“The Wreck of the Deutschland” (1918), which Gerard Manley Hopkins composed between 1875 and 1876, opens with the declaration, “Thou mastering me/God!” (1.1–2). Yet, according to Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) less than a decade later in The Gay Science (1882), the collection of loosely connected aphorisms that is Nietzsche’s most personal work of philosophical maturity, and reiterated by his Persian prophet Zarathustra in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), the work with which Nietzsche is most closely associated, the major consequence of enlightenment logic is a significant passing: “God is dead” (GS 109, 120, 199; TSZ 41). Indeed, “the greatest recent event—that ‘God is dead;’ that the belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable—is already starting,” as Nietzsche avers in The Gay Science, “to cast its first shadow over Europe” (GS 199). This event concerns neither a physical nor a material demise but a conceptual passing. “Nietzsche claims that God is dead, by which he means,” as Derek Parfit (1942–2017) explains in On What Matters (2011–2017), “that Europeans are ceasing to believe that God exists” (2:582; emphasis original).