“God is dead. God is dead: He died of pity”--the phrase runs refrain-like through the “Sayings of Zarathustra.” It is the bright news that Nietzsche brings as his peculiar contribution to the cause of human hope. These are the glad tidings for whose bringing he expects that his feet shall be called beautiful upon the mountain. Therefore they dance, these feet, and bear toward us one who laughs and sings. At least Nietzsche would have us believe that truth--his truth--“comes on light feet” and that it steps to music. “Let the day be counted lost,” he cries, “in which we have not somewhat danced, and let us know that truth to be false which brings no laughter with it.” Yet, whether it was that truth--Nietzsche’s truth--had somehow not the quality of joyousness in it, or whether the poor messenger of these “glad tidings” was the victim of ironical chance, certain it is that his dance brought him to the doors of the mad-house, and that behind these melancholy doors he died. There is however nothing but a certain strangeness of phrase that would lead one to associate this particular message of Nietzsche with his later insanity. It is no new idea that God is dead, no new expectation that the news will be grateful to all who understand its import. Xenophanes near the beginning, Epicurus and Lucretius toward the end of pagan thought had brought the same intelligence. Only, according to Xenophanes the Gods had died not of pity but of vice. “Liars, adulterers, cheats are the vaunted Lords of Olympus.” And according to Lucretius it was again not of pity but of their cruelty the Gods were dead, the gods of that religion Quae caput a caeli regionibus ostendebat horribili super aspectu mortalibus instans. Nor are the ancients the only ones to whom the world has appeared godless. If for Hume God was only suspiciously silent, for Schopenhauer he was conspicuously absent. Still, it was far enough from Schopenhauer’s thought that a God could die of pity. Pity was for him the one divine thing left to a Godforsaken world; it at least might soften, even if it could not cure the fundamental cruelty of life. It was rather the unreason of the world that forbade us to see in its course a divine guidance. For Schopenhauer, God had died quite mad. Vice, cruelty, reticence, irrationality--these had been variously recognized as ills of which a God might die. It remained for Nietzsche to suggest that the most fatal of all disorders, whether in God or man, was just that gentlest of all Christian virtues--Pity or, as the German tongue has it, Mitleid: fellow-suffering. In the understanding of the motives that led Nietzsche to this utterance lies the key to his whole philosophy--if the “lightning flashes” of his thought may, somewhat against his will, be called a “philosophy.” * * * * *