Early Judaism
Nietzsche’s pre-Christian history includes Judaism as a second path leading to Christianity, in parallel to the Greek one. Nietzsche’s historical conception of Judaism results in the division of Judaism into three phases: the biblical era (or Early Judaism), the second temple era (or Priestly Judaism),1 and Diaspora Judaism.2 This division derives from Nietzsche’s “anti-anti-Semite”3 spirit (following his distancing from Wagner and Schopenhauer).4 Nietzsche’s family and personal history offers explanations as to why Nietzsche identified strongly with the Jewish minority in his culture and why Jewish-Christian relations in nineteenth-century Germany are central to an understanding of Nietzsche’s thought.5 In addition, Nietzsche’s identification with European Jews constitutes an essential part of his antinational, anti-German, “Good European” spirit.6 Evidence of this spirit is found in his abandonment of German for French heroes, which accompanied his break with the anti-Semitic, and later Christian, Wagner.7
In the following reconstruction of Nietzsche’s pre-Christian history, I shall pay attention to Nietzsche’s treatment of the first two phases of Judaism.8 My locating of Judaism within Nietzsche’s history of Christianity follows the dual claim that Nietzsche’s conception of Judaism cannot be considered in isolation from the rest of his philosophy and that his view of the Jewish question can only be attained from within his general philosophical framework.9
The parallels established here between ancient Greek religion and Early Judaism follow the claim that Nietzsche’s conception of Early Judaism is a Dionysian one.10 Comparisons of these two early religions can be made on this basis. The parallelism between the Greek and the Jewish paths to Christianity is not merely formal; it touches, instead, the content of these two religions. From the start, Nietzsche characterizes Early Judaism in the same terms in which he characterizes ancient Greek religion, in terms of a religion of thankfulness:
A people that still believes in itself still also has its own God. In him it venerates the conditions through which it has prospered, its virtues—it projects its joy in itself, its feeling of power on to a being whom one can thank for them. He who is rich wants to bestow; a proud people needs a God in order to sacrifice. … Within the bounds of such presuppositions religion is a form of gratitude. One is grateful for oneself: for that one needs a God.—Such a God must be able to be both useful and harmful, both friend and foe—he is admired in good and bad alike.11
Here, again, it is the feeling of thankfulness that governs religion in its original form. Here, again, the feeling of thankfulness results from one’s feeling of satisfaction from a life of joy. And once again, the thankfulness to God is an affirmative answer to the question about the value of life, insofar as this question emerges on the basis of man’s consciousness of self-finitude. Despite its self-satisfaction, Early Judaism knows that it does not embrace the totality of its life. Hence, it cannot venerate itself, in that it needs its own God through which it projects its joy in itself. As such, Early Judaism is also similar to ancient Greek religion in being a stage beyond the stage in which life is absolute in its being immediate. Accordingly, Early Judaism forms the second starting point for the Nietzschean history of Christianity, reflecting on the question of the value of life.
The kind of projection that creates symmetry between the people of God and the people’s God is not alien to Greek religion.12 The point is that the creation of divinity—emerging in Early Judaism as it does in Greek religion—contains the idea that the human is too small to deserve thanks, that the experience of this early Jewish joy of life cannot be conceived in terms of the immediacy of life anymore. The Jewish and Greek feeling of satisfaction is overwhelming to the degree that man cannot be thought to be as man is, and in turn, life cannot be thought to be immediate. It is through man’s projection of himself in God that man is elevated to the level of divinity. According to this same line of thought—which understands the emergence of religion on the basis of man’s finitude—Nietzsche explains the emergence of religion as such in terms of error:
The metaphysical need is not the origin of religions, as Schopenhauer supposed, but merely a late offshoot. Under the rule of religious ideas, one has become accustomed to the notion of “another world (behind, below, above)”—and when religious ideas are destroyed one is troubled by an uncomfortable emptiness and deprivation. From this feeling grows once again “another world,” but now merely a metaphysical one that is no longer religious. But what first led to a positing of “another world” in primeval times was not some impulse or need but an error in the interpretation of certain natural events, a failure of the intellect.13
Nietzsche’s claim that religion is not a need but an erroneous interpretation of nature actually points to the failure of early religious man to grasp nature, and only nature, as the totality of man’s world. This view of early religion, in its attempt to grasp the totality of life as one referring to another world beyond this-world (a partial world), is a view that has already departed from the view of the immediacy of life and therefore that posits the question of the value of life before itself. Nietzsche adds that religion cannot be a metaphysical need. If it were such, it should be said to be inherent in man as such, to be natural. But religion is a product of history and remains historically produced. It does not emerge before man loses the immediacy of life, and it does not appear before man has attained the conditions that put the value of life into question.
Likewise, early religion’s interpretation of nature as another-world does not necessarily imply that early religion holds the totality of the world comprising nature and the other-world as two parts that complement each other. The case of Early Judaism shows that early religion’s error consists in the projection of man and nature onto God. In the context of Early Judaism, the abundance of man’s life results in the emergence of man’s failure to identify man as man, nature as nature, and life as life. It is also manifest in man’s projection of these results in a concept of a natural God:
Originally, above all in the period of the Kingdom, Israel too stood in a correct, that is to say natural relationship to all things. Their Yaweh was the expression of their consciousness of power, of their delight in themselves, their hopes of themselves: in him they anticipated victory and salvation, with him they trusted that nature would provide what the people needed—above all rain. Yaweh is the God of Israel and consequently the God of justice: the logic of every nation that is in power and has a good conscience about it. These two aspects of a nation’s self-affirmation find expression in festival worship: it is grateful for the great destiny which has raised it on high, it is grateful towards the year’s seasons and to all its good fortune with livestock and husbandry.14
If Yahweh is Early Judaism’s God, then Early Judaism is a monotheistic religion. I mentioned that Nietzsche criticizes the claim for the eternity of the one truth, its duration over time, its “monotono-theism.”15 Yet Nietzsche’s positive evaluation of Early Judaism does not contradict his negative criticism of monotheism. The object of Nietzsche’s criticism is not the idea of the oneness of truth. Instead, as the difference between the terms “monotheism” and “monotono-theism” shows, Nietzsche’s criticism concerns the validity of the oneness of the (Platonic-Christian) truth over time. After Nietzsche’s modern genealogical consciousness, such a claim cannot be further supported.16 In this light, Nietzsche’s description of Early Judaism’s ritual worship of its God as a reflection of nature’s seasonal cycles is highly significant to the understanding of Nietzsche’s positive appraisal of the Jewish God, despite its idea of monotheism. This last quotation of Nietzsche, as well as the one above relating to Early Judaism as a religion of thankfulness,17 indicates that Nietzsche conceives of Early Judaism’s concept of God as a natural concept reflecting the totality of life: “The concept of power, whether of a god or of a man, always includes both the ability to help and the ability to harm. Thus it is with the Arabs; thus with the Hebrews. Thus with all strong races.”18
God reflects life as experienced in its totality, life in its good and bad circumstances. God is both good and bad, friend and foe. God is referred to in the good and in the bad: God is one. Nietzsche’s idea of natural monotheism—the conception of the one God as the reflection of the experience of life as one totality—remains similar to Greek polytheism, following its idea of plurality as expressed in the plurality of feelings with which the one and the same deity is addressed. It may be objected here that the monotheist Jewish concept of God differs from Greek polytheism in that it does not embrace plurality as plurality, but as totality. In view of the fact that the natural Jewish God reflects nature in its seasonal cycle, it should be replied that this totality is not absolute. This totality is bound to locality and nativity: “All honor to the Old Testament! I find in it great human beings, a heroic landscape, and something of the very rarest quality in the world, the incomparable naïveté of the strong heart; what is more, I find a people.”19
For Nietzsche, the early Jewish “Nationalgott” represents the same ideal that the early native God of the Greek polis (“deus autochthonus”) represents: Nietzsche’s conception of Early Judaism is similar to his conception of ancient Greek religion as a religion of thankfulness.20 In the context of this parallelism, Early Judaism’s conception of its one God is the first affirmative answer to the question of the value of life on the path leading from Judaism to Christianity.
The terms of this comparison between ancient Greek religion and Early Judaism raise the following question: Does Nietzsche see Early Judaism continuing on the same trajectory as ancient Greek religion? If ancient Greek religion gives birth to Dionysian tragedy, does Early Judaism also do the same? Nietzsche answers: “tragedy—an art form and a pleasure that have remained essentially and profoundly foreign to the Jew, in spite of all poetic gifts and his sense for the sublime.”21
Here one notes the clarity and the element of comparison that these words of Nietzsche entail, showing that Nietzsche was aware of this question. This awareness demonstrates his latent conception of the parallelism between the Greek and the Jewish paths to Christianity, which this work aims to reconstruct. Thus, one can determine that the Dionysian in Early Judaism remains bound to the poetical and the sublime in the Old Testament: “In the Jewish ‘Old Testament,’ the book of divine justice, there are human beings, things, and speeches in so grand a style that Greek and Indian literature have nothing to compare with it. With terror and reverence one stands before these tremendous remnants of what man once was. … —the taste for the Old Testament is a touchstone for ‘great’ and ‘small.’”22
Priestly Judaism
The transformation of Judaism in Christianity is not progress but regression.23 What is more, Priestly Judaism, as a stage between Early Judaism and Christianity, is a regression from Early Judaism. But in contrast with the regression of the history of Christianity through its Greek path from ancient Greek religion to Platonic philosophy, this regression remains in the frame of the trajectory of Judaism as religion. This regression does not involve art or philosophy in the manner that the Greek history involves Dionysian tragedy and Platonism. In what context, then, does Nietzsche conceive the regression from Early Judaism to Priestly Judaism? The following discussion shall show that Nietzsche’s genealogy of the priest as such composes the history of this regression, which is defined in terms of the inversion of the natural values of noble-morality in the unnatural values of slave-morality.
The fact that this inversion takes place within Judaism does not yet mean that the subject of concern here is the Jewish priest as being Jewish. Instead, and in keeping with the above claim that Nietzsche’s conception of Judaism should not be isolated from the general framework of his philosophy, the Jewish priest is meant to represent the priest as such, insofar as the Jews are, by definition, “a priestly people.”24 Put in these terms, the task of describing Nietzsche’s genealogy of the priest is the task of accounting for the genealogy of the Jewish people as a priestly people. This task could be approached through Nietzsche’s account of the Jewish experience, which makes its regression to unnatural values possible:
The Jews—a people “born for slavery,” as Tacitus and the whole ancient world say; “the chosen people among the peoples,” as they themselves say and believe—the Jews brought off that miraculous feat of an inversion of values, thanks to which life on earth has acquired a novel and dangerous attraction for a couple of millennia: their prophets have fused “rich,” “godless,” “evil,” “violent,” and “sensual” into one and were the first to use the word “world” as an opprobrium. This inversion of values (which includes using the word “poor” as synonymous with “holy” and “friend”) constitutes the significance of the Jewish people: they mark the beginning of the slave rebellion in morals.25
The Jews possess a dual identity. First, their external-objective identity refers to them as a people born for slavery. Second, their internal-subjective identity refers to them as the chosen people among the peoples. This dual identity of the Jewish people refers to them as both masters and slaves at once. As the chosen people among all peoples, the Jews are nobles; they possess the noble “pathos of distance.”26 And being born for slavery, they are slaves. If that is the case, the genealogy of this dual identity points to the genealogy of the conditions according to which the priest as such is prepared to constitute the turning point for the inversion of the values of noble-morality into slave-morality: “The priestly mode of valuation can branch off [easily] from the knightly-aristocratic and then develop into its opposite; this is particularly likely when the priestly caste and the warrior caste are in jealous opposition to one another and are unwilling to come to terms.”27
The starting point is the division of the aristocracy itself. This division between the priestly and the knightly aristocracies leads the priestly caste in the direction of creating a new, opposing mode of valuation. With this, the terms of an opposition without the possibility of conciliation are there. But why should the new priestly mode of valuation specifically lead to slave-morality? In opposition to the “powerful physicality”28 of the knightly aristocracy affirming life in this-world, the priestly caste is in a state of physical “impotence”29 that does not allow it to affirm itself in this-world. The priestly caste then occupies the position of the impotent hateful slave: “It is because of their impotence that in them hatred grows to monstrous and uncanny proportions, to the most spiritual and poisonous kind of hatred.”30
Yet, the occupation of the position of the slave does not guarantee the possibility of creating the values of slave-morality. If it is the case that “the noble, powerful, high-stationed and high-minded. … [who out of their] pathos of distance … seized the right to create values and to coin names for these values,”31 then becoming a slave means losing all capacity to create values. I recall though that the (Jewish) priest continues to hold together with this new external-objective identity of the slave the old internal-subjective identity of the noble chosen people. In these same terms, and insofar as the Jews are “the most notable example”32 of a priestly people in human history, the priest is still empowered with his noble capacity to create values.
So far, the priestly noble mode of evaluation and the priestly slave impotent hatred are the two sources for the constitution of slave-morality. But in turning to examine the priestly noble mode of evaluation, Nietzsche directs his negative criticism toward the priest already at the early stage in which the priest still belongs to the nobility: “There is from the first something unhealthy in such priestly aristocracies.”33 Nietzsche’s criticism of the priest as unhealthy concerns the results of the priestly evaluation as one defined in terms of purity and impurity:
“Pure” and “impure” confront one another for the first time as designations of station; and here too there evolves a “good” and a “bad” in a sense no longer referring to station. … “Pure” and “impure” … were rather at first incredibly uncouth, coarse, external, narrow, straightforward, and altogether unsymbolical in meaning to a degree that we can scarcely conceive. … On the other hand, to be sure, it is clear from the whole nature of an essentially priestly aristocracy why antithetical valuations could in precisely this instance soon become dangerously deepened, sharpened, and internalized; and indeed they finally tore chasms between man and man.34
This criticism of the implications of priestly evaluation stands in the context of the Nietzschean comparison of the noble evaluation in terms of good and bad with the priestly evaluation in terms of pure and impure as two parallel forms of noble evaluation. Nietzsche claims that good and bad originate from the noble’s reference to himself as good and to the common plebeian as bad.35 In parallel, the priestly “pure” and “impure” terms of evaluation originate in the same way in which the terms “good” and “bad” originate. However, Nietzsche’s negative view of pure and impure corresponds to the moment subsequent to their birth. Pure and impure, like good and bad, are subjected to the “rule that a concept denoting political superiority always resolves itself into a concept denoting superiority of soul.”36 The political points here to the reality that keeps the concept tied to the empirical as its denotation. Besides that, the soul, or the psychological (seelisch), points to a later stage in which the concept is freed from its subordination to the empirical by way of its denotation of an inner reality.
Accordingly, in the second psychological stage good and bad lose their original political status and become hegemonic. Good and bad enter into a stage in which the concept of the good comes to denote the speaking I on the basis of its mere speech as I. Additionally, the concept of the bad comes to denote what this same speaking I has as its not-I. The case at this second stage is one in which I and good constitute one inseparable unity; for here, the speaking I is not in the position in which it can choose to use this concept of good and drop another. Here, good and bad form language and language is the language of good and bad.
On the other hand, the priestly pure and impure remains tied to the priest’s practice of purity. As such, language loses the validity of its denotation of the priest’s psychology. The priest, in referring to this psychology through the practice of purity, loses all possible contact with political reality. The priests, says Nietzsche, “tore chasms between man and man.”37 But in what way does the negatively presented chasms between man and man differ from the positively presented pathos of distance? The chasms here are between man and man living, first, in one mode of political reality—or, later, one mode of psychological reality—and the priest living in a second reality. The chasms between man and man mean the chasms between this-world of man and the other-world (of practice) of the priest. The chasms between man and man correspond to an order other than that of the pathos of distance . The latter refers to the distance between the good man and the bad man. Against this, the chasms between man and man refer to the difference between the ascetic pure priest and this-world’s man: between the good man of good and bad and the good man of good and evil.38 Or better, if the good man of good and bad is evil, then the chasms between man and man are chasms between good and evil.
For Nietzsche, the dynamic of pure and impure is a dangerous ground: “With the priests everything becomes more dangerous … but it is only fair to add that it was on the soil of this essentially dangerous form of human existence, the priestly form, that man first became an interesting animal, that only here did the human soul in a higher sense acquire depth and become evil.”39 To understand the meaning of Nietzsche’s allusion to depth and evil here, it is necessary to analyze good and evil by relating them to the priestly slave’s impotent hatred as the second source for the constitution of slave-morality. It can be assumed that the priest acquires the impotent hatred of the slave once the priest acquires the latter’s sociopolitical status. Despite becoming a slave, the priest, as an ex-noble, is equipped with the capacity to create values. The priest, being a priest, is a practitioner of purity. Thus, once the priest acquires the hatred of the slave through the acquisition of the sociopolitical status of the slave, this hatred becomes empowered with new values following the logic of the practice of purity.
The result of this transition is that the slave’s hatred loses its earlier impotence only in the sphere of language. On the one hand, the slave’s hatred remains impotent in the sphere of action, while, on the other hand, the slave becomes empowered with the capacity of the priest to create values in the sphere of language. The resulting gap between the acquired potency in language and the remaining impotence in action becomes the background upon which the priest’s logic of pure and impure acquires significance. The model of the priest’s practice of purity becomes that which defines the slave-priest partnership’s mode of action. Insofar as the sphere of the practice of purity is one beyond the reality of this-world, and insofar as the priest-slave action cannot take place in this-world, such action occupies the sphere of the pure. In other words, its sphere becomes that of the future, of the other-world, or better, of both: of the day of judgment, the day in which hatred shall be resolved in acting justice that cannot be acted here and now. In this context, ressentiment becomes the basis for the constitution of slave-morality:
The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: The ressentiment of natures that are denied the true reaction, that of deeds, and compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge. While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is “outside,” what is “different,” what is “not itself”; and this No is its creative deed. This inversion of the value-positing eye—this need to direct one’s view outward instead of back to oneself—is of the essence of ressentiment.40
On the basis of Nietzsche’s discovery of ressentiment as the source of the genealogy of the morality of good and evil, the following paragraphs advance the claim that this genealogy comes to define the history of the problem of suffering as the teleological history of suffering humanity. My starting point is an analysis of the definition that Nietzsche gives to the good in the domain of slave-morality. Specifically, Nietzsche writes, “the wretched alone are the good; the poor, impotent, lowly alone are the good; the suffering, deprived, sick, ugly alone are pious, alone are blessed by God, blessedness is for them alone.”41 In view of this definition of the good, it is suffering alone that becomes the center of human life. For, if this good mirrors the life of the slave, and if the existence of the slave depends on the negation of everything else,42 then suffering alone defines the value of life.
Then, in slave-morality, the question of the value of life from the viewpoint of the problem of suffering takes a new form. Here, suffering is not seen as an integral part of life where the affirmation of the totality of life results in the affirmation of suffering (as in Dionysian tragedy). Moreover, suffering here is not seen as an unwanted part of life that philosophy seeks to avoid (as in Platonism). In contrast with these two perspectives, slave-morality equates the value of life with the value of suffering. Slave-morality’s question is not about the value of life from the point of view of suffering. Slave-morality’s question is much more direct: it is one about the value of suffering. As such, as soon as suffering becomes the good (that is, becomes the value of life par excellence), the value of life is the value of suffering, such that life is good insofar as it is a life of suffering.
The context within which slave-morality conceives of suffering life is that of teleological history. How? The practice of the purity of the priest opens up the possibility of living this-life in the other good world of the priest: the possibility of the experience of this-life, which is good in view of its denotation of the I of the priest, and which is also other(-world) to this-world in view of its divorce from the political and psychological realities of this-world. If that is correct—if some experience of life beyond this-life is possible—and if this-life is suffering, then suffering is not the condition of the totality of life. In addition, if this-life of suffering and the other-life without suffering are both good, then the good in this-life (suffering) is connected somehow to the good of the other-life. Since this-life is negated, the direction of the totality of life leads from this-life to the other-life. Accordingly, the good of this-life is the sign of the good of the other-life. Suffering is the condition of salvation. And so, the teleological history of suffering is the history of the suffering good man beginning with his fall at the hands of evil man and ending with the redemption of the good man and the punishment of evil man in a life beyond this-life, or beyond history.
If this-life is suffering and if this-life is history, then history is the condition of suffering, and therefore, overcoming history is the condition for the overcoming of suffering. Yet, I claimed above that this history is not just the history of suffering, but the history of suffering humanity. How can this claim be true? First, to be clear, humanity refers to the noble and the slave as the sum of the human agencies behind the making of this history. As such, suffering in this history is no longer that of the Dionysian man’s own pain, no more the Dionysian viewpoint that lacks, as the Dionysian sees suffering, the capacity to see the hidden suffering of the slave.43 In this view, this history is not the history of mere humanity, but that of suffering humanity. But does this not contradict the fact that slave-morality sees suffering as what belongs to the slave alone, that slave-morality excludes the noble from the “gift” of suffering, and therefore cannot be said to delimit its definition of the history of humanity to suffering? Such an objection remains true only insofar as the noble is still to be seen as the external other of the slave. But, for Nietzsche, the case of the history of suffering humanity is not one about the suffering of the slave and the noble as the mere sum of humanity comprising these two as two atomic agencies external to each other. Instead, the suffering of humanity is the suffering of the priest in whom the human is born. The priest is the being-together (not the synthesis) of the noble and the slave as the one embracing agency that creates the history of suffering.44 When the priest’s slave-morality accuses the noble of being evil, slave-morality actually accuses the human, or the priest, insofar as the priest is both aristocrat and slave. In sum, the one body of the priest becomes the body of the human, which has the noble—being the agent of evil—inside it. The moment in which the will to power becomes historical is the moment in which the will turns against itself. In this domain, evil and depth are discovered as objects of hatred:
[New Christian] love grew out of it [Jewish hatred] as its crown, as its triumphant crown spreading itself farther and farther into the purest brightness and sunlight, driven as it were into the domain of light and the heights in pursuit of the goals of that hatred—victory, spoil, and seduction—by the same impulse that drove the roots of that hatred deeper and deeper and more and more covetously into all that was profound and evil.45
In so belonging to this order, they belong to the order to which slave-morality’s ressentiment says no. This is the order of slave-morality’s “‘outside,’ what is ‘different,’ what is ‘not itself.’”46 But if the profound and the outside belong to the same order, then evil is not simply the evil of the aristocrat standing there outside. To avoid the apparent contradiction of the belonging of the inside (that is, depth) and the outside to the same order, this order may simply be called the order of the different. Evil is deep and depth is evil. The genealogy of the human, described above, is the priest as both aristocrat and slave. Man is both good and evil, both superficial and deep. If the history of man is the history of man’s suffering, and if suffering is good, then the evil lying in the depth of man is prehistorical. Evil is the starting point of the history of the suffering man. What is this starting point in terms of slave-morality? Slave-morality, in the example of the Jewish priest (in the example of Christianity’s history of suffering humanity), has this origin, where man’s original sin lies deep in man’s evil nature.
Science in Paradise
Slave-morality’s constitution of the teleological history of suffering humanity, in which evil becomes the depth of man as such, bears two important consequences. First, the unity of good and evil, as revealed in the genealogy of slave-morality in the type of Jewish priest (being the human), becomes the ground for slave-morality’s creation of what I want to call the independent economy of sin and punishment in the sphere of morality.47 With the internalization of aristocratic evil in the depth of the good slave, slave-morality conceals, once and forever, the genealogy of slave-morality in the reactive ressentiment, and thereby conceals the traces of the aristocrat in external reality. This concealment gives the whole dynamics of slave-morality the possibility of becoming independent of the need to make any further reference to all external reality. Slave-morality comes to express itself in terms of sin toward a universal punishing God, guilt, bad conscience, and so forth.48 Second, Nietzsche’s genealogical uncovering of slave-morality’s manufacture of evil into man’s original sin provides the basis for his attempt to rescue the original form of science from underneath the concept of the original sin. My claim at this juncture is that Nietzsche’s anti-Christian strategy is geared toward providing the modern Antichrist with the identities of the origins, which his genealogy uncovers.
On the Greek path to Christianity, Dionysian art constitutes such a possible identity. On the Jewish path to Christianity, which proceeds in parallel to Dionysian tragedy, what has been made into man’s original sin—once revaluated into its earlier form and content—becomes a second possible identity of Nietzsche’s modern Antichrist. I have claimed that Nietzsche fails to rescue an independent positive picture of science through his reading of the life of Socrates. In what follows, I shall show how Nietzsche takes up this task again in his attempt to read science from the story of the fall of man in the Bible’s Book of Genesis. Thus, Nietzsche retells his own story of the original sin in The Antichrist as follows:
At the beginning of the Bible … the old God, all “spirit,” all high priest, all perfection, promenades in his garden: but he is bored. Against boredom … he invents man. … But behold, man too is bored. … Consequently God created woman. And then indeed there was an end to boredom. … “Woman is in her essence serpent, Heva”—every priest knows that; “every evil comes to the world through woman.” … “Consequently, science too comes to the world through her.” … What had happened? … Man himself had become God’s greatest blunder; God had created for himself a rival, science makes equal to God—it is all over with priests and gods if man becomes scientific! Moral: science is the forbidden in itself—it alone is forbidden. Science is the first sin, the germ of all sins, original sin. This alone constitutes morality.—“Thou shalt not know”—the rest follows.49
To better appreciate the uniqueness of this unfolding image of science in paradise, it is worth stating above all that for Nietzsche, it is something other than modern science. Nietzsche has modern science emerging in the face of the problem of suffering. In continuity with slave-morality’s Weltanschauung, modern science recognizes suffering within the bounds of the teleological history of suffering humanity. It does so with the purpose of overcoming suffering, which raises modern science beyond the independent economy of sin and punishment, but also keeps modern science tied to asceticism.50 Contrary to this vocation of modern science, paradisiacal science does not think suffering as such. It thinks suffering, that is, distress, from the viewpoint of boredom, or in view of boredom being the only kind of distress found in every paradise.
For Nietzsche, an environment where boredom flourishes is the ideal laboratory of science; it is science’s paradise. The boring paradise becomes the ideal environment for the end of priestly religion. Nietzsche says that God, the priest, and man are equal before boredom. Nietzsche is actually measuring man as God, as priest, and as man before suffering. It is only man, in becoming woman, who is able to overcome boredom. Man as woman does not overcome boredom in the sense of eliminating boredom; instead, man makes of boredom the ideal environment for man’s science as man’s entertainment. This triumph of man is based on man becoming man and woman, and not man becoming man and God or man and priest. In becoming man and woman, man overcomes boredom through science. Of no less importance, man does not need to copy himself. Man does not need to re-create himself in the images of God, the priest, and man. Science is the fruit of man becoming man and woman; it is the fruit of man becoming different from himself as man; and, in turn, it is that which makes man’s reflection, man’s self-image as priest, superfluous.
The interpretation I am offering here emphasizes Nietzsche’s idea of man’s self-sufficiency. Man’s consciousness of finitude does not need to necessarily lead to man’s reflection of himself in the image of the priestly God. For Nietzsche, man is rich enough so as to project from himself a plurality other than the singularity of finitude, and thereby to be able to meet the problem of finitude with the proper answer to it.
With the idea of man’s consciousness of finitude in paradise, the emergence of science in paradise meets the same condition according to which Greek religion and Early Judaism emerge. Besides, paradisiacal science possesses the same kind of pessimism that Dionysian tragedy possesses. Paradisiacal science emerges on the basis of man’s suffering boredom, insofar as boredom is man’s (only) distress in paradise. Man in paradise encounters the problem of pessimism, facing the question of the value of life from the point of view of suffering. In addition, as was the case in Dionysian tragedy, paradisiacal science is man’s affirmative answer to the question of the value of life as suffering. For man does not simply negate boredom, and (the boring) life together with it, but instead creates from boredom the ideal ground for the emergence of science: “the sound conception of cause and effect” as man’s affirmative answer to the question of pessimism.51
So far, paradisiacal science joins Dionysian art both as a second source for the affirmation of life and as another possible identity of Nietzsche’s modern Antichrist. But the comparison between paradisiacal science and Dionysian art can be further extended. Paradisiacal science acquires the deep identity of evil through priestly religion, in the same way Dionysian art acquired this same identity through Platonism. If Dionysian art is Platonism’s evil, and if Priestly Judaism constitutes the example of priestly religion, then paradisiacal science is Priestly Judaism’s evil. In accordance with this line of comparison, Nietzsche’s task toward the restoration of the original identity of science (for the modern Antichrist) ends at the limits of his uncovering of science in its original state. Here, Nietzsche continues to clarify the genealogical process according to which science is deprived of its paradisiacal reality. And this is also the process through which science becomes prepared to acquire its modern form.
The fact that the priest views science as evil makes it necessary to reexamine how Nietzsche sees the connection between knowledge and the Fall as it appears in the Bible.52 Science is man’s original sin, insofar as science provides man with the self-sufficiency according to which man is emancipated from any need of the services of the priest. Accordingly, the reactive defensive response of the priest to the challenge of science is depriving man from the paradise of boredom, which is the condition of science: “Happiness, leisure gives room for thought—all thoughts are bad thoughts. … Man shall not think.”53
Nietzsche here claims that the priest’s outrage against science comprises two elements. First, “the ‘priest in himself’ invents [erfindet] distress, death, the danger to life in pregnancy, every kind of misery, age, toil, above all sickness.”54 This is the reality of that kind of suffering which substitutes for paradisiacal reality and which does not allow man to practice science. Second, the priest provides man on earth with an inverted meaning of suffering: the original sin (paradisiacal science) is the cause of man’s suffering. And as this suffering is God’s punishment, grace, redemption, or forgiveness constitute man’s way of overcoming suffering:
[In] accordance with … [the priest’s] logic—“sin.” … The concept of guilt and punishment, the entire “moral world-order,” was invented in opposition to science. … Man shall not … look prudently and cautiously into things in order to learn … he shall suffer. … And he shall suffer in such a way that he has need of the priest at all times. … The concept of guilt and punishment, including the doctrine of “grace,” of “redemption,” of “forgiveness,” … [was] invented to destroy the causal sense of man: they are an outrage on the concept cause and effect!55
Yet these two elements are one and the same thing. When Nietzsche says that the priest in himself invents suffering, he does not mean that the calamities invented by the priest (distress, death, age, sickness, and so on) did not exist in paradise. Nietzsche’s point is that the priest discovers in these calamities the possibility of inventing a new value of suffering. And since these calamities exclude boredom, science can cause suffering—or be man’s original sin—insofar as for science, boredom is the totality of suffering and thereby is not defined in relation to these calamities. Paradisiacal science may fight these calamities, but since this science does not define these calamities but rather boredom as its object, science may be categorized as evil. Accordingly, to invent these calamities is to invent—in view of paradisiacal science—their earliest possible meaning, and this is the meaning that the priest was the first to give to them.
To make this point clearer, I want to add here that the opposition between paradisiacal science and priestly religion is distinct from that which exists between modern science and the Christian religion (being the culmination of priestly religion). With respect to the latter opposition, modern science approaches the problem of suffering from that angle which has as its object the calamities invented by priestly religion, with the purpose of overcoming them. The difference between modern science and priestly religion concerns their view of the cause of these calamities. As such, this difference extends to their view of the praxis demanded for the overcoming of these calamities. On the one hand, modern science holds the historical man, and only the historical man, to be the cause of these calamities. Accordingly, modern science attempts to uproot these calamities by overcoming the historical sociopolitical conditions of these calamities. On the other hand, priestly religion conceals what modern science uncovers. Specifically, priestly religion conceals this historical sociopolitical dimension behind an independent economy that makes the individual man responsible for man’s misfortune and salvation. And in view of its doctrine of the fall of man, priestly religion may see modern science’s approach to the problem of suffering as falling short of providing man with true salvation from suffering. Priestly religion cannot see modern science as evil causing suffering, but only that it works within the limitations set by man’s evil. For priestly religion, paradisiacal science alone is the cause of evil. For paradisiacal science alone approaches the problem of suffering having boredom as its object, and it is on this basis that the original essence of paradisiacal science may be manipulated and be made into evil.
This does not mean that modern science is the end of religion. According to Nietzsche’s broad definition of science as “the sound conception of cause and effect,”56 modern science does not seem to escape this definition. Nonetheless, the end of priestly religion effected by modern science is essentially different from its end on the terms offered by paradisiacal science. Modern science marks the end of priestly religion in the overcoming-preservation of its object and objective (wherein suffering is conceived of as the invented calamities and the elimination of these is conceived of as history) in the form of science. Paradisiacal science, on the other hand, can mark the end of priestly religion as its absolute opposition, as that whose object and objective (suffering being boredom and its elimination as entertainment) do not provide the ground needed for their conciliation. In sum, paradisiacal science does not meet the conditions that both priestly religion and modern science meet. In opposition to these two, paradisiacal science, insofar as boredom defines its object and objective, remains incompatible with the meaning of suffering within the history of suffering, the meaning of suffering that priestly religion and modern science share.
To conclude, the priest’s invention of life’s calamities as the meaning of suffering is the process according to which paradisiacal science is deprived of its paradisiacal reality and attributed the value of evil. Nietzsche’s text indicates how the process of the priest’s outrage at paradisiacal science prepared science for the acquisition of its modern form.57 In view of the fact that this process culminates in God’s decision to drown man,58 I propose the following hypothesis. After the Deluge man does not become extinct, man survives; and in this way post-paradisiacal science acquires the characteristics of the survivor. Under these conditions, science cannot work in the framework of the abundance of paradisiacal reality, which, being abundant, allows science to conceive of suffering as boredom. In becoming a survivor, science cannot avoid thinking the reality of calamities invented by the priest as the true object of the problem of suffering. Accordingly, the modern revival of science carries within it the genealogy of the survivor. For Nietzsche, this genealogy finds its expression in the modern idea of self-preservation.59
The Legitimacy of the Antichrist
The name of the Antichrist is a name that Nietzsche (and Co.) proclaims to himself: “we immoralists and anti-Christians.”60 This being so, I argue that Nietzsche’s anti-Christian strategy seeks to equip the modern Antichrist with the identities of the origins that his genealogy uncovers. Two things are implied by this claim. First, Nietzsche gives logical priority to the Antichrist over Dionysus. Second, despite the priority attributed to it, the Antichrist is legitimized through the Dionysian being an origin. In favor of the first point, Nietzsche’s own words, in his later self-criticism in The Birth of Tragedy, speak very clearly:
My instinct at that time turned itself against morality with this questionable book, as an instinct speaking on behalf of life, and invented for itself a fundamental counter-doctrine and counter-evaluation of life, a purely artistic, an anti-Christian one. What should it be called? As a philologist and man of words I baptized it, not without a certain liberty—for who knows the true name of the Antichrist?—with the name of a Greek god: I called it the Dionysian.61
This passage points very strongly to the intrinsic relationship connecting the Antichrist with Dionysus. Nietzsche’s Antichrist cannot be read without reference to his Dionysus, and vice versa. Nietzsche refutes the validity of that interpretation of Nietzsche which reads the “anti-” alone, namely, Nietzsche’s anti-Platonism, and dismisses the Dionysian. It also refutes the validity of the counter-interpretation that reads the Dionysian (“differentiated affirmation”) alone and dismisses the Antichrist. Against this background, I take on the challenge of clarifying the significance of the relationship between the Antichrist and Dionysus. Moreover, insofar as Nietzsche used Dionysus in order to have a direct counter to Christ,62 I want to add to Salaquarda’s view and suggest that the Antichrist is prior to Dionysus in view of Nietzsche’s reference to the seeking of his nameless anti-Christian instinct for a name.63 This name is the Dionysian.64
The name is secondary in relation to the instinct. Yet, Nietzsche says that his selection of such a name was not made without a certain liberty: the Dionysian as the name of Nietzsche’s anti-Christian instinct is not absolutely arbitrary. Nietzsche’s account of the ascetic ideal in the Genealogy of Morals underlines the degree of liberty that Nietzsche allows himself in the attribution of this name to his anti-Christian instinct:
It will be immediately obvious that such a self-contradiction as the ascetic appears to represent, “life against life,” is, physiologically considered and not merely physiologically, a simple absurdity. It can only be apparent; it must be a kind of provisional formulation, an interpretation and psychological misunderstanding of something whose real nature could not for a long time be understood or described as it really was—a mere word inserted into an old gap in human knowledge. Let us replace it with a brief formulation of the facts of the matter: the ascetic ideal springs from the protective instinct of a degenerating life which tries by all means to sustain itself and to fight for its existence; it indicates a partial physiological obstruction and exhaustion against which the deepest instincts of life, which have remained intact, continuously struggle with new expedients and devices. The ascetic ideal is such an expedient.65
What really matters, here as before, is the instinct. It is the deep instinct of life that seeks to appear through a name that may be arbitrary. It may be objected that the Antichrist in Nietzsche’s anti-Christian instinct is also nothing more than a name, insofar as anti-Christian is only the adjective of Nietzsche’s deep instinct. This may be true. Yet even if the Antichrist is only a name, it cannot be divorced from the Dionysian; and it is still prior to the Dionysian as a later, freer name. The real significance of this last quotation from Nietzsche’s analysis of the ascetic ideal is that it shows the degree to which Nietzsche was not free to adopt the name Dionysus for his anti-Christian instinct. The Dionysian enjoys the depth through its location at the origins of the Nietzschean history of Christianity.
If the Nietzschean hermeneutics of the Antichrist consists of relying on the Antichrist as the place in which the Christian text negates itself, the remaining task is to use the liberty that this text allows and to decide the name of the Antichrist insofar as this text does not spell out the name of the Antichrist.66 But this liberty is constrained by the need for an origin that can mediate the depth of the anti-Christian instinct. As such, the idea of origin becomes a source of the legitimization of the Antichrist. This thesis appears to be at odds with the claim that, for Nietzsche, genealogy “opposes itself to the search for origins.”67 It is highly persuasive that, in this instance, genealogy does not “confuse itself with a quest for [Christianity’s] … ‘origins.’”68 The origins of Christianity have been shown to be “‘something altogether different’ [from the] … timeless and essential secret”69 of the concept of the good of slave-morality. The accident, to use Foucault’s words, of the historical division of the aristocracy, discussed above in this chapter, was the basis for the emergence of this concept. Furthermore, it is obvious that the Nietzschean genealogy is, from the beginning, destructive in its nature: the historical knowledge it makes “is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.”70
We are reminded that the origins of Christianity’s slave-morality are not merely accidental but also reactive. From here, there remains the possibility that beyond destructive genealogy there exists the Dionysian origin to which slave-morality reacts.71 I have shown so far not only that Nietzsche’s genealogy destroys the metaphysical origins of Christianity, but also that its revelation of the Dionysian origin underneath the history of the fragile modern body—to borrow again from Foucault—is an integral part of genealogy. In fact, Nietzsche was more than aware of the limits of destructive genealogy. Thus, he sought to complete this shortcoming of genealogy by his turn to (Jesus’s) Buddhism.72
If that is the case, the following question arises: Why does the Antichrist need such legitimacy at all? In calling its destroyer Antichrist, Christianity gives to the Antichrist the negative term of its relation to the Antichrist and preserves the positive term for itself. Against this, Nietzsche’s genealogy of slave-morality uncovers this morality as reactive. I have shown that Nietzsche’s achievement lies, above all, in illuminating Dionysian art and paradisiacal science as that against which slave-morality reacts. On this basis, if the Antichrist remains dependent on its definition by Christianity as “anti-,” it throws into oblivion the positive origin that Nietzsche’s genealogy reveals, and thereafter remains bound to Christianity as its mere negative counterpart. Under such circumstances, the Antichrist becomes reactive, insofar as Christianity becomes the only source from which the Antichrist can be read. Alternatively, once the Antichrist assumes the original identities of art and science, the Antichrist dissolves its negativity. Here, Christ is remembered as anti-Dionysian, and therefore the Antichrist becomes the anti-anti-Dionysus: the Antichrist is the return of the unquestionably active Dionysus.
This state of affairs explains the indispensability of the origin of the Antichrist’s identity for its legitimacy as active. And although the New Testament prophesizes that the Antichrist shall come in the future, Nietzsche does not leave the Antichrist dependent on such a prophecy alone. Thus, the end of Nietzsche’s strategy is not about bringing the Dionysian itself; it is rather one about reformulating the coming of the Antichrist as a return. Consequently, it is necessary to dissect the claim that Nietzsche’s legitimization of the modern Antichrist—by making reference to the Dionysian as origin before Christianity—follows the steps of Paul’s legitimization of the Christian faith by making reference to the faith of Abraham as origin before the Jewish law.73
Paul argues for the legitimacy of the Christian faith with reference to the already established legitimacy of the Jewish law. This is the legitimacy of righteousness as that through which the grace of God is attained.74 Since the legitimacy of righteousness through the law is based on heritage, the relationship of both the Jewish law and the Christian faith with such a heritage becomes the site for Paul’s legitimization of the Christian faith (as against that of the Jewish law): “Are they Hebrews? so am I. Are they Israelites? so am I. Are they the seed of Abraham? so am I.”75 The legitimacy of Paul’s faith is the legitimacy of the first seed, that is, of Abraham. This is not the legitimacy of Paul’s voice as a born Jew but rather as a new Hebrew, a new Israelite; for Paul extends the boundaries of grace beyond his blood relationships.76 In this way, he states: “What shall we say then that Abraham our father, as pertaining to the flesh, hath found? For if Abraham were justified by works, he hath whereof to glory; but not before God. For what saith the scripture? Abraham believed God, and it was counted unto him for righteousness.”77
Christianity (New Israel) can be legitimized, as faith, through the original faith of Abraham. Hence, the Christian faith becomes the promise: “For the promise, that he should be the heir of the world, was not to Abraham, or to his seed, through the law, but through the righteousness of faith.”78 In sum, the idea of Abraham as origin grounds the legitimacy of Paul’s Christian faith. As such, the Christian faith is not the negative term of the Jewish law: “Seeing it is one God, which shall justify the circumcision by faith, and uncircumcision through faith. Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid: yea, we establish the law.”79
The authority of the faith of Abraham is dependent upon its historical appearance before the law: “Know ye therefore that they which are of faith, the same are the children of Abraham. And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the heathen through faith, preached before the gospel unto Abraham, saying, In thee shall all nations be blessed.”80 Yet for Paul, the fact that the Jewish law precedes the Christian faith historically does not mean that the Jewish law does not make the law void and establish the faith of Abraham. Instead, “the covenant, that was confirmed before of God in Christ, the law, which was four hundred and thirty years after, cannot disannul, that it should make the promise of none effect.”81 The Jewish law is the temporal negation of Abraham’s faith: “before faith came, we were kept under the law, shut up unto the faith which should afterwards be revealed.”82
The Dionysian legitimization of Nietzsche’s Antichrist follows the same logic of legitimization as Paul’s. If the Christian faith appeals to the origin as its legitimizing source, the relationship of Christ and the Antichrist with the idea of the origin becomes the site for Nietzsche’s legitimization of the Antichrist (as against that of Christ). If slave-morality has been discovered to be reactive to the Dionysian, the site of the origin does not belong to the faith of Abraham-Paul anymore. It belongs rather to the Dionysian, and to the Antichrist as Dionysian.