ABSTRACT
The priestly bearing of the last pope and the ascetic idealism which that connotes mark a thematic shift in Zarathustra's picaresque drama of the soul. With the last pope, Zarathustra's aesthetics of redemption moves on from an exploration of cultural paradigms to an excavation of the latter's genealogical roots in, as it were, the ascetics of redemption. Knowledge, like Christianity, is 'a hangman's metaphysics', demanding of its martyrs the 'sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of the spirit'. Bad conscience is the riddle which the ugliest man represents, the bad conscience of those 'great thinkers' whose honest will to truth, 'foul'd in Knowledge's dark Prison house', has finally taken revenge upon itself. Self-pity is the ultimate sin to which the ugliest man seduces Zarathustra: pity for the loss of his former freedom, pride and self-confidence.
