difficult sentence meaning

What is the meaning of this sentence?

... because believing in something will be seen by the passive nihilist as preferable to taking the risk of not believing in anything, to taking the risk of staring into the abyss – a metaphor for nihilism that appears frequently in Nietzsche’s work.

One source: Nihilism

Solution 1:

... because believing in something will be seen by the passive nihilist as preferable to taking the risk of not believing in anything; that is to say, to taking the risk of staring into the abyss – a metaphor for nihilism that appears frequently in Nietzsche’s work.

Here, "staring into the abyss" is just a restatement of "not believing in anything". Structurally, it means the same as this:

... because believing in something will be seen by the passive nihilist as preferable to taking the risk of staring into the abyss, which is a metaphor for nihilism that appears frequently in Nietzsche’s work.