doctrine God is dead and the old ground of values with him; first voiced of the saint in the forest, dramatised later through the last pope and the ugliest man.
Zarathustra went down the mountain alone, no one meeting him. When he entered the forest, however, there suddenly stood before him an old man, who had left his holy cot to seek roots. And thus spake the old man to…
Zarathustra parts from the saint and marvels that he has not yet heard that God is dead.
Read in the book →“Could it be possible! This old saint in the forest hath not yet heard of it, that GOD IS DEAD!”
The first utterance of the book's announcement that God is dead.
Read in the book →Many too many are born: for the superfluous ones was the state devised! See just how it enticeth them to it, the many-too-many! How it swalloweth and cheweth and recheweth them! “On earth there is nothing greater than…
Even the conquerors of the old God, weary of the fight, end up serving the new idol.
Read in the book →“DEAD ARE ALL THE GODS: NOW DO WE DESIRE THE SUPERMAN TO LIVE.”—Let this be our final will at the great noontide!—
The gods' death is the ground for desiring the Superman.
Read in the book →God is a conjecture: but I do not wish your conjecturing to reach beyond your creating will. Could ye CREATE a God?—Then, I pray you, be silent about all Gods! But ye could well create the Superman. Not perhaps ye…
God is called a conjecture that must not exceed the creating will, and Zarathustra concludes that there are no gods.
Read in the book →IF there were gods, how could I endure it to be no God! THEREFORE there are no Gods.
A famous, ironic argument for atheism that grounds it in the creator's pride.
Read in the book →One should hold fast one’s heart; for when one letteth it go, how quickly doth one’s head run away! Ah, where in the world have there been greater follies than with the pitiful? And what in the world hath caused more…
The devil says God died of his pity for man.
Read in the book →And when I call out: “Curse all the cowardly devils in you, that would fain whimper and fold the hands and adore”—then do they shout: “Zarathustra is godless.” And especially do their teachers of submission shout…
Called godless by the teachers of submission, he accepts the name proudly.
Read in the book →O Zarathustra, here is the great city: here hast thou nothing to seek and everything to lose. Why wouldst thou wade through this mire? Have pity upon thy foot! Spit rather on the gate of the city, and—turn back! Here is…
The city's piety, its spittle-licking before the God of Hosts, and its servile 'appointable virtue' are mocked, while the shopman's gold decides.
Read in the book →It is however a shame to pray! Not for all, but for thee, and me, and whoever hath his conscience in his head.
Returning to prayer is condemned as cowardice, a retreat from the intellectual conscience that has outgrown God.
Read in the book →Five words about old things did I hear yester-night at the garden-wall: they came from such old, sorrowful, arid night-watchmen. “For a father he careth not sufficiently for his children: human fathers do this better!”—…
Two old watchmen's doubts about whether God exists or cares for his children show that the old belief is already hollow.
Read in the book →They did not “begloom” themselves to death—that do people fabricate! On the contrary, they—LAUGHED themselves to death once on a time!
The old gods ended in laughter when one jealous God claimed to be the only one.
Read in the book →If ever my wrath hath burst graves, shifted landmarks, or rolled old shattered tables into precipitous depths: If ever my scorn hath scattered mouldered words to the winds, and if I have come like a besom to…
He sits rejoicing among the graves of old Gods, loving ruined churches when heaven shines through them.
Read in the book →What have I just heard? answered Zarathustra. What wisdom in kings! I am enchanted, and verily, I have already promptings to make a rhyme thereon:— —Even if it should happen to be a rhyme not suited for every one’s…
The rhyme ends with God turned Jew, a mocking image of a declining world that has lost its old order.
Read in the book →When however Zarathustra had gone round a rock, then saw he on the same path, not far below him, a man who threw his limbs about like a maniac, and at last tumbled to the ground on his belly. “Halt!” said then…
The lament addresses a cruel, jealous, unfamiliar God, a performance of faith by someone for whom the old ground is gone.
Read in the book →“Whoever thou art, thou traveller,” said he, “help a strayed one, a seeker, an old man, who may here easily come to grief! The world here is strange to me, and remote; wild beasts also did I hear howling; and he who…
The old man confirms that the old God is dead and that he served him until the last hour.
Read in the book →Thus spake the hoary man, and gazed with keen eyes at him who stood before him. Zarathustra however seized the hand of the old pope and regarded it a long while with admiration. “Lo! thou venerable one,” said he then,…
Zarathustra declares his own ungodliness while the priest's blessing hand holds him.
Read in the book →“He who most loved and possessed him hath now also lost him most—: —Lo, I myself am surely the most godless of us at present? But who could rejoice at that!”— —“Thou servedst him to the last?” asked Zarathustra…
The two men trade accounts of how God died and what he was.
Read in the book →“Thou old pope,” said here Zarathustra interposing, “hast thou seen THAT with thine eyes? It could well have happened in that way: in that way, AND also otherwise. When Gods die they always die many kinds of death.…
Zarathustra faults the God as equivocal and a bad potter, and says good taste itself says 'Away with such a God'.
Read in the book →—“What do I hear!” said then the old pope, with intent ears; “O Zarathustra, thou art more pious than thou believest, with such an unbelief! Some God in thee hath converted thee to thine ungodliness. Is it not thy piety…
The priest reads Zarathustra's godlessness as a piety that honesty has carried beyond belief.
Read in the book →For that old God liveth no more: he is indeed dead.”—
Zarathustra's closing verdict restates the death of God to the old man who served him.
Read in the book →“Zarathustra! Zarathustra! Read my riddle! Say, say! WHAT IS THE REVENGE ON THE WITNESS? I entice thee back; here is smooth ice! See to it, see to it, that thy pride doth not here break its legs! Thou thinkest thyself…
Zarathustra names the ugliest man as God's murderer, who could not endure the one who saw him through and through.
Read in the book →“I know thee well,” said he, with a brazen voice, “THOU ART THE MURDERER OF GOD! Let me go.
Zarathustra names the ugliest man as the murderer of God.
Read in the book →Thou thyself, however,—warn thyself also against THY pity! For many are on their way to thee, many suffering, doubting, despairing, drowning, freezing ones— I warn thee also against myself. Thou hast read my best, my…
God died because his over-pitiful gaze saw all of man's hidden shame, and man cannot endure such a witness.
Read in the book →The God who beheld everything, AND ALSO MAN: that God had to die! Man cannot ENDURE it that such a witness should live.”
A concise statement of the motive for killing God.
Read in the book →God hath died: now do WE desire—the Superman to live.
God's death is called the higher men's greatest danger removed, and it opens the way for their mastery.
Read in the book →Hardly, however, had Zarathustra left the cave when the old magician got up, looked cunningly about him, and said: “He is gone! And already, ye higher men—let me tickle you with this complimentary and flattering name,…
He describes his hearers as those to whom the old God has died and no new God yet lies in the cradle.
Read in the book →All on a sudden however, Zarathustra’s ear was frightened: for the cave which had hitherto been full of noise and laughter, became all at once still as death;—his nose, however, smelt a sweet-scented vapour and…
Having lost their old God, they worship an ass in his place.
Read in the book →Amen! And glory and honour and wisdom and thanks and praise and strength be to our God, from everlasting to everlasting! —The ass, however, here brayed YE-A. He carrieth our burdens, he hath taken upon him the form of a…
The litany parodies Christian worship, with 'Amen', a servant-form God and a beast of burden, to show what is left of God.
Read in the book →At this place in the litany, however, Zarathustra could no longer control himself; he himself cried out YE-A, louder even than the ass, and sprang into the midst of his maddened guests. “Whatever are you about, ye…
The pope defends adoring God in any form, even as an ass, and the shadow says the old God lives again, since with gods death is only a prejudice.
Read in the book →—“And thou,” said Zarathustra, “thou bad old magician, what didst thou do! Who ought to believe any longer in thee in this free age, when THOU believest in such divine donkeyism? It was a stupid thing that thou didst;…
The conscientious one says God seems most believable as slow and stupid, a mocking defence of belief.
Read in the book →—“And thou thyself, finally,” said Zarathustra, and turned towards the ugliest man, who still lay on the ground stretching up his arm to the ass (for he gave it wine to drink). “Say, thou nondescript, what hast thou…
The ugliest man, the murderer of God, will not say whether God lives or is dead.
Read in the book →Leave me alone! Leave me alone! I am too pure for thee. Touch me not! Hath not my world just now become perfect? My skin is too pure for thy hands. Leave me alone, thou dull, doltish, stupid day! Is not the midnight…
Zarathustra says he is 'no God', and that God's woe is deeper than his own and is not his to bear.
Read in the book →Mencken argues, quoting Zarathustra's reply to the market-place crowd that God is dead, that belief in equality and brotherhood is the mob-morality of the ancient Jews credited to their god, and that since educated men no longer believe in that god it is ridiculous to keep the ethics grounded on him.
Takes the death of God as removing the ground of the ethic of equality and brotherhood.
Mencken explains that Nietzsche rejected free will, holding that responsibility was invented to justify punishment and that Christianity is 'a hangman's metaphysic', and that denying God and responsibility restores the innocence of man's existence.
Denying God is presented as denying responsibility and thereby saving man.
Ludovici says that in 'In the Happy Isles' Nietzsche overcomes the pessimism that godlessness brings by pointing to creating as salvation from suffering, the Superman supplying the cheerfulness to face a world without God.
The death of God need not issue in despair if it frees man to create.
Ludovici explains the last pope's story as Nietzsche's history of Judaism and Christianity: the jealous, revengeful God of a strong warlike race degenerates with his people into a soft, pitiful God of love who sacrifices his Son for us, and this process ends in his being suffocated by his own pity.
God's death is the logical end of his degeneration into a God of pity.
Ludovici reads the ugliest man as the murderer of God by an atheism of the great ugly man who reveres beauty: an omniscient God's pity, lacking shame and reverence, could not be evaded and so must not exist; Zarathustra honours his self-contempt as the mark of a great despiser.
God is killed because his all-seeing pity is unbearable.
Ludovici explains that with Nietzsche man came of age at the noon of life: the gods and superstitions of our childhood withdraw, we are responsible for our actions, and having lived our morning under chance we must make our afternoon our own.
The old guardians, the gods of our youth, withdraw.
This is an experiment in interactive reading, and in using AI to help you grow. Thus Spake Zarathustra is notoriously difficult for a modern reader; yet taken as a set of mental exercises, it is guaranteed to transform your thinking by the time you reach the end. Along the way you will have help from the companion, who is always beside the book.
Do you accept the challenge?
Nietzsche elsewhere
Nietzsche says that God is dead, yet as people are constituted his shadow will be shown in caves for millennia, as Buddha's was, and that we must still overcome this shadow.
The death of God is not the end of belief: its shadow persists and must itself be overcome.
Nietzsche says, through a madman in the market-place, that we have killed God, unchaining the earth from its sun and leaving us straying through infinite nothingness; the deed is so great that it has not yet reached men's ears, and the churches are now only God's tombs.
The canonical statement: God's death is a murder committed by us, an event whose magnitude has not yet been grasped.
Nietzsche says, through the madman, that the killing of God may require us to become Gods ourselves merely to seem worthy of the deed.
The death of God imposes a task on its murderers: to rise to the height of the deed.
Nietzsche says that the death of God, the Christian God becoming unworthy of belief, will bring the collapse of everything built on that belief, including all European morality, though most have not yet heard of it; yet for free spirits the news feels not like gloom but like a new dawn, opening the sea again to every hazard of the discerner.
Names it 'the most important of more recent events', whose shadows are only beginning to fall on Europe.
Nietzsche says that the decay of belief in the Christian God is a European event, that what defeated God was Christian morality itself, its veracity sublimated into the scientific conscience, and that rejecting the Christian interpretation confronts us with Schopenhauer's question whether existence has any significance at all, to which Schopenhauer gave only a premature, Christian-ascetic answer.
The victory of honest atheism is cast as Europe's longest and bravest self-conquest.