Nietzsche's Philosophy of Religion

Books i–iv of the gay science were published in 1882. Book v was added in 1887, the year in which The Genealogy of Morals also appeared. The work is thus interrupted by both Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil. In the main, however, I shall treat it as the unity Nietzsche intended. Though the work is a wonderfully rich discussion of everything under the sun I shall confine my attention to what it has to say that bears on my topics of community and religion.

Bernard Williams, in his introduction to the Cambridge translation of the work, claims that ‘This book, like all his others [The Birth?], makes it clear that any life worth living must involve daring, individuality and creative bloody-mindedness’ (GS p. xiv). This is the familiar Nietzsche: the ‘aristocratic individualist’ who, concerned only for the flourishing of the exceptional type, takes society – the ‘herd’ – to be at best a footstool for, and at worst a serious impediment to, the flourishing of a creative elite.

If this were the whole story about The Gay Science – if all Nietzsche valued was the masterful individual hammering society's ‘idols’ to smithereens in the interests of ‘doing his own thing’ – then religion, as a society-bonding ‘fetter’, could be expected to appear as nothing but an oppressive force and as such a prime target for deconstruction. ‘Antichrist’ would then be the long and the short of The Gay Science's philosophy of religion.