When the Russian philosopher and jurist Evgeny Nikolayevich Trubetskoy published The Philosophy of Nietzsche: A Critical Essay in 1903, he was writing from the uneasy frontier where nineteenth-century Christian humanism met the cultural earthquake of modernity. Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God had reached Russia not merely as a European import but as a symptom of a much broader crisis: the collapse of transcendental order in a society that had defined its moral and cultural identity in religious terms. Trubetskoy’s essay, written decades before Nietzsche was canonized in Western universities, reads less like a polemic and more like a sustained diagnosis of the modern soul. His subject is not Nietzsche as a stylist or literary provocateur, but Nietzsche as the metaphysician of self-divinization. This thinker revealed, more clearly than anyone before him, the full consequences of a world without transcendence.
For Trubetskoy, Nietzsche’s philosophy is not a random rebellion against Christianity; it is Christianity’s secular inversion. Nietzsche, he argues, inherits the very metaphysical passion that once animated Christian thought, the will to absolute value, but strips it of its theistic ground. The result is not liberation but a new bondage: the elevation of human will to the position once held by God. What Nietzsche calls the will to power is, in Trubetskoy’s view, a displaced form of theology. Nietzsche dethrones God only to enthrone the self. The modern world celebrates this act as emancipation, but Trubetskoy reads it as tragedy: the transformation of faith into self-worship.
From Faith to Will
Trubetskoy reconstructs Nietzsche’s development as a gradual theological mutation. The young Nietzsche, he notes, begins as a moralist disgusted by the hypocrisies of Christian civilization. His early writings already reveal a desire to purify morality of resentment and weakness. But the mature Nietzsche, after the rupture of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, radicalizes this moral protest into metaphysics: if God is dead, then all values must be created anew by man. The decisive move is not the denial of God’s existence, but the claim that value depends solely on will.
Trubetskoy calls this move “mystical atheism.” In denying transcendence, Nietzsche does not eliminate the need for the absolute; he internalizes it. The divine becomes immanent in the creative will. Yet, detached from any objective good, it becomes self-referential. It seeks power for its own sake. The will to power, therefore, is not an empirical psychology but a metaphysical principle, a substitute for God under the guise of human autonomy.
Here, Trubetskoy sees the core contradiction of Nietzsche’s thought: the attempt to ground value in sheer volition. If power defines right, then the distinction between good and evil collapses into the calculus of strength. But the very language of affirmation and creation presupposes a measure of worth that power itself cannot supply. Nietzsche’s philosophy, for Trubetskoy, embodies the paradox of modernity: it abolishes the transcendent norm yet continues to speak the moral vocabulary of affirmation, dignity, and greatness. The result is not freedom but confusion, an oscillation between worship of vitality and despair at meaninglessness.
The Religious Core of Nihilism
Trubetskoy’s originality lies in reading Nietzsche not as a destroyer of religion but as its ultimate manifestation. Nietzsche’s atheism, he argues, remains theological in structure. The death of God does not eliminate the sacred; it relocates it. Humanity inherits the divine burden of self-creation, but without divine grace. The new commandment is creation ex nihilo: the demand that man make himself from nothing.
For Trubetskoy, this demand exposes the spiritual exhaustion of the modern age. The death of God is not an event in metaphysics but a crisis of the will. Contemporary culture, having lost faith in objective truth, still longs for absolute meaning. Nietzsche’s genius is to make that longing explicit, but his failure is to misrecognize its source. The will to power is the will of a being who still desires infinity but can no longer believe in it. The tragedy of nihilism is therefore religious: the thirst for transcendence without the possibility of grace.
Where secular readers often treat Nietzsche’s proclamation as liberation from metaphysics, Trubetskoy treats it as the metastasis of metaphysics itself. Once God is denied, the self becomes infinite in its demands but finite in its capacities. The result is despair disguised as heroism. Nietzsche’s Übermensch is not a superhuman ideal but a symbol of the will’s self-intoxication. He strives to affirm life without condition, yet the impossibility of grounding that affirmation in anything stable shadows his affirmation.
Psychology of the Overman
Trubetskoy’s interpretation of Nietzsche is at once psychological and metaphysical. He reads Nietzsche not merely as a philosopher of ideas but as a case study in the pathology of modern consciousness. The Overman is the projection of a wounded spirit, seeking salvation through self-assertion. Trubetskoy sees in Nietzsche’s exaltation of strength the reflection of a profound interior weakness, the inability to accept the limits of the human condition. What Nietzsche calls strength is, paradoxically, the refusal to endure finitude.
Trubetskoy’s psychology anticipates later existential critiques: he understands Nietzsche’s rebellion as the inevitable outcome of an inwardly divided self, torn between the hunger for eternity and the denial of transcendence. The will to power is not pure vitality; it is the feverish compensation for metaphysical loss. The constant striving for dominance masks a spiritual void. The modern hero, having killed God, must perform endless acts of self-creation to prove his own divinity. In Trubetskoy’s reading, Nietzsche’s philosophy is less a doctrine of affirmation than a theology of exhaustion.
Christianity and the Pathology of Strength
A central thread in Trubetskoy’s analysis is the contrast between Christian and Nietzschean conceptions of strength. For Nietzsche, Christianity is a religion of weakness, resentment, and submission. For Trubetskoy, this is a profound misunderstanding. Christianity, he insists, does not glorify weakness but redeems it through love. The Christian ideal of humility is not servility but victory over pride. True power lies not in domination but in self-transcendence, the ability to love even in suffering.
In this light, Nietzsche’s critique appears inverted. His Overman, who seeks to impose meaning by sheer will, is enslaved by his own ego, whereas the Christian saint, who surrenders will to love, attains genuine freedom. The paradox of Christianity, power through weakness is, for Trubetskoy, the key to understanding what Nietzsche cannot: that freedom is relational, not solipsistic. The will detached from communion becomes tyranny.
Yet Trubetskoy’s defense of Christianity is not reactionary. He accepts Nietzsche’s diagnosis of cultural hypocrisy: the decay of European Christianity into moral complacency. But he interprets that decay as a failure to live Christianity, not as proof of its falsity. The problem is not faith but its distortion into external conformity. Nietzsche’s rage against the Church, in Trubetskoy’s view, is therefore justified as a protest against dead religion, but misdirected in its conclusion. The answer to hypocrisy is not atheism but renewal.
The Will to Meaning
In diagnosing Nietzsche as a religious thinker without faith, Trubetskoy anticipates themes later developed by existential and phenomenological philosophers. He understands that humans cannot simply abandon the question of meaning. Even in denying transcendence, one affirms the absolute significance of one’s own denial. The will to power is a disguised will to meaning, the refusal to accept absurdity.
Trubetskoy’s critique thus foreshadows modern debates about secular humanism. If all value is created by will, can meaning survive the collapse of objectivity? Nietzsche’s answer is aesthetic: value is an act of artistic creation. Trubetskoy’s answer is ontological: meaning presupposes participation in a reality greater than the self. Without that participation, creation becomes arbitrary, art without truth. The Overman’s song of affirmation rings hollow because it lacks communion.
A Russian Context
Trubetskoy’s reading of Nietzsche must be understood within the context of the religious-philosophical ferment of early twentieth-century Russia. Along with thinkers like Solovyov, Bulgakov, and Berdyaev, he sought to reconcile the freedom of the modern subject with the metaphysical depth of Orthodox Christianity. Nietzsche’s arrival in Russia coincided with the broader crisis of the intelligentsia: the erosion of moral faith following the rise of positivism and the subsequent revolutionary disillusion. To engage Nietzsche, for Trubetskoy, was to confront the temptation of nihilism at the heart of modern culture.
Yet unlike Western apologists, he does not simply condemn Nietzsche; he treats him as the necessary interlocutor of Christian thought. Nietzsche is the mirror in which the modern Christian must see his own failures. Every page of The Philosophy of Nietzsche carries the implicit admission that Nietzsche’s critique of decadence is justified. What must be rejected is not his diagnosis but his remedy. The cure for nihilism is not the divinization of will but the restoration of faith understood as personal communion with the absolute.
This Russian context also shapes Trubetskoy’s tone. His writing lacks the defensive rigidity of Western scholasticism; it reads instead as moral introspection. Nietzsche’s challenge is spiritual, not academic, and Trubetskoy meets it on that terrain. His language oscillates between analysis and confession, as if philosophy were itself a form of repentance.
Style and Method
Trubetskoy writes not as a philologist of Nietzsche’s texts but as a philosopher engaged in theological critique. He reconstructs Nietzsche’s system thematically rather than chronologically, tracing its inner logic from the devaluation of morality to the cult of power. This method, common among Russian religious thinkers, treats philosophy as drama. Nietzsche’s life and thought form a single narrative of rebellion, revelation, and collapse.
At times, Trubetskoy’s reading simplifies Nietzsche’s complexity. He reduces the diversity of Nietzsche’s styles, the psychological, the poetic, the genealogical, into a single metaphysical trajectory. But this reduction serves a purpose: to expose the moral center of Nietzsche’s thought. The focus is not on textual nuance but on existential consequence. What happens to the human spirit when it seeks salvation through power? In that sense, Trubetskoy’s critique is not exegesis but moral phenomenology.
The Critique of Aestheticism
A particularly striking aspect of Trubetskoy’s reading is his rejection of Nietzsche’s aesthetic solution. For Nietzsche, art justifies existence when truth cannot. The artist becomes the new priest, the creator of values. Trubetskoy sees in this move the final stage of idolatry: the substitution of beauty for goodness. When art replaces morality, culture becomes spectacle, brilliant but hollow. The aesthetic justification of life fails because beauty detached from truth cannot sustain meaning.
Here, Trubetskoy anticipates later critiques of aestheticism in modern culture. He sees the worship of art, style, and vitality as the continuation of nihilism by other means. The aesthetic will is still the will to power, disguised as taste. The modern world, he warns, will celebrate creativity while losing its soul.
Freedom and Dependence
Trubetskoy’s ultimate argument concerns the nature of freedom. Nietzsche defines freedom as autonomy, the ability to create and legislate one’s own values. Trubetskoy defines it as participation, the capacity to align one’s will with the divine order. The difference is decisive. For Nietzsche, dependence is slavery; for Trubetskoy, dependence on the good is the condition of genuine liberty.
This contrast reflects the broader divide between modern and Christian anthropology. Nietzsche’s human being is self-enclosed, defined by will; Trubetskoy’s person is relational, characterized by love. The Overman seeks mastery; the saint seeks communion. The modern pursuit of autonomy, severed from transcendence, becomes a form of self-enslavement to pride. True freedom, paradoxically, lies in surrender, not to external authority but to the truth of being.
Relevance and Limitations
Reading Trubetskoy today, one is struck by both the depth and the datedness of his critique. His insistence that nihilism is a religious phenomenon remains compelling. The idea that the will to power is a secularized form of theology anticipates modern theories of political religion and the critique of ideology. In an age of technocratic control and self-optimization, his warning against the divinization of will feels prescient.
Yet his analysis also bears the limitations of his era. His commitment to a specifically Christian solution may apforeclosesgue with secular thought. Modern readers may question whether meaning necessitates theological transcendence or whether community, language, and creativity can offer secular alternatives. Trubetskoy would deny this possibility, arguing that any immanent foundation ultimately collapses into will. Whether one agrees or not, his challenge forces a reconsideration of the metaphysical assumptions beneath contemporary humanism.
What remains powerful in Trubetskoy is not dogma but diagnosis. He exposes the inner continuity between Nietzsche’s affirmation and modern nihilism, between the celebration of freedom and the exhaustion of meaning. His portrait of the Overman as a figure of despair disguised as heroism resonates in a culture obsessed with self-creation and performance. In this sense, Trubetskoy’s early twentieth-century essay reads today as a prophecy of our post-theistic age.
Conclusion: Between Faith and Nihilism
Evgeny Trubetskoy’s The Philosophy of Nietzsche is more than a critique of one thinker; it is a meditation on the destiny of the Western spirit. Nietzsche, for him, is not an adversary to be defeated but a revelation to be understood, the mirror in which modern humanity confronts the emptiness left by the death of God. Trubetskoy’s response is not to retreat into apologetics but to reclaim the metaphysical depth of the person. Against the will to power, he proposes the will to love; against the Overman’s solitude, the communion of freedom and truth.
In the history of philosophy, Trubetskoy remains a marginal figure, overshadowed by his contemporaries. Yet his essay on Nietzsche deserves attention as one of the earliest and most penetrating attempts to interpret the German prophet of nihilism from within the Russian imagination of religion. It captures a moment when philosophy still bore the weight of salvation, when ideas were lived as if they were destinies.
A century later, his critique feels less like an artifact and more like a mirror held up to our own contradictions. The will to power now animates not solitary geniuses but entire societies driven by production, consumption, and self-creation. The world Nietzsche predicted has arrived; the question Trubetskoy posed remains: can a culture that worships its own will still speak of meaning? His answer, that freedom without transcendence becomes another form of slavery, may not convince every reader, but it compels reflection. To read Trubetskoy is to rediscover the seriousness of philosophy as moral inquiry, the attempt to think at the limit where faith and nihilism confront each other.