The argument of this book has been that, though Nietzsche rejects the God of Christianity, he is not anti-religious. On the contrary, I have argued, he is above all a religious thinker. Accepting (as he should) Schopenhauer's twofold analysis of religion as an affective-intellectual-institutional construction which (a) responds to the existential problems of death and pain and (b) expounds and gives authority to community-creating ethos, Nietzsche (a) offers ‘Dionysian’ pantheism as the solution to the problems of death and pain, and (b) argues that we must hope and work for the new ‘festival’: that flourishing and authentic community, absent from modernity, can only be restored through the rebirth of a life- and humanity-affirming religion modelled on that of the Greeks. This, I have argued, is the view presented in his first book and – a more controversial claim – is a view that is maintained, essentially without alteration or interruption, up to and in his last book.

Since this account of the kind of philosopher Nietzsche is is radically unlike anything that has appeared to date in the Anglophone reading, I want to conclude this book by positioning Nietzsche within German intellectual history. I want, that is, to add plausibility to my reading of Nietzsche by showing that the views I attribute to him have a great deal in common with those of many of his German contemporaries who were similarly alive to, in Hölderlin's word, the ‘destitution’ of modernity.