»By no means was Teresa what one would call a monastic creature. She was bored as much by the religious books as by the daily recitation of the prayers. Men should be happy down to the heart and cheer up the others, that was her sole wish.«

Hope is a crucial element of the Christian doctrine of salvation. Walter Nigg draws our attention to the immense significance of the expectation of salvation in the history of faith, in philosophy and in human life in general in his book »Geschichte der Hoffnung« (»The History of Hope«). In this fascinating investigation the author is also concerned with »the other side« of hope: peaks of joy and dramatic disappointment, faith and doubt are dangerously close together. And it is precisely here that Nigg recognises an exceptional potential: he regards this dichotomy as the source of all human creativity.

Today, Rembrandt's significance is unquestioned, he is accepted as one of the great masters. Vincent van Gogh, a great admirer of Rembrandt, once said: »You cannot sincerely love Rembrandt without knowing that God exists.« The theologian Walter Nigg is overwhelmed by Rembrandt's art - and with good reason. No other painter has understood the Bible so thoroughly nor interpreted it so timelessly in paintings and drawings. Nigg's biography shows impressively how much his art was connected to his belief and to his doubts.

Walter Nigg traces the embodiments of evil through the centuries and reveals the effects of belief in the devil on the collective psyche in times gone by. He goes deeply into the saints' struggles with the powers of evil and the poetic endeavours of modern writers to confront the devil. Nigg regards Baudelaire's penetrating observation that the devil's »perfect cunning« consists of his ability to persuade man that he (the devil) does not exist as being particularly appropriate in our modern times. Present-day mankind has fallen a victim to this illusion, to this denial and suppression of the embodiment of evil, without being aware that we are thereby giving the evil virtually unlimited power.

On the lives and thoughts of Meister Eckhart, Jan Hus, Martin Luther, Giordano Bruno, Baruch Spinoza, Blaise Pascal, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Leo Tolstoy and many more.

In time for the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses: This book puts the reformer into another perspective – the church and its critics throughout 20 centuries.

A vivid and lively read – packed full of knowledge.

The standard work – now made available again.

The Book of Heretics tells us about ›unsuccessful saints‹, as Walter Nigg calls them. With great empathy, he writes about seekers of the divine and the truth, internally liberated but expelled from the church, or leavers by choice. His subjects include ›witches‹ and Cathars, famous philosophers and theologians, writers and scholars.

»Heretics are often among the greatest pioneers of new ideas. Their contemporaries could often not yet understand them.«
Walter Nigg

English translation available.

The theologian Walter Nigg spent his whole life studying the great religious thinkers – and his sympathy seems to have been with the unsaintly rather than the saintly, and with the heretics rather than the conformists. In Vincent van Gogh, the unorthodox theologian comes to grips with one of the most unorthodox figures of the 19th century, a brilliant painter who was also a heretic, seeker after God and prophet who spent his whole life striving for and bitterly opposing God. Like Tolstoy, van Gogh finally broke with the church and the clergy and lived according to the laws of a self-created, nature-based religion. Walter Nigg's attempt to retrace Vincent van Gogh's life would appear ambitious – there has scarcely been so much written about any other painter, and few paintings are less well-known than his sunflowers. In fact, however, this abundance of literature makes Nigg's book all the more well worth reading, for the originality and insistence with which he describes van Gogh's life from a quite different angle, namely the religious perspective, and the extent to which religious and artistic development merge and blend, are rare in the extreme.