At this place, the unexamined is examined — perhaps even the unaskable — a possibility that, for this age, appears far too vague: the existence of a “middle path” between religious and scientific convictions, that is, between the religious and the scientific view of the world.

Just as once, in ancient India, Gotama Buddha set out upon his “middle path” between Hinduism and Jainism, so too do we today take a step onto our own middle path — a kind of pantheistic religious philosophy, resembling a silent thaumaturgy — which we wish to insert between the overgrown footpaths of great and small religions on one side, and the one and only straight-lined “highway of science” on the other.

While the religious paths are still adorned with trees bearing diverse fruits of meaning, the scientific highway offers interesting and sophisticated stopping points — resting places in a technical sense. If such a “path” is possible at all, we believe it might rest on a form of faith grounded in intuition and feeling, but also in philosophical and scientific reasoning — a faith in the doctrine of Eternal Recurrence/Return (of the Same), entrusted to us by none other than the “freest of all free spirits” and “the prophet of our time” — Friedrich Nietzsche.

This possibility of a “middle path” is examined here more thoroughly than in any previous work, and though it has taken a side — faith in Eternal Recurrence — it does not shy away from exposing the many difficulties of such a teaching, as well as the objections it faces, sometimes rightly, sometimes not.

For to many — which currently means the vast majority of people on this planet — this possibility still appears unimaginable, and therefore wholly unacceptable.

And perhaps that is precisely the sign that the time has come to reconsider it.

Our intention here is neither to devalue religious beliefs nor to contradict scientific insights — as our Teacher might have wished. Rather, our aim is to present them as special cases of a new perspective on reality, a perspective that would bring together the best of both: the religious sense that all of us — stars, trees, stones, living beings — are parts of one and the same, for us only intuited, ontological Whole, about which we know nothing ontically and probably never will; and the scientific insight into the way it functions as the eternal reccurrence of the same.

In the first case, this would mean a syncretic, and in its deepest nature pantheistic, religion — not seeking God outside the Whole nor within its parts, but recognizing the Whole itself as divine. In the second case, it would imply a radically new approach in science, if not a new science altogether: one capable of renouncing the old onto-epistemological aspirations to answer the question of what the world is “in itself,” and instead calmly accepting the fact that it can only discover how the world functions — precisely as Eternal Recurrence of the Same — thereby finally granting the only possible meaning to its knowledge.

But however ultimate it may be, this thought does not wish to bother anyone, nor to impose itself. Once it is spoken — though surely it has not been spoken only once — it will allow itself to be ignored. It will be enough for it to find its way to those free spirits for whom it was meant, and to no one else.

For this reason, we should not deceive ourselves: the Eternal Recurrence will never become the faith of the majority of people on this planet. Nietzsche himself believed that humanity would divide in half over belief in the Eternal Recurrence, but for us even that is an overestimation. The Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence of the Same, whether in the form of a religious pantheistic philosophy or a philosophical pantheistic religion, will remain a “faith of the few” — of that minority for whom no other teaching or faith suffices, and who draw from it the strength to endure life and to withstand it.

In the end, that is how things stand with the Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence: if it frightens you and fills your bones with dread — then flee from it without looking back. But if it lifts you more than it weighs you down, and if it frees you from the fear of death — then it might well become your religion.

After all — as every post-age demands of us, and as Nietzsche taught us, as his “philosophers of the future” — we no longer insist on being right at any cost. Perhaps we are mistaken — so be it! While we are here, we shall live and wrestle with our “truths” — and one of them is precisely the truth of the Eternal Return of the Same. At times we shall guard them jealously for ourselves, and at times reveal them before others. Yet it is undeniable that they alone draw from us what is highest — and that only beneath their “sky” and “climate” do we remain the healthiest and most potent, prepared for every possibility they carry within themselves…

For all those rare and singular spirits who are not satisfied with what is, nor with what was, but demand that it return eternally as it is — only they are worthy of the doctrine of eternal recurrence.” (Nietzsche, Nachlass, 1881–1883)