A World Without God

would, in fact, be hell.

...Macbeth's sins have left him so despised and dishonored, so utterly bereft of a single saving grace, that by play's end he will have become like the baited bear, cornered and hacked to pieces by enemies wholly bent on his extermination—but not before he gives utterance to his rage and despair in words that, more than anything yet inscribed in the language, express the heart of a world shorn from God. Shakespeare may have given us a villain of singular viciousness; he has nevertheless endowed this excrescence with lines of the purest poetry. It is the final hour of his life. His enemies draw near, their purpose deadly; his wife, the woman he has loved, lies freshly dead, the victim of her own hand. And so from an abyss of bitterest, blackest despair, he finds the words exactly to express the predicament of man without grace, without God. It is a condition of nihilism that, when extrapolated onto the stage of society, reveals a world stripped of every supernatural reference. "The very fabric", as Luigi Giussani so memorably put it, "of an atheistic society has never been defined better."

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
(5.5.17-28)