Nietzsche Versus Paul

The impact of Nietzsche’s genealogical criticism of Modernity implies that, until Nietzsche, Modernity held a false self-consciousness of being affirmative of life. If this is the case, Modernity should be in some form worldly, a form according to which the ascetic character of modern science-morality remained so far hidden. To approach the form in which Modernity appears to be worldly, it is time to recall that, for Nietzsche, paradisiacal science remained a survivor after the priest waged a war against it. Now science, which has become modern, remains bound to the context of its continuous-discontinuous relationship with Christianity. Modern science seems to keep living as a survivor in spite of being discontinuous or because of being continuous with Christianity. This fact becomes clear as soon as characteristics of science as a survivor find their expression in the place in which Nietzsche locates Modernity’s conception of the affirmation of life in the idea of self-preservation:

Nietzsche assumes that the law of life is one. Accordingly, the will of life, or the affirmation of life, is governed by this one law. Although life may find its expression in the different spheres of nature and culture, the law of life-affirmation does not recognize the division between the human condition and the natural condition. So if the human condition and the natural condition appear to present different wills of life, such a difference should be reduced to the one law of will of life, to the really fundamental instinct of life according to which one condition should embrace and explain the second. Further, Nietzsche criticizes the modern natural scientist’s reduction of the natural condition to the human condition. From the viewpoint of his human nook, the modern natural scientist projects his condition of distress on nature. The modern scientist makes of the wish to preserve oneself the one law of the will of life that extends from the human condition of distress in order to embrace and explain the will of life in nature.

Nietzsche does not criticize this (Spinoza’s modern) attitude by introducing one will of life suitable for the human condition and another will of life suitable for the natural condition.2 Instead, Nietzsche gives nature priority. The natural scientist should come out of his human nook and realize that the will of life is a will to power for which the will to survive forms only an exception. From this viewpoint, the human condition, as reflected in the modern condition of distress, ceases to be the end of some possible teleology of the human condition, or of both the unity of the human and the natural conditions. If, for Nietzsche, the end of the will of life is power, then the instinct of self-preservation should be subjected to the economy of waste of the will to power.³ It appears that Nietzsche brings the relationship between the will to power and the will to self-preservation to the limit of sacrifice: life’s fundamental instinct whose aim is the expansion of power might sacrifices self-preservation.

Nietzsche’s claim that the will to power constitutes the only fundamental instinct of life acquires its far reaching implications for Modernity. This claim is the ultimate destruction of Modernity’s idea of progress, that is, the idea that man, and thereafter the modern man, constitutes the crown of creation.⁴ What is of much more significance at this stage is the fact that this Nietzschean claim is pointing to the role that Nietzsche assigns to Modernity within his history of Christianity. Nietzsche claims that if the will to power is the will of life, then the exceptionality of self-preservation in this frame belongs to the order of the temporal: “The struggle for existence is only an exception, a temporary restriction of the will of life.”⁵ If so, and if the instinct of self-preservation defines Modernity, by way of being the instinct through which Modernity legitimizes and affirms (its) life, then Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power seems to demand that (temporal) Modernity itself should be sacrificed.

This resulting demand to sacrifice Modernity seems to me to be in absolute harmony with Nietzsche’s previously discussed demand that Modernity should be overcome. Such harmony would lead to the task of answering the next question: what is the overcoming of Modernity as the sacrifice of self-preservation? The answer may be formulated as follows: overcoming Modernity (as self-preservation) is the overcoming of the preserved self through a true return to nature. This short answer rightly follows the logic of Nietzsche’s criticism of self-preservation. Yet, it still demands a deeper analysis in order to verify the extent to which it affirms the main claim concerning Nietzsche’s attempt to provide man with an authentic lie as an alternative to Modernity’s uncovered nonauthentic lie.

For Nietzsche, a true return to nature is not that of Rousseau’s return: it is an overcoming, progress, a going-up, rather than a going-back. Going-up to nature is the attainment of the unity of nature: the faith that only what is separate and individual may be rejected, that in the totality everything is redeemed and affirmed. If some separate and individual faith affirms itself and thereby dialectically denies other faiths, the Dionysian faith of Nietzsche or of the Nietzschean Goethe becomes the faith of faiths: the highest of all possible faiths through its natural unification of all individual faiths.6

For Nietzsche, the return to nature is the overcoming of the shadow of God: “when all these shadows of God [humanizations of the world] cease to darken our minds … we [will] complete our re-definition of nature … [and] may begin to ‘naturalize’ humanity in terms of a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature.”⁷ Second, Nietzsche says that if “we still have to vanquish his [God’s] shadow,”⁸ “let us [also] beware of thinking that the world is a living being.”⁹ The unity of nature, which Nietzsche sought, is the unity of the dead: “The living is merely a type of what is dead.”¹⁰ Thus, “the will to power which is the will of life,”¹¹ is the will of the dead world. Further, Nietzsche states that this pure nature does not “have any instinct for self-preservation or any other instinct. … There are only necessities. … and the whole musical box repeats eternally its tune.”¹² It results that this unity of dead nature is a unity without end: the circle of the eternal recurrence of the same.

Turning back to Nietzsche’s interpretation of Goethe’s “grand attempt to overcome the eighteenth century through a return to nature”13 illuminates how the totality of the faith in the eternal recurrence of the same becomes the totality of the faith in eternity, which, as such, rejects the timely, temporal, separate, and individual. The legitimacy of the eternal recurrence of the same is that of the naive faith in eternity vis-à-vis the illegitimacy of the dialectical faith in the historical. It is this aspect that shows the idea of the eternal recurrence in harmony with the idea of overcoming. The faith in the eternal recurrence of the same dictates a necessity; therefore, this faith overcomes or rejects. Its love of its fate (“amor fati”)¹⁴ is not passivity depending on metaphysical necessity; rather, this love makes its faith: “how one becomes what one is.”¹⁵

Goethe’s eighteenth century, like Nietzsche’s nineteenth century, is a timely Modernity whose overcoming is demanded by that necessity dictated by the faith in the eternal recurrence of the same. Necessity is the overcoming of the superfluous. By way of overcoming, the unity of nature is meant to substitute the unity of the world from the viewpoint of humanization, or the unity of the teleology of self-preservation as a superfluous teleology:

Physiologists should think before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength—life itself is will to power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results. In short, here as everywhere else, let us beware of superfluous teleological principles—one of which is the instinct of self-preservation (we owe it to Spinoza’s inconsistency). Thus method, which must be essentially economy of principles, demands it.¹⁶;

Overcoming, as a true return to nature and as the overcoming of the preserved self, is the overcoming of the superfluous. If the teleology of the instinct of self-preservation is superfluous, then the preserved-self itself, insofar as it constitutes the end of this teleology, becomes superfluous. More precisely, what becomes superfluous is the unity of the preserved-self, the unity of the preserved-self in being the grammatical unity of the subject,17 which is said to be the modern end of the teleology of the history of Christianity. The preserved-self of the modern subject appears before Nietzsche’s genealogical consciousness as the place in which man’s instincts are accumulated without being brought into (a synthetic) unity. Thus, if a unity is attributed to this subject, this unity cannot be but the mere grammatical unity of the subject. As such, the principle of the will to power rejects the idea of preservation. Moreover, if the (preserved-) self is not a carrier of the will to power (that is, is not a simple instinct), it becomes superfluous from the viewpoint of the necessity of the will to power. Thus, Nietzsche warns: “I fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in Grammar.”¹⁸ This is God as a place of accumulation: “the Christian God, as the maximum God attained so far.”¹⁹

Modernity maintains the duality of this-world and the other-world, while the legitimacy Modernity’s worldliness is grounded in this duality. More precisely, the historical meaning of Modernity’s worldliness is delimited within Christian political theology, or the meaning of man’s activity within eschatological time extending from after the resurrection of Jesus-Christ and before the coming of the Antichrist. For Christianity, the death and the resurrection of Jesus-Christ mark the beginning of salvation, which ought to find its completion in his second coming. Jesus-Christ is not the end of history as such, but rather the end of the history of the Jewish law and the beginning of the history of the Christian faith. Eschatological time is the time in which the Christian faith lives, becomes a time of hope awaiting Christ. At the same time, this time is a time of fear insofar as the Christian text promises catastrophe before salvation. For Christ shall not return before the appearance of the Antichrist.

It is possible to avoid the contraction resulting from the dual nature of Christian time once the Christian believer becomes satisfied with individual salvation that inner faith can guarantee. Yet in this way, the contradictory duality of fear and hope is translated from the frame of time to that of space. On the ground of the inner character of the Christian idea of salvation, this-world’s space can be divided into an individual sphere and a collective one. This is where the first one is meant to correspond to the order of the time of hope and the second to the order of the time of fear. The unity of these two spheres assigns to the inner sphere the task of furthering the hoped-for salvation and to the second one the task of postponing the feared catastrophe.

This formulation is one way to observe the birth of the Delayer (Katechon, κατέχων) of the coming of the Antichrist in the Pauline text.20 Paul’s speech on the Katechon allows supposing that Paul, like the recipients of his letter, the Thessalonians, seems to have known the identity of the Katechon.²¹ The reader should have noticed that my aim here is one directed at the interpretation of Paul’s Katechon in relation to Nietzsche’s criticism of Modernity’s worldliness from the viewpoint of the principle of life-affirmation. This aim brings the prominent understanding of the Katechon to the focus of our attention, namely, the otherworldly political one.²²

This political identity of the Katechon is also revealed in view of its in-between location within the symmetry of good and evil, or between Christ and the Antichrist. This is the symmetrical concealment—the existence without appearance—of both sides of the opposition of good and evil in Paul’s Christian now standing between the past coming of Christ and his future second coming. On the one hand, from the moment of his first coming, Christ is there but shall remain inner until he returns to appear. And on the other, also in this now, the mystery of iniquity is already at work and the Antichrist might be revealed only in his time. In sum, the Katechon’s mere occupation of the political outer-sphere, until he be taken out of the way, assures the keeping latent of the already existing Christ and Antichrist. On the basis of our Nietzschean-oriented reading of the Pauline text, this state of things echoes my analysis of Nietzsche’s conception of the concealment of the Dionysian as man’s deep evil. Besides that, the Pauline concealment of Christ echoes Nietzsche’s criticism of Christianity’s “truly grand politics of revenge, of a farseeing, subterranean, slowly advancing, and premeditated revenge.”²³

The examination of the Nietzschean idea of the modern as Katechon calls his conception of the modern now to the focus of attention. To correspond to the idea of the Katechon, the modern now ought to be defined as the sphere in which the Katechon appears. This appearance can take place under the condition that this sphere is given its legitimacy by the truth of the Christian faith that lies beyond and underneath the temporality of the Katechon’s sphere. In other words, first, the truth of the Christian faith stands underneath the Katechon’s temporality in being its (concealed) grounding metaphysics (of good and evil). Second, it is beyond this temporality in being its past (the death and resurrection of Christ) and in being its future (the second coming of Christ).

The idea of the modern Katechon first appears in Nietzsche’s early writings in the context of his praising of Wagner. Here, Nietzsche’s Katechon are the Germans: “If the Germans have for a century been especially devoted to the study of history, this shows that within the agitation of the contemporary world they represent the retarding, delaying, pacifying power [die aufhaltende, verzögernde, beruhigende Macht].”24 For Nietzsche, such devotion becomes problematic in being conservative, in being “a coming to rest within oneself, a peaceful being for oneself and relaxation,” in the context of Modernity, or within the agitation of the contemporary world. In continuity with this, the German Katechon is the delayer of the Antichrist, being possibly pregnant, or concealed, in the modern agitation, “all revolutionary and reform movements,… everything revolutionary and innovative.” At the same time, this German Katechon is the preservation of Christianity. For this “history … [is] a disguised Christian theodicy,… [therefore it] serve[s] as an opiate.”²⁵

Two interesting features appear in this Nietzschean portrait of the modern Katechon. The first is the reactive character of the modern Katechon in relation to the revolutionary character of modern times. The case of this reactive character is not that of Christian morality’s kind of reaction. The latter “direct[s]. … [its creative] value-positing eye … outward.”26 The former directs its conservative eye inward. Thus, this fact speaks of the cleanliness of the modern Katechon’s conservatism, of its being preservation-without-overcoming. The second feature is the gap between modern Katechonism, being a coming to rest within oneself, a peaceful being for oneself and relaxation, on the one side, and being “power,”²⁷ on the other. Here, although the first aspect of this gap points to the inner and the second points to the outer, the case of this gap is by no means one of contradiction. On the contrary, those two aspects preserve the primary characteristics of the Pauline Katechon. The otherworldly (political) power is the preservation of what has been achieved so far, that is, the preservation of inner salvation.

Against the reactive character of the delaying German history, as one emerging against the background of modern agitation, Nietzsche draws his image of Wagner as its alternative. But one should not rush to the conclusion that the early Nietzsche has Wagner as the Antichrist. Instead, amid the modern agitation, Wagner “unites what was separate, feeble and inactive … he possesses an astringent power. … a spirit who only brings together and arranges: for he is one who unites what he has brought together into a living structure, a simplifier of the world.”²⁸

In his later writings, German history continues to signify Nietzsche’s conception of the Katechon. And what becomes variable is Nietzsche’s view of Wagner together with his view of the Germans.²⁹ The latter is anticipated in the passage just quoted. The fact that German history represents the idea of the modern Katechon may lead to the result that “some might perhaps turn into a commendation of them [the Germans].”³⁰ On the one hand, the latter Nietzsche, who had turned against Wagner, does not only preserve the possible commendation of the German Katechon. Nietzsche actually turns his above-discussed argumentation, in Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, upside down. The honoring and hope-promising German resistance to Wagner is a sign that they still possess some degree of health amid European decadence: “The Germans, the delayers par excellence in history, are today the most retarded civilized nation in Europe: this has its advantages—by the same token they are relatively the youngest.”³¹

For Nietzsche, this would be the only advantage resulting from the fact that the Germans represent the Katechon. Indeed, on the other hand, Nietzsche continues to see the German delayers in a negative way. Accordingly, Nietzsche’s return to “the old problem: ‘What is German?’”32 remains the most important location for the elucidation of this conception of the modern German Katechon:

We Germans are Hegelians even if there never had been any Hegel, insofar as we (unlike all Latins) instinctively attribute a deeper meaning and greater value to becoming and development than what “is.” … It would be. … [another] question whether Schopenhauer, too, with his pessimism—that is, the problem of the value of existence—had to be precisely a German. I believe not. … The decline of the faith in the Christian god, the triumph of scientific atheism, is a generally European event. … Conversely, one might charge precisely the Germans … that they delayed this triumph of atheism most dangerously for the longest time. Hegel in particular was its delayer par excellence, with his grandiose attempt to persuade us of the divinity of existence, appealing as a last resort to our sixth sense, “the historical sense.”³³

Nietzsche’s uses of the expression delayer to denote, besides Hegel, Kant, Leibniz, Goethe, German music, and Charlemagne.34 His conception of the modern Katechon is mainly bound to German Modernity.³⁵ Aphorism 357 from The Gay Science presents, however, Nietzsche’s most comprehensive elucidation of his conception of the Katechon. Fundamentally, this aphorism speaks of the idea that “Schopenhauer. … [the] pessimist…. [the] good European”³⁶ is the Antichrist (of scientific atheism), and that the German Hegel is his Katechon.³⁷ By calling Hegel a Katechon, Nietzsche automatically deprives Hegel’s philosophy of what it is considered to be, of its being the second coming of Christ insofar as this philosophy claims itself to be the making concrete of the Spirit. Such a result is anticipated in my claim according to which Nietzsche’s philosophy stands against the background of the Hegelian failure to bring the history of the spirit into a genuine synthesis. Here Nietzsche arrives at the conclusion resulting from this failure. If Hegel is not the second coming of Christ, then Hegel is a Katechon. For, structurally, Hegel is back into the now between the first Christ and the second one.

Hegel is not the overcoming-preservation of Christianity. He is the preservation-without-overcoming of Christianity. Nietzsche’s confronting of Hegel the Katechon with Schopenhauer the Antichrist leads to Nietzsche’s Schopenhauer appropriating the idea of self-overcoming from Hegel:

As a philosopher, Schopenhauer was the first admitted and inexorable atheist among us Germans: This was the background of his enmity against Hegel. The ungodliness of existence was for him something given, palpable, indisputable…. [and the] unconditional and honest atheism is simply the presupposition of the way he poses his problem, … being the most fateful act of two thousand years of discipline for truth that in the end forbids itself the lie in faith in God. You see what it was that really triumphed over the Christian god: Christian morality itself … Looking at nature as if it were proof of the goodness and governance of god; interpreting history in honor of some divine reason … that is all over now, that has man’s conscience against it. … In this severity, if anywhere, we are good Europeans and heirs of Europe’s longest and most courageous self-overcoming.³⁸

Nietzsche’s substitution of the Hegelian self-overcoming with that of Schopenhauer’s overcoming-preservation reduces the earlier to the status of preservation-without-overcoming—indeed, “for without Hegel there could have been no Darwin.”³⁹ This is, in the end, Modernity’s unauthentic lie. This is the unbelievable idea of a moral world order, or as the young Nietzsche had anticipated, “history… [as] a disguised Christian theodicy,… written with [out] … justice and warmth of feeling.”⁴⁰

In sum, for Nietzsche, there has been no second return of Christ and there shall be no such return. So far, Modernity reached with Hegel the stage of the Katechon’s preservation-without-overcoming and with Schopenhauer the stage of overcoming-preservation. From the point view of Nietzsche, there remains another stage that Schopenhauer’s anti-Christian atheism had not achieved. This is the overcoming-without-preservation of Christianity:

If Schopenhauer is the overcoming-preservation of Christianity, he is the Antichrist only partially. More precisely, Schopenhauerian atheism represents the Antichrist in relation to Hegelian Katechonism insofar as Hegelian Katechonism is the delayer of atheism as such. Hegel delays both the atheism of Schopenhauer and the atheism of Nietzsche (or the atheism of Zarathustra meeting the old pope and the atheism of Zarathustra meeting the ugliest man). Thus, within Schopenhauer’s overcoming-preservation, overcoming appears to be his mere positing of the question about the meaning of existence, where preservation turns to be his hasty Christian-ascetic moral answer.

Here Nietzsche provides us with an important differentiation between the temporality of preservation within Schopenhauer’s overcoming-preservation and the temporality of preservation within the Hegelian delaying preservation-without-overcoming. From the beginning, the temporality of the Hegelian Katechon is one meant to preserve the legitimacy of the Christian Weltanschauung through its delaying of atheism. On the other hand, the starting point of (Nietzsche’s) Schopenhauer is atheism, insofar as he assumed the ungodliness of existence and has the unconditional and honest atheism as his presupposition. The temporality of Schopenhauer’s preservation of the shadow of the Christian God turns out to be a later result, a hasty answer, and accordingly a way of remaining stuck.

Nietzsche’s Schopenhauer does not provide the legitimacy of the modern Antichrist. This legitimacy, like the legitimacy of the Katechon, is pregiven within the hermeneutics of the determinism of Christian history. This is the case insofar as it is “the most fateful. … The event [of the death of the Christian God] after which this problem [of the value of existence] was to be expected for certain—an astronomer of the soul could have calculated the very day and hour for it.”42 Schopenhauer’s question merely opened up a new sphere of temporality. For Nietzsche, this is the temporality of the many following centuries, insofar as “it will require a few centuries before this question can even be heard completely and in its full depth.”⁴³ This is the temporality of atheism as such, insofar as the next centuries will remain stuck where Schopenhauer remained stuck, in Christianity’s ascetic moral perspectives in which faith is renounced along with the faith of God. Out of these words it can be determined that the overcoming-without-preservation, after Schopenhauer’s overcoming-preservation, is preserved for some alternative faith, which cannot be (dialectically) renounced: an authentic faith beyond the history of Christianity, as a history that includes the two—the Hegelian as well as the Schopenhauerian—phases of the temporality of German-European Modernity.

So far, the development of the Nietzschean history of Christianity has reached its highest point. This is the point at which the “higher man” (höhere Mensch) appears as the last man on the stage of this history. In this connection, Nietzsche’s rejection of the modern idea of progress should be recalled: “‘Progress’ is merely a modern idea, that is to say a false idea.” This rejection should not entail the result that the history of Christianity is not a developmental history: “The European of today is of far less value than the European of the Renaissance; onward development is not by any means, by any necessity the same thing as elevation, advance, strengthening.”44

For Nietzsche, the end of the history of Christianity in Modernity is development without progress. What, then, would be Nietzsche’s concept of development that forbids the deduction of the idea of development as progress? My claim remains that Nietzsche defines the development of the history of Christianity as the history of the overcoming-preservation of slave-morality and the constant concealment of noble-morality. In using the European of today and the European of the Renaissance, Nietzsche refers to the higher man and the overman [Übermensch], respectively. The higher man is the conclusion of the history of Christianity, or its purification in being the ultimate realization of slave-morality’s good man: “But now this God has died. You higher men, this God was your greatest danger. It is only since he lies in his tomb that you have been resurrected. Only now the great noon comes; only now the higher man becomes—lord.”⁴⁵ This is the last moment of the overcoming-preservation of Christian slave-morality, of the moment of pity, modern Buddhism, nihilism, pessimism, the wondering free spirit, skepticism, laughter, dance, and the good European.

The modern higher man has become the lord of the stage of the history of Christianity. This is not Nietzsche’s ultimate lord. The higher man is rather a temporal lord. As such, “man is a bridge and no end.”⁴⁶ Thus, the higher man, or the last man, is himself a bridge. Besides that, the transformation of the higher man into a lord is a reflection of the transformation of Zarathustra. Zarathustra (IV) directs his speech “On the Higher Man” to the higher men as he excludes from his audience the ass that was in their company.⁴⁷ He excludes the masses to whom Zarathustra (I) had turned with such a speech.⁴⁸

The task of temporal Modernity, meant to by realized through the (last) higher man, becomes the overcoming of man so as to reach the overman. If that is correct, the decisive question that emerges here is the following one: is the overman’s transcending of man one of overcoming-preservation? Zarathustra says: “You higher men, do you suppose I have come to set right what you have set wrong?… No! No! Three times no! Ever more, ever better ones of your kind shall perish—for it shall be ever worse and harder for you. Thus only—thus alone, man grows to the height where lightning strikes and breaks him: lofty enough for lightning.”49

Zarathustra’s answer is negative. If the overman is to appear after the higher man, the overman is not to preserve the higher man. And if the higher man is to overcome himself, the higher man is to perish: the overman represents Nietzsche’s nondualistic vision of human perfectibility.⁵⁰ Indeed, a positive answer to the above question would necessarily end in a contradiction. If the overman is more valuable than the higher man, and if the overman is the overcoming-preservation of the higher man, it should be concluded that the history of Christianity is a history of progress. This conclusion is avoidable only if the overman is considered as a break, or as an overcoming-without-preservation. Also, this conclusion is avoidable only if the history of Christianity did not preserve the overman (that is, if it had always concealed the overman, even if the overman had appeared along it course), as it is the case of the man of the Renaissance.

This end raises a crucial question about the significance of the Dionysian, or, better, of Ancient Greek tradition, as it comes to fill the content of the idea of origin within the Christian structure. The matter of this question is the inspection of the reality vis-à-vis the virtuality of Nietzsche’s Dionysian ideal and its Greek horizon as seen from within the Pauline structure. The Dionysian does not seem to be able to transcend its Christian structure. For also when Nietzsche claims noble-morality’s values to be natural values, Paul also claims slave-morality’s values to be natural values.51 And as Nietzsche ends by legitimizing the repressed, the truth of the Greek origin becomes relative to the historical horizon opened by the genealogy of Christianity.⁵² Besides, for Nietzsche, the Dionysian remains secondary in relation to the Antichrist. At the last line, Nietzsche’s ideal has been shown to be the naive authentic lie as such, and not some specific Dionysian authentic lie. For Nietzsche, this lie is meant to provide the overman with the possibility of “go[ing] back to the innocent conscience of the beast of prey.”⁵³

I opted in this investigation for a path of inquiry into Nietzsche’s history of Christianity, or Nietzsche and the Antichrist, in view of my criticism of Heidegger’s and Deleuze’s inquiry, which delimits itself to the horizon of the history of philosophy, or Nietzsche and the anti-Plato, and as an alternative to it. I do not mean that such criticism should direct itself to some Christian source for the idea of the history of philosophy.⁵⁴ Instead, I wish to point to the fact that the horizon of the history of philosophy is pregiven, and consequently, from the start, does not allow the interpretation of Nietzsche’s thought beyond the boundaries set by such a horizon. Likewise, the path of inquiry I applied uncovers an open historical horizon of Christianity. Christianity left the name of the Antichrist open to speculations. On the one hand, Christianity binds its name, Christ, with the eternal truth: “we are bound to give thanks always to God for you, brethren beloved of the Lord, because God hath from the beginning chosen you to salvation through sanctification of the Spirit and belief of the truth.”⁵⁵ And, on the other hand, Christianity binds the name of the Antichrist with any Christian-other, “for all men have not faith,”⁵⁶ that is, those who follow “all deceivableness of unrighteousness”⁵⁷ of the Antichrist. For Christianity, the Antichrist is the deceiver as such, whom “all men” believe to be God.⁵⁸ And for Nietzsche, the Antichrist is exactly that any deceiving Christian-other, truth as deception, as an authentic lie: to use Thus Spoke Zarathustra’s style and language, Zarathustra’s deceiving Evangelium.

It is clear by now that the Antichrist acquires in this case the identity of the Dionysian in view of its need of a legitimizing origin and in view of the Dionysian becoming such an origin on the basis of the limits of the historical horizon that Nietzsche’s genealogy opened. Yet, if the idea of the eternal recurrence of the same is taken to stand at the center of Nietzsche’s Dionysian philosophy,59 it would be as speculative as it would be excessive to refer the idea of the eternal recurrence of the same to Solomon’s wisdom in Ecclesiastes. I am not intending to lead the reader in such a direction. My intention has been to show that Modernity’s way to Athens (philosophy) goes through Jerusalem (theology).⁶⁰

A closer criticism of this misleading fictional fixation of the horizon of man’s history—as it becomes the history of philosophy—further supports this claim. The question about the significance of the Greek Dionysian origin should then be examined through an assessment of its unity, which could reflect its independence from its location within the structure of the history of Christianity. This is, in the end, the unity of the idea of the eternal recurrence of the same, insofar as it becomes Nietzsche’s “faith of faiths.” I recall here the criticism of Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal recurrence as self-contradictory,⁶¹ which implies that the reconstruction of the unity of this idea (as metaphysics) is merely a possible interpretation.⁶²

It is helpful at this point to unfold a discussion of Löwith’s thesis, insofar as Löwith treats the idea of the eternal recurrence from the point of view of Nietzsche’s Philosophy together with his criticism of the Christian components in Nietzsche’s thought.⁶³ Löwith’s findings speak of the fact that the idea of the eternal recurrence of the same splits into two irreconcilable cosmological and anthropological parts. On the one hand, the cosmological part describes the goal-less revolution of the universe. On the other, the anthropological part portrays a superhuman act of the human will that consummates the self-overcoming of nihilism.⁶⁴ Löwith finds the second, anthropological part problematic, since it contradicts the positivistic presence of physical energy in the first part. For him, the teaching of the eternal recurrence is a self-made legislation and religion that reflect Nietzsche’s desire to raise finite existence to an eternal “significance.”⁶⁵

Löwith understands Nietzsche’s religiosity as being Christian and un-Greek.66 I totally agree with Löwith’s view of the Christian character of Nietzsche’s thought. But I remain suspicious of Löwith’s misleading assumptions since they lead him to conclude that “the Christian pathos … caused Nietzsche to speak as an ‘Antichrist’ and no longer as a philosopher.” In taking the viewpoint of Nietzsche’s Dionysian philosophy as his starting point, Löwith condemns Nietzsche’s departure from the path of philosophy and his taking of the Christian path. Löwith makes philosophy a constant and Christianity a variable. Also, Löwith’s philosophical approach creates an absolute opposition between Christianity and atheism as such. For Löwith, Nietzsche cooks on the eternal fire of the ancient criticism (of Celsus and Porphyry) of Christianity, but spoils it all by adding much of the pepper of Christian historical dialectics.⁶⁷

From Löwith’s perspective, this is the historical dialectics of modern atheism. Its source, according to Löwith, is Paul’s differentiation between knowledge—as the wisdom of this-world—and the true wisdom of faith, in relation to which the wisdom of this-world is foolishness before God.⁶⁸ The history of postchristian (nachchristlische), or modern, philosophy (Descartes, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Jaspers) becomes a history of the ambiguity of atheism in the (church’s) God of revelation and faith in the God of philosophy.⁶⁹

Löwith, like Nietzsche, finds salvation (without Christian-modern ideas such as willing and overcoming) in the return to an authentic Greek origin. According to Löwith, Greek philosophy is as “little atheist” as modern philosophy. However, from the viewpoint of Greek philosophy there is no opposition between faith and knowledge. The Greek holding-true (Fürwahrhalten) of the doxa and the true knowledge of the episteme are different from faith as pistis.⁷⁰ Doxa and episteme, or the popular religion of the polis and theology/philosophy,⁷¹ build a continuum, insofar as the latter seeks a higher knowledge.