Ludwig Feuerbach ‘slew’ God some forty years before Nietzsche’s madman entered the market square of modernity, lantern in hand and the following lament on his lips: ‘God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we console ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?’ Rising out of the darkness of an apocalyptic void, the madman’s dirge-like ‘requiem aeternam deo’ (GS 125, KSA 3:480–2) could not be further removed from the glad tidings of Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (hereafter ‘Christianity’), proclaiming that the divine attributes of the Christian God are human perfections projected onto an illusory Divine Being. These perfections, avers Feuerbach, are the human powers of reason, will and love, which are intrinsically and respectively related to the human faculty of understanding, the moral law and the human heart. In Zarathustra, it is the same three human powers, or what Feuerbach refers to as ‘the divine trinity in man’ (EC 3, GW 5:31), that Zarathustra is seeking to revitalise in man through the übermenschlich ideal: ‘Let your love for life be love for thy highest hope: and let your highest hope be the highest thought of life!’ (Z1 ‘On War and Warriors’, KSA 4:59).

Although dismissed towards the end of Part 2 of Zarathustra as a consolatory fiction – ‘on [fleecy clouds] we sit our motley puppets and call them gods and Übermenschen’ (Z2 ‘On the Poets’, KSA 4:164) – the Übermensch is presented at the start of Zarathustra as both practical law and normative ideal (discussed at length in Chapter 2). As law, it is the rod with which Zarathustra goads the apathetic human specimen of late modernity to overcome his Christianity-induced limitations. As ideal, it is rainbow, lightning and dancing star. The incorporation of this practical law through self-overcoming entails not only the combined powers of reason, will and love, but their harmonious integration. Not until the ‘highest thought of life’ (the Übermensch) has become man’s ‘highest hope’ and the exclusive object of his love will man voluntarily submit to the law of self-overcoming as decreed by practical reason.