ABSTRACT
What does “nihilism” mean? This question, posed by Friedrich Nietzsche in The Will to Power, is difficult to answer simply For Nietzsche, nihilism meant that “the highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; why?’ finds no answer” (9; §2). This seems to be the case in the postmodern age, where morals are without justification, faith is replaced with cynicism, and God is all too evidently missing, presumed dead. Nihilism did not originate with Nietzsche, however, and neither did it end with him. Before Nietzsche, philosophies of nihilism are evident from classical Greece to Enlightenment Europe; since Nietzsche, and especially since the Holocaust, nihilism is no longer a marginalized philosophy, but one that has become central to an understanding of the history of modernity and twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture. How we understand nihilism in a new millennium—a millennium that is incidentally only possible within a Christian framework—depends upon how its history is understood.
