ABSTRACT
I NOWHERE is the inner split in Nietzsche more evident than in matters of religion. In this respect, too, his conscious attitude was entirely different from his unconscious propensities and his inherited instincts. It is common knowledge that Nietzsche’s father was a pastor and that several generations of his ancestors had followed the same vocation. As a boy he was nicknamed by his comrades der kleine Pastor (the little pastor)—a hint that even at that age he intended to follow the example of his father. According to his sister’s testimony, Nietzsche was a very pious child and gave many a thought to religious questions, which, as she puts it, he was always anxious to convert into practice. Among the poems he wrote in the winter of 1863-4, while still a pupil at Pforta, there is one under the title To the Unknown God which speaks for itself:
On entering Bonn University, Nietzsche first registered for theology, which he gave up in the second term in order to study classical philology under Professor Ritschl. At that time he was still under the influence of German Protestantism. Gradually the vision of ancient Hellas on the one hand and the spell of Schopenhauer’s philosophy on the other became such an overpowering inner experience with him that he tried to blend, or rather mix the two. Even the romantic ‘Cross’ (mentioned in his letter to Erwin Rohde in 1868), let alone
the cult of Wagner, had its say. Then came the biological outlook which he could not so easily reconcile either with his romanticism or with his inherited Christian religion. Yet even after having condemned Christianity wholesale, he still retained his profound religious instinct which played havoc with him on so many occasions, and most of all in Thus Spake Zarathustra, reminiscent of the style and language in Luther’s Bible. Moreover, the very name of Zarathustra would hardly have been adopted by Nietzsche had he not felt a certain affinity with that old Persian sage and religious founder of cosmic duality.
