To fight and conquer this hindrance to a new culture, this is to fight and conquer death; and since death is death only through man, through his yearning or fear, the triumph of a new culture begins with the triumphal song of life, which knows how to make a festival out of even death. To be sure, Nietzsche did not set his most beautiful man over against his most ugly, but we can yet read between the lines what he conceived the most beautiful man to be. He is the man who has pushed far from him the last vestige and survival of fear and slave-service. He is the man who has learned dying as the great Consummator, victorious, surrounded by men who hope and vow that there shall ever be festival where a man who so dies dedicates himself to the living. Here Zarathustra-Nietzsche intimates a kinship with that other Dying Man Who proclaimed his life’s victorious career in His: “It is finished!” and created on Christianity’s Good Friday a festival of death. Nietzsche speaks of the Hebrew, too early dead, who would have confessed Zarathustra’s doctrine, if he had attained to Zarathustra’s years. It did not occur to Nietzsche that such a confession was not at all needed, because the world had perceived the glad message already which would make a festival out of death and teach men how the most beautiful festival was consecrated. Christian art had opposed to the ugliest man the most beautiful human picture: the head full of wounds and blood, the King in the thorn-crown, who understood dying because he understood living. With this victorious song of death began a new culture, a new heroism of humanity, to which death ceased to be a pale ghost, but which confessed even in death: “as dying, and behold, we live!” Then men ceased to learn dying, and because they made no preaching of life out of dying and no vow to life, death became to them a torturing anxiety and care again; they did not dare name his name; they did not dare frankly look him in the eye. And this cowardice and lie disfigure all their action and passion; they would give to death at least the semblance of life; they would believe in ghostly existence still allotted to all the dead, rather than say to death: “Thou are a messenger of God, a revelation, a witness of life; since thou art good, I will greet thee and bless thee!” So Zarathustra demanded of his disciples: “Let your dying be no blasphemy of men and earth; my friends, your spirit and your virtue shall still glow in your dying, like the evening red over the earth, or else death has miserably betrayed you.”