Vu bistu, vu?

So I've been listening to Blood Money, and a chain of thought touched off by the song "God's Away on Business" has left me wondering about the concept of an absent God. Not a God who was never there in the first place, understand, but a God who's disappeared. It seems to be a popular theme. Off the top of my head, I'm looking at everything from Tori Amos ("God, sometimes you just don't come through / Do you need a woman to look after you?") to Tony Kushner's Angels in America ("Sue the bastard for walking out. How dare He") and A Dybbuk ("We will always find Him, no matter how few there are, tell Him we will find Him. To deliver our complaint") to the "absentee landlord" rant of John Milton in The Devil's Advocate. Not to mention a positively dubious canon of Tom Waits:

Don't you know there ain't no Devil
That's just God when he's drunk
("Heartattack and Vine")

Did the Devil make the world while God was sleeping?
("Little Drop of Poison")

God builds a church
The Devil builds a chapel . . .
The Devil knows the Bible like the back of his hand
("Misery Is the River of the World")

I don't believe you go to heaven when you're good
Everything goes to hell anyway
("Everything Goes to Hell")

I'm reminded of some of the plays of Seneca, where the traditional machinery of the divine has clearly broken down. dimitto superos; summa votorum attigi, declares Atreus in Thyestes at the achievement of his unholy plans—"I let the gods fall; I have reached the height of my prayers," as though he has succeeded the gods in their absence. ("Falling Toward Apotheosis," anyone?) The eponymous Medea promises something similar: Invadam deos / et cuncta quatiam, attack the gods and shake everything; and no gods come after her in reprisal for either her presumption or her acts of murder. Or take Lucan's Pharsalia (or Bellum Civile; pick a name), where the only supernatural manifestations are from the malevolent shadow side: Furies, ghosts, necromancy. Whether through national cataclysm or personal disaster, the world has gone all to hell: so clearly the gods are nowhere to be found, because the alternative is that much worse to contemplate. And tell me, how does God choose / Whose prayers he does refuse? ("Day After Tomorrow") But neither Seneca nor Lucan, so far as I am aware, wonder where their gods have gone.

The title of this entry comes from a poem by Hirsh Glik that strange_selkie introduced me to, which she translates freely but emphatically: I really do want, God, to tell you my troubles, but I can't exactly find you anywhere, and inside me there's this fire I don't understand, and in fire I spend all my days. In cellars, in stairways, I hear my death calling to me, and I run high as I can, to the rooftops, and I call for you, God, where the hell are you? I suppose, in some incoherent fashion, I am wondering where this motif begins. Or does every generation imagine it's been abandoned anew? There's a wealth of literature between Silver Age Latin and 20th—21st century music and drama of which I am wholly ignorant. But I'm curious.

Any thoughts?