The judgment that life, the world, and its highest values have no meaning, ground, or worth; existence answers the demand for purpose with silence.
Nihilism names the conviction, or the crisis, that nothing finally matters: God is dead, values have devalued themselves, and no appeal beyond the void succeeds. The term rose in nineteenth-century Russia for revolutionaries who rejected every authority, and Nietzsche made it the diagnosis of an age, while warning that it must be passed through, not settled in. For most who profess it, nihilism is less a home than a verdict on every other home.
Nihilism across the site
Essays (16) · History of Worldviews (11)
Sources
Primary
- Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (1887).
Secondary
- Michael Allen Gillespie, Nihilism Before Nietzsche (1995).
How this compares to Christianity
How does this branch relate to the historic Christian faith?
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- Does it consider itself Christian?
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- Did it arise from the Christian tradition?
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- Is it recognized as Christian by the historic bodies?
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- This site's assessment
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- Reviewer
- Not yet reviewed. The theological reviewers are named on the criteria page when they are appointed.
The comparative record for this entity, its points of convergence and divergence across the ten loci, has not yet been populated. It stands in the assessment queue on the criteria page.
What this assessment cannot settle
This assessment determines what this entity teaches and how that teaching relates to the historic Christian creeds. It does not determine whether any person is saved, whether God accepts their worship, whether they are sincere, or whether the criteria applied here are correct.
This assessment is made from the standpoint described in our editorial statement and our criteria page. It reports classifications; it does not rank sincerity, spiritual standing, or the eternal state of any person.