The Necessary Death of God – Myth, Contradiction, and the Structure of Being

The Question That Will Not Go Away

Have you ever wondered why war exists, why evil persists, why error seems inevitable? Have you ever asked yourself: if God is truly God, why is there a devil; if truth is supreme, why does opposition arise? These are the oldest and most unsettling questions of human thought, questions that resurface in every age because no answer ever seems final.

When we speak of necessity — not as fate or blind determinism, but as the claim that what is, cannot not be — this question becomes even sharper. If Being is necessary and indestructible, why must it appear as if it could be lost? Why must truth show itself through error, eternity through time, life through death?

Across cultures, myth has offered symbolic answers: the god who dies and rises, the deity who is torn apart and restored. These stories give us images of the contradiction, but they do not yet explain why it must be so. To reach the root, we need to look at the very structure of Being itself.

Myth as the First Answer — and Its Limits

From the earliest myths, humanity has staged this enigma in symbolic form. Again and again, myths tell of gods who die, are dismembered, devoured, only to return in new life.

• Egypt: Osiris is killed and torn apart, his body scattered. Through Isis he is reassembled and becomes lord of the afterlife.
• Greece: Dionysus Zagreus is torn to pieces and eaten by the Titans. From his ashes humanity is born, and Dionysus himself is reborn.
• Christianity: Christ is crucified, buried, descends into hell — but rises, revealing that death has no hold on him.
• Hinduism: Shiva, destroyer and regenerator, dances the universe into cycles of death and rebirth, yet always within the eternal.
• Seasonal Myths: Persephone descends to Hades, symbol of death and winter, yet returns, symbol of life and spring.

These myths are not naïve stories. They are humanity’s earliest attempt to make sense of the necessary intertwining of life and death, eternity and loss, truth and negation. They are intuitions of what philosophy will later make explicit.

And yet, myth only pushes the question further down the line. If the divine is eternal, why must it die? If truth is indestructible, why the drama of destruction? If Being is one, why must it appear as torn apart?

Myth dramatizes the contradiction but cannot yet resolve it.

The Philosophical Core

If we set aside myths for a moment, the question that started us off remains: Why must there be error at all? Why does truth not appear immediately and only as truth?

To approach this, we have to return to the most elementary distinction philosophy can make: the distinction between being and nothing. Severino insists that the nothing does not exist — an axiom as simple as it is inexhaustible. Whatever is, is. It cannot slip into nothingness, nor emerge from nothingness. The flower, the stone, the star, the thought—if they appear, they are.

Yet if this is so, another question presses: how can there be difference? If everything is, why is there not simply an undifferentiated One, a seamless whole without division? Why are there this stone and not that one, this moment and not the other, myself and not yourself?

The answer is that Being is not only the “One” but also the “many.” Identity requires difference. To say “this is” implies immediately that it is not the others. If Being were only undifferentiated unity, nothing could be said, nothing could appear, nothing could be known. The very possibility of appearing already requires distinction.

But here a tension arises. For difference to appear, each being must stand out against what it is not. Yet if “what is not” cannot exist (since nothing does not exist), difference can only appear in the form of contradiction: this is, but it appears as not-that. The other is excluded, but it is also there, since it too is Being. Thus, the structure of identity itself necessarily introduces the appearance of opposition.

From here we reach the heart of the matter. What we call “error” is not a contingent accident of thought, nor a flaw that could have been avoided, but the very mode in which difference becomes manifest. To appear as distinct, a being must also appear as not the others. Yet the others are. This “not” is already the seed of contradiction, the place where error germinates. Error is nothing other than the necessary form of difference itself.

This is why Severino speaks of contraddizione C — the contradiction that arises from the nihilistic belief that beings can fall into nothingness or arise from it. This belief is not simply a mistake added from outside but is rooted in the fundamental condition of appearance: beings show themselves as finite, delimited, opposed. And in appearing finite, they appear as capable of ceasing to be, or of not yet being.

Let us pause here. It is crucial to see the progression of thought:

1. Being cannot not be. Nothingness does not exist.
2. Yet beings are many. Distinction is real.
3. To distinguish one being from another, each must appear as “not” the others.
4. But those “others” are also Being; they are, and cannot be reduced to nothing.
5. Thus the difference appears under the form of contradiction: this being is, but it appears as “not” those others that also are.
6. From this contradiction springs the illusion of becoming, the appearance that beings can arise from or fall into nothing.

We can now reframe the initial question: why is there necessity to error, opposition, and contradiction? Because without the appearance of opposition, nothing could stand forth as itself. The multiplicity of Being—without which there would be no world, no relation, no knowledge—requires this apparent fracture.

And yet, the fracture does not remain unresolved. If contradiction necessarily appears, the resolution of contradiction is equally necessary. The eternal structure of Being does not abolish difference but shows it as harmonious: each being is eternal, indestructible, incapable of being lost. What appears as conflict is ultimately the unfolding of an order in which nothing can truly be denied.

The “Killing of God” as Symbol of Contradiction

Now we can return to myth. What does it mean when humanity imagines that the god must die?

• The god symbolizes the eternal, the unity of Being.
• The killing of the god symbolizes the appearing of negation as annihilation: the illusion that truth can perish.
• The devouring of the god (as with Dionysus) symbolizes humanity’s participation in this contradiction, living as though Being were mortal.
• The resurrection or return of the god symbolizes the necessary resolution: non-Being is impossible, the god cannot remain dead, eternity cannot truly perish.

Thus myth does not merely tell stories. It symbolically enacts the necessity of the contradiction: truth must appear as though it were destroyed, precisely so that its indestructibility can be revealed.

Myth as Anticipation, Philosophy as Unveiling

Seen in this light, the myths are not wrong but incomplete. They give a narrative form to the enigma, but they cannot show why it must be so. Philosophy provides the deeper foundation:

• Being is one.
• To appear as one, it must appear as distinct.
• Distinction entails negation.
• Negation necessarily appears as contradiction.
• Contradiction is necessary because even illusion belongs to Being.
• But contradiction necessarily resolves itself, because every being that appears as “negated” remains eternal, incapable of vanishing.

What myth intuits as the cycle of divine death and resurrection, philosophy unveils as the necessary unfolding of identity, negation, and reconciliation within the structure of Being.

East and West — The Universality of the Pattern

The universality of these myths across cultures shows that humanity everywhere has intuited the same necessity: eternity reveals itself through apparent death.

• East: Shiva’s dance embodies destruction as necessary to creation. Buddhist thought recognizes that samsara and nirvana are not two realities but one, misunderstood.
• West: Osiris, Dionysus, Christ, Persephone — the eternal is torn apart, descends into death, yet always returns, revealing that destruction was never real.
• Universal Archetype: the god dies only to reveal that he cannot die.

This is not coincidence. It is the universal symbol of the structure of Being itself, glimpsed through the imagination of myth.

Conclusion: The Drama as the Necessity and Resolution of Appearing

The original question was: why must the oneness of Being include contradiction? Why not appear as pure identity?

The answer is now clear:

• For there to be identity, there must be difference.
• For there to be difference, there must be negation.
• For there to be negation, there must be the possibility of misunderstanding.
• This misunderstanding necessarily appears, because Being cannot exclude what is.
• Yet because Being is eternal, the misunderstanding is necessarily resolved: every being that appears as threatened by nothingness is revealed to be indestructible.

Thus the killing of God, the myths of death and resurrection, the universal drama of alienation and return, are not accidents of culture but necessary appearances of the eternal structure of Being.

Myth dramatizes, philosophy unveils: eternity must appear through its apparent negation, for only thus does its indestructibility shine forth.

The god dies — and precisely in dying shows himself to be immortal. And so too with all things: what appears to pass away can never be lost, for the resolution of all contradiction is already written in the eternity of Being.