Thus Spoke Zarathustra Read Online Free PDF Page B

receptacle of divine grace who rejoices at the idea of eternity: the embodiment and actualization of everything regarded as desirable. What the Christian says of God, Nietzsche says in very nearly the same words of the Superman, namely: ‘Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever.’
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    Zarathustra’s posture as inspired prophet and reader of riddles would itself suggest an atavism in Nietzsche’s mind even if we were unable clearly to identify the earlier stage to which it had reverted. But it was an atavism whose effect was curative, like an electrical storm that breaks up the cloud and bad weather which has caused it. The theme of joy in existence, of the self-sufficiency-in-joy of the sovereign individual, of this joyful self-sufficiency as the aim and meaning of life is what finally reigns as the paramount theme of the book: and this theme derives, not from the grand but ultimately overpowering and stifling conceptions of Christianity, but from someone Nietzsche was later to celebrate as an actualization of the Superman: Goethe.
    When the sound and wholesome nature of man acts as an entirety, when he feels himself in the world as in a grand, beautiful, worthy and worthwhile whole, when this harmonious comfort affords him a pure, untrammeled delight: then the universe, if it could be sensible of itself, would shout for joy at having attained its goal and wonder at the pinnacle of its own essence and evolution. For what end is served by all the expenditure of suns and planets and moons, of stars and Milky Ways, of comets and nebula, of worlds evolving and passing away, if at last a happy man does not involuntarily rejoice in his existence?
    This passage, from Goethe’s essay on Winckelmann (1805), which Nietzsche certainly knew, could stand as the motto of Thus Spoke Zarathustra . It is the distillation of the great benevolent spirit of Goethe, a spirit Nietzsche called ‘dionysian’ and with which, for all its tremendous difference in emphasis, Zarathustra is in accordance.
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    I now offer a brief survey of Zarathustra chapter by chapter and comment on a few individual points about which the reader may like some enlightenment.
    Zarathustra ( Greek Zoroastres) is the founder of the ancient Persian religion, and the book with which he is credited, the Zend-Avesta, is its Bible. Scholars of the nineteenth century questioned whether Zarathustra existed, as they questioned whether Homer existed (probably a side-effect of ‘evolutionism’): both are now rehabilitated. Nietzsche protested at the dissolution of Homer: ‘We gain nothing with our theory of the poetising soul of the people, we are always referred back to the poetical individual’ (Homer and Classical Philology , 1869). So with Zarathustra. He is conjectured to have lived in the seventh century B.C. The heart of his religion is a conflict between Ahura Mazda (Ormuzd), the god of light and good, and Angra Mainyu (Ahriman), the god of darkness and evil. Nietzsche’s explanation of why he appropriated his name for his own hero:
    I have not been asked, as I should have been asked, what the name Zarathustra means in precisely my mouth, in the mouth of the first immoralist: for what constitutes the tremendous uniqueness of that Persian in history is precisely the opposite of this. Zarathustra was the first to see in the struggle between good and evil the actual wheel in the working of things: the translation of morality into the realm of metaphysics, as force, cause, end-in-itself, is his work. But this question is itself at bottom its own answer. Zarathustra created this most fateful of errors, morality: consequently he must also be the first to recognise it. Not only has he had longer and greater experience here than any other thinker…what is more important is that Zarathustra is more truthful than any other thinker. His teaching, and his alone, upholds truthfulness as the supreme virtue.…To tell the truth and to shoot well with