Thomas Nevin’s new reading of Nietzsche is at home on an island of misfit toys. Like Ariosto’s Astolfo, who goes to the moon in search of Orlando’s sanity only to find the good things that humanity has shed, Nevin has gone—not quite as far as the moon—in search of a true Christian. That Nietzsche might brook accommodation in his father’s house, however, pleads convincingly that Luther may have wanted to reform the Church but ended up installing a lost-and-found box instead. Late of the quincentenary of Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses, Nevin has sorted through half a millennium of Christian miscellany and found the following items: one failed monk who refused to presume that he could love God; a late gnostic theosophist who gave God the honor of originating evil; a court philosopher who acquitted God of that charge by removing hope of a better world; and one secular humanist whose hamstrung faith bought him thirty talents of tolerance for the other sons of Abraham. They are Martin Luther, Jacob Boehme, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing.That bien-pensants will undoubtedly dismiss the book as unfashionably Christian is an endorsement. It speaks volumes—perhaps there will be a second one?—about the company in which this book finds itself. It is a book that swears no allegiances and therefore must be read by Christians, by Nietzsche scholars, and by students of German intellectual history alike. As for the rest of Nevin’s ragtag apostolate—Hamann, Hölderlin, and Schopenhauer, to which he would add Jean Paul and F. H. Jacobi—they must await the light that we can only hope they will see. Three volumes of four would make twelve, but then what to do with Paul who made of Christ’s disciples a baker’s dozen?It is among this stray lot of four German Protestants, each of whom stumbled over his cross no less than the best of the apostles, that Nevin locates Nietzsche. To Christ’s question, “Who do you say that I am?,” Nietzsche would probably have replied, “Lord of all losers.” But no honest Christian would disagree, Christ least of all. Many of Nietzsche’s criticisms of Christianity, Nevin suggests, he leveled at straw men, at the Mummers’ play of the Christian bourgeoisie whose hypocrisy he mistook for doctrine. If the worst of disciples betrayed Jesus and the best of them wiped his hands clean, denying him love for good measure, then to be a Christian means to be a failure. All else is a pull on one’s pride and little besides. But even the most squint-eyed reading would bely the evidence if it made of Nietzsche a failed Christian rather than an assailant. One of Nevin’s points is that, not unlike Luther, Nietzsche was an assailant from within and his solo demolitionism bears the mark of one who, not unlike a disciple, suffered dearly from the challenges placed at his feet by the one who was supposed to redeem him.A self-styled “dog-Christian,” Nevin has thus gone athwart and about in search of Christendom’s infamous prodigal but has returned as he must, empty-handed. Nietzsche will not be found, not even in the wrong pew. Though by the end of the book Christians have no reason to sing and dance or to kill a fattened calf, Nevin does recommend that they read Nietzsche. The spendthrift energy of his prose is a tonic that wakes the blood and heads a spiritual coma off at the pass. Nietzsche keeps Christians honest, but can we say that he helps to make them better Christians? That seems to be Nevin’s idea. As for Nietzsche’s epigones, he suggests that the joys of atheism lose their savor when they are not earned and that means taking Christianity seriously, as Nietzsche did from the cradle to the grave.In chapter 1 Nevin argues that, despite the Pauline athleticism of his faith, Luther was subject to a Petrine fault: he failed to love both God and neighbor with all his heart, soul, and mind. Forbidding his followers ease, he put grace-given fides center stage in a theology that offered caritas only a cameo. Luther can thus be charged with the same spiritual mediocrity as Peter who in John 21:15 promises to be best friends (φιλῶ) with the one whom he will deny three times. But what does Luther’s spiritual failing have to do with Nietzsche? Ignoring much of the scholarship on Luther and the Reformation in Nietzsche’s writings, Nevin puts forth an argument from temperamental affinity. He argues that, like Luther, Nietzsche was embattled, was alone, and resolved to shape a new spiritualism. The feudal silhouette of Luther’s Bible hangs over Zarathustra, who sets out to reform “human ontology for future hazards” (65). Nevin’s analysis of Luther’s role in Nietzsche’s intellectual formation should be put in dialogue with more recent contributions on this subject, particularly with the work of Martin A. Ruehl, who has argued that Nietzsche’s understanding of Luther and the Protestant Reformation was almost exclusively shaped by Jacob Burckhardt (“‘An Uncanny Re-awakening’: Nietzsche’s Renascence of the Renaissance Out of the Spirit of Jacob Burckhardt,” in Nietzsche on Time and History, ed. Manuel Dries [Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008], 231–74). For the most recent contribution to the subject, which was published after Nevin’s book but should nevertheless be put in dialogue with it, a recent collection of essays edited by Helmut Heit and Andreas Urs Sommer recommends itself (Nietzsche und die Reformation, vol. 4 in Nietzsche-Lektüren [Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2020]).In chapter 2 Nevin argues that Nietzsche developed a metaphysics of suffering squarely within the German Protestant mystical tradition and that his “home base model of transcendence” was therefore entirely Christian (125). Nevin traces Nietzsche’s Leidensmetaphysik back to Meister Eckhardt and Sebastian Franck, with a nod to Paracelsus, who prepared the way for Jacob Boehme, this chapter’s principal apostate. Finding more than a coincidence—of opposites?—in the fact that both Boehme and Nietzsche wrote books with the title Morgenröthe, Nevin will have to wrestle with the evidence until daybreak before making any claims about influence. But it would be unfair to say that Nevin’s argument rests on little more than the Ungrund of an improbable cosmos. Giorgio Colli has also noted Nietzsche’s affinities with Boehme (Distanz und Pathos: Einleitungen zu Nietzsches Werken [Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1982], 160–61). That Boehme found the seeds of evil in God and made Jesus the brother of Lucifer are more than enough to recommend a close reading of him to anyone interested in Nietzsche as a would-be mystic.In chapter 3 Nevin describes Leibniz as a failed ecumenist and God’s defense attorney in the courtroom proceedings of the Aufklärung. If for Luther man needed to be justified, now it was God, as ratio peccatorum, who had some explaining to do. Leibniz’s belief that reason was a gift from God and thus equal to grace effectively made Christ’s death and resurrection irrelevant. Thus Leibniz implicitly denied God’s transcendence and substantiated Nietzsche’s claim that Christianity dies from the head down. The most salient omission of this chapter are the various formulations of perspectivism throughout Nietzsche’s writings that he derived indirectly from Leibniz. Nikolaus Loukidelis and Christopher Brinkmann have recently done much to show that, though Nietzsche was not influenced very much by Leibniz’s work directly, much of his thought on force, monads, perspectivism, and the subject was derived from Leibniz indirectly through the works of Otto Liebmann, Maximilian Drossbach, and Gustav Teichmüller (“Leibnizian Ideas in Nietzsche’s Philosophy: On Force, Monads, Perspectivism, and the Subject,” in Nietzsche and the Problem of Subjectivity, ed. João Constâncio, Maria João Mayer Branco, and Bartholomew Ryan, vol. 5 in Nietzsche Today [Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015], 95–109). When one considers Nietzsche’s perspectivism as a vestige from an age of ecumenical dialogue and religious tolerance now displaced in the language of epistemology, this doctrine takes on new relevance for a book on Nietzsche’s Protestant fathers.In chapter 4 Nevin argues that with Lessing the murder of the Christian God was brought to completion. In Nevin’s view, Lessing is the prodigal son—to some, the hero—of this book, who departed from the pastoral vocation envisioned for him by his father and left home for a career in theater where over a lifetime of writing he staged the drama of mankind’s liberation from the cross and Christ’s burial for good. Nevin argues that Lessing made skepticism a rite of passage for German intellectuals raised in Lutheran households, effectively replacing the Christian God with a never-ending search for unattainable truths. With Lessing the long fugue of Protestantism thus lost its mooring in the original melody and went off into ever more erratic iterations. Nevin envisions Nietzsche setting out with Lessing on this improbable errand, not least by calling into question the desirability of truth in the first place and by refusing the comforting illusions of his father’s home.This is a book that gives the lead role to its chorus of Protestant thinkers and to Nietzsche an aria at the end of each act. Abounding with sharp insights into the psychology of faith, an erudite attention to the ironies of being a Christian, and a bracing command of the primary sources, Nevin probably wanted to make a case that was more provocative than it is. Of course no one can accuse Nevin of dealing in obvious truths any more than one will mistake Nietzsche for a Christian, but Nevin’s study of the doctrinal deviance of Christendom’s wayward sect lends to his vision of Christianity an elasticity and rare forgiveness that proves most accommodating to misfits.However, one is left wondering by the end of the book: In what sense prodigal? Nevin’s argument is founded on an analogy between Protestantism and the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11–32), but the book lacks a sustained analysis of that parable. One reason for this omission might have been that orthodox readings of this parable are paternalistic. That is, the son’s untimely demanding of his inheritance, his debauchery abroad, and wasting away in revelry are interpreted as wayward, headstrong, and mistaken. When the son returns, he gets down on his knees, admits the error of his ways, and requests to be treated as his father’s slave. It is for this reason that the father welcomes his son back with even greater joy and festivity than he has ever shown the older son, who, understandably put out, Kierkegaard identified as every Christian. By describing the Lutheran tradition as “prodigal” Nevin runs the risk of making unintended concessions to the Catholic expectation that one day the lost sheep will return to the fold, and I do not believe that is Nevin’s intention.There is nevertheless room for unorthodox readings of this parable that I believe would have enriched Nevin’s analysis of Nietzsche’s Protestant fathers a great deal. Nietzsche himself endorses the prodigal son’s dissipation not in his quest for reconciliation with his father but as a model of the every-soul in a quest to find itself. Among the carob pods of Nietzsche’s Nachlass we find an aphorism that Nevin does not discuss. A note from 1883 reads, “Und wer der Erfinder seiner selber ist, der gilt lange al sein Verlorener” (KSA 10:12[12], p. 402). It is important to recall that in the German tradition it is the parable of the Verlorner Sohn, a lexical variant that draws attention not so much to the fact that the son is a wastrel but that he gets lost and nearly dies (ἀπολωλώς). This, because he “lives dangerously” (ἀσώτως). One thinks of Nietzsche’s financial state toward the end of his life. His stipend from Basel was about to run out—hence, his constant concern for living at the expense of the future. Like the son in the parable, did Nietzsche just need a job? In any case, when a famine spreads throughout the land the son “is in need” (ὑστερεῖσθαι). The Greek word literally means “to come late,” “to be a late-comer”—consider Nietzsche’s “last men.” But in the end, when the son returns to his father’s estate, the Greek text says that he comes “to himself” (εἰς ἑαυτὸν δὲ ἐλθὼν), an expression that sounds vaguely Plotinian. Though the father explains that it was fitting to make merry (χαρῆναι) because he was dead (νεκρὸς) and is now alive again (ἔξησεν)—he was lost and now he is found—Nietzsche’s aphorism above opens up room for a heterodox reading of this parable as a story of getting lost in order to find oneself.Of course, it is also a parable about reckless spending (διασκορπίζειν). In TI “Skirmishes” 44, Nietzsche endorses this reading, too, identifying genius with a glorious wasting of oneself: “Genius—in works, in deeds—is necessarily wasteful and extravagant: its greatness is in giving itself away . . . [Das Genie—in Werk, in That—ist nothwendig ein Verschwender: dass es sich ausgiebt, ist seine Grösse]” (The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, trans. Judith Norman [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005]; KSA 6, p. 146). It is thus a parable about the wasting of one’s inheritance as much as it is about reckless deviance from tradition. That Nietzsche was a “prodigal” in spirit is without a doubt, and it is one of the great ironies of his life that only when he had lost his mind did return to the faith of his father. But whether this means that he “found himself,” readers of Nevin’s insightful new book will have to decide for themselves. Those who go insane love life more than they can tolerate it.