Comparative Religion in The Antichrist: Pastiche, Subversion, Cultural Intervention
Antoine Panaïoti
Large portions of The Antichrist are dedicated to comparative discussions of the relationship between Christianity and three other important religious traditions, namely Buddhism, Judaism, and Brāhmaṇism. Having said this, Nietzsche’s exercise in comparative religion in this text is superficially researched, hermeneutically reckless, and methodologically uncritical. Even by the relatively lenient standards of late-nineteenth-century research, comparative religion in The Antichrist is terrible scholarship. Note, however, that such criticism would only have weight if Nietzsche’s purpose in this text were indeed to weigh in on the scholarly debates of the day and to set the record straight on the “true” historical and ideological relationships between Christianity and Buddhism, Judaism, and Brāhmaṇism. But was this really his intention? There are, in my opinion, good reasons to doubt that it was. In fact, I would further submit that to think or assume as much betrays a profound misunderstanding of what it is Nietzsche sets out to achieve through his late foray into the fraught terrain of comparative religion.
In this chapter, I argue that Nietzsche’s discussion of comparative religion in The Antichrist does not aim to disclose the truth or facts about the matters at hand, but is instead strictly tactical. As such, its significance, purpose, and meaning can only be understood against the backdrop of the cultural and intellectual struggles in which it stakes its claims. More precisely, my arguments go to show that comparative religion in The Antichrist is best understood as a kind of pastiche of comparative religion as it had frequently been practiced in Continental Europe since the days of Voltaire, and more specifically as a pastiche designed to subvert Schopenhauer’s variation on the time-worn theme of the Judeo-Christian religions’ relationship to the Indian. Nietzsche’s exercise in comparative religion, I conclude, is best understood as a cultural intervention.
The chapter is separated into two parts. In part I, I provide a succinct overview of Nietzsche’s main comparativist claims in The Antichrist. In part II, I present and defend my interpretation of the status and purpose of Nietzsche’s use of comparative religion in this text. In the conclusion, I examine the implications of my interpretation as regards Nietzsche’s standing as a philosopher.
1 Comparative religion in The Antichrist
Nietzsche advances five main comparativist theses in The Antichrist:
1. Christianity and Buddhism are both nihilistic religions of décadence, but in every other respect they are diametrically opposed (20–23).
2. The original εὐαγγέλιον of Jesus of Nazareth was initially a “Buddhistic peace movement”1 that stood beyond any form of ressentiment (42; see also 31).
3. After the death of Jesus, the early Christian community transformed Jesus’s εὐαγγέλιον into its opposite, namely a thoroughly un-Buddhistic δυσαγγέλιον (or “bad message”) animated by an insatiable thirst for revenge (36, 39, and 42).
4. This profound distortion of Jesus’s original message represents a Judaicization of original Christianity, albeit in a way that is far more life-negating than Judaism ever had been or could be (42–45).
5. The strictly hierarchical orthodox Brāhmaṇism of the Manusmṛti embodies a type of ideology that is the antipode of the anarchist Pauline Christian (56–57).
In the pages that follow, I unpack each of these in turn.
1.1 A tale of two nihilisms
What does Nietzsche mean when he writes that Buddhism and Christianity are both “nihilistic religions” or “religions of décadence” (A 20)? And in what sense are they nevertheless, on his account, “separated from one another in the most striking fashion” (ibid.)?
To answer these questions, we must specify what the terms “décadence” and “nihilistic” denote in Nietzsche’s late prose. Décadence describes the psycho-physiological condition of an organism when there is internal disorder and discord among its drives.2 Its primary symptoms are profound exhaustion (A 17–18), low resilience (A 29–30), and high irritability (A 15)—or, in a word, “weakness” (EH “Destiny” 4; “Books” BT 2).
At The Antichrist 30 Nietzsche explains that the décadent type’s actions and preferences are primarily governed by two instincts, both of which result from his or her “extreme susceptibility to pain.” The first is “an instinctive hatred of reality.” The décadent experiences reality itself as an unavoidable source of pain, and, as a result, comes to feel profound hostility toward it. The second core décadent instinct, Nietzsche tells us, is “an instinctive exclusion of all aversion, of all hostility.” Resistance and struggle are by necessity a source of anguish and suffering for the décadent, so it is only natural that s/he should seek to avoid confrontation at all costs.
Central features of such “religions of décadence” as Christianity and Buddhism can, on Nietzsche’s account, be explained with reference to these two instincts. The notion of salvation that is so central to these traditions is but an expression of the décadents’ hatred of reality. To wit: be it conceived in terms of entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven, unio mystica, or nirvāṇa, the ideal of salvation betrays a desire to escape from reality into some “other” (read: “unreal”) world out of hostility toward reality itself (A 15; GM I 6; TI “Reason” 6). The second primary décadent instinct—that is, exclusion of all aversion and hostility—accounts for the central role of a certain kind of love in Christianity and Buddhism. This is a negative kind of love, the principle of which is non-aversion, non-enmity, and nonresistance (A 30). As such, it stands in sharp contrast to the positive forms of love Nietzsche values, namely those that involve choosing and thus discriminating, caring and thus at times defending, at times attacking.3
The foregoing makes it easier to see why Nietzsche describes the ethos at the heart of Christianity and Buddhism as “nihilistic” or “life-denying.” If, as Nietzsche avers, it is of the essence of life to engage with the world, to embrace struggle and strife, to seek to overcome obstacles and resistance, and to cultivate relations founded on positive, discriminating forms of love, respect, and care,4 then in preaching ideals and values that oppose all of this as folly or sin Buddhists and Christians betray their thoroughly nihilistic, life-denying impulses.
Nietzsche is quick to point out, however, that there is a crucial difference between speaking of folly and speaking of sin in this connection. This is what most fundamentally distinguishes Christianity from Buddhism on Nietzsche’s reading. The Buddhist’s struggle, Nietzsche explains at The Antichrist 20, is against suffering and the folly that causes it, not against sin. Unlike their deluded Christian counterparts, Buddhists are lucid décadents who understand that the causes of human sorrow are unhealthy habits of body and mind for which the individual alone is responsible. In fact, Buddhists reject from the very outset the idea of an omnipotent world-creator, lawgiver, and divine judge, thereby undermining the very foundation of sin and other such moral concepts (ibid.). Christians, in stark contrast to Buddhists, hold primitive metaphysical-cum-theological beliefs, hand in hand with their childish moral counterparts, foremost among which is the crude notion that suffering is the consequence of sin—or transgression against God—and that atonement alone can bring it to cessation (A 21).
Buddhism and Christianity are also opposed as regards the practices that they promote. Nietzsche describes the measures the Buddha prescribes to combat suffering as a form of physical and psychological hygiene:5 a life of open-air travel, the consumption of light food, the cultivation of peace- and cheer-promoting ideas, and, most importantly, the uprooting of all “feelings of revenge, aversion, and ressentiment” (A 20; see also EH “Wise” 6). This stands in sharp contrast to Christian practices, which Nietzsche lambasts as grounded in revulsion before the body, the repudiation of hygiene and cleanliness as “sensual,” abandonment to such harmful sentiments such as guilt, self-loathing, ressentiment, hatred, and the “will to persecute” (A 21–22).
Let us now take a step back to map these crucial differences between Christianity and Buddhism onto The Antichrist 30’s psychological model of décadence. Note, first, that there is an intractable tension between the décadents’ two primary instincts: while their “instinctive hatred of reality” propels them down the path of ressentiment and rancor toward all that is living, décadents’ “instinctive exclusion of all aversion and hostility” urges them to abandon all feelings of hostility toward self, other, and world. Though Nietzsche never explicitly points to it, this tension is altogether unsurprising, considering that Nietzsche describes décadents precisely as people whose instincts are in a state of “anarchy” (TI “Socrates” 4). In light of the foregoing, it stands to reason that Buddhism and Christianity offer two diametrically opposed resolutions to this tension. Buddhism is a genuine religion of (décadent) love and peace in which the “instinctive exclusion of all aversion and hostility” is master, while the “instinctive hatred of reality” has been subdued and sublimated into a gentle and unthreatening “turning away from the world.” Conversely, in Christianity it is the “hatred of reality” that has gained the ascendant, such that what looks like a message of love and peace is really a message of hatred and war masquerading as its opposite.
It is in this way, I suggest, that Nietzsche can have his cake and eat it too. While Buddhism and Christianity share a common core in that they are religions of décadent nihilism, they are also perfect opposites as regards the drive that dominates (and is dominated) in each. They stand on opposite extremes of the nihilist spectrum, and, as such, appear as inverted mirror images of one another.
1.2 Jesus as Buddha
The plot of The Antichrist thickens as Nietzsche turns his attention to the figure of what we would now call “the historical Jesus.” In stark contrast to the vindictive Jesus of the early Christian community’s invention, the real Jesus, Nietzsche tells us, was in fact a kind of “Buddha” figure (A 31) heralding a “Buddhistic peace movement” (A 42). This means that everything Nietzsche writes about the opposition between Christianity and Buddhism at The Antichrist 20–23 does not apply to Jesus’s actual message. What, then, was the true nature of the εὐαγγέλιον, and in what sense was it “Buddhistic”?
Nietzsche suggests that Jesus’s décadent hostility toward reality takes the unthreatening form of a soft-hearted “anti-realism” that regards time, space, concept, and word as having but apparent reality by contrast with the pure, boundless light of inner bliss, in which all oppositions and distinctions fade (A 34). This, he explains, is why Jesus speaks in parables and metaphors alone: the “Kingdom of God” is not a place, let alone a πόλις, but a state of mind equally accessible to all, which is thus both “everywhere and nowhere” (ibid.; see also A 33 and 40); likewise, “God the father” just means the “feeling of eternity and of perfection” that can be achieved when all hatred, resistance, and enmity are transcended, while being the “Son of God”—a title which Nietzsche is adamant Jesus did not claim for himself alone (A 29)—merely signals “entrance into this feeling” (A 34).
It follows that Jesus’s purpose was not to found a system of faith—that is, a creed based on the profession of belief in propositions taken to be true or factual—but rather a “new life” (A 33; see also A 39), or, as we would now call it, a new “way of life.” His εὐαγγέλιον is a practice, not a doctrine—and this practice, this “new life,” is really all that the term “God” denoted in Jesus’s teaching (A 33). The genuinely Christian practice taught by Jesus involves the abolition in one’s heart and mind of all distinctions, including that between a given proposition and its contrary, self and other, Jew and non-Jew, friend and foe, world and heaven, God and human (ibid.). This, and this alone, is the true meaning of Jesus’s teaching of universal love (A 29). And without any such feeling of distance or distinction, what space could there be for ressentiment against the world, the enemy, or the powerful? Indeed, Nietzsche reports, in accepting and even embracing his crucifixion, Jesus sought to provide his followers with the foremost example of “freedom from and superiority to any feeling of ressentiment” (A 40).
This points to the essence of Jesus’s εὐαγγέλιον as Nietzsche describes it in The Antichrist, namely the real-world prospect of leading a life beyond the very possibility of ressentiment. And it is in precisely this sense that, for Nietzsche, Jesus heralded a “Buddhistic peace movement”: in him, as in the Buddha, the décadent’s instinct of “exclusion of all aversion and hostility” is dominant, while the “hatred of reality” is overcome and takes the form of a peaceful “turning away from the world” that has neither an axe to grind nor an enemy to decapitate.
1.3 Hate trumps love
Jesus’s original “peace movement,” Nietzsche explains, suffered a radical inversion shortly after his death. Instead of cultivating love, forgiveness, and the “feeling of eternity” that follows from the transcendence of all belief, opposition, and distinction, the early Christian community abandoned itself to rancor, anger, and quarrelsome dogmatism. The result was the creation of a religion which stands for the very opposite, or “antipode” (Gegensatz) (A 36), of its founder’s Buddhistic message. How is it that Jesus’s Buddhistic εὐαγγέλιον was transvalued into a thoroughly un-Buddhistic δυσαγγέλιον (A 39)?
Nietzsche claims that Jesus’s followers underwent such a profound shock when their leader was executed that they immediately forgot all that Jesus had stood for. Instead of striving to respond in a genuinely evangelical fashion by “forgiving his death” and “with a gentle and calm heart, offering themselves for a similar death,” they instead gave in to “most unevangelical feeling,” namely that of “revenge” (A 40). While Jesus pointed to a truth beyond time, history, guilt, punishment, judgment, and sin—a pure “inner light” in contrast to which everything in space and time seemed but inconsequent shadow play—his disciples placed real-world events center-stage again, complete with a dramatic final act in which the evil would be condemned and the just rewarded, depending on whether they hold the right beliefs (A 39).
Nietzsche is emphatic that the centrality of the belief/disbelief distinction and attendant in-group/out-group opposition in early Christian eschatology is emblematic of the early Christian community’s profound misunderstanding of Jesus’s message. Such a misunderstanding was not primarily the result of an intellectual error, but rather of an ethical failing: incapable of overcoming their ressentiment and thirst for revenge, Jesus’s followers made belief in his resurrection the condition for being spared the Master’s world-destructive wrath at the time of his Second Coming.
The figure of Jesus consequently suffered a two-pronged retroactive transformation at the hands of the early Christian community. First, from mystical prophet of love promoting a Buddhistic practice of non-enmity for whom word, idea, and belief were entirely superfluous and disagreement impossible, Jesus turns combative doctrinaire aggressively putting forward specific theological claims (A 31). This, according to Nietzsche, was the result of the early Christians’ anger toward the Jewish intellectual elite, whom they deemed guilty of assassinating their leader. “It was only now,” Nietzsche writes, “that all the contempt for the Pharisees and the theologians, and all bitter feelings towards them, were introduced into the character of the Master—and by this means he himself was transformed into a Pharisee and a theologian” (A 40). Second, Jesus was elevated to the status of Universal God and Supreme Judge of mankind. Again, this was the work of the early community’s ressentiment toward and thirst for revenge against their perceived aggressors: a Divine Jesus, they threatened, would soon return to judge and inflict endless torment on his enemies (ibid.; see also A 34 and GM I 15).
This is how early (anti-)Christian hatred trumped Jesus’s message of love. “At bottom there was but one Christian,” Nietzsche provocatively declares, “and he died on the cross” (A 39). With Jesus’s last breath, his Buddhistic message of peace collapsed into Death Eternal; from the ashes arose its perfect opposite.
1.4 Pauline Christianity as anarchism
According to Nietzsche, early Christians took a page from the Jewish book in de-Buddhicizing Jesus’s peace movement and making him God and Ultimate Judge. And it was Paul, Nietzsche reports, who had the genius of steering the early Christians’ thirst for revenge into the true and tested channels of Judaic moral transvaluation (A 44). Pauline Christianity is thus, Nietzsche sarcastically claims in the language of the (Neo-)Hegelian, the “rational outcome” of the “Jewish instinct” (A 24), albeit one which “denied even the last form of reality, the ‘holy people,’ the ‘chosen people,’ Jewish reality itself” and is in this sense thoroughly anarchic (A 27). This calls for some explication.
As Nietzsche explains in GM, the Jews’ brilliant post-exilic invention of a single, universal, cosmopolitan God and with him of a “moral world-order” was the first genuinely creative outcome of ressentiment in world history (I 10). Yahweh, like the national God of any powerful, self-affirming people in antiquity, was initially “the expression of Israel’s consciousness of power, of its joy over itself, of its hope for itself” (A 25). After centuries of defeat and humiliation, however, the Jewish priestly classes that had grown to dominance during the post-exilic Second Temple Period radically transformed the figure of Yahweh. Most importantly, he ceased to be an immanent, national God—that is, to be one with his nation, or an expression of Israel’s pride and confidence—and became instead a transcendent, universal God (ibid.).6 Israel’s history, moreover, was rewritten and profoundly falsified: God had given his people moral commands, then punished them for their transgressions, and finally thrown them into exile. It is at this juncture that the concept of “sin” was invented, and with it that of a “moral world-order” (A 26).
From then on, rather than being an expression of kingship, power, courage, sovereignty, ascendance, and health, the idea of God would be mobilized to condemn all such values as “worldly” and thus “sinful.” Goodness would henceforth consist in submissiveness, meekness, weakness, poverty, and ill-health (A 26; see also GM I 8–9). This, for Nietzsche, represents a complete inversion of the “natural” relationship to the divine: up till this point, a people’s celebration of their god was a consequence of their worldly success; henceforth, a universal God would be the cause of a people’s failure or success, with the highest reward going to those who, for the longest time, would languish in a state of utter dejection (A 25).
In so doing, the Jews had taken counterintuitive, yet effective means of surviving and thriving in the most hostile of contexts. They were afforded a sense of pride and an identity in spite of their lack of political sovereignty—something previously inconceivable in the ancient world—and, should their highly seductive system of valuation spread among their masters’ other subjects and eventually among their masters themselves, their enemies were certain to be diminished. Nietzsche thus describes the Jews as “the opposite of all décadents, though they have been forced to act like them to the point of illusion” (A 24) and as possessed of “the most tenacious will to live that has ever existed on earth” (A 27). Indeed, the Jewish priesthood invented décadent, nihilist values, but they did so in the context of a struggle for survival and self-affirmation. The Jews, then, are the very opposite of nihilists. Having said this, it is precisely in the role of the most ferocious anti-nihilists that they actively promote nihilist values.
On Nietzsche’s reading, then, in so far as the arch-Jewish, arch-priestly Paul’s Judaicization of Christianity represents the embrace of a total nihilism, Pauline Christianity is actually anti-Jewish (A 44).7 With Paul at their helm, the early Christians employed the methods of Jewish falsification in turning their immanent master into a transcendent God—exactly as the Jews had done with Yahweh—and in reinterpreting the practical “way of life” which he had preached as a doctrine centered on the notions of moral obligation, transgression, guilt, and repentance—much as the Jews had “moralized” their initially highly practical, this-worldly cult (ibid.). What is more, Pauline Christianity embraces the ressentiment-fueled, inverted moral framework that the Jews had given birth to—the last will be first, and the first last; the lowly, sick, dispossessed, meek, and humble are the “chosen people” who will be saved, while the healthy and mighty are the “evil ones” who will be damned (ibid.). In sharp contrast to the Jews, however, Pauline Christians lack national sentiment, do not dream of political sovereignty on a particular territory on this earth and in historical time—in fact, they regard not a single thing from “this world” as in any way good, save repentance from worldliness itself (A 15; see also A 43). Instead, they invest all of their hopes in “the other world,” which, tellingly, is said to come only after the destruction of this one (A 58). If the Jewish heart’s true desire is the survival and flourishing of its people and kin, that of the Christian is none other than the “will to the end” (A 9). In this sense, in being über-Jewish, Pauline Christianity turns out to be anti-Jewish. Rather than expressing a calculating will to live, as Judaism does, Pauline Christianity expresses an uncompromisingly anarchic will to self- and world-destruction. Unlike the Jew, the Christian does not just play the role of the décadent, life-negating type; he is a sincere nihilist, a life-destroying anarchist (A 27; see also A 44 and 58).
This is how we arrive at the Christianity that Nietzsche compares to Buddhism at The Antichrist 20–23. As a further development and vertiginous expansion of Jewish ressentiment, Pauline Christianity is so profoundly ruled by the décadent “instinctive hatred of reality” that it can do little more than pay lip-service to the décadents’ opposed instinct of “exclusion of aversion and hostility.” It is ultimately as Judaism squared, then, that Christianity turns from an apolitical Buddhistic religion of love to an anarchic Semitic religion of hatred.
1.5 Manu’s “Holy Lies” versus Christianity’s perverse untruths
Toward the end of The Antichrist, Nietzsche provides a brief overview of the orthodox Brāhmaṇical social philosophy presented in the Manusmṛti 8 so as to show that it represents a life-affirming ideology that is the antipode of the life-negating Pauline Christian (A 56–58). It is ultimately in contrasting Christianity to this strand of Brāhmaṇism, Nietzsche claims, that we can understand what it is that Christianity seeks to destroy, but also point the way toward a genuine alternative to Christian life-negation.
The legendary sage Manu’s religious legislation, Nietzsche tells us, is underpinned by values that are the contrary of the Christian’s. Thus, Manu’s entire teaching is founded on respect for what is creative, affirmative, noble, and high-minded in mankind. Together with a purported understanding of the conditions required for such values to thrive, namely strict social hierarchy and various institutionalized forms of the “pathos of distance” (A 57), this is what makes Manu’s Brāhmaṇism the polar opposite of Christian anarchism (A 58; see also TI “Improvers” 3–5).
What is perhaps most significant about Nietzsche’s discussion in this section of The Antichrist is that Nietzsche does not regard Manu’s teaching as more truthful than that of Paul’s Christ. The Brāhmins lie no less than Christian (or Jewish) priests—their religious legislation “eternalizes” what are really the products of a dynamic history of contestation and “experimentation,” and, like all “holy lies,” it seeks to render unconscious and spontaneous what is really the outcome of choices by making such highly artificial structures as the caste system seem “natural” (A 57). But this, for Nietzsche, is no objection to their project.9 What matters, for Nietzsche, is that the Brāhmins’ holy lies, unlike their Christian peers,’ serve “life-promoting” as opposed to “life-depleting” ends. Nietzsche explains, “Ultimately it is a matter of the end to which a lie is being told. That in Christianity the ‘holy’ end is absent is my objection to its means” (A 56; see also the opening lines of A 58). For all of Nietzsche’s complaints against the falsification at work in the Jewish and Christian imaginary, his discussion of the Manusmṛti makes it obvious that his real objections to Christian lies are the life-negating, socially disruptive ends they serve. Life-affirming lies such as the orthodox Brāhmins’ are not merely acceptable by virtue of the ends they serve, they are psychologically, socially, and politically necessary. In order for life-affirming social mores to be fully internalized and spontaneously followed, humans must be made to forget that they are the products of history, and it is the role of genuinely “holy” religious legislators to make certain that such forgetting takes place.
2 Commentary
In the second part of this chapter, I present my interpretation of comparative religion in The Antichrist by means of a three-part commentary. I first argue that Nietzsche’s comparativist discussion was intended as a pastiche of a then-prevalent genre of discourse on religion, especially Christianity. I then discuss the ways in which Nietzsche’s account is meant to subvert Schopenhauer’s comparativist doctrines. In the final section of my commentary, I argue that comparative religion ought to be understood as a cultural intervention.
2.1 A methodological pastiche
Nietzsche’s comparativist account, I submit, is a satirical pastiche. This implies (1) that it closely follows the conventions of a well-known genre and (2) that there is something ironic, insincere, or deliberately untruthful about the whole exercise. Before I provide my reasons for holding these views, I wish to qualify my claim: Nietzsche’s exercise in comparative religion consists of what I call a “methodological pastiche,” not a stylistic pastiche, which is by far the more common form of pastiche. Unlike Zarathustra, for example, which is a stylistic pastiche of liturgical texts—Biblical and otherwise—Nietzsche’s comparativist discussion in The Antichrist is, stylistically speaking, quintessentially Nietzschean. The mimicry at play is not of the stylistic features of the comparativist genre, but rather of its method.
What, then, is the method that Nietzsche satirizes in his pastiche? In broad outline, it consists in comparing Christianity to Indian religion with a view to gaining insight into its “essence” and/or the true nature of its relationship to Judaism. It is no exaggeration to say that this approach to comparative religion was one of the major leitmotifs in late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century scholarship and philosophy. Voltaire, Herder, Schlegel, Schopenhauer, Renan, and Havet all partook in the exercise of turning to Indian religion with a view to setting the record straight on Christianity’s genuine character and relationship to the older Semitic creed.10 The notion of a Buddhistic Jesus, in particular, figures prominently in the writings of Schopenhauer, Wagner, Renan, and Havet, always in conjunction with the claim that “true Christianity” owes little to nothing of substance to the Jewish tradition. Nietzsche’s comparativist claims in The Antichrist paint a very different picture as compared to his predecessors’ accounts, but these claims in The Antichrist are of the same kind—in the formal, as opposed to substantive, sense of “kind”—as those of these widely read forerunners. The method he employs is resolutely unoriginal, and intentionally so.
Let us consider, in this connection, Schopenhauer’s core teachings concerning the relationship between Judeo-Christian and Indian religions. Schopenhauer’s, after all, was by far the most influential account of this kind in late-nineteenth-century Europe. It is also the primary target of Nietzsche’s methodological pastiche.
The Buddha, Schopenhauer argues in his later work,11 gave the clearest and most truthful formulation of the basic insight at the heart of all true religion. In recognizing that nonexistence is preferable to existence, the Buddha’s religion was one of lucid pessimism and ethically forthright “denial of the will,” bereft of the theistic garb and mytho-poetic trappings in which the truths of pessimism manifest themselves elsewhere, both in India’s Brāhmaṇical traditions and further West (WWV II, Book L, p. 698; PP II §116). What is more, Schopenhauer regarded European Christianity as a thoroughly incoherent hybrid: its truthful “core” is pure Buddhistic pessimism, but this core is occluded and defiled by the foolish Jewish optimism or “affirmation of the will” in which it is wrapped up. Thanks to the discovery of India and its “superior religions,” Schopenhauer claims, Europeans at last have the opportunity to recognize the true Buddhist nature of genuine Christianity and salvage their noble Aryan creed from the degeneration it has suffered as a result of Semitic-optimist corruption (WWV II, Book XLIV, p. 623).
The structural affinity between Schopenhauer’s account and Nietzsche’s seemingly rival account is striking. But why, one may ask, regard Nietzsche’s comparativist discussion as a satirical pastiche of Schopenhauer’s discourse, as opposed to a sincere rival account? I support my case on three pieces of evidence.
At GS 99 Nietzsche ridicules Schopenhauer’s devotees (and especially Wagner) for following their master’s cue in, among other things, their “attempt to conceive of Christianity as a seed of Buddhism that has drifted far away.” Did Nietzsche later change his mind and decide that Schopenhauer, in the end, was correct about this matter, as his claims in The Antichrist appear to suggest? This question must be answered in the negative. As becomes evident under closer analysis, Nietzsche just plays the Schopenhauerean game without taking its rules seriously.
To wit: the Buddhistic Jesus of The Antichrist is at odds with the way Nietzsche describes Jesus in all of his other writing. In GS, it is Jesus, not Paul, who identifies the cause of suffering as “sin” (138) (an idea which Jesus could not even have conceived on the account presented in The Antichrist), fails to challenge the erroneous idea of God as Judge (140), and presents himself as a bridge between Heaven and Earth (137) (a dichotomy the Jesus of The Antichrist entirely overcomes); in BGE, it is Jesus (not Paul, again) who is the anarchist (164) and the vindictive inventor of hell (269); and in GM, finally, it is Jesus (not Paul) who preaches the Jewish values of hatred for the powerful (I 8). Verily, the Buddhistic, ressentiment-transcending Jesus of The Antichrist is an anomaly in the entire Nietzsche corpus.12 Contrary to what many have assumed,13 The Antichrist does not convey Nietzsche’s “true opinion” of the “historical” Jesus, but, on the contrary, a thoroughly artificial view designed to serve the specific purpose of satirizing Schopenhauer, Wagner, Renan, and others.
Finally, Nietzsche’s generally positive attitude to Buddhism in The Antichrist contrasts sharply with his highly critical appraisal of the tradition in a number of other late texts.14 Most notably, Nietzsche directly contradicts The Antichrist 20’s claim that Buddhism “stands beyond good and evil” in BGE, where he writes that the Buddha remained “under the spell and delusion of morality” (56). Together with the other passages on Buddhism in Nietzsche’s writing that contradict his claims in The Antichrist (see GM II 21; PF 1885–1887 2[127]; and PF 1887–1888 9[35], 9[60], and 10[190]), this suggests that A’s depiction of Buddhism ought not to be taken at face value, which in turn suggests that Nietzsche’s broader claims about religion in this text are not as sincere as they may seem.
In light of all of the above, it stands to reason that Nietzsche’s comparativist account in The Antichrist ought to be taken with a grain, if not a generous pinch, of salt. More specifically, it ought to be read as a pastiche of Schopenhauerian comparativism—a type of performance that aims to elicit certain responses from its target audience—not as the expression of Nietzsche’s “considered opinions” on the matters at hand.
2.2 Subverting Schopenhauer
The next step in my commentary hones in on the ways in which Nietzsche seeks to subvert the Schopenhauerean account in The Antichrist. Nietzsche’s subversion of Schopenhauer (and, by extension, of his numerous followers in late-nineteenth-century Europe) operates at three principal levels. I examine each of these in turn in the paragraphs that follow.
1. Christianity, Judaism, and Schopenhauer’s (confused) self-understanding. Like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche presents “real-world” Christianity as the result of genuine, Buddhistic Christianity’s Judaicization/corruption. But the overlap ends there. The story Nietzsche tells in The Antichrist is considerably more complicated than Schopenhauer’s, and each of its key steps significantly challenges his predecessors’ version. First, Nietzsche interprets turn of the era Judaism not simply as an “optimistic” religion—as Schopenhauer had it—but rather as a religion of cunning life- and self-affirmation, in which life-negating décadent values are promoted for strictly tactical purposes. Second, contra Schopenhauer Nietzsche interprets Jesus’s original message not as a forerunner of Schopenhauer’s pessimism—that is, as expressive of a ressentiment-fueled desire for world-destruction—but as something far less offensive, namely as a “way of life” oriented only toward private life-negation, as it were. Third, for Nietzsche the Judaicization of Christianity results not in a hybrid product amenable to a simplistic core/shell analysis (as Schopenhauer had it), but rather in a somewhat baffling inversion of both initial elements. As über-Jewish anarchism, Pauline Christianity is both anti-Buddhist and anti-Jewish: it is anti-Buddhist because it has turned into a religion of hatred, ressentiment, and world-destruction that represents a complete inversion of the Buddha’s and Jesus’s “peace movement”; and it is anti-Jewish because it is no longer tactically, but wholeheartedly décadent and life-hating—that is, it is no longer the expression of a people’s or community’s suppressed desire for health and thriving, but gives voice instead to a thoroughly internationalist desire for the annihilation of all life. In satirizing, refining, and subverting Schopenhauer’s comparativist account, then, Nietzsche shows us that Schopenhauer was in fact—contrary to what he took himself to be—not Buddhist, but über-Jewish (or Christian) and thus anti-Buddhist. To wit: his version of pessimism is heir, not to Buddhism, but to the most profoundly Judaic or ressentiment-fueled and thus anti-Buddhist elements of (Pauline) Christianity. This represents a profound and damaging subversion of Schopenhauer’s philosophy of religion and, perhaps more importantly, of Schopenhauer’s self-understanding.
2. Original Christianity, Buddhism, and the nature of their “Truth.” Nietzsche mimics Schopenhauer in claiming that the original Christian teaching is a form of Buddhism. But whereas Schopenhauer proclaimed that the Buddhist core at the heart of genuine Christianity consists of insight into the Universal Truth that this life of suffering is pointless, meaningless, and fundamentally undesirable, Nietzsche claims instead that the purported insights that form the Buddhistic core of (original) Christianity are merely expressive of psycho-physiological decay. More specifically, Nietzsche playfully concedes to Schopenhauer that both the Buddha’s teachings and Jesus’s εὐαγγέλιον are “truthful,” but adds an important nuance. It is true that for people too exhausted to engage the world, certain “hygienic” physical and psychological measures should be adopted to dull the pain and “feel eternal.” And it is true that people who adopt these measures and transcend all hostility will “feel eternal”—this feeling is a “true” experience in that it denotes a real psycho-physiological experience. These “truths,” however, by no means imply that—as Schopenhauer thought he, the Buddha, and Jesus had correctly understood—retreating from all forms of engagement with and struggle in the world is the most appropriate response to life’s challenges for all humans at all times. The Buddha’s and Jesus’s “truth” is only a décadent’s truth, a truth from the perspective of life in decline. Belief in such a “truth” is appropriate, even “warranted” (as today’s epistemologists would say), for those too weak to engage reality and embrace the struggles that this implies, but to present it as a “one-size-fits-all” practical orientation to life and its challenges is both erroneous (in that there are other, radically different, yet equally suitable perspectival/contextual “truths”) and dangerous (in that to insist that this is the Universal Truth is to foreclose the more active forms of engagement in the world on which societal and cultural thriving depends). In short, in playing the game of presenting (original) “Christianity as a seed of Buddhism that has drifted far away” (GS 99), it is as though Nietzsche ceded Schopenhauer his bounty with one hand, while dramatically reducing its cash value with the other. Yes, Christ and the Buddha stand for the same thing, and so, yes, the two are “truthful” in the same sense, yet both were but prophets of their type’s highly idiosyncratic truths, namely the weak, exhausted type—not model, but counter-model for those who may be capable of flourishing in this world and making this world flourish.
3. Schopenhauer’s “Oriental Renaissance” turned upside down. Nietzsche’s claims concerning both Buddhism and Brāhmaṇism in The Antichrist give the impression that he agrees with Schopenhauer that Indian religion is superior to European religion. Toward the end of The Antichrist Nietzsche also follows Schopenhauer’s example in presenting a particular Indian tradition as exemplary of what sound religion involves at its best, the implication being that a “redemption of Europe” of sorts will finally be made possible through the rediscovery of ancient Indian wisdom. Here, Nietzsche is employing the frequently employed trope of the “Oriental Renaissance.” The idea of the Oriental Renaissance was that Europe would eventually come to be as profoundly transformed by its rediscovery of Indian religion as it had been by the rediscovery of Greek science and philosophy a few centuries earlier. This notion first came to the fore in the context of German romanticism’s so-called Indomania (the German romantic Majer, an early acquaintance of Schopenhauer’s, was among the most vocal proponents of an Oriental Renaissance) and it also figures prominently in Schopenhauer’s account of the cultural and philosophical significance of Europe’s encounter with Indian thought and religion (Gérard 1963). Nietzsche’s version of the Oriental Renaissance myth, however, stands Schopenhauer’s version squarely on its head. Nietzsche’s claim is that the Indian religious tradition that ought to serve as the guiding light in Europe’s regeneration is not, as it was for Schopenhauer, “honest,” life-negating, and difference-/distance-transcending Buddhism, but rather the untruthful, life-affirming, and difference-/distance-reinforcing ideology of the Manusmṛti, that is, the tradition which stands at the opposite end of the Indian spectrum, relative to Buddhism (as well as equally “nihilistic” or mystical forms of Brāhmaṇism, for example, the Advaita-Vedānta tradition that so exercised the minds of such influential late-nineteenth-century Indologists as Max Müller and Nietzsche’s friend, Paul Deussen). A double inversion of Schopenhauer’s account is at work here, then. First, it is from the Indian religion of life-affirmation that Europe ought to learn, not from that of life-negation. Second, Europe will be saved not by following the example of the religion that speaks plain truths (“your suffering is your fault and your responsibility”; “if you follows these steps you will bring suffering to cessation”), but by following the example of the religion that lies to its followers in the right way (by “eternalizing” artificial social measures, effectively transfiguring these into “natural” or “revealed” laws) and for the right reasons (to create the kind of hierarchic society on which cultural vitality depends). To Schopenhauer’s claim that life is evil and that the Buddha should be praised for understanding this, Nietzsche here replies that life is good and that Manu should be praised for understanding this; in response to Schopenhauer’s praise of the Buddha’s “honesty” as compared to other religious teachers, Nietzsche counters that it is Manu who should be praised for understanding, that, as Nietzsche elsewhere states, “untruth is the condition of life” (BGE 4). For Schopenhauer as for Nietzsche, the hopes of an Oriental Renaissance crystallize around an idealized Indian sage, but Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s ideal sages are inverse images of one another. And while Schopenhauer is, like the Buddha, perfectly sincere, Nietzsche is merely engaged in a subversive performance, creatively knitting, like Manu, his own web of “holy lies” in the service of life.
2.3 Comparative religion in The Antichrist as cultural intervention
If comparative religion in The Antichrist is, as I have argued, a methodological pastiche designed thoroughly to subvert Schopenhauer’s highly influential variation on the time-worn theme of the Judeo-Christian religion’s relation to the Indian, then it follows that it should be neither regarded nor appraised as the result of a scholarly endeavor or a disinterested quest after “truth.” My claim is that it should instead be read as a cultural intervention.
Nietzsche’s strategy is to undermine and subvert certain Schopenhauerean ideas by employing and redeploying exactly those tropes that gave such ideas their power. Nietzsche rightly recognized that these ideas were formidably influential in late-nineteenth-century Continental Europe. He also regarded Schopenhauer’s cultural heritage as profoundly dangerous. Hence his attempt at subverting him, not by means of argumentation—which he had good reasons to think would be futile—but by means of a playful performance. As situation-bound cultural intervention, comparative religion in The Antichrist is comparative religion done from what Nietzsche elsewhere calls “the optics of life” (BT “Preface” 6)—as such, it is partial, it is biased, it is “untruthful,” and it derives its true meaning only from the context of the battle in which it is engaged.
Nietzsche’s writing in The Antichrist suggests that he was in fact simultaneously engaged in a number of separate anti-Schopenhauerean battles. Nietzsche seeks to (a) combat the cultural after-effects of Schopenhauer’s preference for “pessimist” religions and correlative condemnation of “life-promoting” traditions; (b) divorce Schopenhauer’s rabid and hateful pessimism from Buddhism’s milder and nobler version thereof; (c) disclose the disreputable and highly contingent psycho-physiological and cultural conditions out of which emerged the nihilist values Schopenhauer depicts as universal and timeless; and (d) challenge and disrupt the Schopenhauerean valuation of truth and honesty (here embodied in the figure of the Buddha) as necessarily preferable to untruth and ruse (here embodied in the counter-model of Manu). These themes have all been touched upon above, and they are also discussed at length elsewhere in Nietzsche scholarship. In the present context, I wish instead to call attention to another, less frequently discussed front in Nietzsche’s struggle against Schopenhauereanism.
It is important to recall, in this connection, that Nietzsche considered Christian, arch-nationalist anti-Semites to be the lowest of the low (GM III 26; BGE 215; PF 1888 14[182]). And Nietzsche, of course, was well aware that many such folk reveled in Schopenhauer’s writings and in the works of other anti-Semitic writers (most prominently Wagner) who, in the manner of Schopenhauer, sought to dissociate Christianity from Judaism while in the same breath associating it to the purportedly “pure” Aryan religion of Buddhism. To this crowd The Antichrist delivers an emphatic message:
Your Christian religion, ladies and gentlemen, is predicated on the stupidity of taking seriously what the Jews only made intelligent instrumental use of, namely nihilist, world-hating values. There is nothing Buddhist or Aryan about you. You Christian Anti-Semites are in fact more Jewish than the Jews themselves, only too stupid to realize it. What is more, the Jews didn’t kill your supposedly Buddhistic Jesus—you killed him! And what did you replace him with? Well now, none other than the effigy of an über-Jewish preacher!
Such, I claim, is Nietzsche’s attack on anti-Semitism in The Antichrist. 15 The tactic at work here is an odd admixture of “pulling the carpet from under the opponent’s feet” and “turning the tables on the adversary.” But categorizing it is arguably futile; it appears to be a uniquely Nietzschean approach to philosophy as cultural intervention, with all the strengths, weaknesses, and risks that this implies.
3 Concluding remarks: Nietzsche’s standing as a philosopher
If Nietzsche’s foray into comparative religion in The Antichrist is indeed a subversive cultural intervention as opposed to a disinterested scholarly historical exercise or a philosophical quest for “truth,” then it might rightly be questioned whether this work has any intrinsic philosophical or historical value at all. More generally, if the author of The Antichrist is as insincere as I depict him to be, does he really deserve the title of “philosopher” to begin with? In keeping with his call for a historical turn in philosophy (HH 2), Nietzsche is often described by contemporary commentators as a “historicizing philosopher” (Foucault 1971; Geuss 1999; Williams 2002). And it certainly seems as though “historicizing philosophy” is precisely what Nietzsche attempts to do in The Antichrist. But some may argue, citing my results in support of their view, that in trying to be philosopher and a historian all at once, Nietzsche ends up being neither and producing work that is of no interest to either historians or philosophers.
Consider the two horns of the following dilemma. If Nietzsche’s “historical turn” is taken to imply that he ought first and foremost to be regarded as a historian, then to evaluate him we must determine the degree to which he is committed to and applies such principles of sound historical practice as preoccupation with factuality and the accumulation of strong evidence from the greatest variety of sources in support of all of his claims. By this measure, Nietzsche surely fails—the history he does in The Antichrist and elsewhere is, even on the most charitable of mainstream standards, bad history. If, notwithstanding his professed historical turn, one chooses instead to focus on the so-called philosophical merits of Nietzsche’s work, then it would seem that Nietzsche’s total disregard for soundness and grounding—his total disregard for truth and truthfulness—in The Antichrist and elsewhere implies that he is not really engaged in philosophy to begin with, but in something pre-philosophical like storytelling or strictly rhetorical composition. “Historicizing philosophy” as Nietzsche practices it, then, seems to fail on both counts—it seems to be a nonviable, ill-bred chimera.
This is not the place to make a case for why Nietzsche’s critique of objectivity matters to both historians and philosophers, but interpretive charity demands that an attempt at least be made to dig him out of the pit. The first thing to note is that Nietzsche deliberately bases such accounts as his comparative religion in The Antichrist on “bad” historical practice. His treatment of all major religious traditions is fundamentally and voluntarily unhistorical or ahistorical. Nietzsche deliberately “eternalizes” or “universalizes” (in the manner of Manu) certain aspects of each religious tradition as well as the relations between said traditions. And this is the direct consequence of the axiological “biases” he brings to the table. Nietzsche, of course, is perfectly aware that this, from a scientific perspective, is terrible method. On Nietzsche’s account, however, the methodological commitments historians typically profess and by the lights of which his account might be deemed “bad history” are the product either of bad faith or of culpable ignorance: no historical account is ever non-biased and non-eternalizing. To claim the contrary betrays either hypocrisy or self-deceit. If historians felt strongly enough about “honesty” and “transparency,” then they would not disingenuously claim to be “objective,” but should instead be fully transparent about their biases and the way these affect their work. Perspectives, after all, must fully be “owned” to yield the specific “grasp on reality” that they afford. Fully adopting a perspective, however, comes at a cost for not only “truth” and “fairness” (HH “Preface” [1886] 1 and 6), but also historicity (UM II 10; BGE 224).
The question of “perspective” links up naturally to the domain of the philosophical. According to Nietzsche, “wisdom” involves the ability to consider, weigh, incorporate, and order the greatest variety of perspectives stemming from as many different axiological angles as possible (HH “Preface” 6; GS 382; GM III 12). The standard philosophical ideal of striving to contemplate reality disinterestedly or “from the perspective of no-perspective,” Nietzsche regards as incoherent (a “view from nowhere” is no view at all; GM III 12), ethically perverse (universalizing the drive to impersonality as the nec plus ultra of epistemological virtue is to say “No!” to life; BGE 207), and either disingenuous or delusional (whether they realized it or not, all philosophers have really just been autobiographers; BGE 6). Nietzsche, then, is as little interested in being a “good historian” as he is in being a “good philosopher” as the term is commonly understood.
Nietzsche is quite clear about this: “Philosophers of the future” like him will be Versucher, which is to say “experimenters,” but also, at the same time, “tempters” (BGE 42). By this Nietzsche means that the new philosopher’s “truths” will be free creations—the results of creative and thus deeply personal experimentation (BGE 43)—designed to have a kind of appeal or compellingness that cannot be reduced to their “objective” or “view from nowhere” veracity. A’s philosophical-cum-historical pastiche of comparative religion qua cultural intervention is, as I see it, exactly the kind of philosophical experiment and seduction Nietzsche envisions and calls for in BGE. To the extent that it is at all “truthful,” it gives expression to a type of “truth” that is radically different to the Platonic or the scientific. Whatever one might think of his qualities as a historian or as a philosopher, then, it cannot be denied that, as far as method is concerned, Nietzsche is impeccably coherent, consequent, and transparent or, in a word, honest.
Notes
1 All translations in this chapter are my own. For the sake of brevity, I cite only the text number, not the full KSA reference. All emphases are Nietzsche’s.
2 Thus, at TI “Socrates” 4 Nietzsche explains that Socrates’ décadence is given away by the “anarchy of his instincts,” while at The Antichrist 31 he notes that, as a décadent type, Jesus was in all likelihood a “curious multiplicity and contradictoriness.”
3 On Nietzsche’s idea of what he calls “great love” at GM II 24 (and elsewhere), see also BGE 201 and 260, GS 345 and 377, and GM III 23.
4 This, I would argue, is an important aspect of what Nietzsche’s speculations on “the world as will to power” involve as regards psychology, broadly construed. In the interest of focus and brevity, in this chapter I choose to tiptoe my way around the many difficult questions that arise in connection to the interpretation of the “will to power” teaching.
5 Nietzsche’s principal sources for his comments on Buddhism in The Antichrist are Koeppen (1857), Oldenberg (1881), Müller (1879), but perhaps above all Kern (1882). It is Kern, after all, who most strongly stresses early Buddhism’s (qualified) atheism and explicitly therapeutic or “hygienic” orientation.
6 As a number of scholars have noted (Santaniello 1994; Murphy 2001; Jaggard 2013), Nietzsche draws heavily from Wellhausen 1878 here.
7 This twist in the story Nietzsche tells in The Antichrist should not be confused with Nietzsche’s account of Paul’s conversion to Christianity as an anarchic rejection of Jewish law and its over-demandingness at D 68. In this text, Paul’s transformation is described not as politically, but rather as psychologically, motivated: Paul sought refuge in Christ because he could no longer bear the tyranny of Jewish law and the self-inflicted pressure he suffered as a consequence of his perfectionism. And while Paul is here described as “the first Christian,” nothing in this text suggests that he is the founder of an in fact anti-Christian Christianity. Instead, he is merely described as the first person fully to understand what Christianity could do for anyone who experienced worldly law as a problem. Cf. Acampora, who misleadingly merges the accounts provided by Nietzsche in D and The Antichrist in her discussion of Paul (2013: 116–20).
8 Nietzsche’s source is L. Jacolliot’s (deeply flawed) translation of this text in Les législateurs religieux: Manou. Moïse. Mahomet (1876), which Nietzsche acquired and studied in the first half of 1888.
9 Cf. Young’s confused interpretation of Nietzsche’s assessment of Manu, which has it that Nietzsche was critical of Manu for telling “holy lies” (which runs squarely contrary to the entire spirit of A 56–58) and fails to notice that Nietzsche is in fact paraphrasing, not endorsing, the Manusmṛti when he speaks of social hierarchy as something “natural” (2006: 187–89).
10 For an excellent survey of most of these authors’ engagement with India, see Halbfass 1988, Chs. 4–8.
11 Schopenhauer had very limited knowledge of Buddhism in the earlier phases of his writing career (i.e., between roughly 1813 and 1842), for the simple reason that Europeans knew practically nothing of this important Indian tradition until Étienne Burnouf’s seminal work on early Indian Buddhism appeared in the 1830s. In his later writing (between 1842 and 1859), however, Schopenhauer repeatedly refers to Buddhism, a religion for which his admiration apparently knew no bounds. This is made obvious by his numerous comments on Buddhism in Parerga und Paralipomena (henceforth PP) (1851) and the third edition of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (henceforth WWV) I und II (1859). Note that it is this last edition of the work that I cite in this chapter.
12 My detractors will point to HH 475, where Nietzsche describes Christ as “the noblest human being.” First, whatever Nietzsche meant by “noble” back in 1878, we can be certain that it has nothing to do with “freedom from ressentiment”—a conception of nobility that only appears in Nietzsche’s latest-most work. Second, the rhetorical context is important here as well: Nietzsche is taking a jab at anti-Semites, insisting that they show more respect toward that people among whom such exemplary figures as Jesus and Spinoza arose. As such, HH’s statement to the effect that Jesus was the “noblest human being” might also be tactical, rather than the expression of Nietzsche’s true feelings.
13 These include such Anglo-American commentators as Kaufmann (1974), Acampora (2013), and Jaggard (2013), such “Continental” commentators as Biser (1981), Natoli (1985), and Makarushka (1994), as well as the influential contemporary American theologian Altizer (1997). Rare exceptions include Murphy (2001) and Detering (2010), both of whom, each in their own way, appreciate the satirical character of Nietzsche’s discourse in The Antichrist.
14 This is something none of the major commentators who have turned their attention to Nietzsche’s relationship to Buddhism (Mistry 1981; Droit 1989; Morrison 1999; and Panaïoti 2013) have failed to notice.
15 Yovel (1994) arrives at a similar conclusion. In his view, Nietzsche may be characterized as anti-Antisemitic, even though he ought also to be regarded as being anti-Judaic. My reading is further supported by Nietzsche’s description of the hoped-for political effects of the A’s publication in his somewhat manic December 1888 (draft) letter to Georg Brandes (KSB 8:1170). One of his goals in publishing this text was ostensibly to gain the moral and financial support of the wealthy North-American and European Jewry in his struggle against the so-called “Party of Christianity.”
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