INTRODUCTION
In response to a synthesis between his own experiences of life and the historical period into which he was born, Friedrich Nietzsche developed a philosophy that can be interpreted as the epicenter of western thought. A combination of poor health and the demystification of an impersonal world resulted in a tormented reality that defied any traditional approach to understand it. His maddening mind, as it descended into dementia, illuminated with Promethean Fire a fault line that had developed in western thought more than two thousand years earlier; a conceptual fault line that divided the spirit of human existence into a duality between body and soul. From its headwaters in the holistic and rational landscape of pre-Socratic thought, this existential spirit flowed easily into the irrational realm of a fractured symmetry between material and ethereal being. Along this fault line, cultural shocks and aftershocks would continue to convulse European civilization for more than a century following Nietzsche’s death. From the tension within this fault, from its potential energy Jesus the Nazarene and Adolf Hitler the Nazi derived their personal power to become historically significant individuals. This paper will attempt to explore, possibly at a Gestalt level, some connections between Nietzsche’s godless philosophy and the phenomena of these two men as they attempted to be about the Almighty’s work here on Earth.