The Pure Sky and the Eternal Return: Zarathustra’s Affirmative Atheism

Abstract Zarathustra initially describes churches as the stale caves of world-denying priests. However, following his encounter with the eternal return of the same, Zarathustra overcomes this resentful atheism. The pure sky that Zarathustra desires above all else, a sky emptied of the gods, is not visible again through the holes in ruined church roofs, but really thanks to these holes. The pure sky is an image of the world liberated from the teleological time of theistic providence, indeed even from the divine necessity that pantheism attributes to the world. Yet for all that it is god-less, the pure sky is acknowledged to be a gift of the same metaphysical-Christian history of God that it only seems to negate: the sky’s pure eye peers through holes in church roofs. Zarathustra, though an “old atheist,” can now love “even churches.” I call this Zarathustra’s affirmative atheism. I also link affirmative atheism to the conception of eternal recurrence as a self-abolishing anti-teaching. In the eternal return, Zarathustra’s atheism is finally indistinguishable from a history of churches and therefore negates itself. But although it is not a new teaching, affirmative atheism points to something novel. This is an atheism that can no longer be taught in doctrines but must be lived as fate.