Nietzsche Versus Paul

The comparison of Socrates and Jesus entails that, for Nietzsche, the idea of the instrumentality of reason and religion is mediated through Socrates and Paul. Therefore, a preliminary comparison between Socrates and Paul becomes necessary. Nietzsche says that Socrates “had initially sided with reason” concerning “the question whether regarding the valuation of things instinct deserves more authority than rationality.”¹ In a similar manner, he writes that Paul had also initially sided with the Jewish law: “In his youth he had himself wanted to satisfy it [fanatically].”² Only after this initial stage, or only “in the end,” Socrates discovered something: “privately and secretly, he laughed at himself, too: in himself he found, before his subtle conscience and self-examination, the same difficulty and incapacity,”³ that he was like the “noble Athenians” who “were men of instinct and never could give sufficient information about the reasons for their actions.”⁴ Similar to Socrates’s own personal experience is also Paul’s later discovery: “then he discovered in himself that he himself—fiery, sensual, melancholy, malevolent in hatred as he was—could not fulfill the law.”⁵

But Socrates and Paul differ in the ways in which they self-overcome such self-contradictions. Socrates, on the one hand, overcomes neither reason nor instinct, insofar as he makes of reason the instrument of his instinct: “But is that any reason, he encouraged himself, for giving up the instincts? One has to see to it that they as well as reason receive their due—one must follow the instincts but persuade reason to assist them with good reasons.”6

One should take note here of the fact that Nietzsche turns to his Socrates with the following question: “is that any reason … for giving up the instincts?”⁷ Nietzsche’s question is not: is that any reason for giving up reason? This means that Socrates’s question was not directed at that which he had initially held as perfect, that is, at reason. Against this, Paul’s question is directed at that which he had initially held as perfect, that is, at the Jewish law: If Socrates encouraged himself, Paul suffered, “He suffered … from a fixed question which was always present to him, and would never rest: what is the Jewish law really concerned with? And, in particular, what is the fulfillment of this law?”⁸ The basic question with which Nietzsche confronts Socrates and Paul is the question concerning the immorality involved in the experience of realizing reason (Socrates) and the law (Paul): that realization—or fulfillment—of the perfect ideal whose initial assumption of it being perfect points to the idea of it being moral. With his above criticism of both Socrates and Paul, Nietzsche emphasizes the fact that such an ideal is not at all moral. Moreover, he shows that the idea of the moral character of that which is held to be perfect (reason and law) corresponds to the initial state that exempts it from confronting the moral question.

What constitutes the core of this Nietzschean criticism is Socrates’s and Paul’s own praxis, or their involvement in fulfilling the perfect ideal as it results in an experience of disappointment with such an ideal. And thereby Nietzsche posits the question about praxis: “what is the fulfillment of this law” in the case of Paul? and what is the fulfillment of reason in the case of Socrates?9 I pointed out that this situation demands a practical self-overcoming, it demands an instrument for self-overcoming. On the one hand, Socrates the “great ironist” makes of reason the instrument of his instinct, and this way dissimulates his having seen “through the irrational element in moral judgment.”¹⁰ On the other hand, the “mind. … [of the] fanatical” Paul—who was not an ironist but “a very tormented, very pitiable, very unpleasant man who also found himself unpleasant”—remains tortured by the moral question involved in the practice of the fulfillment of his perfect ideal. This is the “holy God[’s] … Jewish law, which had received in the person of Paul the highest distinction the Jews were able to conceive.” Paul’s mind cannot think the practical “way out” from his suffering in the same way that Socrates did. For Paul, to make of the law an instrument living together with his instincts means maintaining his suffering, insofar as the “law was the cross to which he felt himself nailed.”¹¹

Paul “hated” the law. Thus, “he sought about for means of destroying it—and no longer to fulfill it.” If Paul’s objective became the destruction of the law, the instrument he sought is other than the law itself: Paul’s thought leads him to an alternative instrument; it leads him to the revelation of the reasonable idea of the instrumentality of Jesus for the destruction of the law—that is, for “the way out … [from his] moral despair: … it is unreasonable … to persecute precisely this Christ! For here is the way out … the Cross … [was] necessary for the abolition of the law!”¹²

It could be deduced, then, that Nietzsche’s idea of the instrumentality of reason originates from the self-reflection of the mind following one’s disappointment with his initial idea of the perfection of his ideal. This is the perfection that collapses under its exposure to the moral question raised in the moment in which the ideal is brought to the realm of practice. Nietzsche does not come to deal with the idea of the instrumentality of reason in view of his treatment of Socrates: Nietzsche’s uncovering of Socrates’s hidden (later) self-consciousness of the instrumentality of reason results from Nietzsche’s projecting of his image of Paul onto that of Socrates. More precisely, Nietzsche’s earlier reading (in Daybreak [1881]) of Paul’s problem of moral despair—involved in his practice of the law—is not only projected onto “Luther … [who] wanted in his monastery to become the perfect man of the spiritual ideal.”13 It is also projected onto Nietzsche’s later reading (in Beyond Good and Evil [1886]) of Socrates. In the case of Paul, Nietzsche explains how to “really read”¹⁴ the well-known story of the conversion of the apostle from Saul to Paul. But in the case of Socrates, Nietzsche says that he is uncovering one of the many secrets of “that great ironist,”¹⁵ whereas he does not speak earlier about Socrates’s secret conversion. If that is the case, there is sound basis to assume that Nietzsche approached the later (1886) and the unknown (Socrates’s secret conversion) with the help of the earlier (1881) and the known (Paul’s overt conversion). If Socrates, Plato, Jesus, and Paul are the main figures in Nietzsche’s attempt to change the course of history, the basic figure among those four is that of Paul.¹⁶

Nietzsche’s Paul becomes the center of the unity comprising Socrates, Nietzsche, and Paul in Nietzsche’s thought. Nietzsche reads his own (modern) experience and the experience of Socrates of the arousal of the moral question within practice in view of his reading of Paul. My thesis defended hereafter is that the significance of Paul for Nietzsche is constituted by Paul being Nietzsche’s exemplar: Nietzsche’s Paul is the practical positive-maker of slave-morality, whose place Nietzsche sought to occupy as the practical positive-maker of noble-morality, insofar as Nietzsche rejects the Pauline claim concerning Christianity’s inversion of Judaism. In addition, it is in view of this Nietzschean Paul that Socratic reason and Jesus’s Buddhism become Nietzsche’s instruments.

To this end, I want to first emphasize Nietzsche’s self-reflection in the same terms with which he reflects on Paul in the above quotation.¹⁷ As early as 1908, Bernoulli wrote about Nietzsche’s “vision” of the idea of the eternal recurrence of the same that “Nietzsche had experienced … in that first summer at Sils his day of Damascus; it was as if the scales were falling from his eyes; he completed the progression from No to Yes; Saul became Paul; the pessimist became optimist.”¹⁸

In continuity with this insight of Bernoulli’s, Nietzsche’s reflection on the Nietzsche-Paul relationship includes four points. First, Nietzsche says for Paul “the destiny of the Jews—no, of all mankind—seems to him to be tied to this notion.”19 And in parallel, Nietzsche explains to his reader “Why I am a Destiny”: “I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of … a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite.”²⁰ Nietzsche warns against being interpreted as a “founder of a religion” or as “holy” (like Paul). And in view of this, he prefers to be considered “a buffoon” (like Socrates).²¹ Second, Nietzsche wrote about Paul’s revelation that “this second of his sudden enlightenment, he possesses the idea of ideas, the key of keys, the light of lights.”²² Similarly, Nietzsche describes his own Thus Spoke Zarathustra’s “experience of inspiration” in terms of revelation.²³ Third, of Paul Nietzsche writes that he found that “history revolves around him.”²⁴ In parallel, Nietzsche’s self-interpretation adds: “The uncovering of Christian morality is an event without parallel, a real catastrophe. He that is enlightened about that, is a force majeure, a destiny—he breaks the history of mankind in two. One lives before him, one lives after him.”²⁵ Fourth, and last, if Paul is “the teacher of the destruction of the law,” Zarathustra is “the teacher of the eternal recurrence.”²⁶

Nietzsche’s relationship to Paul cannot be explicated through the oversimplified terms of animosity.27 And Nietzsche’s later works cannot be dismissed, or alternatively be positively evaluated, as polemical.²⁸ It is only the Genealogy of Morals that Nietzsche calls polemical.²⁹ I can agree concerning the idea of the negative character of the language of Nietzsche’s noble-morality. I insist though on the fact that such negativity belongs to the Anti christ itself. Yet, it is not polemics that is meant to turn the negative to become positive.³⁰ I am aiming here to show the identity of the negative character of both the Antichrist and noble-morality, and also to show continually that the ultimate positive standpoint of both Nietzsche and Paul belongs to the originally positive origin, that they belong to Dionysus (Nietzsche) and to Abraham (Paul), insofar as that origin for which polemic becomes irrelevant, or at best secondary.³¹

One should then turn anew to the “interest to work out that particular understanding of Paul from which Nietzsche directed his harsh attack in his late work, since it provides an important resource for the proper interpretation of Nietzsche’s own philosophy of the ‘transvaluation of all values.’”³² But while Salaquarda states that to pursue such an interpretation further no longer lies within his investigation,³³ this work takes upon itself the task of exceeding these limits of investigation. I have already begun this task by showing how Nietzsche’s Paul is the source according to which Nietzsche uncovers Socrates’s hidden instrumentality of reason. In order to expand this claim, one should further develop Salaquarda’s Nietzsche-Paul “dialectical resemblance” with a criticism of his formulation of this dialectical resemblance in terms of the proposition “the ‘revaluator’ Nietzsche confronts the ‘revaluator’ Paul.”³⁴ The Nietzschean dialectics “Dionysus versus the Crucified”³⁵ is one between noble-morality and slave-morality.³⁶ If that is the case, then according to Salaquarda’s proposition, Paul is the revaluator of noble-morality and Nietzsche is the revaluator of slave-morality. This way, and insofar as Priestly Judaism is the revaluator of noble-morality, the proposition in question abolishes the distinction between Priestly Judaism and Paul’s Christianity. Salaquarda reconstructs a Nietzschean “history of morals”³⁷ whose second phase (antithesis of the natural thesis) is the history of decadent movement, to which Judaism belongs, and which does not succeed in seizing power until the rise of Christianity.³⁸

If one admits the diminishing of the significance of the Jewish phase, the thesis fits well with Nietzsche’s conception of Judaism and Christianity as the revaluation of natural values,³⁹ and his conception of himself as revaluator of all values.⁴⁰ One can then conclude together with Salaquarda:

I do agree with those who ascribe the first two impulses to Nietzsche and disagree with the idea of overcoming-preservation (Aufhebung), which Salaquarda’s idea of the Nietzsche-Paul dialectical resemblance is meant to defend.⁴² For he is claiming that Paul’s revaluation is the overcoming-preservation of noble-morality and Nietzsche’s overcoming-preservation is the revaluation of slave-morality. But the fact is that the Nietzsche-Paul dialectical resemblance stands on an absolutely different ground. First, Nietzsche is not at all interested in a forward movement in which the experiences of humanity on its way to the present are to be overcome and yet preserved. To the contrary, Nietzsche’s problem par excellence is that of preserving Christianity after the failure of Hegel’s overcoming-preservation. To put it in the terms of the above discussion comparing Paul and Socrates, to overcome and preserve is to have the perfect ideal that has already resolved its historical dialectics and therefore whose practice does not invite the moral question. And if Nietzsche finds himself invited into this question, it should be deduced that Hegel’s kind of Modernity is preserved, but could not be overcome. Salaquarda ignores this. Also, he ignores Nietzsche’s search for forgetfulness,⁴³ as well as his criticism of Hegel’s preservation of Christianity.⁴⁴

On what ground, then, does the Nietzsche-Paul dialectical resemblance really stand? In contrast to Salaquarda’s reconstruction of Nietzsche’s history of morals, I insist on the fact that, for Nietzsche, there exists a genuine difference between Judaism and Christianity: the revaluation of noble-morality belongs to Priestly Judaism before Paul. The significance of Paul against the background of this achievement of Priestly Judaism is a practical one. This task consists of bringing out the already existing values of slave-morality from the depth of the negative to the surface of the positive. It is in these terms alone that the instrumentality of Jesus for Paul becomes significant: Jesus is Paul’s instrument for the sublimation of the Jewish hatred in the Christian love; he is Paul’s salvation of slave-morality’s concept of the good from its negative character within the Jewish law. This act is by no means an act of overcoming-preservation of noble-morality. This act conceals of noble-morality that which Priestly Judaism could not conceal: the traces of the noble in the problematic economy of sin and punishment. Thus, for Nietzsche, Paul’s Christian love is an overcoming-without-preservation and overcoming-preservation at one and the same time: it is the overcoming-without-preservation of noble-morality and the overcoming-preservation of the Jewish law. Presenting revaluation in terms of overcoming-preservation alone seems to be confusing the Jewish law with noble-morality. Additionally, this confusion forms the background for understanding how this presentation overlooks one more integral component of the Nietzsche-Paul dialectical resemblance: the faith of Abraham as the thesis of Paul. For when recognized, one has to recognize the Jewish law as its antithesis, and thereby discover his reductive equation of the Jewish law and noble-morality.

Beyond this criticism, I want to add that the faith of Abraham is the origin to which Paul’s return is a return and is not a return. It is not a mere return but rather a forward movement in relation to the Jewish law, that is, insofar as the Christian faith is the overcoming-preservation of the Jewish law. At the same time, it remains nonetheless a mere return in view of noble-morality: the direct relationship between Abraham’s faith and the Christian faith is the source of the legitimacy of the Christian faith, apart from any historical dialectics, and apart from any negative standpoint that the Christian faith may occupy within such a historical dialectics. If the Christian faith represents both the negative term of the Jewish law and the negative term of noble-morality, the return of this faith to Abraham legitimizes this faith apart from its overcoming-preservation of the Jewish law.

The second half of this claim now should follow: Nietzsche resembles this Pauline scheme. As I wish to show, Nietzsche’s genealogy is about the refutation of the legitimacy of Paul’s origin. I have shown that this genealogy reveals the true origin; it reveals noble-morality, which slave-morality had concealed. Thereafter, the destroyer of slave-morality (the Antichrist) makes a return to this newly revealed origin: a return that legitimizes the Antichrist apart from the negativity inherent in its act and its name. In sum, if genealogy reveals the anti-Dionysus in Christ, the Anti-Christ becomes the anti-anti-Dionysus: the Antichrist is the return of Dionysus. The legitimacy of this return relies on an interpretation inherent in the Christian myth. Nietzsche does not evaluate Christianity as an objective observer, but as one who was reared within the tradition and obsessed with the truth and value of Christian claims long after he had rejected them.45 For Nietzsche, the history of Christianity is the practical involvement in fulfilling the perfect ideal. And this history has resulted in an experience of disappointment with such an ideal: “the whole of history is the refutation by experiment of the principle of the so called ‘moral world order.’”⁴⁶ Still, the myth of the Antichrist constitutes the location in which the Christian text’s self-negation becomes that self-overcoming returning back before its earliest constituting moment, that is, the moment of the constitution of slave-morality long before Paul:

And what would the name of Paul mean in Nietzsche’s mouth if not the same as Zarathustra? “The self-overcoming of morality, out of truthfulness; the self-overcoming of the moralist into his opposite.”⁴⁸ If with Nietzsche, and if for the sake of truthfulness, Paul returns back to correct himself in negating himself in his absolute opposition, and not their synthesis, it would be a mistake to say that in this way Paul preserves himself: instead, in this way Paul erases himself. Nietzsche wants a return to Dionysus. Nietzsche does not want to preserve the history of Christianity. As Paul wanted to conceal noble-morality, the new Paul (Nietzsche) wants to forget slave-morality. If that is correct, the Antichrist has been legitimized and has proved the existence of its values in the revealed noble-morality. On this basis, there remains before Nietzsche the task of realizing the out-bringing of those values from the depth of the negative to the surface of the positive. And here, Nietzsche follows Paul and relies on the Buddhism of Jesus as his instrument for the completion of this task.

The relationship between noble-morality and slave-morality is one between irreconcilable oppositions. On this basis, the Nietzsche-Paul dialectical resemblance includes an overcoming-preservation and an overcoming-without-preservation. With this in mind, the Christian overcoming-preservation of Judaism should be formulated in terms of sublimation (and not in terms of the Hegelian Aufhebung). My point is that the logic of the Hegelian Aufhebung assumes that universal totality according to which the movement of overcoming-preservation does not, and cannot, keep anything (such as noble-morality) outside (the Spirit). On the other hand, the logic of (the Nietzschean) sublimation relegates the movement of overcoming-preservation within the boundaries of an instinct: sublimation expresses the refinement of some instinct. Hence, sublimation acknowledges the possibility that something (such as noble-morality) can remain outside its limits. The result is then that the Christian faith is the sublimation of the Jewish law and the repression of noble-morality.49

Nietzsche points to the birth of the Christian love from the Jewish hatred as sublimation.⁵⁰ Moreover, one could add that since Salaquarda’s point of view had looked for the idea of overcoming-preservation elsewhere—that is, between slave and noble moralities—it missed the fictional moment of self-negation in the sainthood of Paul:

Let us ask what precisely about … [the] phenomenon of the saint has seemed so enormously interesting. … It was the air of the miraculous that goes with it—namely, the immediate succession of opposites, of states of the soul that are judges morally in opposite ways. It seemed palpable that a “bad man” was suddenly transformed into a “saint,” a good man. The psychology we have had suffered shipwreck at this point: wasn’t this chiefly because it had placed itself under the dominion of morals, because it, too, believed in opposite moral values and saw, read, interpreted these opposites into the text and the facts? What? The “miracle” merely a mistake of interpretation? A lack of philology?⁵¹

Nietzsche corrects the mistake involved in the interpretation of how a bad man is suddenly transformed into a saint, a good man: the immediate succession of opposites, the succession bad man and good man, the succession Saul and Paul is fictional—self-negation is fictional. Under the totality of the will to power (that is, the totality composed of overcoming-preservation and overcoming-without-preservation), the fictional character of the negation (in Saint Paul’s self-negation) does not refer Paul’s self to the Jewish instinct. Rather, the self here refers to the will to power underlying the Jewish instinct: “with Paul the priest again sought power … his requirement was power.”52 Hence, insofar as power refers to instincts other than Paul’s Jewish instinct, the Christian overcoming-preservation of Judaism is reduced to a preservation and a fictional overcoming. For overcoming as such is found in the noble instinct. And if the Christian overcoming-preservation does not apply to both slave and noble moralities, then the overcoming-without-preservation (that is, negation) of the Jewish instinct is fictional. Or, to put it otherwise, if the Christian overcoming-without-preservation of noble-morality does not erase the fictional character of its overcoming-preservation of Judaism, then the will to power cannot be reduced to the terms of the Hegelian Aufhebung: the will to power involves both an overcoming-preservation and overcoming-without-preservation.

To reattain power an instrument is needed: “Paul willed the end. … [His requirement was power and] consequently he willed the means.”⁵³ As anticipated, Jesus was Paul’s instrument: Saul dies with Christ and Paul is resurrected with him. The instrument makes the conversion possible. More precisely, this instrument conceals the sublimation and presents it as self-negation. In sum, the grounds for Nietzsche’s interpretation of (Paul’s) sainthood is the will to power: if “life itself is will to power”⁵⁴—if it is also true that the meaning of asceticism is a will to nothingness⁵⁵—then the phenomenon of the saint cannot be taken to transcend this law of life.

According to the Nietzschean genealogy of slave-morality, Paul, the first Christian, resolved the crisis of Priestly Judaism’s economy of sin and punishment, which Nietzsche tries to imitate. Yet, Nietzsche’s attempt to overcome Christianity turns his criticism into a negative one: Nietzsche finds the Christian rehabilitation of slave-morality’s concept of the good to be problematic. How, then, do these two contradictory aspects come together?

It is already clear that the Nietzschean genealogy of the priest is the place in which the unity of man—or of the aristocrat and the slave—is realized as the birth of the human in the history of Christianity. Seen from the perspective of Nietzsche’s “artistic conscience,”56 or his artist’s “good conscience,”⁵⁷ this fact is translated into the Nietzschean proposition “in man, … [whose Dionysian imperative is to] have it [suffering] higher and worse than ever, … creature and creator are united.”⁵⁸ Accordingly, the aesthetic action of the will to power in this-world is translated into the horrible, ugly cruelty and torture of evil in the language of slave-morality. This basic Nietzschean text turns to Pauline Christian love with the reminder that to love, in this-world, is to act out one’s will to power. Despite this, Christian morality masks this evil, which is necessarily involved in Christian love as good, or, better, as its only positive virtue: “God on the cross—is the fearful hidden meaning behind this symbol still understood?—Everything that suffers, everything that hangs on the Cross, is divine. … We all hang on the Cross, consequently we are divine. … We alone are divine.”⁵⁹

Christianity does not denote Christian love (of the transcendent other) as evil cruelty, but instead as good sacrifice, as the good self-cruelty and self-torture. Does this not mean that Christian love corresponds to the order of life-affirmation, that Christianity affirms suffering in order to return back to this-world? The above argument leads toward a primary positive answer to this question, which Nietzsche affirms:

The Jews are the counterparts of décadents: they have been compelled to act as décadents to the point of illusion, they have known, with a non plus ultra of histrionic genius, how to place themselves at the head of all décadence movements (—as the Christianity of Paul—) so as to make of them something stronger than any party affirmative of life. For the kind of man who desires to attain power through Judaism and Christianity, the priestly kind, décadence is only a means: this kind of man has a life-interest in making mankind sick and in inverting the concepts of “good” and “evil,” “true” and “false” in a mortally dangerous and world-calumniating sense.⁶⁰

The ultimate focus of Nietzsche’s criticism of slave-morality is his demand for what I shall call an authentic lie: the lie that does not produce the illusion of the other world that becomes, as illusion, the negating alternative of this-world. Seen from this perspective, the Christian lie is confusing. On the one hand, it produces the illusion that it is of the kind of the Dionysian, that is, that it ends tragically.⁶² And on the other, there remains the danger, which does realize itself, that priestly men would act as decadents to the point of illusion: to use decadence to that extreme in which the priestly man becomes naive and forgets that the will to power was acting as decadent, therefore turning to have decadence as an end. And for Nietzsche, this is the problem of the Priestly, which starts by affirming life but ends by negating it.

This Nietzschean conception of the naivety of faith (as opposed to his genealogical consciousness) becomes the keyword for my understanding of Nietzsche’s rejection of slave-morality’s illusion. Seen first apart from the problem of the unauthentic priestly lie, naivety can represent Nietzsche’s idea of health. Thus, in view of Nietzsche’s history of Christianity until this point, it can be asserted that Nietzsche’s idea of early Greek religion and of Early Judaism refers to the idea of healthy naivety in local particularities. This is the idea of the existence of one sole faith that remains true in view of its reference to itself alone, a self-reference that equates the naive faith with an unquestionable absolute truth. Local, particular life is solitary. This naive life can be seen as lacking all contact to other external faiths. Thus, the faith of local life is not brought to question or justify itself in the framework of some philosophical-historical dialectics external to it, and consequently does not fall under the danger of losing its innocent naivety. Likewise, Nietzsche does not conceive of this naivety as given. Rather, it is a naivety attainable through (dialectical) struggle.

For the young Nietzsche, this idea of naivety is represented in Apollonian art. Contrary to Schiller, Nietzsche rejects the idea of a stage of the unity of man with nature as if it were a simple and self-evident unavoidable state: a state necessarily found at the beginnings of all cultures.63 This claim becomes clearer by turning to the genealogy of the Christian in the Genealogy of Morals. The genius of Christianity, according to Nietzsche, consists in its bringing of humanity’s growing consciousness of debt to a halt. Christianity’s paradoxical relief of humanity is one in which God sacrifices himself for the guilt of mankind. God pays himself since he is “the only being who can redeem man from what has become unredeemable for man himself—the creditor sacrifices himself for his debtor, out of love (can one credit that?), out of love for his debtor!”⁶⁴

Everything that precedes the definitive ordering of rank of the different national elements in every great racial synthesis, is reflected in the confused genealogies of their gods. The advent of the Christian God, as the maximum God attained so far, was therefore accompanied by the maximum feeling of guilty indebtedness on earth. Presuming we have gradually entered upon the reverse course, there is no small probability that with the irresistible decline of faith in the Christian God there is now also a considerable decline in mankind’s feeling of guilt; indeed, the prospect cannot be dismissed that the complete and definitive victory of atheism might free mankind of this whole feeling of guilty indebtedness toward its origin, its causa prima. Atheism and a kind of second innocence belong together.⁶⁵

On the one side, Nietzsche anticipates the result of modern atheism to be a kind of second innocence after universality’s eradication of local particularities, that is, after “its triumph over the independent nobility.”⁶⁶ On the other, Nietzsche sees that Christianity only “afforded temporary relief” to the problem of humanity’s growing bad conscience of debt: “Now to him that worketh is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt. But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness.”⁶⁷

This points back to Jesus as an instrument in the hands of Nietzsche and Paul. For Nietzsche, Jesus (or Buddhism or modern atheism) is the instrument toward a new naivety, a new Dionysius, transcending the totality of the history of Christianity, that is, transcending its maximum God. For (Nietzsche’s) Paul, Jesus (or the resurrecting God after his suffering on the cross) was only a temporarily successful instrument toward a new naivety (new faith) transcending the totality of the history of Judaism, that is, transcending its accumulating debt and punishing God. This attempt is temporary due to the fact that it lasted for the time between Paul and Nietzsche. For Nietzsche’s genealogy of slave-morality uncovers the concealed aristocratic other underneath its proposition of good and evil as well as the concealed Jewish God in Priestly Judaism’s and Christianity’s sublimated continuum. Thus, Nietzsche’s genealogy shows that the Christian faith has become an unauthentic lie. If the Nietzschean genealogy reveals the historical dialectics that the Christian faith conceals, this faith’s atheism in the Jewish God cannot anymore be said to be the innocence of a single and sole faith.

The Nietzschean genealogy of the Christian faith in slave-morality demonstrates this fact. This genealogy shows that the illusion of the simplicity of the Christian faith results from the external absence of Christianity’s others. But this absence is not genuine but the mere concealment of these others—that is, the plurality (of the complex as against the simple) concealed in the depth of the Christian soul. And in fact, this illusion is nothing but the illusion that Christianity is a return to the naivety of the local particularity. But it should be kept in mind that Nietzsche’s negative criticism does not fall on illusion as such, but on unauthentic illusion. For once this unauthentic illusion is believed, then this-world’s reality, or the otherness that constitutes the totality of the real man as subject and as object, is believed to be sin, and nothingness is believed to be the true object of man: to believe in the Christian faith—or to act as decadents to the point of illusion, to the point of the possible and of the necessary—is not nihilism; rather, it leads to nihilism. Nietzsche then rejects that illusion which claims itself to be a universal synthesis, that illusion which claims to have overcome historical dialectics and its other within this dialectic. This rejection takes place when, on the one hand, the belief in such untrue illusion brings man back to innocence and when, on the other hand, genealogy reveals the fact that such illusion is still involved in historical dialectic.

I have already demonstrated how Jesus’s religion and Socratic reason are opposite instruments. Naivety beyond the history of Christianity demands Jesus (Buddhism) as its instrument. Genealogy, on the other hand, demands Socratic dialectics as it instrument. Within history, and on the edge of history, the Nietzschean genealogy is noninnocence par excellence: it binds suspicion in motivations and interests.68 And through its usage of the exposing-revealing Socratic dialectics,⁶⁹ Nietzsche’s genealogy keeps revealing before modern consciousness the history that “we no longer see because it [the slave revolt in morality]—has been victorious.”⁷⁰

Following Paul, Nietzsche’s return to the Dionysian is a return to a naive origin: a return to the authentic lie being the one faith/truth lying beyond historical dialectic,71 where the Dionysian is now seen as innocent rather than as flawed by original sin.⁷² And returning to the sought-after origin raises the question about the proper praxis toward it. Thus, under which condition does the idea of the praxis of Nietzsche’s Paul come to complete the idea of the strategy of his Paul? This question brings into focus the above-discussed opposition between the instrumentality of reason and the instrumentality of (Jesus’s) religion. More specifically, the following idea should be considered here: it is through his own experience of disappointment that Nietzsche reads the idea of instrumentality in Socrates’s and Paul’s experiences of disappointment. If Nietzsche did indeed go through such an experience, then his reading of Socrates and Paul seeks to find the proper instrument for a way out from such experience. And as Nietzsche’s reading of Socrates follows his reading of Paul, the instrumentality of religion reaches beyond the instrumentality of reason. The problem that shall occupy the remaining pages of this chapter concerns the limits of the instrumentality of reason, which in turn demand the instrumentality of religion.

The first point to be treated in the context of this problem is a short elucidation of the idea of Nietzsche’s experience of disappointment. One way in which to read such an experience is from the point of view of Nietzsche’s biography, as growing from deep religiosity toward strong atheism.73 For it is true that the “man who says God is dead and the man who now rejects a doctrine he used to hold are in truth not one and the same. The one who says God is dead is the one for whom God used to be alive, used to be a Thou, and we know that for Nietzsche in his youth He was certainly that. So we are witnessing a tragedy, that of denial.”⁷⁴ Or, more accurately, we are witnessing a disappointment. Second, and more importantly, Nietzsche’s disappointment is founded in his departure from his earlier Schopenhauer-Wagner world. And that would be the dominant script for his life, according to which he viewed his life on the model of Saul-Paul with the sudden departure in the middle of the first Bayreuth Festival (1876) marking the satisfying dramatic moment of conversion.⁷⁵ Third, what remains primarily decisive in this context is Hegelian philosophy being the background of Nietzsche’s thought. If Hegelian philosophy had invented its historical others in order to overcome-preserve them, and if such overcoming-preservation had failed, what remains after Hegel is Modernity’s embracing of such otherness. It is here that, for Nietzsche, the moral question becomes demanding. It is here where the modern ideal synthesis collapses to give way to Nietzsche’s question about the legitimacy of the moral judgment of the modern subject before its other.

The picture that Nietzsche’s genealogy unfolds before modern consciousness thereby shows that man is the totality of man’s instincts. But the history of man does not reveal the totality of man’s instincts. History reveals before historical consciousness only those instincts that the historical narration points to as being part of history. Thus History renders the idea of the plurality of man’s instincts, yet it can reveal this plurality only partially—in view of the limits of its historical horizon—and thus cannot divine man’s future. For the future is open for the realization of instincts of which we are not historically conscious (that is, instincts that at least were never realized in genealogically known history).

Extending the horizon of the historical consciousness by exploring the forgotten regions of the history of the human soul may bring the knowledge of man’s future to a higher degree of certainty. But one cannot be fully certain about man’s future insofar as the idea of the plurality of man’s instincts does not exclude the possibility that this plurality can be infinite. Thus, seeking a practical way toward a future beyond nihilism cannot rely on the possibility of its legitimacy as the mere denied depth (of the deep instinct). Nietzsche’s genealogy, being the extension of man’s historical horizon (or his discovery of the Dionysian), becomes bound to the task of uncovering the denied depth of man as repressed, or as that which once appeared on the surface and was later repressed into the depth of man: for Nietzschean genealogy it is thus not entirely right to say there are no facts, only interpretations. There are facts, but only insofar as they inhere in interpretations.⁷⁶

Nietzsche’s turn indeed legitimizes the possibility of the Dionysian and delegitimizes slave-morality as man’s sole possible perspective. Still, this turn reduces the horizon of what is legitimate: it produces a gap between what ought to be legitimized (mere depth) and what seems to be practically legitimized. One cannot but become suspicious of the legitimacy of Nietzsche’s Dionysus as one rooted in the idea of the legitimacy of the deep as such. This suspicion has grown from the moment in which Nietzsche is witnessed reducing the problem of modern atheism to Christian atheism through his following the path of Pauline logic and practice, which delimits the history of man to the concept of overcoming and its following derivations (or Aufhebung, sublimation, and repression).

At this point, I want to keep developing this cardinal criticism of Nietzsche to a further stage,77 and turn to ask how Nietzsche is led on this path. Nietzschean genealogy exposes the possibly seen horizon of human experience as a plurality of instincts before consciousness. In this view, genealogy only delegitimizes tyranny before plurality. But the consciousness of plurality is that temporality from which the question of the future challenges Modernity:

In an age of disintegration that mixes races indiscriminately, human beings have in their bodies the heritage of multiple origins, that is, opposite, and often not merely opposite, drives and value standards that fight each other and rarely permit each other any rest. Such human beings of late cultures and refracted lights will on the average be weaker human beings: their most profound desire is that the war which they are should come to an end.⁷⁸

If it is assumed that Nietzsche’s view of Modernity is that of an end—that is, of an age of disintegration—these words could be taken to reflect Nietzsche’s genealogical consciousness. This is the consciousness that sees the (modern) body comprising the heritage of multiple origins. One comes to realize that Nietzsche’s problem, emerging from his genealogical consciousness, appears in the resulting self-reflection of the two types of man that he describes. This problem relates to the equality among the instincts that have gathered along man’s genealogical experience. Moreover, this equality results in the lack of a principle that is authentic as well as unified or simple (and not a mere illusion of a synthesis) and that alone can make judgments and evaluations possible. Genealogical consciousness demands an order that necessarily involves self-negation: “sabbath of Sabbaths. … [on the side of the] weak [type of man] … [and] self-control, self-outwitting. … [on the side of the] powerful”79 type of man.

It can here be claimed that it is this Nietzschean genealogical consciousness that leads Nietzsche toward the elaboration of his Pauline practical solution, the solution according to which the genealogical spectrum of man’s instincts is ordered (that is, narrated, in the form of repressed deep history of [Pauline] overcoming). The Nietzschean history of Christianity becomes the history of (Socratic) reason. The history of reason is the history of the teleology of reason insofar as this teleology is that of the instrument which had revealed man’s instincts along history, and which ends by revealing its instrumental essence in the end of its history, in the moment in which it reveals before genealogical consciousness, at the same time, all those instincts that this instrument served. Genealogical reason reveals the dialectical claims of all man’s instincts, and thereby becomes that practical solution which rejects them in view of their historical character. Genealogical reason overcomes the condition of the plurality of equal, indiscriminative, and nonunique instincts by way of negating them all as purely historical (that is, as justified only in the past moment in which they were justifiable and as unjustified at this moment). This is the moment in which reason justifies man’s instincts altogether, and thereby negates them altogether. In order to connect Nietzsche’s opposition between Socratic irony and Jesus’s symbolism with his rejection of irony,80 it can be asserted that the limits of genealogy constitute the end of (Socratic) irony: the end of the possibility that one meaning (instinct) appears on the surface when another meaning (instinct) remains latent, in the moment, moreover, in which genealogical reason brings all possibly knowable instincts to the surface.

As a result of its negation of all historical instinct, genealogical reason not only negates the actual instinct claiming for absoluteness, but also negates all past instincts revealed in man’s repressed depth insofar as those are historical instincts. Genealogical reason ends the delegitimatizing results of both slave-morality and noble-morality. Accordingly, Nietzsche—insofar as he delimits the legitimacy of the Dionysian within history rather than within metaphysics—does not secure for the Dionysian its legitimacy in nature as such: Nietzsche locates the Dionysian within what may be called natural culture and natural state. This is the status of the origin: the starting point of human culture in which the singularity of the Dionysian is pregiven. The initial state of human culture is historical and yet does not result from, or involve, historical dialectics.⁸¹

It now appears how the idea of origin protects the Dionysian Antichrist from the destructive impact of the realization of the teleology of the instrumentality of reason in genealogical consciousness. It has thus been shown how Nietzsche’s genealogical consciousness leads Nietzsche into the path of Paul: First, the overcoming of noble-morality (Paul) and slave-morality (Nietzsche) is realized through the negation of all laws (Paul)82 and all instincts (Nietzsche). Second, this negation does not necessarily result in a return to nature as such.⁸³ Third, this negation can result instead in a return to the original culture: to Abraham (Paul) and to Dionysius (Nietzsche). For the origin as such does not suffer the relativity from which all laws suffer. It is true that, for Nietzsche, truth is discovered in a process of self-recognition.⁸⁴ Nietzsche’s attack on Socratism indicates that Nietzsche sought truth without any kind of justification (or dialectics). However, as I explain here, the legitimacy of (Dionysian) art as an innocent origin clarifies how Nietzsche’s truth can be aesthetically justified without being discursively justified. In the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, Nietzsche’s idea of the destructive character of history does not differ from his later idea of the destructive character of genealogy:

When the historical sense reigns without restraint, and all its consequences are realized, it uproots the future because it destroys illusions and robs the things that exits of the atmosphere in which alone they can live. Historical justice … always undermines the living thing and brings it down: Its judgment is always annihilating. … [This is what] one can learn in the case of Christianity … under the influence of a historical treatment.⁸⁵

On behalf of this, Nietzsche makes the “demand that man should above all learn to live and should employ history only in the service of the life he has learned to live.”⁸⁶ But in this essay, Nietzsche neither tells us anything directly about life nor conceals it from us.⁸⁷ If that is the case, Nietzsche (who could not give a definition of life before the use of history) turns the order of the young Nietzsche on its head: after the use of genealogy, life shall be lived in the form of a new naivety.