Introduction

Taking as its starting point Stephen Metcalf’s startling fusion of Jean Paul’s “Speech of the Dead Christ from the Universe that There Is No God” (1796) with Salvador Dalí’s Christ of Saint John of the Cross (1951), this introductory chapter argues that we need to rediscover the sense of shock in Nietzsche’s famous parable of the madman who, running into the marketplace with a lamp at midday, announces the “death of God.” In order to understand what the “death of God” or the “death of the symbol” might mean in the twenty-first century, and what the saving power of the god or a knowledge of the divine might also mean, this study proposes to consider the surprisingly extensive reception of Nietzsche by theologians in the twentieth century and undertakes to survey and analyse some of the major figures in this aspect of the reception of Nietzsche’s thought. In an insightful, yet unjustly overlooked, study of Christian readings of Nietzsche, Yves Ledure offers a point de départ for this present survey and analysis of how critics across Europe responded to the competing discourses of theology and philology in Nietzsche’s writings against religion, encompassing thinkers and theologians from France, Italy, and Switzerland.