It’s common to see the two world wars as the events which finally dealt the lethal blow to modernism’s utopian dream. However, several decades before Europe burst into flames, the enigmatic works of Friedrich Nietzsche hinted at the consequences of modernity. In 1882, he wrote what might be his most famous passage, a brief story about a wild-eyed madman who in the early morning light runs into a marketplace to ask the incredulous shoppers all around him, Where is God? He answers himself, "I want to tell you. We have killed him, you and I. We are all his murderers." For Nietzsche, the rationalistic Christianity which had oppressed the West for centuries had about run its course. The truce between reason and myth, between order and chaos, was soon to be broken. And this was all because the “God” of the Enlightenment—the respectable divinity which modernism had domesticated—had finally died. Nietzsche’s madman continues on, asking what sort of atonement or holy ceremony will replace the old dead God. “How shall we console ourselves, we, the murderers among all murderers?” Nietzsche concludes his story:

Here 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 to the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering—it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves!"— It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?"

For Nietzsche’s madman, “God” is the god of Western rationalism (which, to him, is nothing more than Socrates’ wicked bastard child). In his wide-eyed frenzy, the madman sees what the respectable Victorians fail to recognize: modern rationalism has outlived its ability to maintain respectability. Modernism has been living among the tombs which were once the holy temples of Christendom. It is nothing more than a squatter on hallowed ground. As the madman saw it, modernism had thereby invited its own destruction. The “tremendous event” which was prowling about in search of something to destroy had already set it sights on the pomposity which was Western rationalism. The end was inevitable, only the moment of judgment remained unclear.