What happens when God isn’t looking? Greg Clarke looks at the connections between the death of God in modernity and the behaviour and moral universe of Modernist writers and artists.

"The fool says in his heart ‘There is no God’", according to the writer of Psalm 14. The Hebrew words translated as "fool" in the Psalms apparently refer not to someone’s intellect, but to their moral fibre. A fool is not an idiot, but a reprobate. He (or she) doesn’t believe in the law of God, and deliberately acts against it.

The twentieth century can therefore rightly be named the century of fools, for it has seen the rise and rise of atheism and immorality among its intellectuals and artists. Not all such people have turned their back on belief, but the overwhelming force of Western intellectual and artistic life this century has deliberately run counter to the previous convictions of Christian faith and moral guidance. The arts movements of the twentieth century, collectively known as ‘modernism’, can be dated from the influence of Nietzsche’s books in the late 1880s to the Second World War, although they are still very influential today. Modernism can be summarized as an exploration of what the world could be like without God at the centre.

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