The God of the Eternal Return in Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy

Abstract

Friedrich Nietzsche in his books fought against the christian God and during his fight he spoke about how he understands God. That leads us to the question: If the God of morality, the christian God died for Nietzsche, does that mean that God himself died for Nietzsche too? This paper strives to show that the answer to this question is not simple. Nietzsche’s phantasm of the Eternal Returning gives possibilities to place the concept of God among others fundamental ideas of Nietzsche’s philosophy, like the will to power or nihilism. One of the possibilities described in this paper shows that God lives in every moment of the Eternal Return. The second possibility shows that God is the climax of the Nietzsche’s idea of the Eternal Return. This article is of course only an interpretative experiment because Nietzsche never wrote directly about the understanding of the God that he might believe in. However one might wonder why Nietzsche wrote so much about God in his books and how much we can find out about his understanding of God.