You’ve lived this life before

The mystical insight came to Nietzsche like a lightning flash: time eternally recurs – and life must be lived accordingly

by Mark Higgins + BIO

Sunshine on the High Alps of the Valais in Front of the Mountain Range of Monte Rosa (c1843-4) by Alexandre Calame. Photo by AKG London

teaches at a secondary school in England. He holds a PhD in philosophy from Birkbeck College, University of London and writes about religion, ethics and pedagogy. His work has appeared in academic journals, popular theological magazines and the book Friendship: Philosophical Explorations (2026).

Friedrich Nietzsche said a great deal about himself. He was the self-styled ‘Antichrist’, the herald of the ‘death of God’, a thinker who prided himself on disclosing the ‘human, all-too-human’ origins of morality, the soul and religious belief. He despised Platonism, regarded himself as history’s most formidable opponent of Christianity, and often wrote with a fiercely materialist agenda. Given these credentials, Nietzsche appears to be one of the least likely figures to merit the title ‘mystic’. But he was precisely that.

One reason it might seem odd to call Nietzsche a mystic is that he himself went to great lengths to oppose certain forms of mysticism. Nietzsche contrasted his relationship to mystical thought with that of his predecessor, the German pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer. Whereas Schopenhauer idolised the mystic as someone capable of intuiting the secret, inner oneness of all things, Nietzsche considered such a train of thought to be deeply pathological. To even countenance the possibility of a deeper, truer layer of reality beyond appearances – as Schopenhauer did – is to deny the value of this world in favour of something imaginary. Nietzsche argued that Plato was the original progenitor of this mystical perspective and that, because of this, he was ultimately to blame for the world’s greatest blight: Christianity. Platonism, Christianity, Schopenhauer’s philosophy and similar forms of mysticism all constitute an unhealthy flight from reality. They share the same life-negating view that there is some other, more perfect reality beyond appearances. But for Nietzsche, appearance is all there is. As he put it in The Gay Science (1882): ‘Mystical explanations are considered deep; the truth is, they are not even shallow.’

The kind of mysticism Nietzsche opposed is often called apophatic mysticism. As the contemporary theologian Celia Kourie outlines, apophatic mysticism is about ‘stripping away … attitudes and concepts and imagery … in order to lead to the abyss, or the void – the blinding brilliance of the divine darkness.’ Apophatic writers view God as that which cannot be named or even conceived of. The closer you are to freeing yourself of ideas and conceptions, the closer you are to God. It is a negative attempt to understand God; one grasps Him by grasping what He isn’t. Apophatic mysticism dominates the mystical tradition through spiritual writers as varied as Pseudo-Dionysius, Meister Eckhart and St John of the Cross. It also finds a strong presence within Buddhist thought. The apophatic is the everyday understanding of mysticism, and it is the mysticism Nietzsche ascribes to Plato and Schopenhauer. It is the attitude of moving beyond the world of fleeting, contingent material appearances to some inner oneness, to the divine handiwork behind the created universe.

The apophatic isn’t, however, the only form of mysticism. It can be contrasted with a rival ‘cataphatic’ tradition. Cataphatic mysticism, according to the spiritualism scholar Janet Ruffing, is typified by ‘wonder, amazement, appreciation … for the earth itself.’ This form of mysticism sees reality as inherently revelatory. Rather than flying from speech and negating appearances, the cataphatic, Kourie holds, ‘indicates a moving towards speech, and effects affirmative mysticism, approximating aspects of divinity [to nature]; it is luxuriant, profound and full of splendour, rejoicing in the beauty of God’s creation.’ This form of mysticism neither rejects reality nor negates the self. The cataphatic delights in haecceity – in the ‘this-ness’ of every object. It is this form of mysticism that Nietzsche embraced, minus the God part.

A recurring instance of Nietzsche’s cataphatic spirituality is in his characteristic elevation of the quotidian. He begins Book Four of The Gay Science with a new year’s resolution to bless all things:

I want to learn more and more to see the necessity of things as the beautiful: – thus I will be one of those who makes things beautiful. Amor fati: let that from now on be my love! I want to wage no war against the ugly. I do not want to accuse, I do not even want to accuse the accusers. Let looking away be my only negation! And, all in all and on the whole: some day I just want to be a Yes-sayer!

It is no surprise that the same book that begins by celebrating the extraordinary beauty of mundane things culminates in Nietzsche’s ‘most dangerous’ idea, an idea that shapes his cataphatic mysticism: the doctrine of eternal recurrence. The story of Nietzsche’s discovery of the eternal recurrence is essential to his development as a mystical thinker.

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It is August 1881, in the Upper Engadine, near Sils-Maria in Switzerland. Nietzsche is 36 years old, yet illness and near-blindness have already ended his academic career. Like most days this summer, he is taking a hike in the mountains, a brief escape from the migraines and stomach problems that plague him. During these walks, he does his best thinking. Near the hamlet of Surlej, beside Lake Silvaplana, Nietzsche approaches an unusual pyramidal boulder. He stops. The lake is motionless. There, Nietzsche would later write in Ecce Homo (1908), a thought came to him like a ‘lightning flash’.

Nietzsche called this thought an ‘inspiration’, something that ‘overtook’ him. His language parallels Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus: the experience is described in multisensorial terms, as something utterly irresistible, effecting in him a radical change of perspective:

If you have even the slightest residue of superstition, you will hardly reject the idea of someone being just an incarnation, mouthpiece, or medium of overpowering forces. The idea of revelation in the sense of something suddenly becoming visible and audible with unspeakable assurance and subtlety, something that throws you down and leaves you deeply shaken – this simply describes the facts of the case. You listen, you do not look for anything, you take, you do not ask who is there; a thought lights up in a flash, with necessity, without hesitation as to its form, – I never had any choice … All of this is involuntary to the highest degree, but takes place as if in a storm of feelings of freedom, of unrestricted activity, of power, of divinity … This is my experience of inspiration; I do not doubt that you would need to go back thousands of years to find anyone who would say: ‘it is mine as well’.

A logical proof in mathematical terms would never convey the ineffable nature of his mystical insight

The insight into the eternal recurrence – the flash of lightning – is that everything, every item of existence, has always recurred and is destined to recur ad infinitum. This is not a claim about some other world. It concerns precisely what we see, touch, smell and taste. All things, all experiences, all events, all thoughts will recur in the very same way they have come to pass. You have lived this life exactly this way countless times before. You have read this essay, contemplated these notions, woken on this day an infinite number of times previously and will do so incalculably more times again. Because of this cosmic repetition, every parcel of reality gains an ‘infinite depth’, an infinite gravity – for its story is destined to be re-lived, re-experienced, again and again, through endless ages. This is the idea that Nietzsche came to believe with the same force that Paul discovered his faith in Jesus.

Personal testimonies from the time of his inspiration dispel any possibility that he was being hyperbolic or romantic. One of Nietzsche’s friends, Resa von Schirnhofer, described how he shared his life-changing discovery:

As Nietzsche rose to leave his manner suddenly changed … glancing around as though in danger of being overheard, he confided the ‘secret’ Zarathustra had whispered in Life’s ear … There was something uncanny in the way he spoke of the ‘eternal return’ … Another Nietzsche had suddenly stood there … Then, without further explanation, he returned to his usual self.

And in a letter to his friend Heinrich Köselitz, written at the time of the experience, Nietzsche confided:

The intensity of my feelings makes me tremble and laugh at one and the same time … I have not been able to leave my room … my eyes were inflamed … These were not tender tears of pitiful emotion, but tears of jubilation … possessed as I was by a new vision that I am the first of men to know.

Since Nietzsche considered himself to have discovered a cosmological truth, he planned to devote a number of years to scientific study in order to rigorously defend the doctrine. But after some early attempts at formulating a proof for his theory, he abandoned this course. A relic of this brief moment in Nietzsche’s thinking is a collection of ‘proofs’ found in his notebooks that he never intended to publish – and which have been almost universally ridiculed by the scientific community ever since. But what he soon realised was that his experience was incapable of being grounded in scientific thought. A logical proof in mathematical terms would never adequately convey the ineffable nature of his mystical insight. Nietzsche’s brief attempt at a scientific formulation was a post hoc attempt at rationalising what he was already committed to. Just as a theologian’s attempts to ‘prove’ God presuppose their conclusion, primarily acting as an intellectual bolster to what they already believe, Nietzsche’s passing scientific formulation of his eternal recurrence can be seen as a similar exercise. Theologians call this fides quaerens intellectum – faith seeking to provide a rational understanding for what is already embraced as true.

But there still seems to be something distinctly odd about a profoundly atheistic thinker like Nietzsche holding convictions based on something akin to a religious experience. Atheism per se doesn’t preclude beliefs based on powerful numinous or unexplainable experiences, even if many atheists have historically doubted their epistemic reliability. An interesting recent work on this subject is Dale Allison’s Encountering Mystery: Religious Experience in a Secular Age (2022), which presents a number of case studies of modern-day atheists and agnostics, who take the epistemic reliability of profound but unusual experiences very seriously. A striking example comes from the author and activist Barbara Ehrenreich, who experienced an overwhelming numinous experience during a walk through a mountain town in California when she was 17 years old. ‘It was a furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all things at once,’ she later wrote, ‘too vast and violent to hold on to, too heartbreakingly beautiful to let go of … I felt ecstatic and somehow completed, but also shattered.’ Through the succeeding 50 years, Ehrenreich remained a steadfast atheist, but she never denied her enigmatic experience – much like how Nietzsche’s atheism didn’t diminish his experience at Sils-Maria.

For Nietzsche, accepting eternal recurrence isn’t a ‘faith’ in the negative way he characterised that term – that is, of believing in something imaginary or otherworldly that can’t be verified. Nietzsche considered eternal recurrence to be a quality of this world, not some other world. Moreover, he considered eternal recurrence itself to be verifiable; he took his own experience at Sils-Maria to be evidence in its favour. Nietzsche also thought that others had experienced it before. In a late notebook entry he exclaimed: ‘I have discovered the Greeks: they believed in eternal recurrence! That is the mystery-faith!’– referring to the cult of Dionysus, whose mythic dying and resurrection he viewed as symbolising this cosmological belief. In fact, the rationale of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85), Nietzsche’s most enigmatic work, was as an imagistic, poetic, musical ‘proof’ of eternal recurrence, a pathway by which a receptive reader might gain a new perspective on the eternal nature of all things.

The atheist has become, through his encounter with the eternal recurrence, strikingly close in his language to that of the religious contemplative

Nietzsche’s response to his insight was a distinct form of mysticism. He came to view everything around him as endowed with its own privileged status as eternal. While Nietzsche certainly rejected pantheism – nature is not divine – the eternality that he attributes to all things is nonetheless a traditional attribute of God. There is a new non-theistic and non-religious sacrality in Nietzsche’s new perspective. In the language of mystical theology, it constitutes a form of the ‘cataphatic’ tradition, which finds its chief expression in the ‘night song’ in Zarathustra:

It is night: now all fountains speak more loudly. And my soul too is a fountain.It is night: only now all the songs of the lovers awaken. And my soul too is the song of a lover.An unstilled, an unstillable something is in me; it wants to be heard. A craving for love is in me, which itself speaks the language of love.I am light; oh that I were night! But this is my loneliness, that I am girded by light.Oh that I were dark and nocturnal! How I would suck at the breasts of light!And even you I would bless, you little twinkling stars and glowworms up there! – And be blissful for your gift of light.

Nietzsche’s language is replete with logic-defying symbolism, multisensory and erotic imagery, confessions of ineffability, and recourse to an incantatory rhythm. These are all classic markers of the language of mysticism. The atheist who lamented God’s lingering ‘shadow’ over Europe and its culture-sapping, genius-frustrating consequences has become, through his encounter with the eternal recurrence, strikingly close in his language to that of the religious contemplative. Consider the resemblances of Nietzsche’s ‘night song’ to the celebrated ‘dark night’ of the 16th-century mystic St John of the Cross:

On a dark night, kindled in love with yearnings – oh, happy chance! –I went forth without being observed, my house being now at rest.… In the happy night, In secret, when none saw me,Nor I beheld aught, Without light or guide, save that which burned in my heart.This light guided me …Oh, night more lovely than the dawn,Oh, night that joined Beloved with lover, Lover transformed in the Beloved!

Does this mean, then, that through something akin to a religious experience, Nietzsche emerges as a type of mystic? Reading Nietzsche is always a hazardous journey. Just when you think you have him, a provocative aphorism comes along, and he slips through your fingers. Nietzsche did not drop his atheism because of his strange experience of eternal recurrence, or the perspective on reality it granted him. Instead, he charted a new pathway of secular, atheistic mysticism, an alternative to Schopenhauer’s equally atheistic celebration of the world-negating saint-figure.

Many 20th-century scholars argued that Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence was really just a thought experiment that he proposed, not something he actually believed. They have done so largely out of embarrassment, hoping to rescue Nietzsche from esotericism and slot him comfortably into the family of early sceptical and naturalistic thinkers. In doing so, these interpreters overlooked the way Nietzsche characterised his own experience, and the testimonies of those who knew him. There is, however, a kernel of truth in the thought-experiment interpretation. The most important implication of eternal recurrence for Nietzsche was the dramatic impact he anticipated it would have on the life of the person who discovered it. The first time eternal recurrence makes an appearance in Nietzsche’s published works is in The Gay Science. Here, Nietzsche presents the eternal recurrence as provoking a challenge to his audience to reconsider their lives from the perspective of eternal recurrence:

The heaviest weight. – What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine.’ If this thought gained power over you, as you are it would transform and possibly crush you; the question in each and every thing, ‘Do you want this again and innumerable times again?’ would lie on your actions as the heaviest weight! Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to long for nothing more fervently than for this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

Does your life have such splendour that it deserves an infinite number of encore performances?

Rather than a simple thought experiment, however, I argue that this text is more akin to a spiritual examen. The examen is a genre of spiritual writing perfected by authors like Thomas à Kempis and St Ignatius of Loyola. Nietzsche was acquainted with this type of meditative life-assessment, and he had practised a Christian version of it in his adolescence, at a point when he still hoped to become a Lutheran minister.

In the Christian examen, a divine figure poses a question to the reader based on their conduct and choices (à Kempis often refers to a question from the Gospel of Mark: ‘What doth it profit a man, to gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’). This is followed by a moment of critical decision as the reader carefully reflects on the possible implications of each choice. Nietzsche’s examen is a deliberate counter to the Christian examen. He invites you to reconsider your life before the prospect of its endless repetition: would you affirm your choices if your present life possessed eternal depth? For Nietzsche, this is not a test of moral action. Rather, the only criterion for a life worthy of repetition is its aesthetic quality: whether your life has such splendour that it deserves an infinite number of encore performances. While such a prospect might be a source of despair for some, for those who truly love their life, the thought of replaying it all over again leads to an ecstatic joy: ‘You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine …’

Eternal recurrence is the basis for continual self-transformation as you attempt to craft a life that warrants repetition. Shaping your life through the certainty of eternal recurrence is to transfigure it into something compelling and dramatic – like a Homeric epic, worthy of its own endless echo. Nietzsche’s unusual experience at Sils-Maria gave him, as he saw it, a new, ‘graced’ perspective on reality. From then on, he viewed everything in the universe as having an awe-inspiring, eternal quality, which underpins Nietzsche’s language and imagery in Zarathustra, a text that sits comfortably alongside the classics of Western mysticism. Even if most philosophers have long regarded Zarathustra with a mixture of bemusement and scorn, this cannot be said for artists. From Frederick Delius’s cantata A Mass of Life to Richard Strauss’s tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra, the poetry of W B Yeats and Rainer Maria Rilke, and the prose of D H Lawrence and Thomas Mann, Zarathustra has been an immense source of inspiration.

Nietzsche’s discovery of eternal recurrence was not only the fountain of his cataphatic mysticism, it was also a moment of dramatic personal conversion. To grasp the infinite echo of one’s own life is to be placed under a new and terrible demand: to live in such a way that one could will its every detail again and again. Life becomes not something to be endured, but something to be crafted – an aesthetic whole worthy of its own repetition. Even if Nietzsche was mistaken about the truth of eternal recurrence, the challenge it poses remains. It confronts us with the question of whether our lives are merely being lived, or whether they are being affirmed – not once, but eternally.

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