Nietzsche knows his message will be lost on the ears of the populace; he has no expectation for the masses to understand his message, let alone implement it. Thus, Zarathustra’s message is not universal, as Christ’s was. Indeed, his audience gets smaller and smaller as the book goes on, starting with the masses at large, shrinking to a group of disciples, and finally concluding with just Zarathustra himself. The book ends with Zarathustra returning back to the solitude of his cave, disappointed by the outside world’s inability to grasp his doctrine. But the prophet quickly pulls himself together: “Well then, that has had its time!” he declares, “My suffering and my pity for suffering—what does it matter? Am I concerned with happiness? I am concerned with my work…this is my morning, my day is breaking: rise now, rise thou great noon!”47 The prophet, content with merely forging something of his own, neglects the people of the outside world—in the end, what do they matter? The book’s finale puts forth a message that could not be more at odds with the universality of Christ’s message of brotherly love.
In adopting the Christian form, Nietzsche completely rid it of its content. Every semblance of Christian sentiment had been completely excavated and discarded by Nietzsche— all that remained was a hollow shell of metaphoric language, myths and stories that he filled with his own thoughts. Hegel, as we have seen, was the complete opposite. Drawn to the Christian calls to universal brotherly love and fascinated by the divine, Hegel took it upon himself to dive deep within the rich content of the Bible, but had to do away with its maze of parables and myths to do so. The two philosophers took radically opposite approaches, while evaluating the exact same faith. Christianity, perhaps, has been made a bit more clear to us. Hegel has shown us how the religion’s truths, when rendered in conceptual form, don’t sound as silly as their metaphorical counterparts. He’s provided us with an excellent Biblical analysis, and shown us that religion and philosophy, despite often appearing at odds, may not be all that different, not just in aim, but in actual content. Nietzsche, on the other hand, has shown us the arrogance in religious claims to divine truth, and the folly in supposing that reality is as clear cut as we ordinarily think it is. He’s demonstrated the sheer power of religious language, and shown us just how effective parables can be when they are filled with the words of a clever artist instead of a prophet with claims to divine inspiration. What precise conclusions are to be drawn from all of this taken together is unclear: even today, Christianity, and the very notion of religious belief, is still a topic of intellectual debate and philosophical quarrels. What is rather evident, is that though the two philosophers took radically different approaches to religion and philosophy, they share a knack for being able to competently analyze the world in a genuinely unique and challenging light. Hegel and Nietzsche are two of the most influential and interesting philosophers to ever think. Wherever one stands in the philosophical debate, it is impossible to deny the sheer brilliance of these two eccentric Germans.
Works Cited Friedrich, Hegel Georg Wilhelm, A. V. Miller, and J. N. Findlay. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, and Walter Kaufmann. The Portable Nietzsche: Selected and Translated, with an Introduction, Prefaces, and Notes, by Walter Kaufmann. Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1976. Nietzsche, Friedrich, and Walter Arnold Kaufmann. The Will to Power: a New Transl. New York: Vintage Books, 1968.
