American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

He described American culture as youthful and innocent, unburdened by calcified traditions.“The American way of laughing does me good,” he wrote after reading Die Abenteuer Tom Sawyers, “especially this sort of sturdy seaman like Marc [sic] Twain. I have been unable to laugh anymore at anything German.” He preferred American “silliness more than German cleverness,” and found the playful American spirit of “naiveté and letting-oneself-go” physically and psychically regenerative: “Even villainous acts acquire a form of completeness and the closeness to the wild, and gunshots and marinas result in good health.”7 Though he appreciated how Americans seemed free from the weight of entombing memories, he regretted that their freedom from the past yielded a hasty pursuit of the here and now. In their “lust for gold; and the breathless haste with which they work,” they were infected with “the distinctive vice of the new world”8—“modern restlessness.”

For Nietzsche, Emerson represented a new flora and fauna of thought. He discovered in this American essayist and poet a new kind of thinker who believed that ontology and epistemology were useful only insofar as they addressed the fundamental question of philosophy: not What is the nature of being? What are the conditions of knowledge? or How do I know? but rather, as Emerson put it, “How shall I live?”

his studies caused him to question his religious beliefs. Nietzsche had entered the gymnasium at age fourteen with an ardent Lutheran faith as his trusty companion. He came from a line of Lutheran clergy—both his paternal and maternal grandfathers had been ministers, as was his beloved father, Ludwig.

It was Emerson who first instructed Nietzsche “about philosophy in life.”35 Enlivened by his discovery, Nietzsche penned his very first philosophical texts as a Germanian in direct response to his reading of Emerson.

Emerson’s essay reminded young Nietzsche that religious faith was not the only force that limited an individual’s will and intellect. Indeed, Emerson impressed on him that there are all sorts of influences—historical, physiological, even familial—that condition the individual’s experiences and limit his perspectives. The plain fact, Nietzsche came to realize, is that as human beings, we inherit so much of who we are that the distinction between the aboriginal and the adopted, between freedom and necessity, might itself be a phantom.

The individual may seek release from that which has formed him, but Emerson expressed doubt whether this was fully possible. As he argued, “The menagerie, or forms and powers of the spine, is a book of fate: the bill of the bird, the skull of the snake, determines tyrannically its limits…. How shall a man escape from his ancestors, or draw off from his veins the black drop which he drew from his father’s or his mother’s life?”42 In direct dialogue with Emerson on this question, Nietzsche asked, “What is it that pulls the soul of so many men of power down to the commonplace, thereby hindering a higher flight of ideas? A fatalistic structure of skull and spine; the condition and nature of their parents;…their environment; even… their homeland.” For Nietzsche, it was disturbing to consider the sheer range of external forces, “stifling the capacity of the soul through force of habit.” What troubled him was not simply that “we have been influenced,” but that we are so blind to influences that we cannot tell the difference between our self and the world, our independence and our inheritance.43

Nature vs nurture in Nietzsche and Emerson

In a second attempt at philosophical writing a month after composing “Fate and History,” Nietzsche, in “Freedom of Will and Fate,” made his debt to the American philosopher explicit. He argued that “Freedom of will, [is] in itself nothing but freedom of thought,” and that “free will is only an abstraction indicating the capacity to act consciously; whereas by fate we understand the principle that we are under the sway of unconscious acts.”

Nietzsche’s discovery of Emerson in 1862 seems to have been the turning point when he decided he would try to go it alone without his religious faith. His first philosophical writings suggest that even as a teenager, he knew this wouldn’t be easy.

PK deconverts PK

It was Emerson’s characterization of the liberated thinker as “intellectual nomad” that helped Nietzsche to imagine himself as a “free spirit” in a quest for truths of his own making.67 Likewise

Wanderlust New Age

home in America for Nietzsche’s philosophy? After almost three decades with Emerson’s writings, the prospect seemed likely indeed. After all, it was America that had created the thinker with whom he thought as he came to terms with himself and his world. It was the American Emerson who showed Nietzsche the possibilities of thought beyond the good and evil of Christian piety. It was the American Emerson who critiqued sterile ideas and made philosophy a friend to life. It was the American Emerson who understood that philosophical inquiry in a world without absolutes works by ex ample and provocation only. And it was the American Emerson who Nietzsche believed never could have been produced within the suffocating philistinism of his native German culture. Nietzsche did not know much about America, but he did know—or at least he believed—that with one exception (himself), Germany could never have given birth to such a dynamic thinker. He summed up his feelings for Emerson this way: “Emerson. Never have I felt so much at home in a book, and in my home as—I shouldn’t praise it, it is too close to me.”

With curiosity and confusion, fascination and frustration, they sought to make sense of a thinker who one writer in 1900 described as “the most radical philosopher of the century, and one of the most picturesquely eccentric figures in all literature.”1 Interest in Nietzsche grew so rapidly that by the 1910s observers could, without hyperbole, refer to the American “Nietzsche vogue.”

According to Nietzsche, modern Western culture was founded on a pack of lies:truth, universal morality, God. These were mere fictions, products of human imagination, which had no basis in the real world.

Nietzsche’s antifoundationalism (the denial of universal truth), together with his sustained critiques of Christian morality, Enlightenment rationality, and democracy, has compelled many Americans to question their religious ideals, moral certainties, and democratic principles.3 Turn-of-the-last-century scholars, writers, political radicals, and ministers form the first generation of Americans whose confrontation with his thought compelled them to reevaluate their inherited values in light of his criticisms. Though they had grown up in a world still confident in universals, Nietzsche’s“genealogy of morals” caused them to question the value of their values. In his concept of the “Übermensch,” Americans found a convenient vehicle to assess the forces confronting the individual in an age of growing dislocation and anonymity associated with mass politics and mass markets. In his tragic biography they discovered a cautionary tale about the perilous course of the great man in the democratic era and the soul of man under secularism.

Postmodernism

The American Nietzsche reception set against the broader historiography of his international reception demonstrates how many dominant features of the American uses of Nietzschean philosophy—in particular, interest in his rejection of Christian altruism and asceticism, bourgeois liberalism, the ethics of economic collectivism, democratic, socialist, and feminist egalitarianism—were common features of transnational Nietzsche interpretations.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, virtually all fields of thought were moving toward scientific verification and away from speculative thought. It was this rigidly positivistic atmosphere that Nietzsche’s writings in the 1870s and 1880s stridently opposed. However, the thinker who Urban discovered in the pages of Genealogy did not advise returning philosophy to the speculative realm of metaphysics. Metaphysics and positivism represented, for Nietzsche, opposing sides of the same coin: both were grounded in the principle of universal truth. Metaphysics rested on the belief in timeless foundations of universal values, whereas positivism assumed the universality of the scientific method and objectivity. Nietzsche posed his philosophical anthropology in opposition to both the older and the newer trends in thought. Urban discovered in Nietzsche a thinker who rejected the search for both the metaphysical and the natural foundations of truth and values, and sought instead to examine the human origins, cultural genealogy, and value of values.

As Urban read Nietzsche, he embarked on an excursion into the history of Judeo-Christian morality, which, since his childhood as the son of an Episcopal priest, he had assumed to reflect transcendent moral imperatives. Following Nietzsche’s lead, Urban began not only to excavate the tangled trajectory of Western moral thought but also to rethink the standard against which he would judge all claims to universal truth.

PK reads PK

Interest in his works spread so rapidly that by the early 1890s, observers could refer meaningfully to Nietzsche “cults” and the widespread “Nietzsche vogue.” The most prominent readers fascinated with Nietzsche’s work came from left-leaning liberationist, progressive circles, including anarchists, socialists, feminists—both hard-boiled Marxist materialists and more aesthetically inclined romantic radicals. However, the early fascination with Nietzsche cut across the political spectrum, as right-leaning cultural conservatives were also drawn to his writings.18 Yet the one divide that the Nietzsche enthusiasm did not traverse in any meaningful way in the initial years of its European vogue was the gulf between the worlds of radical cultural politics and the German academy.

The earliest US importers of Nietzsche’s philosophy were anarchists, leftist romantic radicals, and literary cosmopoli-tans of varying political persuasions who tracked developments in European intellectual life in real time.

Although their political commitments varied, American anarchists, romantic radicals, and literary cosmopolitans celebrated Nietzsche’s philosophical assault on modern slavishness and his emphasis on the unfettered ego as a source of human progress. They exalted Nietzsche as an exemplar of the freethinker who was pious only to his own liberated self. And like Urban, they recognized in Nietzsche a transformative thinker who had ushered in a new era of moral philosophy. Their interest in and uses of Nietzsche also reflect a long-standing Eurocentrism in American radical thought. Though committed to a notion of intellectual cosmopolitanism, by emphasizing Nietzsche’s European context and influence they suggested that advanced thought was something exclusive to Europe. In doing so, they questioned whether Nietzsche’s philosophical dawn would ever break in the United States.

Reitzel informed his readers that Nietzsche prophesied a world beyond the supernaturalism and pessimism of institutional Christianity, a world in which enlightened souls would find the sources of redemption in themselves. He affirmed that Nietzsche’s call for a self-initiated deliverance from every trace of ethical otherworldliness and a redemption self-achieved could help his anarchist readers articulate their as-yet hazy longings for a world free of institutional authority.

Nietzsche’s primary focus on the inner grandeur of the individual should be familiar to American readers, Schumm argued, because it recalled “the gentle sage of Concord.” Both thinkers were “pronounced individualists” who rejected outworn creeds, and were “experimenter[s]” who sought, as Nietzsche put it, “Life as a means of knowledge.” Likewise both fought the “dead level of mediocrity,” the hollow Christian and egalitarian chants of the age, which threaten, in Emerson’s words, to “melt the world into a lump.” Though Schumm made no claim for influence, he noted the strong affnity between the two authors, thus observing that if America could produce an Emerson, so too might she have ears to hear his insights repeated by Nietzsche.

Later seeking to redact the adjective “Nietzschian,” which he helped to popularize in America, Huneker asserted, “The only Christian, he was fond of saying, died on the Cross. The only Nietzschian, one might reply, passed away when crumbled the brilliant brain of Nietzsche.”

Though initially more aesthetic than political, Thompson’s jaundiced assessment of American democratic pluralism increasingly colored the magazine’s commentaries. Unlike Reitzel and Tucker, who employed Nietzsche for their anarchism of the Left, Thompson utilized Nietzsche for his aristocratism of the Right. He argued that America must be “ruled by … the strong man” lest it become “eaten alive by parasites.” He thus used his canon of cosmopolitan thinkers to criticize cosmopolitan realities in America.58 Nietzsche confirmed his belief that America was a “doomed republic,” for it operated under the “monstrous fallacy that all men are born free and equal.” The problem with modern democracy is that it mistakes “plutocracy” for leadership and “ballotocracy” for public order. Critical of the leveling tendencies in modern life, and of its assault on the natural “intellectual aristocracy,” Thompson made his debt to Nietzsche explicit:59 And M’lle New York sees the democratic hatred of the individual that is the chief mark of this drab, commercial civilization.

In the first doctoral dissertation on Nietzsche in the United States, Cornell University philosophy student Grace Neal Dolson agreed that the Nietzsche vogue hardly justified scholarly interest in him, or warranted a philosophy dissertation on him. But she argued that to reckon with Nietzsche was simply to confront head on “the general intellectual movement of the past decades…. In one sense, he was inevitable.” Nietzsche had observed how the increasingly naturalistic view of the universe made a mockery of moral commitments.

Yarros speculated in 1901 that “probably no sound thinker entertains the faintest fear of the spread of Friedrich Nietzsche’s amazing gospel” in America. But that wasn’t the point. While they might reject “theoretical Nietzscheism,” they had long ago embraced it in practice. Commercialism, greed, laissez-faire, the quest for empire: these were the cornerstones of American life. Americans, he speculated, would very well find “theoretical Nietzscheism” abhorrent, precisely because it so accurately laid bare their ethics. Americans thus had no use for Nietzsche because they had been Nietzscheans all along.

No author did more to establish the persona of Friedrich Nietzsche in America than H. L. Mencken. His 1908 study, The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche—the first full-length English-language book written for a general audience in America—offered a rollicking master narrative about Nietzsche’s religious upbringing, his intellectual path from parsonage to public enemy, his battle with poor health, and his warfare on the slave morality of modern Christianity. Nietzsche’s dramatic life story and personality were for Mencken no sideline attractions: they were relevant for understanding the pulsating “will to power” marking every page of his writings. Mencken’s Nietzsche “hurled his javelin” at the “authority” of God, of transcendent morality, and of universal truth.

According to Broene, Nietzsche suffered from the absence of a strong male presence after the early death of his father. “Growing up as he did in a family of women,” and longing for the “strong, controlling hand of a father,” he developed a “changeableness, a mutability” that explained his inability to make commitments both emotional and intellectual. In Broene’s estimation, Nietzsche’s philosophical antifoundationalism was the direct result of his feminized psychology.

Amid the contestations, a consensus emerged that Americans were too confident in the universal value of their bourgeois Christian worldviews to have any meaningful use for such a radically antifoundational, antireligious, antidemocratic thinker. And yet, by invoking Nietzsche in superlatives, high-lighting his European influence, debating his persona, and showing the usevalue of his name as adjective and “ism,” his earliest American commentators unwittingly answered their own question.

Sometimes symbolic, more often literal, here as heartless misanthrope, there as brutal intellect, Nietzsche’s multivalent image proved to be an indispensable resource for religious moderns to come to terms with the warring moral impulses both within their faith and between Christianity and secular culture. He gave them an opportunity to dust off what for many had become an artifact of primitive Christianity—the Antichrist—and use it to describe his menacing image for modern society.

Shailer Mathews, dean of the University of Chicago Divinity School and advocate of the Social Gospel movement, warned, “A religion that cannot meet the deepest longings of restless hearts, … that makes respectability its morality, that would muzzle scientific inquiry will be ignored by a world that has outgrown it.” Mathews understood that moderns hungry for spiritual and psychic nourishment, and a new ethics to address new realities, could no longer be satisfied with the spiritual “crusts of yesterday.”

“No one can think, and escape Nietzsche.”8 The power of the philosopher’s ideas was everywhere apparent, and religious commentators agreed that if any institution could put an end to what another religious observer called the “Nietzsche madness,” it was the church.9 But in their effort to call a halt to the Nietzsche epidemic that they believed had taken hold of nonreligious and antireligious Americans, religious commentators became unwitting carriers of the disease. Indeed, Nietzsche’s ideas found entry into the American moral imagination through the most unlikely of promoters: men of the cloth.

the religious uses of Nietzsche are less a study of how his ideas transformed religious thought than a story of how religious readers imaginatively appropriated, adapted, and domesticated his ideas in their effort to reassert their flagging moral authority in modernizing America. Nietzsche’s philosophy made important contributions to turn-of-the-century Christian apologetics in America, and thus proved itself a crucial if unlikely resource for strengthening religious commitments and overcoming the crises facing institutional religion as it backed its way into a new century.

Xtians used N for their own purposes

Nietzsche’s significance for theologians, Patton sug gested, was not his hostility to Christianity as such but rather his questioning of Christian moral standards. Patton pointed to Nietzsche’s discussion of the origin of Christian values in On the Genealogy of Morals as an example of how historicism, pushed to its logical conclusion, enabled him to “impugn the validity of all moral ideas by tracing their origin.” The problem with Nietzsche, as with all those caught up in this genealogical impulse, is that he employed it not to better understand scriptural authority but to undermine it. By arguing that divine ideals had a human origin, Nietzsche sought not simply to criticize Christian moral values but to “put in question the value of these values.” Having stripped Christian values of any divine authorship, Nietzsche had no recourse but to fall either back onto a biological basis of morality, or forward into the abyss of no morality at all.

Identifying Nietzsche as the spokesperson for modern critics “who have seen that Christian ethics have no rock-basis apart from Christian dogma,” a writer for the Living Age argued that Nietzsche had it right: without belief in Jesus Christ as savior, the morals of Christianity made no sense. As Nietzsche observed, secular moderns sought to exalt the ideals of humanitarianism and democracy while forsaking the Christian faith from which they sprang. Thus, it was liberal moderns who proved to be even more timid than religious fundamentalists, for their whole ethical worldview was now founded on a lie: they had dropped the metaphysics of Christianity but not its ethics, assuming them to be universal. Nietzsche’s antifoundationalism wasn’t cheery, but at least it was logically consistent: Christian ethics without Christian faith is unsustainable.18

Perfect summary of woke

While religious moderns sought the assurances of fundamental truths found in orthodoxy and the permissiveness found in liberal Protestantism, the two seemed increasingly difficult to reconcile. As Nietzsche’s religious readers demonstrate, they may have yearned for modern freedom more than truth, but they were coming to wonder whether they needed truth more than freedom.

Barth solves this

Like Nietzsche’s pious Protestant readers, Catholic interpreters focused on his assertions about the outmoded nature of Christianity in the modern world. “Is dogma out of date?” asked a Catholic commentator responding to challenges from “fashionable notions of the present day,” which viewed religious creeds and dogmas as “belated survivals” of a premodern world well lost.22 Though not indifferent to the challenges of modernity for Roman Catholicism, they argued that the question of theological relevance itself reflected the destructive tendency in modern thought to view knowledge and values as mutable, variable, and progressive. The problem for Catholics was not that their faith was outsized by modern problems but that moderns were too willing to substitute natural philosophy for supernatural religion, and the winds of speculation for the Rock of Ages. They took delight in Nietzsche’s own insistence that a despiritualized Christianity was too flimsy a foundation for Christian ethics, and thus used Nietzsche to critique liberalizing tendencies in Protestantism to divorce ethics from religion.

Nietzsche’s Catholic interpreters thus overwhelmingly asserted that only religious moderns who accept the heresy of a changing universe feel the pressure to bring their theology up to date. They leave themselves open to moral relativism and thus have no response to Nietzsche, who would gladly “clear away” Christianity as the mere “‘accumulated rubbish’ of the centuries.”

But Nietzsche’s misguidedness offered salutary lessons about the failures of Protestantism. His failures demonstrated how Protestantism’s rationalist approach to the Word of the Bible and its historical openness to scientific thinking stretched biblical authority too thin. By hoisting will above Word, and by failing to appreciate human intellect as a finite and imperfect faculty, Luther had sent early modern theology along a dangerous course that led straight to Nietzsche. What they both failed to realize, and what the Roman Catholic Church had always stressed, is that true free will is not intellect unhindered but human will working in cooperation with God’s grace. Catholic interpreters thus felt compelled to highlight the Protestant roots of Nietzsche’s errors, employing his philosophy as evidence of the dangerous worldliness of the liberal Protestantism that dominated American public life during the Progressive Era.

In “False Prophets,” a series of lectures on the misguided heralds of modernity delivered at St. Paul’s Cathedral in New York City, Gillis sought to set the record straight. In his view, Nietzschean godlessness represented all that was sick and morally depraved in modern life. Nietzsche advocated a topsy-turvy moral universe, and thus underscored the gross licentiousness and libertinism of modern culture. For Gillis, Nietzsche’s haunting vision of a post-Christian world required no interpretation. While true Christians aimed to build a common life based on the Golden Rule, Nietzsche sought to free the aristocratic superman to trample on the weak and to run roughshod on all bonds of human love and obligation. Gillis criticized liberal Protestant readers who tried to tease a religious message out of Nietzsche’s philosophy: “Any attempt to make immoralism moral can result only in a tour de force.”38

Against David Frenchism

While Catholics typically employed Nietzsche to distinguish Catholicism from an all-too-worldly Protestantism, both Catholics and Protestants agreed that Nietzsche’s assaults on Christianity helped the faith more than they hurt it. Even the modernist-friendly critic Petre argued that Nietzsche’s supreme contribution was his facilitation of a reaffirmation of religious faith: “we can learn from [Nietzsche] something that will enrich the truths we already possess.”40 Nietzsche thus identified and exemplified the problems of secular philosophy as a source of values and meanings. He demonstrated that philosophy was no substitute for religion, man no substitute for God; and in doing so, that religion still had a future in modern America.

According to Shailer Mathews, a leading light of the Chicago School’s liberal theology, “In [the] contrast between the teaching of Jesus and the teaching of Nietzsche we are confronting the fundamental antithesis that lies in the world of values.”43 In Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), Walter Rauschenbusch likewise described Nietzsche’s philosophy as the “direct out-growth” of the social world of industrialization, speculating that there exists “an intimate causal connection between the industrial system which evolves the modern captain of industry and the philosophy of Nietzsche which justifies and glorifies him.”

According to Lyman Abbott, Congregationalist minister and editor of Outlook, the “two contrasted principles” — Nietzsche’s “self-seeking” versus Jesus’s “altruistic” ethics—reflected the two competing answers between which moderns must choose: According to one conception, the end of life is the development of a type—what Friedrich Nietzsche calls “the beyond man;” according to the other conception, the end of life is the development of a race organized in a new social order—what Jesus calls “the kingdom of heaven;” according to the one conception, the method is self-service and the sacrifice of others; according to the other, the method is self-sacrifice and the service of others.

Rev. Robert Loring preached that “Nietzsche is more like strong medicine than like pleasant food.… Like many old-fashioned tonics they often leave a bitter taste in the mouth. There seems, however, to be this difference; while the old-fashioned tonic had printed on the bottle, ‘Shake before Taking,’ in the case of Nietzsche you first take, and then you shake.”63 In Nietzsche’s bracing writings on religion, liberal Protestant ministers and theologians discovered a valuable moral stimulant that would energize Christians and an intellectual astringent that would enable them to do some long-overdue spiritual, ethical, and liturgical housecleaning.

Adderall

As Jackson Lears has observed, many turn-of-the-century Protestants, feeling plagued by the “weightlessness” of modern experience, became attracted to the medieval asceticism in Catholicism. For Protestants of late Victorian and Progressive America who felt “overfed” and “overcivilized” by modern culture, the self-denying strain of the Catholic martyr appealed to their longing for intense bodily experience, a mystical “release” from secular anomie, and a righteous stoicism in the face of a degenerate and decadent world.65 The comforts of modern life and the secular millennialism of modern culture, Catholics and Protestants could agree, had an influence on modern faith’s making religion too easy, too soft, too feminine.

Why postliberals convert today

Nietzsche’s “bitter tonic,” Figgis contended, was necessary insofar as it showed the bad faith of liberal faith. Nietzsche reminded modern Christians that any life worth living comes at a cost, and any faith worth having is a faith which demands something of the believer. Nietzsche had performed a “direct service to the Christian, and is far less antagonistic than he supposed,” for he helped retrieve the true meaning of Christian living from those tendencies in modern life that were cheapening it. Why call Nietzsche an enemy for demonstrating that the modern church was increasingly peopled with half-hearted believers who used their Christianity as a moral conceit? Let the all-too-human masses have their easy comforts, their blind faith in progress, their delight in breezy entertainments, and their romantic attachment to moral platitudes. But those who recognize the “tremendous greatness of life” understood with Nietzsche that true Christian faith is intractably difficult. Likewise, any God worthy of belief must be a God worthy of awe. Nietzsche had shown that “life is tragic, and that man needs redemption.” Impressed by his commitment to martial virtues, Figgis affirmed that “the price for the world’s ransom must be paid in blood. The world would not be worth redeeming could it be paid in any lower coinage.”

Nietzsche’s religious readers drew analogies between his philosophy and the original gospel of the historical Jesus. They argued that Nietzsche not only reformulated Jesus’s emphasis on the value of human personality but also wanted belief to be less rule-bound and yet more spiritually demanding. Nietzsche rejected the dogmas, the priests, and the scholasticism for a truer gospel of life, just as Jesus had rejected the formal religion of the Pharisees. Nietzsche’s philosophy thus hoisted Jesus above ecclesiastical Christianity, just as Jesus had himself raised the bar of spirituality above the rigid dogmas and practices of early Judaism.80 Moreover, the religious readers incorporated Nietzsche’s challenges against Christian altruism and sentimentalism in their retelling of a muscular Jesus as they sought to distance “true” Christianity from the feminizing aspects of modern Protestantism.

Foster was unique, though, in recognizing the full implications of welcoming Nietzsche into his thought. Once moderns could find in Nietzsche reasons to doubt the absoluteness of Christianity as well as an antidote to disenchantment accompanying that doubt, it would be difficult to return to Jesus as rock and refuge: “we cannot lead [our] age back to Jesus, which has grown out beyond him.”82 George Burman Foster stands out among religious thinkers, in that he accepted Nietzsche’s ideas of a fully de-divinized Jesus.83 Trained in Berlin and Göttingen, Germany, he spent his years in Chicago teaching a radicalized ver sion of the historicist theology he had learned abroad and preaching it from pulpits in both Baptist and Unitarian churches. Heavily influenced by Nietzsche, Foster adopted what he would come to identify as a “functionalist” view of religious belief and practice. In his scholarly books, he sought to move Christianity away from its history as an “authority-religion,” which understood itself as the sole and final arbiter of meaning and truth. For Foster, the “conviction of the finality [that is, absoluteness] of the Christian religion” could no longer be reconciled in a world “where the fixed has yielded to flux, being to becoming, absoluteness to relativity, force to ideals.”

He simply calibrated his writing to an audience of young seekers, not those he believed were already sated. Foster argued that while no religion is a finality, all express a uni-fying experience of humankind, namely, the longing for divinity. “God is but another human name for Eternal Yearning,” he explained.92 It was Nietzsche who recognized the peculiarly desperate nature of modern man’s spirituality. Modern science successfully challenged the toppled absolutes of religion, showing God to be a “human fantasy,” but not the ultimate absolute in man:a yearning for transcendence.

While Nietzsche diagnosed the predicament of modern longing, he also showed the personality capable of overcoming it. Foster introduced Nietzsche as “the Prophet of a New Culture” whose life and thought heralded an exalted image of modern man. “Man as the goal, beauty as the form, life as the law, eternity as the content of our new day—this is Nietzsche’s message to the modern man.” He stressed that the path to higher spirituality cannot look “backward ” to inherited traditions, but must look “forward ” to a new imagined world of creative invention and discovery. He proclaimed, “A man is coming to be leader—a man who, as no other, embodies in himself all the pain and all the pleasure, all the sickness and all the convalescence, all the age and all the youth, of our tumultuous and tortured times: Friedrich Nietzsche

Though the “preaching of Superman might be called Messianic,” Nietzsche taught that this savior is in each one of us.100 Foster argued, then, that in coming to Nietzsche, one comes closer to himself: Nietzsche as one’s inner messiah. He stressed that even those readers who were not yet familiar with “the great personality of Nietzsche” knew him, “for a part of him is in your own heart and hope. If you have ever thought seriously about yourself … you have taken up into yourself a part of Nietzsche as you have so thought.

Just like Jesus