The first time I read the words "eternal return" in Nietzsche I immediately had to recall Origen's pochaastasix.… For the Greek church father smuggled the genuinely Hellenistic idea of the eternal recurrence of things and the eternal repetition of the origin and end of the world without further ado into Christian theology and then built on it the magnificent doctrine of the bringing of men back to God … But this divinization of the world was, for Origen, not just an end, but also a beginning. When the cycle of things had reached its beginning again, it began all over. The terrible spectacle of the fall, sin, punishment, redemption, and return to God is repeated over and over again—from eternity to eternity or, as one could better translate the word aion from one world-cycle to the next.

One of the principal themes in Nietzschean thought is "the interpretive...