Nietzsche's Religious Development as a Student at the University of Bonn
Nietszche's most famous work, Also sprach Zarathustra, is still one of the most baffling books in modern philosophical literature. It presents such a complete revaluation of all established religious values that any new light thrown on the religious development of its author is sure to be welcomed. There can be little doubt that the man who gave the world what he thought and many others still think to be a New Gospel must have lived an unusually rich religious life. It is only natural that anyone vitally interested in the unconventional religious views of the mature Nietzsche should feel constrained to inquire into their origin and early stages of evolution. Now one of the most remarkable facts about Nietzsche is that, thanks to the foresight of his sister, more records of his early intellectual development have been preserved than of any other writer of comparable significance. Thus far, however, even detailed books on Nietzsche, including the most painstaking of them all, Charles Andler's six volumes entitled Nietzsche, sa vie et sa pensée, have failed to give an adequate analysis of his early religious development. This serious gap in scholarship concerning Nietzsche was due in part to the non-existence of an edition of Nietzsche's complete works. The recent publication of the first three volumes of the Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe of Nietzsche's works allows us, for the first time, to trace as fully as we may hope to trace, Nietzsche's religious development from his early boyhood to the end of his student days.