Frederich Nietzsche
In the musical Oklahoma! Ado Annie and Will Parker sing, “With Me It’s All or Nuthin’ is it All or Nuthin’ With You?” I like to imagine the duet being sung by Thérèse of Lisieux and Friedrich Nietzsche. I can just see the sweet little French girl and the skinny German with his big moustache, the first crying out in girlish enthusiasm, “I will have all!” and the second in sickly sadness crying, “I will have nothing.”
The Doctor of the Church and the Philosopher of the Anti-Church were contemporaries. Nietzsche was born in 1844 and died in 1900. Thérèse was born in 1873 and died three years before Nietzsche in 1897. In one of those quirks of history, there is a story that two of them stayed in the same hotel in Paris while Thérèse and her father were on pilgrimage to Rome.