Soul Death

     Nihilism remains partial until it is realized that the reductio ad hominem [Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 186] is actually a reductio hominis. “The night brought on by the death of God is a night in which every individual identity perishes. When the heavens are darkened, and God disappears, man does not stand autonomous and alone. He ceases to stand. Or, rather, he ceases to stand out from the world and himself, ceases to be autonomous and apart. No longer can selfhood and self-consciousness stand purely and solely upon itself: no longer can a unique and individual identity stand autonomously upon itself. The death of transcendence of God embodies the death of all autonomous selfhood, an end of all humanity which is created in the image of the absolutely sovereign and transcendent God” [Altizer, Descent into Hell, pp. 153-154]. For the devout humanist, such loss of self is but another form of dehumanization to be vigorously resisted. The humanist, therefore, refuses to repeat the confession of the writer:

The meandering word dies by the pen, the writer by the same weapon turned back against him.
     “What murder are you accused of?” Reb Achor asked Zillich, the writer.
     “The murder of God,” he replied. “I will, however, add in my defense that I die along with him” [Edmond Jabès, The Book of Yukel, Return to the Book, Waldrop (tr.), p. 172].

Nihilism can be a sign of weakness or a mark of strength. Unable to accept loss and anxious about death, the partial nihilism of the modern humanistic atheist is a sign of weakness. For the writer who suffers crucifixion of selfhood, nihilism is the mark of the cross. On Golgotha, not only God dies; the self also disappears.
— Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/theology Erring, p. 33.