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........

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