It would be a dreadful thing if we were still to believe in sin: but no matter what we do, if we repeat it countless times it is innocent. If the thought of the eternal return of all things does not overwhelm you, that is no one's fault; and it is not to its credit if it does do so. —We judge our predecessors more gently than they themselves judged: we regret the errors they incorporated, not their wickedness.
The passage enlightens us as to why in point four of the first project "the innocent" is mentioned. With the death of the moral God, the sinners and the guilty parties vanish from being as a whole, and the necessity of being-as it is-assumes its prerogative.
The second plan proceeds now to reverse the sequence of the principal thoughts, inasmuch as it begins with the thought of return. It runs (XII, 426):
This plan also provides directives in some other respects: "necessity" does not refer to any arbitrary kind of necessity but to that of being as a whole. "The play of life" reminds us immediately of a fragment of Heraclitus, the thinker to whom Nietzsche believed he was most closely akin, that is to say, fragment 52: Αἰὼν παῖς ἐστι παίζων πεσσεύων· παιδὸς ἡ βασιληίη. "The aeon is a child at play, playing at draughts; dominion is the child's" (that is to say, dominion over being as a whole).
The suggestion is that innocence pervades being as a whole. The whole is aiōn, a word that can scarcely be translated in an adequate way. It means the whole of the world, but also time, and, related by time to our "life," it means the course of life itself. We are accustomed to defining the meaning of aiōn thus: "Aeon" suggests the "time" of the "cosmos," that is, of nature, which operates in the time which physics measures. One distinguishes time in this sense from the time we "live through." Yet what is named in aiōn resists such a distinction . At the same time, we are thinking of kosmos too cursorily when we represent it cosmologically.