The philosopher Paul Ricoeur has described Nietzsche as the central figure in a trilogy of what he usefully terms ‘the masters of suspicion’, the predecessor being Karl Marx and the successor Sigmund Freud: those who gathered together the two previous centuries of questions posed to Christian authority, and persuaded much of the Western world that there was no authority there at all. Behind all three lies Ludwig Feuerbach, who first voiced the idea that God might be part of humanity’s creation, rather than vice versa.
