“An untimely figure who still speaks to us”? Paul Valadier, Georges Morel, Bertrand Vergely, and the Search for the Sacred

As a philosopher who is also a Jesuit priest, Paul Valadier is one of France’s most prolific commentators on Nietzsche, on whom he has published several works. For Valadier, Nietzsche’s chief argument is that the metaphysical sickness of the West has essentially religious roots. An insistence on the experiential dimension of Nietzsche’s thought is one of the chief virtues of his reading of Nietzsche. Georges Morel’s evolving intellectual trajectory away from the Church is reflected in his three major trilogies on St John of the Cross, on Nietzsche, and on philosophical anthropology. For Morel, the key question was: Do those thinkers who, in the wake of the “death of God,” announce the “death of Man” really succeed in escaping from the necessity of surreptitiously reintroducing “him” (or “Him”) into their discourse? Bertrand Vergely expresses what so many of the Christian thinkers and theologians examined in this study have discovered in Nietzsche: not just a remarkable intellectual resource with which one is able to ponder the most profound religious questions, but also a passion for life. Understanding the Christian reception of Nietzsche could thus well form the prolegomenon to another study or project, namely, the search for the recovery of the sacred.