Few commentators would dispute the claim that Nietzsche’s works are principally concerned with the question of morality. But within that scholarly consensus there is a tendency to overlook the fact that Nietzsche’s sustained critique of morality is itself an extension or a refinement of the morality under scrutiny. As Nietzsche succinctly puts it in one of his late notebook entries: ‘Morality itself, as honesty, compels us to negate morality’ (WLN 5[58]:113, KSA 12:206), or in a more effusive entry written slightly earlier: ‘that one must subject moral valuations themselves to a critique … is itself our present form of morality, as a sublime sense of honesty … as the most sublime kind of probity’ (WLN 2[191]:96, KSA 12:161–2). We hear the same refrain (but see Introduction, n31) in his retrospective work, Ecce Homo: ‘Zarathustra is more truthful than any other thinker. His teaching, and his alone, posits truthfulness as the highest virtue’ (EH ‘Why I am a Destiny’ 3, KSA 6:367). Thus, notwithstanding the scorn habitually heaped by Nietzsche on the ‘will to truth’ as a tenacious moral residue in the fields of science and philosophy (see GS 357, KSA 3:600), it is with this will that Nietzsche flushes out what in his view is ‘the most malicious form of the will to lie’, namely Christian morality. ‘Have I made myself understood?’ he bristles in Ecce Homo; ‘What defines me, what sets me apart from the rest of mankind is that I have unmasked Christian morality’ (EH ‘Why I am a Destiny’ 7, KSA 6:371–2). But if truth is ‘the highest virtue’ in Nietzsche’s system of values, it is but one of a number of Christian virtues which he appropriates and repurposes in a critical onslaught that consumed the greater part of his productive life.