Of all the images that Nietzsche presents in this part, the image of the god On the cross is the one that he appears to be the most cynical and derisive of. This is also the only one that Nietzsche merely conjures and does not take direct ownership of when he claims that “Modern people can no longer relate to the hideous superlative found by an ancient taste in the paradoxical formula ‘god on the cross’. Nowhere to date has there been such a bold inversion or anything quite as horrible, questioning, and questionable as this formula.” (44) The first idea of interest in this image is the idea that it is something that separates the modern sensibilities from the ancient. When Nietzsche claims that modern people can no longer relate to this hideous superlative, he seems to be suggesting that the grotesqueness of a dying god is no longer shocking to us. Nietzsche seems to be asking to compare the ancient conception of the Gods, one where they are all powerful, immortal dictators of human fate, to our own modern conception where god is something that is weak and that can be destroyed by human agency and by doing so realize the absolute absurdity that s contained in that distinction. With such an image, Nietzsche seems to be challenging our ability to call that ‘god on the cross’ a God at all.  It is fitting then, that Nietzsche intentionally avoids capitalizing the word god whenever he mentions this image, an action that seems to be his way of indicating the absurdity of our modern instinct. This section has been filled with critiques of modern sentiment and religious ideals, and the ‘god on the cross’ fits the themes of this chapter more than any other image in the section. This is paralleled with the negative impact of religious character highlighted in the image of the great ladder of religious cruelty.
In section 55 of this chapter, Nietzsche asserts that “There is a great ladder of religious cruelty, and of its many rungs, three are the most important. People used to make human sacrifices to their god, perhaps even sacrificing those they loved the best- this sort of phenomenon can be found in the sacrifice of the firstborn”. There are two interesting elements inherently contained in this image of the ladder. The first is that this is inherently an image of ascension, the reader automatically feels as if their climbing towards some new height, and perhaps some new plateau. Second, this image is implicitly limited much like a ladder and thus has an endpoint. Something that has grim ramifications in Nietzsche’s model of sacrifice. Nietzsche’s rhetoric is perhaps at it’s strongest in this section. Here he plainly and positively asserts when he says there is, something that he rarely does in his philosophy. Perhaps this is done in this section to emphasize the fact that this subsection is the philosophical heart of the section. In a chapter called the religious character, no other image describes the said character in such plain and unequivocal terms. Nietzsche continues to build this image when he states “Then, during the moral epoch of humanity, people sacrificed the strongest instincts they had, their ‘nature’, to their god; the joy of this particular festival shines in the cruel eyes of the ascetic, that enthusiastic piece of ‘anti-nature’”. Here he equates morality with sacrifice, a concept that he indicates is antithetical to nature. This passage also further illuminates the critiques that he poses against the figures of Schopenhauer and The Buddha since they were known for their belief in those ascetic sentiments of negation that Nietzsche so heavily disavows. Nietzsche then continues building the image by asking the question “what was left to be sacrificed? In the end, didn’t people have to sacrifice all comfort and hope, everything holy or healing… Didn’t people have to sacrifice God himself and worship rocks, stupidity, gravity, fate, or nothingness out of sheer cruelty to themselves? To sacrifice God for nothingness”. It is significant that Nietzsche chooses to close the image the same way that he opens the book.  By posting an image and a question he forces the reader to really meditate on the gravity of his words. In this final sacrifice, religion turns against itself and destroys the one thing that defines it, leaving it without definition or cruelty. This is the age that Nietzsche suggests that we’re living in, and his meditation on the religious character seems inherently interwoven with this perspective. By exploring the image in this manner, he is reinforcing the themes of people, sects, and locations that we have seen throughout this whole chapter. It is through deeper analysis of these three themes and the intersections between them that we obtain a fuller idea of what the religious character is.
