Abstract
Nietzsche's later view of history is a critique and parody of Renan's History of the Origins of Christianity. Nietzschean genealogy places into question both the person of the historian (and his or her readers) and the apparently innocent aestheticism of the contemplation of the past. History proceeds through the categories of shock, rupture, and scandal, not by Renan's sentimental continuity and evolution. Beneath every asserted continuity is the workings of priestly-philosophical power structures. Nietzsche hopes to free man from individual guilt through the myth of eternal recurrence, according to which events are so intertwined that none may be uniquely designated as cause (sinner) or effect (punishment). The issue here is between Renan's narrative view of reality and Nietzsche's nonnarrative view. Nietzsche's nonnarrative "life of Jesus" is really an attack on the narrative principle itself.