“God seemed for an instant to be an atheist”

“God seemed for an instant to be an atheist” condenses a theological paradox into a political insight. The expression refers to the moment when Christ, dying on the Cross, cries, “Father, Father, why have you forsaken me?”: God appears, briefly, not to believe in himself. The book treats this not as a general rejection of Christianity but as the distinctive force of its image of divine abandonment—a God who undergoes the isolation of atheism.

The Expression and Its Context

The phrase emerges from a discussion of belief that persists even when a person consciously denies its object. Alenka Zupani’s example imagines a man released from prison after being persuaded that God does not exist; he returns in fear of divine punishment, knowing that God does not exist but wondering whether God knows it too. The example shifts the problem from what an individual believes to what the presumed observer or symbolic order is taken to know.

The expression names a more radical version of that uncertainty. At the crucifixion, the question is no longer merely whether a person believes in God. Christ’s cry makes divine abandonment itself audible, as if God were momentarily separated from belief in God. That reversal gives the phrase its charge: atheistic isolation is not only a position outside religion but an experience represented within Christianity’s account of the Cross.

The Cry from the Cross

The book invokes G. K. Chesterton to emphasize that the decisive rupture lies in the cry from the Cross. In Chesterton’s formulation, the cry confesses that “God was forsaken of God”; the expression “God seemed for an instant to be an atheist” recasts that confession as a moment when divinity voices the atheist’s isolation. The emphasis falls on a brief interval, not a permanent doctrine: God seems, for an instant, to occupy the position of one abandoned by God.

This makes the crucifixion an unusual answer to the question of what kind of divinity could speak to atheism. The passage contrasts this God with gods defined by inevitable recurrence or unalterable power. The Christian image does not simply present an invulnerable authority; it presents God undergoing revolt and abandonment. The phrase therefore holds together religious and atheistic language without making them identical: it describes a divine experience that gives expression to isolation usually understood as the atheist’s own.

From Divine Abandonment to the Other’s Knowledge

The expression also prepares the book’s critique of modern cynicism. Contemporary subjects, it argues, may profess skepticism, exploit others without illusions, violate ethical constraints, or pursue extreme practices while relying on a silent assumption: the big Other does not know. Their subjective conduct may change dramatically, yet the symbolic order is imagined to remain ignorant, allowing the basic state of things to persist.

The phrase’s theological paradox clarifies why mere disbelief is not enough to transform that situation. The decisive change would come when the subject recognizes that the Other knows—or recognizes that the Other does not exist as the supposed guarantor of ignorance. Read alongside Christ’s cry, the expression marks a rupture in the presumed relation between authority and knowledge: what matters is not simply whether belief survives, but whether the structure that allows people to act as if no one knows can still be sustained.