THR Web Features   /   August 25, 2025

The Man Who Killed God

Contradiction was at the core of Friedrich Nietzsche’s thought.

Ed Simon

( Die Wilde Jagd (The Wild Hunt), c. 1889, by Franz von Stuck (1863–1928), Lenbachhaus, Munich, Germany; public domain, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.)

The last eleven years of Friedrich Nietzsche’s life were ones of mental collapse, spent briefly in two sanitariums and then under the care of his controlling sister at her Art Nouveau villa in Weimar, Germany. In continual delirium, the philosopher railed against imagined conspiracies and persecutions, while referring to himself as, variously, “the Crucified” or the Greek god Dionysius. “I want, I want to be mad,” he wrote to the Swedish playwright August Strindberg, “it is a joy to be mad!” To Jacob Burkhardt, the great historian of the Italian Renaissance and Nietzsche’s former colleague at the University of Basel, he dispatched a missive claiming that he had been literally “crucified by the German doctors in a very drawn-out manner” but had ultimately “put Caiphas in fetters.” 

Historians differ on why Nietzsche’s rational faculties declined so decisively during the last decade of his life. Tertiary syphilis contracted as a young man in a Cologne brothel is a popular hypothesis. Another is that he suffered from the same neurological condition that took his Lutheran minister father’s life. Whether spirochete or tumor, the cause is assumed to have been something that lay latent in the grey folds of his brain until it began to eat away at his selfhood. 

His demise was an inevitable part of the fate he instructed his readers to love—amor fati—and whose power he described in his 1878 book Human, All Too Human, where he observes that in “looking at a waterfall we imagine that there is freedom of will and fancy in the countless turnings, twistings, and breaking of the waves; but everything is compulsory, every moment can be mathematically calculated.” Human destiny is no different. The “delusion of the acting agent about himself, the supposition of a free will, belongs to this mechanism.” Whatever caused Nietzsche’s dramatically public collapse on a brisk winter day amid the baroque resplendence of Turin’s Piazza Carignano was determined long before January 3, 1889, as were his institutionalizations, first in Basel and then in Jenna (the city of his Übermensch Goethe), before being discharged into the care of his sister. Villa Silberblick was where Nietzsche died, at the age of fifty-five, only five months before the dawn of the twentieth century, which in his 1888 Ecce Homo he had correctly predicted would witness “wars such as the earth has never seen before.”

A century and a quarter after Nietzsche’s death, we might well consider the legacy of a figure who has been both lionized and demonized, his work so often misinterpreted and so deeply resistant to interpretation. The consummate coiner of anti-scriptural dictums, a thinker so radical that “God is dead!” still has the power to shock—he has also been so widely popularized that the adage, “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger,” one common on inspirational posters and sung by Kelly Clarkson in a 2011 hit.

We still have not decided what to do with the walrus-mustachioed, wild-eyed author of Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals, Twilight of the Idols, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and The Antichrist. “For believe me!” Nietzsche oracularly declared in his 1882 The Gay Science, “the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment: to live dangerously!” But a question remains: How dangerous is Nietzsche? 

Because of the pernicious influence of his sister, an avowed antisemite who along with her husband founded a failed “Aryan colony” called Nueva Germania in Paraguay and who was responsible for editing many of Nietzsche’s works, the philosopher can sound like the Morning Star of fascism. It is easy to conclude as much of a thinker who announced in his 1888 The Antichrist that “Pity stands opposed to the tonic emotions which heighten our vitality,” who conceived of the Übermensch and heaped scorn on the compassionate Christian “slave morality” while celebrating the a “master morality,” who at one point championed the antisemitic composer Richard Wagner—a philosopher, moreover, who opined in his 1883 allegorical fever-dream Thus Spoke Zarathustra that “Man is something that shall be overcome.” 

Two generations of revisionist scholarship have complicated the issue, with Walter Kaufmann in his 1950 study Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist arguing that many of the most shocking pronouncements have been “emphasized out of all proportion and thoroughly misunderstood.” Indeed, as Kaufmann makes (convincingly) clear, Nietzsche was a vociferous, consistent, and lifelong opponent of antisemitism (admittedly because he found it to be a pedestrian bigotry), and his references to terms like “Aryan” must be read in the context of nineteenth-century philology and not twentieth-century eugenics. 

Nonetheless, it would be disingenuous to attempt to explain away all that is distasteful in Nietzsche. Trying to tame past thinkers is a fool’s errand, and there is no way anyone can honestly mold Nietzsche into a closet democrat or liberal—or even a humanist, since he was often quite the opposite. A governing irrationalism, or supra-rationalism, is all too evident in the man, which is why it is difficult to characterize him simply as a philosopher. Kaufmann admits that as a systematic thinker Nietzsche is lacking, but he ranks him “far superior to Kant and Hegel as a stylist.” From Luther, Nietzsche acquired a polemical voice and from Goethe an erudite one. Schopenhauer and Wagner were influences that he came to forcefully reject. One approach is to interpret him as a creative writer whose prose in such works as Thus Spoke Zarathustra displayed, for all of its bombast and preening, an electric brilliance. As he accurately described himself in his frankly self-referential Ecce Homo, “I am no man, I am dynamite!” 

Narcissistic, delusional, unbalanced—Nietzsche was all those things. He was also a genius. More than even a poet, Nietzsche was a prophet—a jaundiced, nihilistic, and cracked prophet, but a prophet nonetheless. The minister’s son who toddled about the house preaching about the Holy Ghost and who briefly attended seminary was the same person who would grow up to declare that the only true Christian had perished on the cross and that God was dead. Contradiction was at the core of Nietzsche’s thought, which proceeded less through syllogism or argument than through gnomic anecdote and aphorism to dissect and denounce the complacency and mediocrity of bourgeois modernity. 

If Nietzsche was a philosopher, he belonged to the tradition of the ancient Cynics or his beloved Sophists (although not the rationalist prig Socrates); a counterexample to the observation made by Henry David Thoreau in Walden that “There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers.” Temperamentally different from Thoreau but kindred intellectually, Nietzsche conducted thought with a hammer. He imbibed and radiated philosophy in its distilled form, though Nietzsche was at least marginally a creature of the academy, with degrees from Bonn and Leipzig and a brief appointment at Basel. Diogenes lived in a barrel and castigated Alexander the Great; Nietzsche—dynamite and Anti-Christ—was a professor with a PhD. And yet it seems a grave error to read a pronouncement such as one from The Gay Science—“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?”—and think that he is operating in the same dreary, analytical discipline as an A.J. Ayer, a Hilary Putnam, or a Willard Quine. 

That quotation echoes the madman in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Nietzsche’s fictionalized version of the founder of Zoroastrianism espouses an anti-ethic, the ancient Persian prophet revising the binary morality that he introduced to Western religion, which Nietzsche considered pernicious, decadent, and life-denying. Most people know the obituary that Nietzsche penned for the deity: “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” Studied agnosticism was intellectually popular during the Victorian Era, but it would be a mistake to interpret Nietzsche as a respectable freethinking gentleman atheist in the mold of a Matthew Arnold or Thomas Hardy. (Besides, he had less room for the English than he had for God, or even for strenuous believers in whom he saw the glimmer of heroism, albeit perverse in its rejection of life.) Nietzsche’s atheism is of a more radical sort, a deicidal position that ironically does consummate honor to God precisely by taking Him seriously. Nietzsche’s doubts (if it’s fair to describe them so prosaically) were derived from Darwinism but were already baked into his metaphysics. Furthermore, an Arnold or a Hardy believed that their religious doubts could coexist, however precariously, with the whole Enlightenment scaffolding of progress, that teleological faith that history is ever arcing toward some greater world, a faith which was always a secularized form of millennial Christianity anyhow. But Nietzsche, like Dostoevsky, understood that for God’s murderers there are certain responsibilities, certain punishments.

We are still fumbling about in the Götterdämmerung of the Abrahamic deity, as the “tremendous event is still on its way,” Nietzsche wrote in The Gay Science. “Lightning and thunder require time.” This is not a variation on the dubious secularization thesis; Nietzsche does not understand religion as mere superstition or epiphenomena but as something far more primal and essential. “Contemporary theology is unquestionably in a state of crisis, perhaps the most profound crisis which Christianity has faced since its creation," write Thomas J.J. Altizer and William Hamilton in Radical Theology and the Death of God. Taking Nietzsche as seriously as Nietzsche took God, they understand him as the figure who “brought to an end the metaphysical tradition of the West.” Dynamite indeed. Because what is illusory was not only the “Mr. Nobodaddy” of the Bible dismissed by William Blake but meaning itself. For Nietzsche, God was always being sacrificed. He retained as least some of his father’s understanding of the meaning of Calvary. Gods are forever dying, Nietzsche held, and they are continually being reborn. 

Among his most potent contributions is the Apollonian and Dionysian binary he introduced in his 1872 The Birth of Tragedy. According to Nietzsche, culture is a delicate balance between the Apollonian (reason, logic, order, harmony, and balance) and the Dionysian (irrationality, emotion, disorder, passion, and chaos). Crucially, Nietzsche argued that it is impossible to eliminate or subdue either. As in Euripides’ The Bacchae, Dionysius cannot be tamed or controlled, and he most definitely cannot be banished. There is a danger even in trying, and certainly one in not giving the Devil his due, lest his energies refuse to remain sublimated. “The Dionysian…understands how to incite the individual to the highest pitch of exaltation,” wrote Nietzsche, “which enables him to feel himself a god and to walk in a state of rapture and enthusiasm, as if possessed.” An awareness of the satyr’s tricks is necessary if you wish not to be tricked. Even if individual gods are in twilight, the idea of them never is, and demons can’t be exorcized. “All gods are poets’ parables, poets’ prevarications,” Nietzsche wrote, but their influence is nonetheless very real. Myths are everything, God is a myth, but so is progress. The gods may be self-constructed, but they can’t help but be birthed. But what sort of deities will we be midwives for? That we create our gods means we have an urgent duty to create them well. 

“Man is the cruelest animal,” said Zarathustra, and most of Nietzsche’s oeuvre seemed fine with that dark fact. Yet what precipitated Nietzsche’s madness, arguably his last sane act, was when he witnessed a horse being flogged in the Piazza Carignano and he embraced the beast to protect it. “Man incarnate must also go mad,” remarked Georges Bataille of Nietzsche in a 1986 interview in the journal October, and that description of succumbing to the contradictions is also an apt surmisal of modernity. It risks sentimentality, but there is an intimation of a kinder god in Nietzsche’s embrace of the tortured animal in that moment of sympathy, empathy, and compassion—sentiments the philosopher belittled in his works but which he displayed so dramatically in his final free action. Yet the work itself augurs the coming of darker gods as well, dark gods that threaten to consume us. 

In the same year that Nietzsche went insane, the artist Franz von Stuck painted a work titled The Wild Hunt depicting the demonic pagan god Odin in a dark field populated by spectral, screaming figures. What von Stuck conjures isn’t ancient Teutonic myth so much as a vision of Nietzsche’s warning about the coming “shock waves, earthquakes, the transportation of hills and valleys such as the world has never yet imagined in dreams,” when mere “politics” becomes “entirely absorbed into the realm of spiritual warfare.” Odin is eerily familiar, the resemblance uncanny—pale, gaunt, and grim-visaged with a smear of black hair across his forehead and a toothbrush mustache above his lip. An aspiring Austrian painter born the same year that von Stuck finished his composition considered it his favorite piece, although after staring long into the abyss and finding that it stared back, that student abandoned art for a career in politics.