Religion and Philosophy

This book offers an exercise in reception theory and investigates the key figures in the reception of Nietzsche’s critique of Judeo-Christianity in the course of the twentieth century. It has often been remarked upon — but rarely, if ever, explained — why Nietzsche, the author of the famous parable in The Gay Science in which a madman announces the “death of God” and a self-proclaimed opponent of organised religion, should have been a figure of such profound interest to writers, thinkers and theologians who were of a Christian persuasion. In order better to understand the attractiveness of Nietzsche to practitioners of faith, this book undertakes an analytical study of the reception of Nietzsche by around a dozen writers and thinkers working within the discourse of twentieth-century theology in the European tradition (French, Italian, German, Polish, and Swiss).