead him into true spiritual transformation. Religion, being human, could never do this. Only the Spirit of God in us can restore what was once taken from us: His divine likeness.