Abstract

Thomas Nevin's new reading of Nietzsche is at home on an island of misfit toys. Like Ariosto's Astolfo, who goes to the moon in search of Orlando's sanity only to find the good things that humanity has shed, Nevin has gone—not quite as far as the moon—in search of a true Christian. That Nietzsche might brook accommodation in his father's house, however, pleads convincingly that Luther may have wanted to reform the Church but ended up installing a lost-and-found box instead. Late of the quincentenary of Luther's Ninety-Five Theses, Nevin has sorted through half a millennium of Christian miscellany and found the following items: one failed monk who refused to presume that he could love God; a late gnostic theosophist...