Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

Nietzsche is one of the best-documented philosophers in history: his correspondence, his working notebooks (the Nachlass) and his published works were the subject, from 1967 onward, of the reference critical edition, the Kritische Gesamtausgabe (KGW), established by the Italian philologists Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, whose Kritische Studienausgabe (KSA) in 15 volumes (1980; 2nd revised ed. 1988) reproduces the text in an accessible form — which made it possible to distinguish rigorously what Nietzsche himself published from what belongs to working notes never intended for publication^[6]. It is this distinction, largely ignored before 1960, that made it possible to understand how far the posthumous book The Will to Power, compiled by his sister, betrayed her brother's real thought — a point to which we will return in detail later in this article^[7].

The reference academic biographies in English and German — those by R. J. Hollingdale, Rüdiger Safranski, Curtis Cate, Julian Young and Sue Prideaux — agree on the substance of the facts related below, while still debating certain points, notably the exact medical diagnosis of the 1889 collapse^[8]. This article rests on that basis, not on the legend — now hagiographic, now demonising — that long circulated about him, notably as a result of the instrumentalisation carried out by his sister.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born on 15 October 1844 in Röcken, a small village in the Prussian province of Saxony, where his father, Carl Ludwig Nietzsche, had served as Lutheran pastor since 1842^[9]. He was the son of a line of pastors on both sides: his paternal grandfather had himself been a Lutheran ecclesiastical superintendent, and his mother, Franziska Oehler, was also a pastor's daughter^[10]. The child's very name, Friedrich Wilhelm, was chosen in honour of the King of Prussia Frederick William IV, whose birthday fell on the same day as his birth^[11].

His father died in July 1849, when Friedrich was only four, from a brain disease whose exact nature remains debated by biographers — the sources of the time speak of a "softening of the brain", a vague diagnosis of nineteenth-century medicine that could cover several distinct pathologies^[12]. His young brother Joseph died in turn a few months later, in January 1850, at the age of two. This double loss left the family — his mother, Friedrich, his younger sister Elisabeth born in 1846, his paternal grandmother and two aunts — to settle in Naumburg, where young Friedrich grew up in an exclusively female household strongly marked by Lutheran piety, to the point that his schoolmates nicknamed him, with a mixture of mockery and respect, "the little pastor"^[13].

Pforta, the best pupil of his generation

Nietzsche received a scholarship to enter, in 1858, the famous Schulpforta (Pforta), one of Prussia's most rigorous schools for the study of the classical humanities, where he received intensive training in Greek, Latin and German literature until 1864^[14]. It was there that the extraordinary philological mastery was forged that would enable him, a few years later, to obtain a university chair without even having defended a doctoral thesis.

Bonn: theology abandoned and the first break with faith

In autumn 1864, Nietzsche enrolled at the University of Bonn to study theology and classical philology at the same time, in the hope, shared by his family, that he would become a pastor like his father and grandfather^[15]. He abandoned theology, however, at the end of the first semester: reading the Life of Jesus by the rationalist exegete David Friedrich Strauss, which reduces the Gospels to a mythological elaboration by the primitive Christian community, and The Essence of Christianity by the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, which reduces God to a projection of human aspirations, helped definitively shatter his faith^[16].

This early break with institutional Christianity is therefore not the fruit of an inverted mystical experience nor of a late philosophical revelation: it stems first from an academic reading of nineteenth-century German historical-critical exegesis — the same Tübingen School whose theses continue to feed, even today, certain sceptical readings of Scripture — readings which the reader will do well to examine with the same critical caution as any other historical hypothesis, rather than receiving them as an established conclusion.

Leipzig, Ritschl and the discovery of Schopenhauer

Nietzsche followed his teacher, the great philologist Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl, to the University of Leipzig in 1865, where he formed a lasting friendship with the Hellenist Erwin Rohde^[17]. It was also at Leipzig, in 1865, that he discovered by chance, in a second-hand bookshop, The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer — a reading that overwhelmed him and lastingly nourished his metaphysics of willing, before he detached himself from it philosophically in the 1880s^[18].

Ritschl was so impressed by his pupil's philological abilities that, in his letter of recommendation, he presented him as destined to succeed in whatever he undertook^[19]. Nietzsche completed his studies at Leipzig in 1868, without having defended a doctoral thesis or obtained the habilitation required to teach at university — an administrative gap that his mentor was about to circumvent in an uncommon way.

An appointment at twenty-four, with no thesis or regular doctorate

Thanks to Ritschl's decisive support, the University of Basel appointed Nietzsche, in May 1869, as extraordinary professor of classical philology — at the age of twenty-four, with no regular doctoral thesis. The University of Leipzig hastily awarded him, in March 1869, an honorary doctorate in order to regularise his academic situation^[20]. He remains, to this day, one of the youngest known holders of a chair of classical philology^[21]. Significantly, testifying to his early detachment from the Prussian political order, Nietzsche renounced his Prussian nationality before settling in Switzerland, and remained stateless for the rest of his life^[22].

Friendship with Richard Wagner and Cosima at Tribschen

Nietzsche had met the composer Richard Wagner in Leipzig before his appointment to Basel; once a professor, he became a regular at Wagner's villa in Tribschen, near Lucerne, where he also befriended Cosima Wagner^[23]. This intellectual and emotional relationship, one of the most intense in Nietzsche's life, deeply permeates The Birth of Tragedy, in which Wagner appears as the modern heir of the Dionysian genius of Greek tragedy. It gradually deteriorated from the mid-1870s and broke off definitively after the first Bayreuth festival in 1876, which Nietzsche found disappointing, then ended in open rupture when Wagner composed Parsifal, a work in which Nietzsche saw a capitulation to Christianity and the redemptive aesthetic he loathed^[24].

The Franco-Prussian War of 1870: an orderly under fire

In 1870, Nietzsche enlisted as a volunteer orderly in the Prussian army during the Franco-Prussian War — not as a combatant, his status as a stateless person residing in Switzerland (Prussian nationality revoked on 17 April 1869, never replaced by Swiss nationality) and his university post subjecting him to no conscription, but in the voluntary service of the wounded. In the course of his service he contracted diphtheria and dysentery, and returned to Basel profoundly marked by the spectacle of war^[25]. The philosopher and biographer Walter Kaufmann put forward the hypothesis, debated but unconfirmed, that Nietzsche may also have contracted syphilis during this period, in a brothel — a hypothesis that would resurface later in the debate over the causes of his 1889 collapse^[26].

The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and the philological scandal

His first book, The Birth of Tragedy, appeared in 1872. In it Nietzsche argues that Greek tragedy was born of the tension between the Apollonian principle (order, form, individuation) and the Dionysian principle (intoxication, fusion, dissolution of the individual), and that Socrates, by substituting dialectical reason for this fertile tension, precipitated the decline of the Greek tragic spirit^[27]. The work, dedicated to Wagner, was received with extreme severity by academic classical philology: the young Hellenist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff published a devastating pamphlet accusing Nietzsche of having betrayed the scholarly standards of his discipline in favour of aesthetic speculation without philological foundation^[28]. This scandal lastingly marginalised Nietzsche within German academic classical philology, from which he never again received institutional recognition.

Untimely Meditations (1873–1876)

Between 1873 and 1876, Nietzsche published four essays collected under the title Untimely Meditations: on David Strauss, on the uses and disadvantages of history for life, on Schopenhauer as educator, and on Richard Wagner at Bayreuth^[29]. This last essay, published in 1876, constitutes Nietzsche's final great public tribute to Wagner before their break.

The 1879 resignation: illness as liberation

Nietzsche's health deteriorated continuously during the 1870s: disabling migraines, severe eye disorders and chronic digestive troubles forced him to take leave from the university as early as 1876–1877^[30]. He finally resigned formally from his chair on 14 June 1879, at thirty-four, with an annual pension of 3,000 Swiss francs paid for six years by the University of Basel^[31]. Far from being merely a defeat, this resignation freed Nietzsche from the burden of teaching and allowed him to devote himself entirely to writing: from 1879 onward, he published almost one book each year^[32].

Human, All Too Human and the turn toward the free spirit

Nietzsche no longer had a fixed home: he now spent his winters on the Mediterranean — most often in Italy, in Genoa or Nice — and his summers in Sils-Maria, in the Swiss Engadine, whose high-mountain landscapes would directly nourish the imagery of Zarathustra^[33]. Human, All Too Human, published in 1878, marks a decisive stylistic and philosophical turning point: abandoning the metaphysical lyricism of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche adopts a brief aphoristic form and a positivist-inspired method, under the influence of his friend the philosopher Paul Rée, to analyse psychologically the origins of moral and religious values.

Lou Salomé: intelligence, rupture and the missed intellectual trinity

In 1882, Nietzsche met in Rome, through his friend Malwida von Meysenbug, the young Russian philosopher and writer Lou Salomé, then aged twenty-one^[34]. Won over by her intelligence, Nietzsche envisaged with her and Paul Rée the formation of an intellectual "trinity" of free spirits who would live and work together. On 5 May 1882, Nietzsche and Salomé climbed Monte Sacro together, above Lake Orta in northern Italy — a moment of which he kept a dazzled memory, and after which he entrusted to Salomé, according to the biographies, the plan to lead her step by step to the ultimate consequence of his philosophy, she whom he judged the first capable of following him^[35].

On 13 May 1882, in a photographic studio in Lucerne, the three friends had themselves photographed in a staging that has remained famous: Nietzsche and Rée, harnessed like oxen to a small cart, pull Lou Salomé seated in the wagon and brandishing a whip adorned with sprigs of lilac — a photograph that Nietzsche himself had suggested^[36]. Nietzsche twice asked for Salomé's hand, through Rée's clumsy intermediary and then directly in Lucerne; both proposals were refused. After several months of growing tension, fed notably by the hostility of Nietzsche's mother and sister toward Salomé, the trio broke up definitively in autumn 1882^[37]. This rupture, one of the most painful in his emotional life, immediately preceded the writing of Zarathustra.

The Gay Science (1882) and the announcement of the death of God

Published in 1882, The Gay Science contains the most famous aphorism in the entire history of modern philosophy: that of the "madman" who runs one morning into the marketplace crying that he is looking for God, before announcing to the incredulous and mocking crowd that God is dead and that humanity itself has killed him^[38]. We will return to this in detail in the section devoted to the death of God.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1885): the Übermensch and the eternal recurrence

Written in four parts between 1883 and 1885, Thus Spoke Zarathustra is Nietzsche's most widely read, most poetic and most ambitious work. In it he stages an imaginary prophet, borrowing his name from the historical founder of Mazdaism — a choice that Nietzsche himself explains in Ecce Homo, as an inverted tribute to the first moralist in history, who becomes here the mouthpiece for a destruction of the morality he had himself founded^[39]. The Ignispedia article devoted to the historical prophet of Zoroastrianism deals in detail with this literary appropriation, distinct from the real content of ancient Iranian preaching. It is in Zarathustra that Nietzsche develops his two most famous doctrines: the Übermensch and the eternal recurrence, set out later in this article.

Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and On the Genealogy of Morals (1887)

Beyond Good and Evil (1886) systematises the Nietzschean critique of Western moral philosophy, which he accuses of always having concealed, behind claims to rational objectivity, the psychological prejudices and power interests of its authors^[40]. On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), presented by Nietzsche himself as a polemical commentary intended to clarify and deepen Beyond Good and Evil, adds the founding distinction between master morality and slave morality, developed in the doctrinal section of this article.

The year 1888: creative fever before the collapse

The year 1888 is, in Nietzsche's life, a period of literary production of extraordinary intensity: he wrote in quick succession The Case of Wagner, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, Ecce Homo — his intellectual autobiography, with provocative chapter titles ("Why I Am So Wise", "Why I Am a Destiny") — and Nietzsche contra Wagner^[41]. This creative fever, in which some biographers already see the prodromes of the coming collapse, ended abruptly at the beginning of January 1889.

The Turin Horse: Legend or Reality?

The most famous account of the collapse — Nietzsche rushing in tears to protect a horse that its coachman was beating on Piazza Carlo Alberto — appears in the sources only after Nietzsche's death and rests on second-hand testimony^[49]. Contemporary specialists of his biography routinely describe this episode as "apocryphal", without, however, being able to establish with certainty what actually happened that day^[50]. What the sources document with certainty, by contrast, are the "madness letters" (Wahnbriefe) that Nietzsche sends in the following days — brief, megalomaniac texts, signed sometimes "Dionysus", sometimes "the Crucified", which alarm their recipients and trigger the immediate intervention of those around him^[51].

A Still-Disputed Medical Diagnosis

The diagnosis made at the time by the doctors was that of general syphilitic paralysis — then the dominant hypothesis in late-19th-century psychiatry for any progressive dementia accompanied by megalomania^[52]. This reading is still debated today: other researchers have proposed a bipolar disorder developing into vascular dementia (Cybulska), a slow-growing retro-orbital meningioma (Leonard Sax), frontotemporal dementia (Orth and Trimble), or even a hereditary disease of the CADASIL type — it being understood that most contemporary commentators consider that this clinical collapse in no way invalidates, from a strictly logical point of view, the philosophical value of the works published before 1889^[53].

After his transfer to the clinic in Basel on 8 January 1889 and then to the one at Jena under the direction of the psychiatrist Otto Binswanger, Nietzsche is finally taken back into the care of his mother at Naumburg from May 1890 until her death in 1897^[54]. Throughout this entire period, Nietzsche never recovers his intellectual lucidity; he can no longer speak coherently, nor recognize those around him, and still less write or think philosophically^[55]. It is his sister Elisabeth, returned from Paraguay where she had founded a Germanic colony with her husband, who takes over from 1897 at the Villa Silberblick in Weimar, where she also installs her brother's archive and manuscript collection^[56]. Nietzsche dies on 25 August 1900, probably as a result of pneumonia complicated by a stroke, and he is buried, in accordance with his known last wishes, in the churchyard cemetery at Röcken, alongside his father^[57].

A Catholic encyclopedia that claims scholarly rigor cannot treat Nietzsche's reception without honestly setting out the central — and deeply troubling — role played by his sister in constructing his posthumous image. It is a textbook case of how a philosophical work can be diverted after its author's death, to the point of producing a major historical misunderstanding that academic research only really corrected from the 1950s-1960s onward.

The Antisemitic Colony of Nueva Germania

In 1885, Elisabeth Nietzsche marries Bernhard Förster, a former teacher who had become a prominent figure of German nationalism and of the militant antisemitism of his time^[58]. The couple leaves Germany on 15 February 1887 with fourteen German families to found, in Paraguay, an "Aryan" colony named Nueva Germania, supposed to embody a völkisch ideal of racial purity^[59]. The enterprise quickly collapses under the weight of unsuitable farming methods, disease, and unpayable debts; Bernhard Förster commits suicide on 3 June 1889, a few months after his brother-in-law's collapse in Turin, and Elisabeth finally abandons the colony in 1893 to return to Germany^[60].

Nietzsche and Antisemitism: What the Texts Actually Say

Contrary to the image his sister will later help spread, Nietzsche himself publicly and vigorously opposed the antisemitism of his time, including that of his own brother-in-law. In a December 1887 draft addressed to Elisabeth about her marriage to Förster (no. 968), he reproaches her, in substance, with the idea that her union with an antisemitic leader expresses an estrangement from his whole way of life, which fills him with anger or melancholy^[61].

In another letter to Elisabeth from the same period, he stresses how important it is to him never to be confused with the antisemites of his time: Förster, he writes in substance, will remain in the eyes of the world an antisemitic leader, and it is for him a question of honor unambiguously to mark his rejection of antisemitism, as he does in his writings^[62].

When he discovers his own name — that of Zarathustra — being used in an antisemitic journal (Antisemitische Correspondenz), he vigorously attacks, in a December 1887 draft (no. 967) whose exact addressee remains uncertain, his sister's husband's party, whose intrigues he refuses to let soil his ideal^[63].

These texts, now well documented by academic research — notably by the Germanist Robert C. Holub in his reference study Nietzsche's Jewish Problem^[64] — establish unambiguously that Nietzsche regarded a public and unequivocal break with antisemitism as a question of personal honor. This biographical reality makes all the more troubling the way his philosophical legacy was appropriated after his death.

The Will to Power: A Book Nietzsche Never Wrote

In 1894 Elisabeth founds the Weimar Nietzsche Archives and then, after taking control of her brother's manuscripts from 1897, undertakes with the help of the writer Heinrich Köselitz (known as Peter Gast) to compile scattered fragments from Nietzsche's working notebooks — notes he had never prepared or approved for publication — under the title The Will to Power (Der Wille zur Macht), published for the first time in 1901 and then in an expanded version in 1906^[65]. The book is presented to the public as Nietzsche's masterful philosophical testament, whereas it is an editorial montage constructed after his death from working notes that the author himself had never organized in this way nor intended for print as such.

It is precisely the philological work of Colli and Montinari on the whole Nachlass, from the 1960s onward, that established that this compilation corresponds to no overall plan actually conceived by Nietzsche, and that the selection and ordering of the fragments, carried out by Elisabeth and Gast, steered Nietzsche's thought in a more systematic direction, more favorable to a völkisch reading, than the texts actually published during his lifetime allow^[66]. Since that critical edition, the international academic community treats The Will to Power not as a book by Nietzsche, but as a collection of working fragments to be handled with extreme philological caution — never as an authority equivalent to the finished works published by Nietzsche himself.

The Shadow Cast over the 20th Century: From Weimar to National Socialism

Widowed, returned to Germany, and solely responsible for the archives and the publication of the works of her brother, who had become famous in spite of himself, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche actively cultivates, in the following decades, an image of her brother compatible with rising German nationalism, going so far as to solicit and receive official financial support from the National Socialist regime for the Nietzsche Archives from 1933 onward^[67]. Although she formally joined only the German National People's Party (DNVP) in 1918 and not the NSDAP itself, she cultivates close ties with the Hitler regime in the last years of her life; Adolf Hitler attends her funeral in person on 8 November 1935^[68].

The scholarly rehabilitation of Nietzsche against this appropriation is due, essentially, to the German-American philosopher Walter Kaufmann, whose foundational work Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1950) was the first to demonstrate, with systematic philological rigor, how far the Nazi image of Nietzsche rested on a distortion of his actual texts — even if more recent research qualifies certain aspects of this thesis by stressing that the Nazis themselves continued the work of tendentious selection initiated by Elisabeth, without her always being solely and directly responsible for it^[69]. This case illustrates an elementary methodological principle, valid for ancient sources as for modern ones: attributing a thought to its author always requires going back, as far as possible, to the text truly intended by that author, not to what his heirs — even his own family — chose to show of it.

The Death of God: A Diagnosis, Not Mere Provocation

Aphorism 125 of The Gay Science, entitled "The Madman" (Der tolle Mensch), stages a man who runs one morning into the marketplace with a lit lantern, crying out that he is seeking God. Faced with the mockery of the crowd of unbelievers who already no longer believe in God without having drawn the consequences, he proclaims:

"God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we comfort ourselves, we, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives — who will wipe this blood off us?" — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §125, "The Madman", 1882^[70]

A decisive point, often lost in the popular vulgate of this formula: Nietzsche is not announcing here triumphant good news for atheists, but a historical and cultural diagnosis — the observation that European civilization, while having intellectually ceased to believe in the Christian God, has not yet measured the scale of the metaphysical, moral, and cultural earthquake that this collapse will bring^[71]. In aphorism 343 of the same book, Nietzsche specifies that "belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable" and that, as a result, everything "built upon this faith", including "our whole European morality", is destined to "collapse"^[72].

This reading is decisive for understanding the real scope of the formula: Nietzsche does not naively rejoice at the disappearance of God; on the contrary, he dreads its practical consequences for a civilization that continues, out of habit, to live off a Christian moral capital whose metaphysical foundation it has undermined — it is precisely this point that the theologian Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, takes up in his Introduction to Christianity: there he reads Nietzsche's proclamation as taking up the very language of the Christian tradition, and invites readers not to refute Nietzsche but to let his parable question the believing conscience about the way Christians themselves may have enclosed God in outdated frameworks of thought and in a piety cut off from reality^[73].

Nihilism: When the Highest Values Devalue Themselves

Nietzsche defines nihilism — a term he does not invent but considerably deepens — as the crisis in which "the highest values devalue themselves"^[74]. In other words: it is not only that men cease to believe in God, in morality, or in objective truth; it is that the very foundations on which these beliefs rested collapse from within, leaving humanity with no compass either for judging good from evil or for giving meaning to its own existence. Nietzsche sees in this the direct and inevitable consequence of the death of God he has just diagnosed: deprived of a transcendent foundation, Western morality — including in its secularized forms such as progressive humanism or scientific socialism — provisionally continues to function out of inertia, before collapsing in its turn.

Without ever naming Nietzsche, Pope John Paul II, in his encyclical Fides et Ratio (1998), describes this same phenomenon in terms that directly echo his diagnosis:

"In the wake of the crisis of rationalism, what has finally appeared is nihilism. As a philosophy of nothingness, it has a certain attraction for people of our time." — John Paul II, encyclical Fides et Ratio, 14 September 1998, §46^[75]

The Pope there describes this nihilism precisely as a state in which "research is an end in itself, without hope or possibility of ever attaining the goal of truth", and in which life is reduced to "an occasion of sensations and experiences in which the ephemeral has pride of place"^[76] — exactly the diagnosis Nietzsche had made, a century earlier, of post-Christian Europe, except that the Pope, unlike Nietzsche, sees in this nihilism neither a necessary stage nor a liberation, but a sickness of reason to be cured by recovering the fruitful articulation of faith and reason.

The will to power: a metaphysics of willing

The will to power (Wille zur Macht) is the most discussed — and the most distorted — concept in all of Nietzsche's philosophy. In the texts published during his lifetime, Nietzsche uses it as an explanatory principle that is at once psychological and biological: no living being seeks first and foremost its own preservation, as the Darwinism of his time postulated, but the increase of its power, understood as the capacity to overcome resistances and to impose itself on its environment^[77]. In The Antichrist, he thus formulates his own definition of good and evil from this principle:

"What is good? — Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man. What is evil? — Whatever springs from weakness." — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, § 2, 1888^[78]

Two levels of reading must be carefully distinguished here, which much popular exposition systematically confuses: on the one hand, the aphorisms published during his lifetime, in which the will to power serves as a psychological and explanatory principle of human behavior and systems of values; on the other hand, the working fragments compiled after his death in The Will to Power, which attempt to make of it a general cosmological metaphysics of all reality — an extension Nietzsche himself never formulated or published in this systematic form, and which contemporary scholars, following Colli and Montinari, largely hesitate to attribute to him as such^[79].

The eternal recurrence: "the greatest weight"

In aphorism 341 of The Gay Science, entitled "The Greatest Weight" (Das grösste Schwergewicht), Nietzsche proposes the most radical and existentially demanding thought experiment in his entire work:

"What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence...' Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine!'" — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, § 341, "The Greatest Weight," 1882^[80]

The eternal recurrence is therefore not first and foremost, in Nietzsche, a cosmological thesis about the real cyclical structure of time — although he at times considered giving it this physical scope in his working notes — but an existential test: whoever could will to relive eternally, without removing a single instant, even the most atrocious sufferings, would have reached the summit of the affirmation of life that Nietzsche calls amor fati, love of one's fate, which he defines as learning "to see as beautiful what is necessary in things" so as to become "only a yea-sayer"^[81].

The philosopher Karl Löwith, in his classic study Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, showed the internal tension, never truly resolved by Nietzsche himself, between this existential reading of the eternal recurrence as an ethical criterion and his temptation, in certain unpublished fragments, to give it a literal cosmological scope — a tension that illustrates, once again, the risk of treating Nietzsche's unpublished working notes as a finished and coherent doctrine^[82].

The overman and the transvaluation of values

It is through the mouth of his prophet Zarathustra that Nietzsche announces, from the prologue of the work onward, the advent of the overman (Übermensch):

"I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?" — Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue, § 3, 1883^[83]

The overman is not, in Nietzsche's intention, a biological figure of racial selection — the very misreading that National Socialist propaganda was to exploit from the 1930s onward — but an ideal of creating new values by a spirit strong enough to assume, without being crushed by it, the collapse of the old transcendent values. Where ordinary man passively endures the death of God and sinks into the nihilism of resignation, the overman transforms it into an opportunity to become himself the author of his own tables of values — a project Nietzsche sums up in the formula of the transvaluation of all values (Umwertung aller Werte), the title he initially considered giving to his entire late work.

Genealogy of morality: masters and slaves, the birth of ressentiment

It is in the first essay of On the Genealogy of Morality that Nietzsche develops his most influential — and philosophically most contestable — distinction between two fundamental types of morality. Master morality starts from the spontaneous self-affirmation of the strong, who call "good" what resembles them — their own nobility, their power, their joy in life — and "bad," by simple secondary opposition, what is foreign or inferior to them. Slave morality, conversely, is born of a psychological reversal:

"The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of natures that are denied the true reaction, that of deeds, and compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge." — Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, First Essay, § 10, 1887^[84]

Unable to take real revenge on their masters, the weak invert the scale of values through a purely psychological operation: they now call "evil" the strength, pride, and domination of the masters, and "good" their own submission, humility, and pity — a reversal Nietzsche calls the "slave revolt in morality," whose historical origin he traces to the ressentiment of the Jewish people of antiquity, prolonged and universalized, in his view, by primitive Christianity^[85]. It is this precise genealogy that places, within the Nietzschean system, Christian humility, compassion, and renunciation among the symptoms of a psychology of the vanquished disguised as virtue — an objection treated in a dedicated section of the Ignispedia article on frequent errors concerning humility, to which the reader is referred for the detailed refutation of this precise point, without redeveloping it fully here.

Perspectivism and the critique of truth

Finally, Nietzsche rejects the idea of a neutral, disembodied knowledge that would grasp reality "in itself" independently of any point of view:

"There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective 'knowing'." — Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, Third Essay, § 12, 1887^[86]

All knowledge, according to this doctrine of perspectivism, is necessarily relative to a vital point of view, an interest, a particular configuration of the will to power that utters it — which leads Nietzsche to his most radical formula: "there are no facts, only interpretations"^[87]. As will be seen below, in the Catholic assessment of this doctrine, it runs up against a logical difficulty that several contemporary philosophers, including Alasdair MacIntyre, have judged fatal.

One Christian only, and he died on the cross

Written in 1888 but published only in 1895 — its editors, Franz Overbeck and Heinrich Köselitz, having delayed its publication because its content was judged too explosive — The Antichrist is the most violently anti-Christian text in Nietzsche's entire work^[88]. Yet it draws a distinction of decisive importance, often erased by popular exposition: that between the historical person of Jesus and the ecclesial institution built up after him.

"The very word 'Christianity' is a misunderstanding — at bottom there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross." — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, § 39, 1888^[89]

For Nietzsche, Jesus himself embodied a radically anti-ressentiment form of life — a gentleness, a non-resistance to evil, and an absolute refusal to judge others that Nietzsche associates, not without a certain paradoxical esteem, with a psychology close to that of Dostoevsky's "idiot"^[90]. It is Saint Paul, according to the central thesis of The Antichrist, who allegedly betrayed this original teaching by introducing into it the doctrine of personal immortality, sin, sacrificial redemption, and judgment — a doctrinal apparatus Nietzsche interprets as an instrument of priestly power designed to subjugate the masses through guilt^[91].

The real target: Pietist Lutheranism, not sacramental Catholicism

A point often overlooked by hasty readers of The Antichrist deserves to be stressed with the same intellectual honesty as every other subject: the concrete, biographical, and psychological target of Nietzsche's critique of Christianity is first of all the German Pietist Lutheranism of the nineteenth century in which he himself was raised — a religiosity strongly centered on individual guilt, scrupulous moral introspection, and a highly subjective, interiorized reading of grace — far more than the sacramental, incarnational, and communal theology of Catholicism, whose own intellectual tradition Nietzsche in fact knew rather little, in particular Thomist natural theology or the sacramentality of the Church as the body of Christ. This qualification obviously does not absolve Nietzsche of having wished, in his explicit intention, to target Christianity as a whole and not only the confessional variant of his origins; but it invites us not to receive his critique as if he had measured and discussed the Catholic tradition in all its theological depth.

Pity as weakness: Mitleid versus caritas

The most fundamental point of friction between Nietzsche's thought and Catholic theology concerns the nature of pity (Mitleid). For Nietzsche, pity is by nature a force of vital depression: it multiplies suffering by making the one who feels it share in it, weakens the strong who exercise it, and artificially keeps alive what the natural selection of existence would tend to eliminate^[92]. What he designates by the German term Mitleid — literally "suffering with" — is however a distinctly narrower notion than what Catholic theology means by caritas, theological charity: a supernatural participation, by grace, in the very love with which God loves each person, which belongs neither to the passive affect of commiseration, nor to utilitarian calculation, nor to psychological weakness, but to an infused virtue that uplifts and strengthens the one who exercises it rather than lowering him^[93]. This confusion — treating Christian charity as a mere theological synonym of the affective pity he analyzes in his contemporaries — constitutes one of the major weak points of the Nietzschean critique, to which the following section will return.

What Nietzsche's diagnosis gets right

An honest Catholic reading of Nietzsche must neither caricature him as a mere nihilist provocateur nor minimize the real accuracy of part of his diagnosis. Nietzsche saw, with a lucidity rare for his time, that nineteenth-century Europe continued to live on a Christian moral capital — the dignity of the person, the value of compassion, the hope for a meaning of history — while having undermined, through Enlightenment rationalism and then materialist scientism, the metaphysical and theological foundation that alone made this capital intelligible^[94]. He also saw, with clinical clairvoyance, the psychological fragility of certain degraded forms of piety — obsessional scrupulosity, social ressentiment disguised as virtue, moralism without real charity — which a Catholic theology of virtue, attentive to the risk of Pharisaism, cannot simply brush aside. It is precisely this observation that the encyclical Fides et Ratio takes up, a century later and without ever naming Nietzsche, when it describes contemporary nihilism as the direct consequence of a crisis of rationalism that has cut reason off from its capacity to attain the truth about God and man^[95].

Why the death of God is not the end of the story

But where Nietzsche stops at the observation and draws from it the necessity of a human and solitary creation of new values, the Catholic faith answers that the madman's diagnosis in The Gay Science describes a real sickness of modern civilization, not a metaphysical truth about God himself. Ratzinger, commenting precisely on this parable, refuses to answer it with a mere triumphalist counter-proclamation: he sees in it on the contrary a call to the believing conscience, whose responsibility is immense in the way it may, through its own spiritual mediocrity, have helped make God inaccessible to the men of its time^[96]. The Catholic answer to nihilism is therefore not to deny the gravity of the Nietzschean diagnosis, but to refuse its conclusion: it is not because a civilization has lost the faith that God has ceased to exist, nor that man is condemned to become the sole solitary author of his values — it is the sign, on the contrary, that a new evangelization, rooted and not purely moralizing, remains necessary and possible.

The genetic fallacy: a psychological origin does not refute a truth

On the strictly logical plane, Nietzsche's genealogical method — psychologically explaining the origin of a moral belief in order to discredit its validity — rests on what philosophers call the genetic fallacy: showing that a given Christian virtue was born, historically, from a psychological ressentiment proves nothing at all about whether that virtue is false or bad in itself. A mathematical proposition remains true even if the one who formulated it is discovered to have harbored a petty ambition; in the same way, Christian humility can be an authentically good virtue, even if certain historical Christians practiced it with a real ressentiment toward the powerful of their time. In his genealogy, Nietzsche systematically confuses the contingent psychological origin of a belief with its own validity — a confusion the British philosopher G. E. Moore was to denounce more generally, a few decades later, as one of the most common errors of the moral philosophy of his time.

Perspectivism destroys itself

The Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre — himself become, in the decades following the publication of his major work, an Aristotelian and then Thomist thinker converted to Catholicism — showed, in his classic study After Virtue (1981), the structural difficulty of Nietzschean perspectivism: the thesis that "there are no facts, only interpretations" presents itself as an objective fact about the nature of all knowledge, and not as a mere interpretation among others — which makes it, in its very formulation, self-contradictory^[97]. MacIntyre further argues that the Nietzschean "great man," in claiming to become the sole creative source of his own values, cuts himself off precisely from the social and traditional conditions that alone make intelligible the very existence of objective goods to pursue — so that Nietzsche, far from prevailing by default over the Aristotelian tradition he claimed was obsolete, reveals on the contrary, through his own impasses, its necessity^[98].

Löwith, de Lubac, Balthasar: the generation that answered Nietzsche

Nietzsche elicited, throughout the twentieth century, a Catholic response of exceptional intellectual quality, which it would be unjust to reduce to a moralizing condemnation. Cardinal Henri de Lubac, in his great work The Drama of Atheist Humanism (1944), analyzes Nietzsche alongside Feuerbach, Marx, and Comte as one of the four great prophets of the nineteenth century's prophetic atheism — those who, unlike ordinary skepticism, made the negation of God a veritable religion of substitution; his conclusion, which became famous, is that "without God, man can in the end organize the earth only against man"^[99]. Hans Urs von Balthasar, whose 1928 Zurich doctoral thesis dealt precisely with eschatology in modern German literature, devotes long pages to Nietzsche in his Apokalypse der deutschen Seele, seeking to understand philosophically why the Nietzschean rejection of Christianity is paradoxically accompanied by an inextinguishable nostalgia for greatness, the sacred, and transfiguration^[100]. Closer to us, the philosopher Rémi Brague places Nietzsche at the term of the "modern project" he traces in The Reign of Man: after Bacon and Descartes, modern man, having renounced any measure higher than himself — cosmos, creator God, natural order — comes, in Nietzsche, to have to "overcome" man himself, for want of still being equal to what he now demands of himself^[101]. The philosopher Fabrice Hadjadj, an avowed reader of Nietzsche as much as of Heidegger, embodies finally a contemporary way of taking Nietzschean unbelief seriously rather than dismissing it with a defensive apologetics^[102].

Humility is not a slave morality: the paradox of Christ

The most direct answer to the Nietzschean objection that Christian humility is a psychological invention of the weak to take revenge on the strong has already been treated in depth in the Ignispedia article devoted to frequent errors concerning humility. Only the crux of the argument will be recalled here: authentic Christian humility does not debase man; it reveals to him his true dignity, that of being loved and called by God — and it takes a rare strength, not a weakness, to lower oneself freely without losing oneself, as the paradox of Christ himself shows:

"who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant... he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross." — Saint Paul's Letter to the Philippians 2:6-8^[103]

What Nietzsche never manages to conceive in his genealogy is precisely the existence of a free lowering, chosen from fullness and not suffered from powerlessness — the very distinction the Catholic tradition draws between servility (disguised weakness) and true humility (strength that gives itself).

The "where evil abounds": Nietzsche in the great modern spiritual combat

The Ignispedia article devoted to "Where evil abounds" already places Nietzsche's 1882 proclamation within the great panorama of the modern spiritual combat, alongside Darwinian materialism, Marxist dialectical materialism, and Freudian suspicion — four nineteenth-century diagnoses converging to dissolve, each in its own way, the transcendent foundation of human dignity^[104]. This article does not redevelop this point in detail, but invites the reader who wishes to place Nietzsche within this broader genealogy of modern atheism to refer to it.

• Zarathustra — the historical prophet of Mazdaism whose name Nietzsche appropriated for his own philosophical spokesman
• Henri de Lubac — Le Drame de l'humanisme athée, the classic Catholic analysis of nineteenth-century prophetic atheism
• Hans Urs von Balthasar — the theologian of beauty who dialogued all his life with German literature and philosophy, Nietzsche included
• Rémi Brague — the philosopher who places Nietzsche at the endpoint of the failure of the modern project
• Fabrice Hadjadj — a contemporary apologist who takes Nietzschean unbelief seriously
• Frequent Errors Concerning Humility — the detailed refutation of the "slave morality" objection
• Where Evil Abounds — Nietzsche placed in the frieze of the modern spiritual combat