 While Kierkegaard’s criticisms of Luther come from within the Christian tradition, those of Nietzsche come from a thinker who put himself outside  it.[34]  However, it took some time for this critique of Luther to develop, and in his earlier period until 1876 Nietzsche’s writings are highly favourable towards Luther himself and the Reformation generally; but from this point on, his view of both becomes increasingly negative and hostile (see Bluhm 1943, 1950, 1953 for a detailed account of this trajectory; this is also discussed in Large 2003). For Nietzsche, Luther came to represent the paradigm of the non-aristocratic man, who rather than accepting and overcoming himself, instead despised himself and tried to flee from himself by turning to God. Thus, while Nietzsche may have seen in Luther a prefiguring of his own attempts to get beyond a morality of law in the name of  freedom,[35]  ultimately he came to view this liberating impetus as something Luther himself betrayed. More positively, however, while no direct references to Luther are made, and while any such influence would be mediated by other figures such as Schopenhauer, it is arguable that some elements in Nietzsche’s rejection of the idea of the free will might be found in Luther, not with respect to Nietzsche’s causal determinism, but at the level of his doubts concerning the power of free choice to occupy a neutral position between the agent and their actions—for example, in Nietzsche’s well known criticism of “popular morality” which 