Nietzsche's Idea of Luther in Menschliches, Allzumenschliches

Abstract

Until 1876 Nietzsche paid Luther very high compliments. The works and letters of his first creative period abound with praise for the German reformer. The youthful Nietzsche, professor of Greek and philosopher of culture, more than once expressed his intellectual indebtedness to the spirit of Wittenberg. In those early years he felt himself the heir of the Lutheran Reformation and the inveterate foe of Roman Catholicism. Though anything but an orthodox Protestant, he was nevertheless firmly convinced of the intellectual and moral superiority of Protestantism to the Church of Rome. As late as 1876 he looked upon Protestantism as a source of light and freedom and upon Roman Catholicism as the embodiment of darkness and intellectual bondage. However, all his complimentary utterances on Luther and the Reformation are scarcely based on an intimate knowledge of the man and the movement he inspired. They rather express little more than the idea of Luther held by most educated Protestants of that day. What he said reflects the general, favorable attitude characteristic of Protestant Germany: Luther the great hero of the Reformation, the first representative of modern culture, without whom the world in which we live would be quite unthinkable. In other words, Nietzsche identified himself as late as Richard Wagner in Bayreuth (1876) with the then prevalent Protestant opinion of the Reformation: “Halten wir an dem … Geiste fest, der sich in der deutschen Reformation … offenbart hat …” (IV, 54).