Nietzsche became a harsh critic of religion in general and Christianity in particular. Scholars recognize Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883), composed with a biblical-narrative style, as his masterpiece. Like most of his books, it went largely unnoticed. Here he announces that “God is dead.” This was his way of stating that most people had stopped believing in God. Therefore, religion was no longer capable of serving as the basis for a moral code. The doctrine of eternal recurrence, the concept that all things will return—in precise detail—an infinite number of times, forms the fundamental idea behind the book. Eternal recurrence asks a question: what kind of person would find the concept of repeating one’s life identically an infinite number of
