Divine Absence and Moral Collapse: Four Visions of Modernity

This paper investigates the existential crisis of divine absence as interpreted by Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Franz Kafka. Drawing on William Hubben’s comparative study, Four Prophets of Our Destiny, the paper argues that these thinkers offer four distinct responses to the collapse of traditional religious authority and the moral disorientation of modernity. Nietzsche’s genealogy dismantles theological morality in favor of self-created values and the will to power. Kierkegaard reclaims the absurd through a paradoxical leap of faith, redefining guilt as existential despair before the divine. Dostoevsky confronts the problem of suffering and moral freedom through narratives of rebellion, grace, and redemptive love. Kafka renders the divine as an absent and inaccessible authority whose silence gives rise to a universe of unexplained guilt and metaphysical bureaucracy. Together, these authors articulate a spectrum of modern responses to the eclipse of divine perfection, forming a shared prophetic vision of human destiny in a post-theistic age.