Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Rethinking Morality
The Superman and the Will to Power
Death of God and Christianity
Eternal Recurrence
Summary
Analysis
Next, Zarathustra encounters a haggard-looking man along the path and is distressed that some sort of priest has entered his kingdom. The man eagerly approaches Zarathustra, saying he seeks “the last pious man.” He served the old God to the last, he explains, but is now retired—he is the last pope, and he’s been seeking the old saint who praised God in the forest. Finding the saint dead, the pope decided to seek Zarathustra instead.
Zarathustra first mistakes the old pope for a conventional priest who teaches traditional morality—someone he can’t imagine entering his kingdom. It transpires that the pope knows that God is dead. He was seeking the old saint Zarathustra met at the beginning of the book, but the saint seems to have died without learning of the “death of God.”
Themes
Zarathustra asks the old pope how God died, and the pope explains that when God was young, he was hard and vengeful and built a Hell. But in old age, he mellowed and became more like a weak, fretting grandparent. Ultimately, he was destroyed by his pity for humanity.
Zarathustra muses that if God was going to be so angry with humanity for misunderstanding him, then he should have spoken more clearly. He took vengeance on his own creation for turning out badly, which Zarathustra calls a sin against good taste. He says that it’s better to will one’s own destiny into existence; to be a fool. or even to be God oneself than to believe in such a god. The old pope says that Zarathustra is more pious than he realizes, even more holy, for not believing in such a god. His honesty will bear him “beyond good and evil.” Zarathustra sends the old pope to his cave.
Zarathustra’s musings reveal some of Nietzsche’s quarrels with traditional Christian belief. Zarathustra faults God (or teachers of Christianity) for humanity’s struggles and says that it’s better for people to occupy God’s place and determine their own future. The former pope believes that this attitude indicates genuine holiness, a gateway to a new moral code.
Themes
