The Last Messiah

The Last Messiah is a short essay written in 1933 by the Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe. It is one of his most important works and was later expanded into his book On the Tragic. Though brief, it condenses the core of his thought: human beings suffer from an excessively developed consciousness, which produces anguish in a world that offers no answers to the fundamental existential questions.

The essay opens with a poetic image: a hunter who, with his bow and arrow, gives up hunting because he feels kinship with all living things. Returning without prey, he perishes, unable to live by natural impulses. This figure embodies the essay's thesis: justice, the deepest organizing principle of this man, is mocked by the state of things, and death offers no sanctuary or consolation. Zapffe regards humankind as a biological paradox, an overgrowth of nature that has gone disastrously wrong.

Since the species has not died out, Zapffe asks why. His answer is that people repress this surplus of consciousness, more or less knowingly. To describe how, he outlines four defensive mechanisms, which he calls remedies against panic: isolation, which expels all disturbing thoughts; anchoring, which fixes meaning to stable points such as family, home or belief, though in his account these become living lies, a notion he borrows from Ibsen; distraction, which keeps attention occupied so the mind does not turn in on itself; and sublimation, which redirects energy toward positive ends. Zapffe considers sublimation the rarest of the four, and acknowledges that writing the essay is itself an attempt at it.

In the closing section, the author argues that humanity deludes itself into believing it is destined for triumph, and that as long as this belief persists, nothing essential will change. He foresees the coming of a last Messiah, a man bold enough to strip his soul bare before the idea of doom, whose pain would be the collective pain of the Earth. Unlike the biblical command to be fruitful and multiply, this Messiah would preach self-knowledge and infertility, so that the earth might fall silent. His message would be rejected, and he would be buried by those who oppose him.

The essay influenced later philosophical pessimism. The horror writer and philosopher Thomas Ligotti refers to it frequently in his book The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, citing it as a prime example of that tradition.