Nietzsche understood the enormity of the modern secular experiment, the creation of a human order in which the question of God had become obsolete, because he realized the degree to which our whole moral tradition had depended on divine authorization. In contrast to the glibness with which the idea of a rational moral order was endorsed by liberal intellectuals, he was among the very few who foresaw the crisis of morality that would unfold. The death of God meant the advent of nihilism. All of Nietzsche's efforts were directed to awakening his contemporaries to this realization and struggling courageously, if tragically, to find a means of confronting it.

He understood that the abandonment of faith in God would put all the greater pressure on morality. But it would soon collapse. "Every purely moral value system (that of Buddhism, for example) ends in nihilism: this is to be expected in Europe. One still hopes to get along with a moralism without religious background: but that necessarily leads to nihilism. — In religion the constraint is lacking to consider ourselves as value-positing" (Will to Power, 16). Now we are constrained by the realization of our own responsibility for positing values. There can be no grounding or authorization beyond the discretionary impositions of our own will. Opposing what he considered the typically English assertion of George Eliot — that morality can survive unaffected by the loss of God — Nietzsche insisted on the wholeness of Christian morality. When they continue to insist that good and evil remain intuitively self-evident to them, "we merely witness the effects of the domin­ion of the Christian value judgments and an expression of the strength and depth of this dominion: such that the origin of English morality has been forgotten, such that the very conditional character of its right to existence is no longer felt. For the English, morality is not yet a problem" (Twilight of the Idols, 516).

Should we add that in our day morality has become a problem? Its effect is making itself felt in the crisis of self-confidence shaking the liberal institu­tions erected upon it. Nietzsche was under no illusion about the extent to which the core liberal conception of individual rights was derived from this doomed Christian morality. It was the Christian idea of the soul whose origin and destiny is transcendent that first made it possible for the individual to stand over against society and the world, as a reality that can never simply be contained by them. This was the source of individual rights. To this, Christianity added the related idea of the equality of all souls before God. "This concept furnishes the prototype of all theories of equal rights: mankind was first taught to stammer the proposition of equality in a religious context, and only later was it made into morality: no wonder that man ended by taking it seriously, taking it practically!—that is to say, politically, democratically, socialistically, in the spirit of the pessimism of indignation" (Will to Power, 401). Now all of that magnificent superstructure has had its supports kicked from under it, for "man has lost the faith in his own value when no infinitely valuable whole works through him" (12).

What remains is nihilism, a nihilism that liberal formulations are unable to conceal as their own truth. That realization was what made Nietzsche one of the intrepids of our history, launching out on a path of exploration for a passage beyond nihilism. He sought, in a resolute acceptance of the situation in which "nothing is true, everything is permitted," the strength that would enable him to live without positing a meaning to life. By unreservedly embracing the will to power as the force in all reality, he sought to find a way beyond all ressentiment or bitterness toward the futility of our condition. He would finally, he hoped, become like the overman (Ubermensch) he visual­ized, capable of affirming even the eternal return of everything meaningless, including the "last man." Through this love of his fate (amor fati) he sought to avoid the wallowing despair of nihilism. "It wants rather to cross over to the opposite of this — to a Dionysian affirmation of the world as it is, without subtraction, exception, or selection — it wants the eternal circulation" ( Will to Power, 536).

But the path was not there. Nietzsche could not find in the indomitable defiance of his fate the means that would overcome the realization of the futility of his own achievement. Of what use is the triumph of the will over nihilism? Is not it too futile? Too brilliant to be deceived by errors and too honest to construct illusions, every page of Nietzsche testifies to the ache he endured in his soul. He had not reached the Ubermensch, nor attained the "joyful science" (fröliche Wissenscbaft). He was still "the most pious of all those who do not believe in God" (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 260), and he knew the extent to which "we godless antimetaphysicians still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old, that Christian faith that was also the faith of Plato, that truth is divine" (Gay Science, 283). For all the talk about "extending grace to himself," Nietzsche knew that it was impossible.

Like many of Dostoyevsky's heroes, he could not live in a world without God. He experienced the abyss opened by the loss of God with a depth unknown to liberal self-assurance. He longed for a god that would fill the absence of the God who had died. Yet Nietzsche could not find his way to divinity because, at a controlling level, he willed the absence of God. There is a play of masks and levels in Nietzsche, where we are asked to admire the heroic defiance of absurdity but nowhere permitted to ask if the absurdity is not after all willed. Is there not a pride of megalomaniacal proportions at work in this assertion of the human spirit triumphing over all? A superiority for which the absence of God is somehow essential?

The tragedy of Nietzsche is that on the one hand he experienced the loss of God yet refused to follow the intimations that would lead to the rediscovery of the transcendent. It was, as the last now unemployed Pope explained to Zarathustra, "your piety itself that no longer lets you believe in God" (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 262). The crisis of nihilism is rooted in Christianity itself. "The end of Christianity — at the hands of its own morality (which cannot be replaced), which turns against the Christian God (the sense of truthfulness, developed highly by Christianity, is nauseated by the falseness and mendaciousness of all Christian interpretations of the world and of history . . ." (Will to Power, 7). What is there to prevent an unfolding of this Christian inspiration toward a deeper realization of its meaning?

The crisis of the Christian world (which is, after all, what the crisis of the modern world is about) could just as easily lead to a deeper rediscovery of the Christian truth. That is the path uncovered by Nietzsche's great contem­porary explorer of the spirit. At the same time that Nietzsche was struggling with these issues in Germany, Dostoyevsky was undertaking a parallel spiritual journey with very different results. "Nihilism" had already been invented in Russia (by Turgenev in Fathers and Sons) by the time Nietzsche came to write about it, and Dostoyevsky had lived among the circles of atheistic revolutionaries that had gone beyond the boundary of good and evil into terrorism. He had contemplated the abyss and understood "the magic of the extreme" (Will to Power, 396). Dostoyevsky had peered over the edge and recognized himself in it. Reflecting on the notorious Russian terrorist Nechaiev, he concludes "probably I could never have become a Nechaiev, but a Nechaievetz — for this I wouldn't vouch, but maybe I could have become one . . . in the days of my youth" (The Diary of a Writer, 147).

Instead, he was saved by the encounter with grace, an utterly free gift of himself by another that pierced Dostoyevsky to the core. Through his recollection of the experience of wholly gratuitous kindness, an episode unremarkably ordinary in the life of a human being, he came to see this as the deepest measure of reality.¹⁴ Beyond the will to power is the transformative power of love. This is the great insight that Dostoyevsky struggled to unfold in all his novels, particularly the last five great ones. In them he explored the inner world of the Napoleonic criminal types who lived beyond good and evil, beyond all boundaries, in whom Nietzsche recognized his own free creators of values, the highest men. But he carried the meditation further into the awareness of demonic self-closure that also troubled Nietzsche. The overman or higher man, for all his titanic striving, does not step outside the human condition. All he is left with is his defiance, which can neither provide a meaning nor create an order. He ends with a nihilism even darker than the one with which he began because now it is self-imposed. Dostoyevsky had discovered the secret of the will to power as a will to closure against any truth beyond the self.

It is precisely the refusal against all that does not derive from the self that is the essence of his will. But that does not mean that now man extends grace to himself. The project remains futile. How can he extend what he does not have? From where shall it come? Man has already resolved to close himself off against the appeal of all that is beyond himself. All that is accomplished then is the confinement of the self within a demonically self-constructed prison, an imprisonment that can be successful only if it is extended to include all others who might call forth a response. The spirit of indomitability ultimately merges with the spirit of domination. Yet the imprisonment is never quite complete. An inchoate glimmer of awareness of an order of reality beyond the self remains. Stavrogin, the formidable hero of The Possessed, once he has finally taken the last step of denying all difference between good and evil, declares that he knew he would be free of convention "but that if I ever attained that freedom I'd be lost." His suicide mirrors his spiritual self-destruction. "What was I supposed to apply my strength to? That I could never see and I still don't see it to this day" (426, 690).

Dostoyevsky's focus is always on the moment of struggle within the personality before it has definitively decided. This is particularly the case with Ivan Karamazov whose soul is the battleground between God and the devil. Its culminating exposition is surely the celebrated "Legend of the Grand Inquisitor," which is so often misinterpreted when lifted from its context. The most important aspect is that the story is recounted by Ivan (not Dostoyevsky) and the personae, the Inquisitor and Christ, represent dimensions of his inner struggle. Ivan, by means of the tale, is testing the extent to which one form of existence can stand comparison against another. The Inquisitor represents the spirit of revolt against the injustice of the order of Creation, the Christian order in which men are given freedom without any firmly controlling hand to guide them. Left to their own devices they have irresponsibly churned up the ocean of misery that is human history. The Inquisitor is convinced, by contrast, that he possesses a superior knowledge of justice. Instead of abandoning the millions who misuse their freedom so that a few may be saved, he would save them all by abolishing the source of the trouble in freedom itself.