Belief and Atheism, Skepticism and Suffering
How does Nietzsche’s history of Christianity continue its development toward early Christianity? Or, put otherwise: Why does the history of pessimism not remain Platonic and priestly Jewish? What (dead) ends did the Greek and the Jewish paths result in? And how did such ends come to constitute the conditions that make the emergence of the Christian faith possible? In Nietzsche’s words, the relevant question is one about how such faith becomes demanded:
The faith demanded … by original Christianity, in the midst of a skeptical and southern free-spirited world that looked back on, and still contained, a centuries-long fight between philosophical schools, besides the education for tolerance given by the imperium Romanum—this faith. … resembles in a gruesome manner a continual suicide of reason—a tough, long-lived, wormlike reason that cannot be killed all at once and with a single stroke.1
Nietzsche describes the demand for the Christian faith as having two aspects. As seen from the perspective of the philosophically skeptical world into which the Christian faith was born, this world demands faith as such as a way out from skepticism as such. And as seen from the perspective of the Christian faith itself, this faith is demanded (or conditioned) as Christian: as that specific “paradoxical formula “god on the cross.”2 I advance here the main claim that the demand for the Christian faith results from the demand for faith as such. The above quotation from Beyond Good and Evil assumes man as human, that is, as the unsynthetic unity of the noble and the slave, which was born in the genealogy of the priest. The Christian faith is born in the moment in which faith is demanded by man as both noble and slave, insofar as Nietzsche uses a reflective language to describe this demand: he speaks of suicide and sacrifice (“a … suicide, … a sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of the spirit; at the same time, enslavement and self-mockery, self-mutilation”) resulting from the (inner) conflict between the apparent (“the noble taste that seems to deny suffering”) and the deep (“the Orient, deep Orient, … Oriental slave”).3
Faith as such is demanded as a result of the crisis that man’s world of skepticism has reached. Yet—and against this demand—it is only the demand of the slave to spring from the deep to the apparent in the form of the specific Christian faith that represents itself as realizable. Under these conditions, the constitution of the Christian faith consists in making suffering the condition of skepticism. On the one hand, if the crisis of noble skepticism demands faith as such, it demands faiths and not the one specific Christian faith. On the other hand, in order to formulate its faith in apparent language, the Christian faith cannot depend on the negative general characterization that the noble skepticism’s demand for faith as such gives it. To clarify this point, I want to recall Nietzsche’s genealogy of slave-morality within noble-morality: The transformation of the concept of the bad in noble-morality into the concept of the good in slave-morality demands from the slave that he abandon the negative standpoint of the bad and assume the positive position of the priest’s narrating good self. In a similar manner, the constitution of the Christian faith demands from the suffering slave that he abandon the negative standpoint of the object of skepticism in general and assume suffering as the positive term within the dialectics of skepticism and suffering.
In order to make suffering the condition of skepticism, the Christian faith should make sense of the claim that the noble and tolerant Greco-Roman skepticism is as skeptical about suffering as it is skeptical in general. As Nietzsche stresses above, noble skepticism is not given as skepticism about suffering. Nietzsche describes the noble position as one that is skeptical concerning suffering and as one that “seems to deny suffering.”4 The noble position is skeptical and only skeptical: its skepticism has no object, and thereby neither affirms suffering nor denies suffering; but rather, as skepticism in general, it seems to deny the slave’s “concealed suffering.”5
To become that faith which is demanded, the Christian faith holds as true the following proposition: skepticism as such is skepticism about suffering. As soon as this proposition is held to be true, and since skepticism does not affirm suffering, skepticism becomes the denial of suffering. In continuity with this, noble skepticism is divorced from tolerance: noble skepticism becomes the fixed intolerance in relation to suffering, in the same manner in which the concept of the good in noble-morality became fixed in the concept of evil in slave-morality. And what does it mean to be intolerant of suffering in terms of the (new) language of the Christian faith ? If skepticism is skepticism about suffering, and if the Christian faith is the faith of suffering (or the faith in the formula “god on the cross”),6 then skepticism is also skepticism about the faith of suffering. Skepticism is atheism: it is not the “noble and frivolous tolerance, … ‘catholicity’ of faith, … freedom from faith, that half-stoical and smiling unconcern with the seriousness of faith.”7
The picture resulting from this state of affairs is one in which the Christian faith labels not only noble skepticism as atheism but also any faith different from it. It does so, moreover, against the background of the Christian faith’s proof of itself as that which is demanded as Christian and not as faith per se. I mentioned that when the Christian faith comes to legitimize itself in apparent language, it has the particular formula “god on the cross” as its grounding moment. This way, the Christian faith excludes faiths and faith as such from the possibility of being demanded by the crisis of skepticism. In turn, as soon as the Christian faith becomes legitimated (or becomes demanded), it proves skepticism to be illegitimate together with skepticism’s possibilities, its possible demand of a plurality of faiths and of faith as such.
Nietzsche’s characterization of the slave’s Christian faith as absolute, as “unconditional, … tyrannical,”8 results in the identity of faith with the Christian faith: the truth is faith and truth is the Christian faith. The proposition “God exists” is true insofar as the formula “god on the cross” is true, and vice versa. This identity between belief in the existence of God and belief in the formula “god on the cross” results from the fact that the Christian faith is the belief in this formula. And since this formula demands belief in the existence of God, belief in the existence of God, if taken alone, and if taken as part of any belief other than the Christian faith, is not true faith: the true belief in the existence of God should imply the belief in the formula “god on the cross.”
This interpretation of Nietzsche’s view of the advent of Christianity against the background of skepticism may be extended by examining its implications for Christianity’s conception of Judaism. It can now be added that the Christian faith deduces the following: if the commandment “love your neighbor as yourself” is fulfilled, then all the laws of the Torah are fulfilled.9 I have said that the (Christian) claim to truth becomes identical to the Christian faith. Under these conditions, Christianity cannot accept the Jewish law. But according to its claim to be continuous with Judaism, Christianity should provide its own formulation of the Jewish law. Thus, Christianity can fulfill both the condition of the absolute truth of its faith and the condition of the truth of the Jewish law only by deploying love as what I want to call a minimal form of the Jewish law.10 From the viewpoint of Christianity, Judaism remains one more faith other than the Christian one. Yet practically, Judaism cannot be said to be another faith. Christianity does not recognize anything that can be called another faith: for Christianity, faith as such and the Christian faith are one and the same. Accordingly, Judaism is Christianity’s historical other, which belongs to the order of Christianity’s absolute other, or what is not Christian, or skeptical atheism: “As concerning the gospel, they [the Jews] are enemies for your sakes.”11
However, I made the claim that Christianity considers skeptical atheism as evil causing suffering: the Christian faith “presupposes that the subjection of the spirit hurts indescribably; that the whole past and the habits of such a spirit resist the absurdissimum which ‘faith’ represents to it.”12 If that is the case, how does Christianity construct Judaism as a producer of suffering? Paul claims that sin exits with the Torah, and sin is the condition of suffering (death).13 The Torah is the cause of suffering. But, if the Torah, as Torah, is the cause of suffering, then the Jewish practice of the law—as a production of suffering—may be said to maintain its specific otherness to Christianity. Such a conclusion would be true if Christianity holds the proposition that, with the absence of the law, sin and thereby suffering do not exist as a true proposition. For this proposition delimits the production of suffering to the practice of the Jewish law and therefore speaks of Judaism as being the source of suffering. But for Christianity this proposition is not true: Paul claims that sin, and therefore suffering, existed (but did not appear as sin for God) before the Jewish law.14 Thus, the Jewish practice of the law should not be called Judaism, but skepticism of the truth of the Christian faith, and thereby the other atheist producer of suffering.
In the terms of slave-morality, Nietzsche conceives of the birth of the Christian faith from the crisis of noble skepticism as an inversion of the openness and plurality of the one apparent language of the good noble into the closeness and singularity of the language of the good Christian slave. This is the inversion in which the presence of the many bad unknown others of the noble is substituted by the presence of the one evil known other of Christianity. Thus, in the terms of this continuum between Christianity and Priestly Judaism, Christianity becomes the antithesis of paradisiacal science in the same manner as Priestly Judaism. The fact remains that for Nietzsche, Platonism, Priestly Judaism, and Christianity represent one party: the party of slave morality. Nietzsche’s attack on this party takes all possible forms. One of these forms is that in which Nietzsche argues against the Jewish Plato and thereby does not keep the Greek and Jewish paths to Christianity purely separated: “It has cost us dear that this Athenian [Plato] went to school with the Egyptians (—or with the Jews in Egypt?).”15
By saying this, I do not intend to fuse the Greek and the Jewish paths to Christianity. On the contrary, the division between them remains highly important for the examination of the analogies and differences between them. In this course of inquiry, and within the framework of the Greek path to Christianity, Christianity appears to be a return of Platonic dogmatism through the crisis of skepticism. How is that? I have made note of Nietzsche’s claim that “skepticism concerning suffering, at bottom merely a pose of aristocratic morality, … seems to deny … [the slave’s] abundant concealed suffering.”16 I want to add here that Nietzsche has the Pyrrhonian skeptics in mind here. As a cure from the disease of dogmatism, the Pyrrhonian suspends any judgment that goes beyond what appears and is led thereby to the ataraxia. If that is correct, the Pyrrhonian skeptic knows suffering only as it appears: the Pyrrhonian does not know concealed suffering and in turn appears to deny suffering.17
Pyrrhonian skepticism does not meet, and cannot meet, the Christian faith. Pyrrhonian skepticism does not know the slave’s hidden suffering upon which the Christian faith is erected. Also, Pyrrhonian skepticism does not know the suffering that may result from the Christian faith as dogma, for the Christian faith proves itself to be salvation from suffering, that is, it brings happiness to the believer:
Psychological confusions:—the demand for belief—confused with the “will to truth” (e.g., in the case of Carlyle). But in the same way, the demand for unbelief has been confused with the “will to truth” (—the need to get free from belief, for a hundred reasons: to be in the right against some “believers”). What inspires the skeptic? Hatred of the dogmatist—or a need for rest, a weariness, as in the case of Pyrrho.18
If indeed the road of Pyrrhonian skepticism does not cross that of the Christian faith, in what terms does Pyrrhonian skepticism demand the Christian faith? For the Christian faith, Pyrrhonian skepticism, which deals with the suffering of the dogmatic and ignores hidden suffering, does not embrace the problem of suffering in its totality. Thus, the Christian faith is demanded in view of the Pyrrhonian skeptic’s indifference, or rather in view of skeptical passivity translated into practical denial toward hidden suffering.
At this point, the Nietzschean history of Christianity becomes more interesting. So far, the parallelism between the Greek and the Jewish paths to Christianity includes four stages: Greek religion and Early Judaism, Socrates and Jesus,19 Platonism and Priestly Judaism, and Dionysian art and paradisiacal science. And here, the case of skepticism adds one more stage to these four stages. This is the stage of Buddhism represented by the Buddhist Pyrrho on the side of the Greek path to Christianity and the Buddhism of Jesus on the side of the Jewish path to Christianity.
Nietzsche writes:
Sagacious weariness: Pyrrho. To live a lowly life. … No pride … to honor and believe what all believe. On guard against science and spirit. … A Buddhist for Greece, grown up amid the tumult of the schools; a latecomer; weary; the protest of weariness against the zeal of the dialecticians; the unbelief of weariness in the importance of all things … no contest; no will to distinction; to deny the Greek instincts. … His life was a protest against the great doctrine of identity (happiness = virtue = knowledge). … wisdom does not make “wise”—The right way of life does not want happiness, it turns away from happiness.20
For Nietzsche, the decadence of Greek philosophy, which starts with Socrates, reaches its high point in the Buddhism of Pyrrho.21 Against this background, Buddhism becomes the high point of three cultures: Greek Antiquity (Pyrrho), Judaism (Jesus), and Modernity (Schopenhauer). This contextualization throws a new light on Nietzsche’s conception of skepticism. The question whether Nietzsche was a skeptic or not yields contradictory answers. On the one hand, Nietzsche becomes a skeptic in view of his vindication of the intellectual honesty of the skeptical philosophers.22 On the other hand, he becomes dogmatic in view of his mere denial of Christianity.23 Nietzsche’s relations with skepticism are very complex: Nietzsche’s approval of skepticism would increase along with the strength of his polemic against Christianity and traditional philosophy. Still, there is something intriguingly paradoxical about the fact that he becomes more approving of skepticism even while he himself becomes in various ways less skeptical.24
However, one cannot approach Nietzsche’s conception of skepticism apart from his conception of Buddhism. In view of the inseparable connection between skepticism and Buddhism, Nietzsche’s approval of skepticism should be understood in view of his approval of nihilistic Buddhism. From this perspective, Buddhism (and thereafter skepticism) is not approved for itself; rather, it is approved as a high point. Buddhism is approved as that necessary stage in which all judgments are denied and affirmed at one and the same time, and through which Nietzsche sought the overcoming of the history of Christianity.
With this in mind, I want to put forth the following three claims: First, Nietzsche reads into Buddhism that kind of nihilism which characterizes the state of the end of culture—Pyrrho is the end of Greek Antiquity, Jesus is the end of Judaism, and Schopenhauer is the end of Modernity.25 Second, this kind of Buddhism forms the basis for the emergence of a new beginning that constitutes the overcoming of this end in terms of a demand—Christianity is demanded beyond Greek Buddhist skepticism and beyond Jesus’s Jewish Buddhism, and Nietzsche’s modern Antichrist is demanded beyond modern European Buddhism. Third, Christianity’s, or more precisely Paul’s, overcoming of the dead ends that the Greek and the Jewish paths have reached becomes Nietzsche’s model for the overcoming of modern Buddhism.26 Before I turn to a defense of this last claim, Priestly Judaism’s crisis of sin and punishment should first be discussed, since this crisis is the ground for the emergence of Jesus the Buddhist, who is in fact the turning point that makes the realization of the Christian faith possible.
Sin and Punishment
I have already pointed to the fact that Jewish slave-morality results in what has been termed the independent economy of sin and punishment. How, then, does this economy become the crisis of Christianity’s Jewish world demanding the advent of the Christian faith? Recall that the priest, as both aristocrat and slave, becomes the human joining these two agencies in one body. The first is the apparent, discoursing, good suffering slave, and the second is the deep, silenced evil of the original sin. The internalization of the otherness of the aristocrat in the depth of the human means its concealment from the apparent world. And if the aristocrat is concealed, the reactive character of slave-morality is also concealed. According to this concealment, man forgets the natural aristocratic possibility of action, and in turn the reactive form of action becomes man’s only possibility for action.
In view of this end, here arises Nietzsche’s criticism of subjectivity, as brought to the world along with slave-morality, which starts with the subjectivities of God and his slave as defined in terms of sin and punishment:
Yaweh the God of “justice”—no longer at one with Israel, an expression of national self-confidence: now only a God bound by conditions. The new conception of him becomes an instrument in the hands of priestly agitators who henceforth interpret all good fortune as a reward, all misfortune as punishment for disobedience of God, for “sin”: that most mendacious mode of interpretation of the supposed “moral world-order” through which the natural concepts “cause” and “effect” is once and for all stood on its head. When one has banished natural causality from the world by means of reward and punishment, one then requires an anti-natural causality. … A God who demands—in place of a God who helps.27
At this stage, the later Jewish concept of God is not that of Early Judaism anymore, it is not the earlier, natural, one local God of a religion of thankfulness reflecting the Jewish affirmation of life: “The old God could no longer do what he formally could. One should have let him go. What happened? One altered the conception of him: at this price one retained him.”28 The later God of justice is instead the incapable, denatured, conditional, rewarding, punishing, antinatural, demanding, and abstract God serving as “an instrument in the hands of priestly agitators.”29 According to this later concept of God, Judaism loses its earlier reflective-expressive purpose, it loses the symmetry between man and God according to which man is not God only insofar as man thanks himself through thankfulness to God. Such a symmetrical relationship is substituted by a relationship of cause and effect. On the basis of this new relationship, God and man come to constitute the totality of the world from which the active (aristocrat) has been dismissed. After dismissing the (outer) subjectivity of the aristocrat, the problem of the independence of slave-morality becomes one of finding the cause of suffering, that is, the subjectivity behind suffering. If such subjectivity cannot be attributed to the noble anymore, it should be attributed to the slave. For, in view of slave-morality, the good slave is the legitimate narrator, or, to use Nietzsche’s words, the slave is the legitimate interpreter of the phenomenon of her suffering. However, seeking the cause of suffering means seeking the subject who does evil, when the suffering slave is the object of evil.
Some correction of the concept of God may provide a way out of this contradiction. How is that? It has been said that for slave-morality, man is both slave and aristocrat, both good and evil. As evil, man is the cause (of the effect) of suffering as good. If that is correct, to be both the subject and the object of suffering is to cause suffering in one sense (that is, to be a sinner to God) and to be the object of suffering in another sense, that is, to be punished by God in order to go back to being good. Under these terms, slave-morality retains its claim concerning the truth of the opposition of good and evil as it distributes the active—or suffering-productive—subjectivity of the aristocrat in the completion of the activity of the sinner man and that of the punishing God of justice. Slave-morality attains the independence it has sought: the aristocrat is concealed, and nonetheless the result of her activity (suffering being the condition of the slave’s being good) still exists:
[When the] Jews … faced … the question of being or not being, they preferred … being at any price: the price they had to pay was the radical falsification of all nature, all naturalness, all reality. … They made of themselves an antithesis to natural conditions—they inverted religion, religious worship, morality, history, psychology one after the other in an irreparable way into the contradiction to their natural values.30
Here Nietzsche’s criticism of the metaphysical choice, of the Platonic “egyptianism. … and monotono-theism”31—appears again. To be, says Nietzsche, is to decide to endure and last beyond the moment: not to “let [God] go”32 when one should. This criticism of the decadent concept of the metaphysically existing God is highly significant for Nietzsche’s understanding of the continuum between Christianity and Priestly Judaism.33 This Jewish phenomenon in relation to which Christianity is but “a copy … in unutterably vaster proportions”34 is in continuity and harmony with the above analysis of Christianity’s turn to Platonic philosophy so as to have the proof of the existence of God as sufficient for the proof of the Christian faith.
Also, from this perspective, slave-morality’s formulation of the history of the problem of suffering in terms of teleological history reappears: the history of God and man, in which man acts as sinner and the God of justice reacts as punisher. If that is the case, God’s justice appears to mean here the teleology of sin and punishment whose end is God’s turning the wheel back to the moment before man’s sin, to the moment of creation: the return to the zero-sum in man’s account of sins.
Slave-morality’s economy of sin and punishment results in the twofold problem of its concepts of God and man. As to its concept of God, the late Jewish God is both metaphysical and historical. As I have demonstrated, the metaphysical character of God results from preserving him in the moment in which he should have been let go. From this it follows that the good God is not historical, or is not active anymore. Yet, this same God becomes active as he punishes man for being sinful. Accordingly, God is brought back to history through his teleological activity as reactive (to evil). Hence, the identity of the metaphysical God and the historical God is the identity of the God of creation and the God of salvation. For one may deduce that punishment is an act of salvation insofar as punishment returns the sinner, and thereby also God, to the primordial state of creation. This means that God can conciliate his metaphysical character, that is, preserve his existence and historical character (his activity in the world of man), only within a teleological history of salvation. Under these conditions, it is in the context of this totality alone that God can remain a good God, that is, be explained as good. Once one action of God is stripped away from his teleological history of salvation, this God soon becomes evil, or at best paradoxical. The problem is that slave-morality’s concept of an active God remains dependent on evil. For the God of justice does not act the good but reacts to the noble good. And if God does not react, does not punish, does not have his action framed within the teleology of sin and punishment, then he is arbitrary, paradoxical, or even evil.
The economy of sin and punishment results in that concept of man which reflects, as it completes, this same concept of God. Here one comes to take note of the fact that it is not only man’s activity in the world which cannot be but sinful. Sin is man’s one and only means to communicate with God. I posit that this state of things, which can be summed up as the negative character of slave-morality’s concept of the good, defines the crisis of the economy of sin and punishment and thereby demands the Christian faith. And it is not Nietzsche who discovers this crisis: Nietzsche’s criticism translates Paul’s exposition and legitimization of what I want to call, using Paul’s language, the human argument against the Jewish law:
But if our unrighteousness commend the righteousness of God, what shall we say? Is God unrighteous who taketh vengeance? (I speak as a man) God forbid: for then how shall God judge the world? For if the truth of God hath more abounded through my lie unto his glory; why yet am I also judged as a sinner? And not rather, (as we be slanderously reported, and as some affirm that we say,) Let us do evil, that good may come? whose damnation is just.35
This argument becomes the basis for Paul’s criticism of the negative character of the Jewish law, that is, the Jewish law’s making sin knowable (positive) and thereby keeping the good latent (negative): “What shall we say then? Is the law sin? God forbid. Nay, I had not known sin, but by the law: for I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet. But sin, taking occasion by the commandment, wrought in me all manner of concupiscence. For without the law sin was dead.”36
It is clear then that Paul’s problem is one to do with reality, or, put in Nietzsche’s words, with the noble doing, which is defined from the point of Paul’s slave-morality as sin and evil. Yet, Paul’s limiting of his argument against the Jewish law shows that one (such as Nietzsche) may read in the Pauline text the fact that Paul assumes that slave-morality (Torah) had already concealed noble-morality. Paul’s remaining problem is the after-appearance of noble reality, that is, sin, through the Jewish law in view of the reality-character of the Jewish law. This reality-character of the Jewish law formulates into language its concept of the good. However, for being negative, this concept of the good remains dependent on the positive character of evil, and therefore can only use the words “do not.”
From this analysis, which shows the hermeneutical tightness of the Nietzschean criticism of Paul’s text, it is not difficult to guess how the crisis of the Jewish world of sin and punishment demands the Christian faith as the positive formulation of the Jewish law. Paul finds such positive imperative in love: “Love your neighbor as yourself” is the only positive formulation of the Jewish law. Yet, for Paul, as for Nietzsche, this reformation does not imply a cut with the concept of the suffering good of slave-morality. To be positively good is to love. And to love (the other) is to sacrifice (oneself for the other). Hence, and insofar as sacrifice implies suffering, the good man suffers in the act of sacrificing-love, and not anymore in the act of sinning. In addition, the good, loving God does not punish man: he rather punishes himself, or he sacrifices himself for man. Under these conditions, sin is not an act but a lack: the lack of love. In sum, the loving God, as the loving man, suffers in sacrifice, and does not love one who does not love, or who does not “not covet.”
The resulting transformation of Christian love into the positive formulation of the suffering good implies that the good should appear in historical reality in the same manner in which the Jewish law (as well as sin) appears in this reality. I want to next direct attention to Nietzsche’s Christology, which takes Jesus to be the possibility of the advent of Christ, who is the realization in the incarnation of the good suffering-sacrificing Christian God.
Jesus: The Only Christian
If Pyrrho is a Buddhist on Greek soil, Jesus is another Buddhist on Jewish soil: “a soil very little like that of India.”37 In the Greek world, as in the Jewish world, Buddhism seems to emerge as distinct from its terrain. If so, and if Christianity is demanded by the passivity of Greek skepticism and the negativity of the Jewish economy of sin and punishment, then Buddhism should constitute the basis for the possibility of the realization of this demand. In this light, and in view of the fact that Nietzsche did not elaborate on Pyrrho’s Buddhism much beyond his unpublished notes from 1888, the case of Jesus’s Buddhism shall become the basis for my continued examination of Nietzsche’s narration of the emergence of Christianity.
To follow Nietzsche’s same first step: in The Antichrist, in approaching the figure of Jesus, the target appears to be a criticism of Strauss’s idea of the historical Jesus:
The “holy people” … produced for its instinct a formula which was logical to the point of self-negation. … The little rebellious movement which is baptized with the name of Jesus of Nazareth is … the priestly instinct which can no longer endure the priest as a reality. … This holy anarchist … was a political criminal. … This is what brought him to the Cross. … He died for his guilt.38
I want to call the picture presented here Nietzsche’s historical Jesus. I submit that Nietzsche refers with this picture to the possibility of the historical Jesus as one defined in terms of Strauss’s project The Life of Jesus: the project of the modern science of history that attempted to construct the truth of Jesus from the viewpoint of the historical facts.39 In locating himself within this context, Nietzsche is criticizing the idea of self-sufficiency of Strauss’s historical science. More precisely, Nietzsche is here saying the following: If the question is one of historical facts about Jesus, these facts are the teleological truth of history. Thus, the historical Jesus is the teleological meaning of the history of Judaism. This meaning is the end in which all Judaism’s logical contradictions are resolved. As teleological, this end is the only possible construction of the history of Judaism. And thus, as historically teleological, Jesus is possible in one, and only one, way: whether “understood or misunderstood,”40 the historical Jesus is the conclusion of the Jewish formula that was logical to the point of self-negation.
If this is indeed so, assuming the unity of the historical facts and their interpretation leads Nietzsche to understand the historical Jesus as a logically deducible political revolt against the Jewish church. Nietzsche’s historical Jesus, who represents the purification of Judaism from its remaining contacts with reality, represents the (only possible) synthesis of the unity of the aristocrat and the slave in the priest, and therefore the end of the (logically contradictory) living-together of the aristocratic instinct with that of the slave. Yet this living-together became an internal conflict between the priestly ruling class and the “Chandala within Judaism.”41 The center of the opposition between the slave and (what remained of) the aristocrat is moved to the interior of Judaism. This is the opposition between the “Jewish [virtual] reality” (the “retained … priestly values, priestly words”) and the “even more abstract form of existence … [and] even more unreal vision” (the historical Jesus’s Christianity as the Jewish self-negation).42 Yet:
It is quite another question whether he was conscious of any such antithesis—whether he was not merely felt to be this antithesis. And here … I touch on the problem of the psychology of the Redeemer.—I confess there are few books which present me with so many difficulties as the Gospels do. These difficulties are quite other than those which the learned curiosity of the German mind celebrated one of its most unforgettable triumphs in pointing to. The time is far distant when I too … savoured the work of the incomparable Strauss.43
According to this terminology, the problem of Nietzsche’s historical Jesus is one without difficulties as it is quite other than the problem of the psychology of the Redeemer . But before explaining how his interest in Jesus’s psychological type is possible and significant, Nietzsche rejects Strauss’s unserious reading of tradition, his applying to the “ambiguous … [stories of saints] scientific methods when no other records are extant.”44 In view of this criticism, Nietzsche’s point is the following: if what is expected from the point of view of the Hegelian synthesis is the historical Jesus being the objective realization of the Hegelian idea, as born from the logical contradictions of the Jewish thesis, then one should turn to Judaism, for Judaism is that external source which the Hegelian historian may turn to instead of remaining entangled within the ambiguous tradition.
In this light, Nietzsche claims that the scientific method limiting itself to the biographies of Jesus as narrated in the New Testament corresponds to Jesus’s psychological problem, to the “psychological type of the redeemer. For it could be contained in the Gospels in spite of the Gospels, however much mutilated and overloaded with foreign traits. … Not the truth about what he did, what he said, how he really died: but the question whether his type is still conceivable at all, whether it has been ‘handed down’ by tradition.”45
In view of these words, the following claim can be made: the question that lies behind Nietzsche’s concern with the psychological type of Jesus is one about the way in which it would be possible to keep the validity of the Nietzschean picture of the historical Jesus and assure together with that the possibility of the Christian construction of the figure of Christ over that of Jesus by making reference to the New Testament’s Gospels alone. This claim is based on the understanding of Nietzsche’s turn to his psychological method after the failure of history to “read out”46 Jesus from the Gospels. What is being stressed here is that what remains important for Nietzsche is to have the Gospels—as distinct from any other source—proving the actual existence of Jesus through the Christian tradition, proving that his type is still readable out from the Christian tradition that handed him down.
The importance of this proof lies in the possibility of explaining the resurrection of Judaism in the figure of Paul’s Christ. Nietzsche’s historical Jesus is the Jewish end of Judaism in the Christian-ness of the anarchist Jesus. Thus, the history of Judaism, as one ending in the historical Jesus, does not explain the possibility of the reemergence of the Jewish church in the Christian church. Nietzsche seeks after the non-Jewish source that can make such reemergence possible. Indeed, this source is non-Jewish and non-Christian: it is Nietzsche’s Jesus being the only Christian, for “in reality there has been only one Christian, and he died on the Cross.”47 This is Jesus according to his nonhistorical psychological type. Briefly stated, this psychology is that of an “idiot. … [of an] instinctive hatred of every reality”:48
Instinctive hatred of reality: consequence of an extreme capacity for suffering and irritation which no longer wants to be “touched” at all because it feels every contact too deeply. Instinctive exclusion of all aversion, all enmity, all feeling for limitation and distancing: consequence of an extreme capacity for suffering and irritation which already feels all resisting, all need for resistance, as unbearable displeasure (that is to say as harmful, as deprecated by the instinct of self-preservation) and knows blessedness (pleasure) only in no longer resisting anyone or anything, neither to evil nor to the evil-doer—love as the sole, as the last possibility of life. … These are the two physiological realities upon which, out of which the doctrine of redemption has grown.49
Here it appears that Jesus’s kind of Christian love is twofold: to be loved (as resulting from the instinctive hatred of reality) and to love (as resulting from the instinctive exclusion of all aversion). Nietzsche’s Jesus represents love resulting from the rejection of being either the object of suffering or the subject of suffering. Jesus’s kind of love cancels out suffering: it makes suffering meaningless for life and for redemption beyond this-life. In turn, the life and the death of Jesus, that is, the practice of Jesus’s love in his life, as in his death, transcend Nietzsche’s history of Christianity. Jesus does not have a place in Nietzsche’s history of Christianity as the history of the value of life from the viewpoint of suffering. For Jesus’s love does not admit suffering, it does not let suffering appear before its eyes. This love does not have even that ground—it does not have the phenomenon of suffering—upon which pessimism is articulated into a problem. The absence of suffering implies the lack of the question requesting an affirming or a negating answer to the question of the value of life:
Jesus … cares nothing for what is fixed. … The concept, the experience “life” in the only form he knows it is opposed to any kind of word, formula, law, faith, dogma. He speaks only of the inmost thing. … Everything else, the whole of reality, the whole of nature, language itself, possesses for him merely the value of a sign, a metaphor. … Such a symbolist par excellence stands outside of all religion, all conceptions of divine worship, all history, all natural science, all experience of the world, all acquirements, all politics, all psychology, all books, all art. … Dialectics are likewise lacking, the idea is lacking that a faith, a “truth” could be proved by reasons (—his proofs are inner “lights,” inner feelings of pleasure and self-affirmations, nothing but “proofs by potency”—).50
What has been exhibited here is the portrait of Nietzsche’s Buddhist Jesus: Nietzsche’s politically and historically disinterested idiot. Nietzsche understands “idiot” essentially in terms of its Greek meaning, that is, as the designation for an apolitical man, a private citizen refraining from participation in the business of the state.51 I declared that my purpose behind invoking this portrait of Jesus is to show that Nietzsche’s Jesus exemplifies the Nietzschean idea of Buddhist passivity, which becomes the grounds for the possibility of the rebirth of Priestly Judaism in the form of the new Jewish church. As such, Jesus does not belong to the Nietzschean history of pessimism in the same sense as Nietzsche’s Jesus does not belong either to the party that affirms this-life or to the party that negates it. Yet, this does not mean that this idiot is not precisely what is needed for the resurrection of Jesus as Christ. On the contrary, it is this ahistorical character that makes Nietzsche’s Jesus needed and demanded for the resurrection of the Jewish church in the Christian church, as I shall demonstrate.
Christ: The Anti-Dionysus
Nietzsche’s articulation of the historical Jesus makes room for his psychological construction of the psychological type of Jesus. It is Jesus’s psychological type, rather than the so-called historical Jesus, that becomes the basis for the construction of Christ. Nietzsche’s Christology is established through the possibility of the unity of Jesus-Christ in the unity of Jesus’s psychological type and Christ. On these grounds, I claim that this unity is found in Nietzsche’s inversion of Christian Christology. Nietzsche shows that Jesus the man—that is, Jesus so far known to the Christian as the historical Jesus—is in fact what the Christian considers as the divine Christ. As Nietzsche describes him above, Jesus the man of flesh is ahistorical: he does not sin, punish, or reward,52 but loves in an otherworldly actuality. This man does not know of the history of the Jewish church or that of the Christian church: “As a psychological possibility, however, this [Jesus’s] way of life is utterly unhistoric.”53 If that is the case, the mere idea of Jesus’s ahistorical character prevents any historical interpretation from preserving him in his original form: “such a type could not remain pure, whole, free from accretions.”54 Thereafter, “the history of Christianity—and that from the very death on the Cross—is the history of progressively cruder misunderstanding of an original symbolism.”55 This misunderstanding gives birth to what I want to term the Jewish Christ:
Only the Cross … it was only this terrible paradox which brought the disciples face to face with the real enigma. … Here everything had to be necessary, meaningful, reasonable, reasonable in the highest degree. … “Who killed him? who was his natural enemy?” … Answer: ruling Judaism, its upper class. From this moment one felt oneself in mutiny against the social order. … Up till then … this warlike trait … was lacking in his image. … Precisely the most unevangelic of feelings, revengefulness, again came uppermost. … An historic moment appeared in view: the “kingdom of God” is coming to sit in judgment on its enemies.56
Here, Nietzsche explains how the Jewish Christ—that is, the historical Jesus—is made possible. He is the “holy anarchist”57 whose Christian-ness is Judaism’s self-negation. Besides that, however, the misunderstanding of Jesus gives birth to what I call the Christian Christ: “And now an absurd problem came up: ‘How could God have permitted this?’ … Answer: God gave his Son for the forgiveness of sins, as a sacrifice. … From now on there is introduced into the type of the redeemer step by step: the doctrine of a Judgment and a Second Coming, the doctrine of his death as a sacrificial death, the doctrine of the Resurrection.”58
Nietzsche faces a difficulty in explaining the possibility of the reemergence of the Jewish church in the form of the Christian, insofar as Nietzsche’s historical Jesus becomes the mere Jewish Christ (Christianity as the mere self-destruction of Judaism). Nietzsche overcomes this difficulty by way of creating continuity between the Jewish Christ and the Christian Christ as these two come to constitute Christ: the complete portrait of the Nietzschean political-historical Christ in the frame of Nietzsche’s inversion of Christology. This takes place on the basis of Nietzsche’s transformation of Jesus the man—traditionally known as the historical Jesus—into a divine man, into an otherworldly, apolitical, and ahistorical man. And so, what is traditionally known to the Christian as Christ—or the divine son of God who resurrects and is to return—becomes in the hands of Nietzsche historical: Nietzsche’s politically and historically interested Christ. This Jewish-Christian Christ is the redemption of Priestly Judaism from the crisis of its economy of sin and punishment through the death of the Jewish Christ and his resurrection as the Christian Christ:
Wherefore, my brethren, ye also are become dead to the law by the body of Christ; that ye should be married to another, even to him who is raised from the dead, that we should bring forth fruit unto God. For when we were in the flesh, the motions of sins, which were by the law, did work in our members to bring forth fruit unto death. But now we are delivered from the law, that being dead wherein we were held; that we should serve in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter.59
What Paul holds to be the body of Christ is what Nietzsche holds to be love in Jesus’s glad tidings. And what Paul holds to be spirit is what Nietzsche holds to be the body of the new Jewish Church. If that is correct, when seen from the perspective of Paul, Nietzsche should further explain how Paul’s interpretation was made possible, and how his own interpretation could not then be made possible. The question facing Nietzsche becomes one about what dictated the interpretation of Jesus as a misunderstanding, that is, about the fact that Jesus is not a mere sign: Jesus is understandable and yet was misunderstood.
Nietzsche’s argument shows that the political-historical Christ would have been impossible without Nietzsche’s Buddhist Jesus as a misunderstood original symbolism. This is that symbolism taken to be mere signs around which the questions “Who killed him?”60 and “How could God have permitted this?”61 were articulated. Each of these two questions leads to one side of Nietzsche’s Christ: the first question leads to the Jewish Christ and the second to the Christian Christ. When taken together, both questions lead (back) to Jewish history. In light of these quotations, the path of Nietzsche’s Jesus back to history appears to have been dictated by his paradoxical death on the cross: “For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom: But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness.”62 The early Christian community did not understand this death as being continuous with Jesus’s way of life, that “this ‘bringer of glad tidings’ died as he lived.”63 This Nietzschean claim concerning the unity of the life and the death of Jesus is reflected in his characterization of Jesus’s language as a symbolic one: “If I understand anything about this great symbolist, it is that he took for realities, for ‘truths,’ only inner realities, … he understood the rest, everything pertaining to nature, time, space, history, only as signs, as occasion for metaphor.”64
Then, the question is: which is sign and which is reality, the world outside or the inner world? For the early Christian community, reality is outer-reality. Thereby, the death of Jesus turned to be a sign in outer reality: a revelation of God in history. As signs, historical revelations demand an interpretation, an interpretation approached by historical questions, whether as to the history of man (Who killed him?), or as to the history of God (How could God have permitted this?). On the other hand, Nietzsche, who is also external to the inner world of Jesus, is suspicious about the meaningfulness of the history uniting Judaism and Christianity. Thus, Nietzsche’s qualification—“If I understand anything about this great symbolist”—reveals him to have a limited understanding of Jesus. This understanding is limited to the fact that the truth of Jesus is his inner world, and that the outer world is for him a sign that is meaningless in itself, and yet this sign remains Nietzsche’s clue to approach the inner reality of Jesus.
So, it is through Jesus’s inevitable political-historical misunderstanding that Nietzsche’s Buddhist Jesus comes to constitute the basis for the possibility of the Christian renewal of Judaism in the figure of Christ. This is the figure of the anti-Dionysus insofar as Christ is the renewal of the anti-Dionysian slave-morality. This does not mean yet that Jesus was needed for the construction of the figure of the anti-Dionysian Christ. For otherwise, one should assert that what was demanded was anything that could bring about misunderstanding: the question of how the Buddhist-idiot Jesus was demanded for the renewal of slave-morality in Christianity still stands.
I recall here that Nietzsche’s inverted Christology introduces the possibility of a true Christianity that substitutes the Christian faith with practice, that is, with Jesus’s “way of life.”65 And what is revealed here is Jesus’s deep instinct: “The profound instinct for how one would have to live in order to feel oneself ‘in heaven,’ to feel oneself ‘eternal,’ … [the instinct through which] the whole of Jewish ecclesiastical teaching was denied.”66 If that is the case, and if Dionysian art and paradisiacal science have also been revealed as deep instincts, the following question arises: is this profound instinct of Jesus one more possible identity of Nietzsche’s modern Antichrist next to Dionysian art and paradisiacal science? On the one hand, Nietzsche’s Jesus could be connected to European Buddhism in the same manner in which Dionysian art and paradisiacal science are connected to modern art and modern science, respectively. On the other hand, there remains the difference that in comparison with the historical character of Dionysian art and paradisiacal science, Jesus is that depth which is given through its irreconcilability with history and thereby cannot be translated in the otherworldly history, that is, cannot appear.
It follows that, for Nietzsche, Buddhism and the Dionysian do not belong to each other: Buddhism, considered in the case of the Greek Pyrrho, the Jewish Jesus, and the modern Schopenhauer,67 marks an end and thereby a new beginning. This implies that both Buddhists—Jesus and Pyrrho—are neither Dionysian nor anti-Dionysian. If that is correct, and if Buddhism marks an end and a new beginning, who, then, is Nietzsche’s Jesus? If the psychological type of Jesus is depth that cannot realize itself in the outer world, it can still bring about the realization of some other instinct: the Buddhist psychology of Jesus can serve as an instrument and be demanded as an instrument. One could speculate that the adoption of the psychology of Jesus, as an instrument, seems to open doors to new possibilities once this depth steps into the outer world. How is that? Jesus’s psychology makes the outer world to be a set of meaningless signs. For that instinct which makes of this psychology its instrument, this fact turns the way into the outer world of suffering a naive experimental trip. This is especially the case if the fact that the psychology of Jesus is that depth which had, until now, avoided suffering as subject and as object is taken into consideration.
The question about how Jesus, being a Buddhist, was demanded for the renewal of slave-morality in Christianity has been fully answered in the idea of the instrumentality of Buddhism. Further, Nietzsche’s idea of the instrumentality of Buddhism as such has also been established. From this perspective, a new insight into the relationship between Nietzsche and Nietzsche’s Paul has been uncovered: both stand at an end marked by Buddhism, whether Greek, Jewish, or European, and both discover the possibility of the instrumentality of Buddhism. I want to note here that the idea of the instrumentality of Jesus, both for Nietzsche’s Paul and for the modern Nietzsche, excludes the possibility that Nietzsche’s Jesus may be read either as anti-Dionysian or as Dionysian.68 Also, that Jesus is an instrument and Dionysus is the goal means that the difference between both is one of kind and not of degree. It is fairly obvious that Nietzsche thinks of this instrumentality for the revaluation of values other than those which Paul revaluated. Nevertheless, and given the idea that an instrument remains independent from its user, the idea of the instrumentality of Buddhism as common ground for both is firmly established.69
One is led to the task of delving deeper into the identities and differences between Nietzsche and Nietzsche’s Paul. Yet, before that, one ought to take note of the following: First, Jesus is a turning point in the same way Socrates was a turning point. Second, Jesus was misunderstood in the same way Socrates was misunderstood. Third, Jesus’s religion is an instrument in the same way Socratic reason is an instrument. And fourth, the depth of Jesus’s psychological type is the antipode of superficial reason. Nietzsche, as I said, conceives of reason as superficial par excellence: the instrument of dialectics through which deep instincts break out into that surface which is the outer world and its language. Does this mean that Nietzsche attempts to make of Jesus’s true Christianity (that is, of European Buddhism as represented through his conception of Jesus’s Buddhism) an instrument to use besides, or apart from, the instrument of reason? The immediate task that this question calls for is a comparison between Nietzsche’s Socrates and Nietzsche’s Jesus.
Religion and Reason, Jesus and Socrates
To begin the comparison between Nietzsche’s Socrates and Jesus by foregrounding the differences between these two figures, Nietzsche’s refutation of Renan’s Life of Jesus is a good place to start. In The Antichrist, Nietzsche rejects his “antipode[s]”70 (that is, Renan’s) conception of the advent of Christianity in terms of progress; and he also rejects his characterization of Jesus as hero and as genius. But what is primarily important here is Nietzsche’s rejection of that Jesus “which Renan has wickedly glorified as ‘le grand maitre en ironie.’ … [for in] the meantime, there yawns a contradiction between the mountain, lake and field preacher, whose appearance strikes one as that of a Buddha on a soil very little like that of India, and that aggressive fanatic, the mortal enemy of theologian and priest.”71
In view of this criticism, Nietzsche substitutes Renan’s great ironist with his “great symbolist.”72 This Nietzschean disagreement with Renan reveals the underlying reference of Nietzsche’s Jesus to Nietzsche’s Socrates: the reference of Jesus the great symbolist to Socrates the great ironist. This irony, which Nietzsche seeks to make his Jesus innocent of, refers to the coexistence of an apparent and a hidden meaning that are independent of each other in view of the reference of each of them to itself.73 Against this, symbolism refers to the coexistence of a meaningless apparent sign and the hidden meaning to which this sign refers.
Nietzsche’s account of Jesus as symbolist renders only one meaning of Jesus possible: the truth of Jesus that has the components of the Jewish-Christian outer world as meaningless signs defining its meaningful inner world. According to this one possibility, the unity of Jesus is the unity of a decadent life and a decadent death. Hence, the question of whether the unity of the life and death of Jesus should be read from the viewpoint of his life or from the viewpoint of his death becomes an unnecessary and superfluous one. Nietzsche succeeds at winning his Jesus as a positively meaningful, practical instrument apart from Paul’s interpretation of Jesus. Thus, Jesus becomes that meaningfully independent turning point in the history of Christianity. Jesus is not a mere sign that is meaningful in itself, and that becomes meaningful only in view of Paul’s interpretation. Jesus is the turning point from Judaism to Christianity due to his followers’ misunderstanding and their manipulation of the symbolism of his inner world.
Against this, Nietzsche’s account of Socrates as ironist renders two meanings (one apparent and one hidden) of Socrates possible. I have already shown that Socrates becomes the turning point from Greek tragedy to Platonism under the condition that he be an ahistorical sign, a sign that makes the Platonic interpretation of Socrates’s death possible. In this context, Nietzsche sought to secure an independent, non-Platonic meaning of Socratic science. In the end, Nietzsche is led to the conclusion that Socrates’s irony was misunderstood: the life of Socrates does not lead to the death of Socrates if a continuity between the redeeming character of the practice of science (the life of Socrates) and the martyrdom of Socrates (his death) is followed. Instead, Socratic science leads to meaningless death, to death as the simple conclusion that science is no medicine. Nietzsche thus wins his Socrates as an ironist only. In sum, Nietzsche’s Socrates (as distinct from Plato’s Socrates) and Nietzsche’s Jesus (as distinct from Paul’s Jesus) result in irony and symbolism, respectively: Nietzsche’s reading of the Platonic text, of Plato’s apologia of himself, renders an ironic Socrates possible; and on the other hand, Nietzsche’s reading of the Gospels, of the Christian “sectarians’ … apologia of themselves,”74 renders a symbolic Jesus possible.
Jesus’s symbolism and Socratic irony seem to locate Jesus and Socrates within an order in which they exclude each other. Moreover, of central importance for the comparison of Jesus and Socrates is Nietzsche’s refutation of one more aspect of Renan’s Jesus, namely, his rejection of Renan’s claim that Jesus was a fanatic “impérieux,”75 a rejection that joins his understanding of Jesus’s glad tidings. According to this refutation, and insofar as Nietzsche characterizes Socratic reason as tyrannical,76 Socrates and Jesus do not simply exclude each other: the relationship of Jesus and Socrates is that of opposition. And that is the opposition between two instruments: the one is the decadent, loving, deep, symbolical Buddhism and the second is the decadent, tyrannical, superficial, dialectical reason.
It can be said that these two instruments are reason and religion, insofar as Nietzsche’s conception of Buddhism does not denote Buddhism as a particular religion, but his modern concept of religion as such. If European Buddhism is the culmination of the history of Christianity, then Buddhism can denote the concept of religion as such, or “what is usually called a ‘religion.’”77
This result implies that Nietzsche brings the modern problem of religion into a new dimension. After his uncovering of the fictional character of the opposition between (the Platonic) truth and (the Christian) faith, Nietzsche discovers the true opposition as one between the two instruments of religion and reason, between two ways of praxis, and not between two sets of beliefs. The one is the praxis of dialectics as it appeared in Socrates’s way of life and the second is the praxis of true Christianity, or Buddhism, as it appeared in Jesus’s way of life:
In the … psychology of the “Gospel” … blessedness … is the only reality—the rest is a sign for speaking of it. … The consequence of such a condition projects itself into a new practice, the true evangelic practice. … The Christian … is distinguished by a different mode of acting. Neither by words nor in his heart does he resist the man who does him evil. He makes no distinction between foreigner and native, between Jew and not-Jew. … The life of the redeemer was nothing else than this practice. … —A new way of living, not a new belief.78
Jesus’s kind of practice is then a liberation from the historical: “One could, with some freedom of expression, call Jesus a ‘free spirit.’”79 This practice liberates the true Christian from the Jewish instinct and the Jewish faith, that is, from the reality of the (diseased) Jewish economy of sin and punishment and from the new Christian belief in redemption in Heaven. But is this not also the result of the practice of the dialectical Socratic reason? As has been demonstrated, Socratic dialectics liberates Socrates’s fellow Greek men from their certainty about their (diseased) Greek instinct at the moment in which dialectics unfolded before their eyes the historical character of this certainty. Additionally, Nietzsche’s true understanding of the problem of Socrates showed that Socratic dialectics leads to the truth of Platonic metaphysics only when misunderstood, just as Jesus’s true Gospel leads to the belief of Pauline Christianity when misunderstood.
This being the case, and with the assumption that the Nietzschean comparison between Jesus and Socrates is provoked by his attempt to overcome modern nihilistic Buddhism, the following thesis may put forward: The task of the Antichrist, which is the overcoming of modern nihilism, demands an instrument. The first instrument is reason; the application of the dialectics of Socratic reason ends in Nietzsche’s genealogy; genealogy is an instrument that can evaluate and categorize only on the condition that it interrogates ideals as a discourse about the genesis that combats Egypticism.80 And this genealogy unfolds historical Modernity in the plurality of man’s instincts before the Nietzschean genealogical consciousness. Socratic reason ends in a negative dialectics which is destructive, that is, which ends in ironical death. In this light, Jesus’s religion appears as a second instrument. This religion delivers itself to the otherness of the deep instinct after the genealogical consciousness resulting from Socratic dialectics reveals such depth before its eyes. The opposition between Socrates and Jesus enters into a successive order: Overcoming modern nihilism demands the assumption of Jesus’s way of life where Socrates’s kind of practice ends. The task of overcoming the history of Christianity demands that the practice of Jesus’s religion should follow that of Socratic reason: the psychology of Jesus’s religion, in opposition to Socratic reason, seems to promise a future; in other words, the deep instinct’s adoption of the naive depth of Jesus’s psychology makes the free trip into the symbolical meaningless outer world a courageous experience opening new possible doors and horizons.
I conclude, first, that Nietzsche proves the abuse of Socratic reason by Plato and the abuse of Jesus’s Christianity by Paul: Nietzsche shows that Platonism is not the truth and that Paul’s Christianity is not the Christianity. Second, Nietzsche proves that Socratic reason and Jesus’s Christianity are independent of any instinct/faith that may make use of them. Third, Nietzsche proves that Socratic reason and Jesus’s Christianity are instruments. And if Socratic reason and Jesus’s Christianity are instruments (that is, may be used again) and if their characterization as decadent may correspond to the modern state of nihilism, then these two turn to represent for Nietzsche’s modern Antichrist two successive paths to overcome modern nihilism.