SOURCE: "The Wayward Disciple," Frau Lou: Nietzsche's Wayward Disciple, Princeton University Press, 1968, pp. 141-71.

Binion is an American educator and critic. In the following excerpt from his highly praised biography of Andreas-Salomé, he discusses her 1894 study of Friedrich Nietzsche's life and work.

[After Nietzsche's breakdown in 1889] Lou could develop no farther as authoress, feminist, or female except as Nietzsche's ex-disciple. In "Der Realismus in der Religion" of late 1891, she implicitly declared herself loyal to Nietzsche's sometime Réealism. Her professed purpose was to pin down "the religious affect," as Nietzsche had prompted her to—and she did identify its two edifying components quite nicely: a feeling of deepest personal insufficiency and the very opposite. Her final purpose was what she took Nietzsche's to have been: religious prophecy. She contended that the "science of religion" must henceforth attend to the religious affect, presumably an all-human affect given a huge...