Nietzsche and the Critique of Religion
Tracy B. Strong
Born of the mysteries of dawn, they ponder on how, between the tenth and the twelfth stroke of the clock, the day could present a face so pure, so radiant, so joyfully transfigured—they seek the philosophy of the morning.
HH 638/KGW IV-2/3741
On the title page of the draft of Der Antichrist, Nietzsche had given “Umwerthung aller Werte” as his subtitle. He crossed that out and replaced it with “Fluch auf das Christenthum”—Curse on Christianity. Indeed, it appears that he was debating issues of priority in his mind. The planned original title page had as subtitle “Versuch einer Kritik des Christenthums/Erstes Buch/der Umwerthung aller Werte”—“Essay on a Critique of Christianity/First Book/The Revaluation of all Values.” His original plans saw The Antichrist as the first book in a four-volume work to be entitled the “Revaluation of All Values.” After the critique of the religion, he planned to proceed to a “critique of philosophy as a nihilistic movement,” then to a critique of “the disastrous species of ignorance—morality.” The last book was to be the “philosophy of the eternal return” and would be called “Dionysos” (KGW VIII-3, 347; see also 397).
The last three were never written, but why the change to the designation of the first book? The most likely explanation is that he realized that it would not be possible to undertake the Umwerthung aller Werte until there had been set forth a Fluch auf das Christenthum. The curse appears to be a necessary prerequisite for the revaluation. Why might a curse on Christianity be the necessary prerequisite for a revaluation of all values? In this, as is so much else, Nietzsche rejoins Marx. At the beginning of the Introduction to a Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx wrote that the “criticism of religion was the premise of all higher criticism.” Presumably he meant that if religion were left without critique, it made impossible any critique of the society in which we actually live, thus any understanding of human society. It did so because it posed an impossible requirement for the true knowledge of an other: it required that knowledge of the other be like the knowledge of God. And since we could have no knowledge of God—although God could of us—conclusive knowledge of other human beings and of one’s self was rendered impossible. We would, willy-nilly, remain captured by an error-picture.
I might note that neither Nietzsche nor Marx stands alone here. For Freud, practically echoing Marx’s designation of religion as the “opium of the people,” religion was an “illusion” that served to paper over the distresses inherent in civilization. While Lenin was willing to tolerate religion when it was politically advantageous, his judgment on religion was severe. It was “religion for the people.” “Just because any religious idea,” he writes to Maxim Gorky, “any idea of god at all, and flirtation even with a god is the most inexpressible foulness . . . [especially when accepted by the bourgeoisie]. . . . For that very reason it is the most dangerous foulness, the most shameful infection . . . . All god-building is the fond self-contemplation of the thick-witted philistine” (Lenin 1980: 122–23).2 Hannah Arendt found Christianity to be “unpolitical, non-public,” indeed, unworldly. Charity, she wrote, was “worldlessness.” She saw the Christian emphasis on individual goodness as fundamentally hostile to that which is public (Arendt 1998: 54–55; 74). Indeed, for all the instruction she took from her study of Augustine, the message that comes away from her doctoral dissertation is that the Incarnation releases mankind from the necessity and practice of politics. There was nothing more dangerous (Arendt 1996).3
These are not the simple dismissals of nonbelieving self-proclaimed “atheists” such as we find today, who substitute their belief in science for that in God—not actually a real substitution for, as Babette Babich has shown, Nietzsche argued that they amounted to the same in human consequences. Their distress with Christianity derives from a deeper source, a distress at a structure implanted so deeply in the Western self that it shapes the thought of nonbelievers as much as it does that of believers. Think back to this passage in Max Weber:
For weakness it is to be unable to look the fate of the age full in the face. The destiny of our culture, however, is that we shall once again become more clearly conscious of this situation after a millennium in which our allegedly or supposedly exclusive reliance on the glorious pathos of the Christian ethic had blinded us. (Weber 2004: 24)
For Weber the dangers from Christianity are only a thousand years old—presumably from the time that the development of the Carolingian minuscule made bureaucracy possible. But, how has the “Christian ethic . . . blinded us”? At the very end of GM, Nietzsche writes that humans would “rather will the void than be void of will” (lieber . . . das Nichts wollen als nicht wollen). He means by that that even after the death of God the structure of willing characteristic of the Socratico-Christian West will persist. That structure consists in the pursuit of something (truth, a banister) that is destined to fail, precisely because it is pursued. Yet, one never gives up trying. The genius of Christianity was to have established that it was possible to attain truth but only in heaven. Nihilism consists in attempting doing something that cannot be done. I cannot resist noting that Groucho Marx is invoking nihilism when he asserts: “I would not belong to any club that would have me.” Stanley Cavell says, “The reason consequences furiously hunt us down is not merely that we are half blind, and unfortunate, but that we go on doing the thing that produced these consequences in the first place” (Cavell 1971: 309).4
What about Christianity needs critique? Christianity holds out the possibility of redemption. To be redeemed means to be released from the past one has lived and start a new life. To attain redemption requires that one live life in a certain way. The effect of the redemption promise is to make the world calculable: if one does such-and-such, then one will be redeemed.5 The imperative, then, is that our actions have predictable consequences. And from this comes the need to master the world, to make it conform to our will. When Heidegger, following Nietzsche, says that science is the new religion, he means that they have fundamentally the same aim—to make the world knowable and predictable. Weber and Schmitt’s analysis of secularization make the same point.
Thus secularization—a reality in modern times—is not an alternative to religion. It is in the end more of the same. As Nietzsche notes,
The political illusion, about which I smile as do my contemporaries over the religious illusion of earlier times, is above all secularization, the belief in the world and a beating-out-of ones-senses of the “beyond” and the “afterworld.” Their goal is the well-being of fleeting individuals: thus socialism is its fruit. . . . They have no reason to wait as did humans with eternal souls and eternal becoming and future improvements.
Nietzsche opposes his own teaching to this religio-secularized form of being: “Live such that you must wish to so live again. . . . You will do so in any case” (KGW V-2: 402–403).6 The theme of eternal return is meant as a counter to the religion/secularization stance.
And with the evolution of Christianity into secularization, the apprentice is unleashed. Playing out the consequences of the secularization development, we are now capable, as Hannah Arendt writes,
of starting processes of our own . . . . However . . . only under certain circumstances does frailty appear to be the chief characteristic of human affairs. The Greeks measure them [human affairs] against the ever-presence or eternal recurrence of all natural things, and the chief Greek concern was to measure up to and become worthy of an immortality which surrounds men but which mortals do not possess. To people who are not possessed by this concern with immortality, the realm of human affairs is bound to show an altogether different, even somehow contradictory aspect, namely, an extraordinary resiliency whose force of persistence and continuity in time is far superior to the stable durability of the solid world of things. Whereas men have always been capable of destroying whatever was the product of human hands and have become today even of the potential destruction of what man did not make—the earth and earthly nature—men had never been and never will be able to understand or even to control reliably any of the processes they start through action . . . . And this incapacity to undo what has been done is matched by an almost equally complete incapacity to foretell the consequences of any deed or even to have realizable knowledge of its motives. (Arendt 1998: 232–33)
Her thought echoes reflections in Nietzsche to the effect that one knows neither the origins of an action nor any consequences beyond those that are immediate (“Who knows the consequences? Five steps ahead . . .”) (KGW VIII-3, 164). Central to what brings home the impact of this is the realization that we have it in our power to destroy the earth itself. If we can destroy the earth, we no longer think ourselves frail. The Greeks had, however, retained a sense of human frailty in that for them human action was measured against the eternality of the natural world. If modern man can destroy the world, we cannot measure ourselves against eternity.
Several points emerge from this consideration. First is that the nature of contemporary human action is to set in march in the world processes, the consequences of which cannot be determined. Second, the modern attitude toward such processes is to seek to render the world of human affairs stable at the expense of the natural world—a reversal of what Arendt takes to have been characteristic of the Greeks.7 Third, the pursuit of the desire to make the world stable and knowable—the aim of modern science—has introduced the consequences of human unpredictability into the natural world. Unleashed with this are sets of occurrences in response to which no human action can be taken. Events occur for which there can be neither forgiveness nor punishment. (One has only to think of the actual and coming ecological crises). Arendt continues, “It is therefore quite significant, a structural element in the realm of human affairs, that men are unable to punish what has turned out to be unforgivable.” In The Human Condition, she refers this to Kant’s understanding of “radical evil”—later her experience with Eichmann will lead her to modify this to the idea of the “banality of evil.” But importantly such events “transcend the realm of human affairs and the potentialities of human power, both of which they radically destroy wherever they make their appearance. Indeed, . . . the deed itself dispossesses us of all power” (Arendt 1998: 241). Importantly, this development was related by Nietzsche to the death of the political. In 1871, with his attention still turning around the problematic of BT and the problem of cultural revolution, he writes: “From what does the art of the state disappear. From science. And this from what? A turning away from wisdom, a lack of artistry” (KGW III-3, 156).
A critique of the above will first require a critique of religion and for us in the West in particular of Christianity. With this context in mind, let me turn to Christ, the Antichrist, and Christianity. For translators, the title of the book Der Antichrist is ambiguous, as the German permits. It refers, on the one hand, to that being whose world-historical role it is to oppose Christ: the Antichrist. It also means “The Antichristian,” the person who or that which opposes Christianity. In perhaps a kind of faded memory of their early instruction, some scholars have insisted that the book is really about Christianity and not about Christ, thereby preserving His life from the pollution of institutions. Some of these scholars have, as editors, required that the title in the English version, be given as “The Antichristian.” That is, I think, a mistake. Nietzsche is quite conscious of the double meanings and means them both: one of the main themes of his book is the problematic relation between Christ and Christianity. I propose here to look, on the one hand, at what Nietzsche says about Christ and then to relate that to what he says about Christianity. It is not the case, I will argue, that the two are, as some have claimed, quite separate. But it is also not the case that the two are easily related to each other. “Anti” (αντί) in Greek means not only “against” and “opposite of” but also “in place of” and “in comparison to.” In 1 and 2 John, “the Antichrist” refers to the person who denies that Christ is the Messiah. In 1 Jn 2:18, it is said that there are already in the world many antichrists (in lower case). Importantly, the Antichristos is never, and for Nietzsche should not be, identified with Satan—to take the term as such would mean to remain within the logic of Christianity.
I begin with two texts:
Whatever Is done out of love is done beyond good and evil. (BGE 153 /KGW VI-2, 99)
Jesus said to his Jews: “The law was for servants—love God as I love him, as his son! What are morals to us sons of God?” (BGE 153 /KGW VI-2, 101)
These two passages are from the central section of BGE, a book that is Nietzsche’s most extended investigation of a kind of quasi-transcendental deduction of knowledge. More precisely, it is an investigation of what occurs to a person who makes claims of knowledge. It starts by raising the question of what would be the case if truth were a woman.8 He notes that philosophers are not expert around women—philosophers make clumsy lovers. One might conclude from this that philosophy has little to do with truth. It is, however, more natural to conclude that philosophers do not know how to love women—or truth. Love is, one might say, a quality that one must manifest in order to raise authentically the question if something be true or false. Insofar as love is a form of cognition—and for Nietzsche it is (see the section of GS entitled “we must learn to love”)—the consideration of love here is a consideration of what happens to us when we encounter the world in love, that is, as philo-sophers.
The first question the passages point at is what it would mean to be or go “beyond good and evil,” beyond, I take it, the realm in which moral categories apply to one’s actions. More bluntly, when one has gone beyond good and evil (Who can do this? How is it done?) where does one find oneself?9 The second passage raises a question about the difference between love and law—the question notably raised by Saint Paul. Note that it does not here suggest a gulf between Jesus and Paul. It suggests that for Nietzsche the figure of Jesus is a kind of immoralist or amoralist and that He knows something about love that entitles Him to claim that He is liberated from the realm of law and thus perhaps from that of morality, at least from categorical imperatives.
The notion that love stands in a dangerous or perhaps antagonistic relation to morality is not new to Nietzsche. Kant makes a distinction between pathological and practical love and suggests (both in the “Doctrine of Virtue” and the Critique of Practical Reason) that will-governed practical love (as opposed to what he calls pathological love) only is consonant with moral behavior.10 He suggests that marriage is a valuable institution because it provides a moral framework for a relationship that threatens always to transform one between persons to one between objects.11
Yet, Nietzsche is unlikely to share with Kant the same valuation of morality as potentially helpful to love. In understanding this, it is important to remember the intimate link between morality and law. For Kant, we find the moral realm only as a law—that is the only way we can experience morality. This tells him something about the relation of human beings to morality: as we are not perfect beings we must experience the moral realm (which Kant understands as the realm of freedom) as an imperative, that is, as law. Nietzsche shares much of this understanding of morality; but he is less likely to worry about calling into question the status of morality. Kant, on the other hand, must at some level devalue that which cannot be experienced as law, as imperative. In relation of Christ, a question implied by my previous citations is: Is love commensurable with morality as law?
An additional question is raised by the comparison of Nietzsche with Kant, as it would be with most moral philosophers. Typically, moral philosophers have argued that the validity of morality depended on the (potential) universalism of the claim of reason (or utility, or whatever). That is, the principles on which a true morality (as opposed to historically codified social practices) rested must be able to evaluate every relevant human act. (Exceptions were generally made, of course, for the realm of Naturwissenschaft as well as for analytical statements). There was, in other words, an unspoken moral imperative that underlay morality itself, an imperative that, as it were, moralized morality. Nietzsche’s questions here open the possibility that there may be occasions when we might understand actions to be valued and valuable, which could not, however, be judged morally correct. (Bernard Williams wrote about this and it is one of the reasons for his interest in Nietzsche.) We must thus also determine how and who determines what is and is not moral.
Does Christ do this? Clearly, He does. Thus we must ask about Him—how does He, and who is He, to determine what is moral. Jesus stands for Nietzsche as the example of the man who knows more about love and loves more than has anyone else—he is the human being who has “flown highest yet and gone astray the most beautifully” (BGE 60 / KGW VI-2, 77).12 Thus the investigation of Nietzsche on love properly goes through an investigation of Nietzsche on Christ.
Nietzsche’s relation to Christ, as is his to Socrates, is multiple and complex. Nothing can be more wrong or more misleading than a facile conclusion that he was “against” either of them. (This is not to say that he was not, only that the conclusion cannot be facile.) As noted, Der Antichrist can be held to name Jesus: there is throughout Nietzsche’s writing about Christ a distinct note of admiration, not to say sometimes of jealousy.13 Christ, says Nietzsche, is “the noblest man”; he wanted to “take the notion of punishment and judgment out of the world”; he was “the destroyer of the law.”
Nietzsche focuses on Christ’s life, not on his teachings. Christ exemplified a “new praxis” (KGW VIII-2, 351) by which Nietzsche means what Christ manifested in his life and actions. As with Luther’s usage, it is der eingefleischte Gott—God made flesh, incarnate—to whom Nietzsche’s attention is drawn. And, as the important is in what Christ did, not what he urged, what we might call Christ’s being or identity was for Nietzsche never fixed. Indeed, much of Nietzsche’s analysis of Christ sounds at times like all that which we normally associate with what Nietzsche seems to value. Christ, he says, is “a free spirit: he has nothing to do with that which is fixed (allem Festen). . . . He believes only in life and the living—and such ‘is’ not, such becomes” (KGW VIII-2, 406).
But one may respond that Nietzsche clearly is not preaching for Christ. And surely, he curses Christianity. Some commentators have here sought a tempting distinction between the founder and the institution—a sort of première cycle reading of the “Grand Inquisitor” chapter of The Brothers Karamazov—and argued that Nietzsche distinguishes the genius from the institutionalizing rationalist, in this case Christ from Saint Paul (about whom, it is true, Nietzsche has almost nothing favorable to say—see in particular the first two books of Morgenröte). This will not quite do. There has to be something in the manner in which Christ approached the world that is responsible for what happened. If Christ is presented so favorably—so free and without fixed form, thus so Dionysianly—something has to have gone wrong with what he manifests. Along these lines it is important to remember that Nietzsche does not think that Paul is the responsible person for the degeneration. He writes, “The Gospels are invaluable as evidence of the already irresistible corruption within the first community. What Paul later carried to its conclusions . . . was nonetheless merely the process of decay which commenced with the death of the redeemer” (A 44/ KGW VI-3 216).
The Dionysian being is “related to” Hamlet (see Birth of Tragedy 7), he who knows that there is no good reason for anything to have permanence, thus that nothing is or remains fixed or individuated. In Der Antichrist, Nietzsche considers Christ to have attacked all form: He “denies Church, state, society, art, knowledge, culture, civilization.” Nietzsche associates this attack with “what all wise ones (alle Weisen) have done” (A 44/ KGW VI-3 338). Christ’s life, His praxis, is for Nietzsche a life of complete and perfected interiority, abandoning all relations to others, almost a kind of self-referential solipsism. A consequence and an indication of this for Nietzsche is that the life of Christ is only possible in isolation from society. At the beginning of Z, Zarathustra encounters an old man who has not yet heard that God is dead. Zarathustra hurries on, without telling the old man. The reason is not simply to spare him the news—Nietzsche rarely refrained from public pronouncements of this nature. The reason is that the life the old man lives—imitatio Christi—is in fact possible, but only as a hermit, only in isolation from society. From this it follows that the import and significance of the actuality of God’s death has to do with its consequences for our relations with other beings. It is, I might say, political.
For Nietzsche, God is important in terms of human interaction, not just as a “belief.” Along these lines, Nietzsche’s discussion of Christ is resolutely non-world-historical. The significance Christ assumes is not as the head of the great social movement which we know as Christianity, but as a particular being, unique in the history of the world. In fact, Nietzsche declares that there “has been only one Christian and he died on the cross.” Such a life, he continues, is still possible, not “as a faith but as a doing, a not-doing of many things above all, an other Being (Nicht ein Glauben, sondern ein Thun, ein Vielesnicht-thun vor Allem, ein andres Sein.)” (A 39/ KGW VI-3, 209).
What then was wrong with Christ? Except for forty days and the moment of His transfiguration, Christ chose not to live apart from society.14 Christ establishes, however, a new way of life in which only so-called inner realities count. The Gospels, claims Nietzsche, totally annihilate the distance between God and humans. This is not a matter of faith or believing in something but of leading a “different” kind of life. Salvation—redemption—requires, impossibly of us, that we make it actual. The problem of Nietzsche is that “inner realities” abandon effectively all criteria of judgment and place an impossible and unfulfillable demand on humans—a demand that is the source of nihilism.
The most interior form of praxis possible is a requirement of and for love. In an important section of BGE, Nietzsche argues:
It is possible that under the holy fable and disguise of Jesus’ life there lies concealed one of the most painful cases of the martyrdom of knowledge of love: the martyrdom of the most innocent and desirous heart, never having enough of human love, demanding love, to be loved and nothing else, with hardness, maniacally (mit Wahnsinn), with terrible eruptions against those who denied him love, the story of an unfortunate person, unsatiated and insatiable in love, who had to invent hell in order to send to it those who did not want to love him—and who finally, having gained knowledge about human love, had to invent a God who is all love, all ability to love—who has mercy on human love because it is utterly so wretched and unknowing. Anyone who feels that way, who knows this about love—seeks death. (BGE 269/ KGW VI-2, 235)
This passage occurs in the section of BGE entitled “what is noble.” It is immediately preceded by the claim that one who knows the heart will know that “even the best and profoundest love” is “more likely to destroy than to save.” There is an opposition here between godly and human love. The question is why does Christ’s love require of him that He seek love, to be loved, that He command love: “Thou shalt love.” Key, I think, to this passage is that Christ is seen as “never having enough” of human love. There is no satiation, none of that state which makes the ecstasy of love and the actuality of beholding possible. The indication in the passage is that Christ’s love found or must find human love insufficient—“Love God as I love Him.” In terms of the analysis of audience and exemplars I have analyzed elsewhere, we might say that Christ could never be an audience to himself. (If this is so, the most difficult moment for Nietzsche to grasp fully must be the scene in Gethsemane, before the arrest. “Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless not as I will but as thou wilt” (Mt. 26:39). It is the moment of Christ’s supreme humanity. For Nietzsche it is a suicide.)
What is it about Christ’s life that might make this so? Again, it is the life He lived that must be the problem for Nietzsche. His life is “the road towards a holy mode of existence.” So it leads him toward death, to what Nietzsche explicitly calls a suicide disguised as a judicial murder, one which Nietzsche thinks is the same in mode as that of Socrates (AOM 94 / KGW IV-3, 50). This happens because in the fulfillment of the teachings of Christ (if we were to live them) “we understand all, we live all, we no longer retain any hostile feelings.” We claim that “all is good—and that it gives us pain, to deny anything. We suffer if we were once to be so unintelligent as to take a stand against something” (KGW VIII-2, 409).
What does Christ know about love that leads Him to seek death? I think it is something like this. The exclusivity of love as interiority means that the only way to overcome the existence of evil is to bring it inside you and transform it in one’s self. In his essay “Experience,” Emerson writes critically on this topic: “Conscience must feel [sin] as essence, essential evil. This it is not: it has an objective existence, but no subjective” (Emerson, R. 1978: 489).15 In other words, Emerson is saying that evil is not, cannot, and should not, be subjective. It is only actual or concrete (there is a deep criticism of Hegel here): one can only take a stand against it. One cannot take it on or into oneself—one cannot bear “the sins of the world.” For Nietzsche, what is wrong with Christ’s love is that it pushes him to justify his life by requiring that others love Him. Since He is all love, in Him all evil will be redeemed. I cannot replay it here, but Nietzsche is opposed to the very idea of redemption as a way of dealing with the weight of the past (redemption is an overcoming rather than a transfiguration of the past), as I hope my analysis of the “On Redemption” chapter in Zarathustra showed.16
The centrality of love in Christianity derives from the Scriptures—“God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him would not perish but have everlasting life” (Jn 3:16). It remains central to Christian doctrine. Augustine made love central to his understanding of human action, incorporating into it the direction or object of love. Calvin took up Augustine’s challenge against what he took to be the legalism of Catholicism. In the Institutes, he writes that a central part of “Christian liberty” is that one be released from the “yoke of the law so that God’s love may be available, as it were to a loving son and not to a terrified servant” (Calvin 1846: 19). He is calling on us to love God as Christ did, “as his son.”
To think then about Christ on love, we have also to think about the status of the law in Nietzsche.17 The law, he writes, has been most at home in the realm of the “active strong, spontaneous, and aggressive” individuals (GM II: 11/KGW VI-2, 327). The founding of law is thus an opposite of ressentiment; and ressentiment is explicitly linked by Nietzsche with anarchists and anti-Semites. The Christ-like opposition to law as a mode of governing behavior is thus complexly linked to Nietzsche’s understanding of his relation to the Jews (and casts light on his celebration of the Laws of Manu). In AC 24 he notes that the “redeemer’s formula” is “Salvation comes from [is of] the Jews”—“Das Heil kommt von den Juden” (quoting Jn 4:22).
I cannot explore this at length here. Suffice it to say that the Jews are the people of the law and as such are a people of affirmation and aggression. This is because the law, as understood here, is not just everyday law but is rather the establishment of good and evil, a way of organizing the world, a manifestation of a positive will to power. The law is a creation of horizons, and horizons are, we know from Kant and Nietzsche, the condition of life.
From this it seems that one way of not being a person of the law is to focus, as does Christ, entirely on interiority. Christ, however, was the only Christian and “he died on the cross”—that is, He succeeded but only as the exceptional case and thus a dangerous exemplar. This imperative toward innerness, toward privacy and away from others has special consequences. Christ loves everyone, unconditionally. Such a great and unselfish affirmation destroys all horizons, all that might shape the world in his teaching. Christ’s love is a kind of absolute freedom and terror—“sois mon frère ou je te tue” said Babeuf during the French Revolution. The universality of Christ’s love orders that all love him. Nietzsche here points to a relation between the moral structure of Christianity and the Terror. “I hate Rousseau in the Revolution,” he writes in Twilight.
“What have we to do with the law?” By demanding a life outside and beyond any structure or organization Christ makes impossible or unnecessary any form of organized human existence. (Christianity, notes Nietzsche in 1888, is the “abolition of the state” (KGW VIII-2, 337)—which should make one think twice about what Nietzsche might have to say about the state.) And this also renders impossible that seeing which is at the same time overlooking that was necessary for health or love. “The wisest man would be the richest in contradictions; he, as it were, has feelers for all kinds of men; and right among them has his great moments of grandiose harmony.” Nietzsche refers to this state as one of justice (KGW VII-2, 179–80).18
Yet, humans are drawn toward the life of Christ, a life that dissolves itself: Why and how? The Gospels, in Nietzsche’s reading in Der Antichrist, in fact seduce by “means of morality” (A 44/ KGW VI-3, 218). They promise, that is, that the rewards for moral behavior will occur by means of redemption. Redemption is, however, the stance that one can by one’s own actions (or by no actions at all) find oneself being changed. Other beings are not necessary. The problem with morality thus appears to occur for Nietzsche when humans—especially loving humans—deny that they are in contact with others. Paradoxically, morality is thus a form of an alleviation of the problem of skepticism or of other minds, without ever doing away with the threat of skepticism. If this is true, then the Christian need not make any distinctions between those he or she encounters, which means that paradoxically to be redeemed the Christian need encounter no other person. Here I might note that when one is behind the veil of ignorance (as in the work of John Rawls), there is no need to talk to anyone else as all are expected to come up with the same judgments if reasonable and rational—Rawls remained a Christian, as his undergraduate thesis shows us. All this is (of course) disguised. In HH, Nietzsche notes the cleverness of Christianity to have focused on love:
There is in the word love something so ambiguous and suggestive, something which speaks to the memory and future hope, that even the meanest intelligence and coldest heart still feels something of the luster of this word. The shrewdest (klugste) woman and the commonest man think when they hear it of the relatively least selfish moments of their whole life, even if Eros has paid them only a passing visit; and those countless numbers who never experience love, of parents of children, or lovers, especially, however, when the women and men of sublimated Christianity, have made their discovery (Fund gemacht) in Christianity. (AOM 95 /KGW IV-1, 50–51)
Love can go wrong. This passage is an argument against the use that Christianity makes of Eros, a subject to which Nietzsche occasionally returned. But it is more interesting as a reflection on love and the status of the self that loves. Compare it, for instance, to this passage in SE. Nietzsche has just suggested that the fundamental import of what he calls culture is to “further the production of the philosopher, of the artist and the saint within and without us.” The philosopher makes becoming available to us; the artist makes “a clear and distinct image” of what is never seen “in the flux of becoming.” The saint is the person whose “individual ego has entirely melted away and who feels his suffering life as an identity, affinity, and unity with all that is living. . . . There is no doubt that we are all related and connected to this saint as we are to the philosopher and the artist; there are moments and, as it were, sparks of the brightest fire of love in the light of which we no longer understand the word ‘I’” (SE 5 /KGW III-1, 378). Note, by the way the democracy: “we are all related.”
Nietzsche goes on to applaud this state as at the root of our hatred of ourselves (thus our ability to be outside ourselves) and thus of the pessimism that Schopenhauer sought to “reteach our age.” Love breaks down the Apollonian (hence the Dionysian elements in Christ). Like its parent Eros, it is the dissolution of definition. It is dis-individuation, the deconstruction of limits.
But alone it cannot suffice. The problem with Christ is that his knowledge of love leads him to want death. Death is a dissolution—so much Nietzsche had got from Schopenhauer. Love is a form of death in this sense—so much Nietzsche had recognized in Wagner; Freud will find here the source of his understanding of the erotic. In fact, should two be in love with each other (which is not the exemplar/education model) a species of madness results. Nietzsche writes, “Both parties . . . consequently abandon themselves and want to be the same as one another.” In the end, neither knows what for him or her is supposed to be an exemplar, what is to be dissimulated, what is pretense. He writes in Morgenröte: “The beautiful madness of this spectacle is too good for this world and too subtle for human eyes” (D 532/ KGW V-1, 308). Love in itself produces nothing that can continue in this world.
So where does the Antichrist come from—what gives rise to (I presume) him? In the notes that did not make it into the final version of Ecce Homo, Nietzsche indicates that he could not have accomplished what he had were he not to have been the descendant of Protestant ministers. He pursues the implication: “My formula for that: the Antichrist is himself the necessary logical development of an authentic Christian, in me Christianity itself is overcome” (KGW VIII-3, 425).19 The Antichrist is not a simply dialectical opponent to Christ—he is the possible (although not necessary) logical development of that which Christianity starts. He is, one might say, the Messiah for a world that is not Christian. And here we extend the meanings of Der Antichrist. Khristos is the Greek for “messiah.” Hence the Antichrist is also the anti-Messiah Messiah.
So the question must be what is loved. For Christ and God this is clear. I noted the great commandments above. God loves the world. But whom do humans love? They love God with all their heart and mind and strength; and they love their neighbors as themselves. Do they love themselves? In the way they love God, I suppose. But what is left for our neighbors if we must love them when we love God unconditionally and with the sundering intensity that Nietzsche attributes to Christ. Christ really did love others as he loved himself as he loved God. And that is death. Such love loves not wisely but too well—as Othello discovered and Nietzsche intimates Christ knew (See KGW VIII-3, 336).
In other words, God and Christ do not function as what Nietzsche, in SE, called exemplars: we cannot, in fact, find in them the self that is our self but not yet our self, (we cannot genoi hoios essi—become what [we] are). Why then the attraction? There are two important lessons here. First, morality is what keeps us from dying on the cross. Morality thus preserves a life that is constantly seeking to deny itself in love. There is an indication in The Antichrist that humanity has become addicted to “moraline,” that is, to a dangerous and destructive drug which, however, one cannot do without. We constantly run toward God and must at the same time make it impossible for us to reach Him. The problem with Christianity is that it requires that we be moral if we are to remain alive—a conclusion not dissimilar to that which Freud was to reach in Das Unbehagen in der Kultur—“The Uneasiness in the Culture,” problematically given in English as Civilization and Its Discontents. This is a form of nihilism. But it also means that not anyone, as any time, can, for any reason, simply shake off the demands of morality. To continue the drug metaphor (and it is not just a metaphor), one cannot go cold turkey on morality without a serious reaction—and the danger that humanity might in this century do so is at the source of Nietzsche’s distress about the century he foresaw. This is what sons of God have to do with morals.
Second is the lesson that Cordelia tried to teach her father. To love according to one’s bond, that is according to what one is—is all that can be required and no more should be expected. In the refusal of the acknowledgment of this lesson, there is only silence, or death—the nothing that comes of nothing. Such silence—the still between two soundings, Nietzsche calls it—is the only possible human acknowledgment of the absolute.
It is noteworthy that in Der Antichrist Nietzsche counterposes himself to morality as a “Hyperborean,” as, that is, a worshiper of Apollo during the winter months (A 7/ KGW VI-3, 172). He suggests that his love of humans is such as to excise the emotion of pity from human beings. In a late note, he remarks that the Hyperborean is in fact a particular kind of philosopher: “One who is in no ways a moralist.” In fact, not being a moralist is the only path to bringing “philosophy back into respect” (KGW VIII-3, 411–12).20 For: “There is nothing for it; there is no other way to bring philosophy back to honor but to hang all the moralists” (KGW VIII-3, 412).
The demands of Christ lead to death; we resist death by means of morality; morality keeps philosophy from happening: it transforms the human love that allows one to be besides oneself and thus always with oneself into one that requires that one be dissolved into God. Christian love—modeled on the example of Christ—was a form of solipsism, a solipsism only mitigated by morality and the promise of redemption. The costs of the moral point of view, Nietzsche suggests, will be “hecatombs” (KGW VIII-3, 413), for after the death of God, there will be no limits to what can be called “good” and the moral point of view will justify even the most horrific of crimes.
Against this Nietzsche occasionally counterposes what he calls “human love.” As he found himself in diagnostic exploration of the will to morality he found himself increasingly alone. The denial of the universally applicable moral point of view had seemed to leave only death open as a way of making contact with others. He indicates, therefore, that he sought form. “I had artificially to enforce, falsify, and invent a suitable fiction for myself.” What he needed, he continues, was the belief that he was not alone, that he was not thus isolated and not alone in seeing as he did (HH P1 /KGW IV-2, 8). Recognizing that life requires deception, he deceived himself. Recognizing this, he indicates in a letter to Overbeck on February 3, 1888, that his writing must henceforth find release in attack. “No one would expect a suffering and starving animal to attack its prey gracefully. The perpetual lack of a really refreshing and healing human love, the absurd isolation it entails, makes almost any residue of a connection with people merely something that wounds one.” It is worth noting that Elisabeth forges a letter dated about the time of this one to the effect that Nietzsche is longing for female companionship—hers in fact. In her usual perverse way, she understood something of her brother.
The perversion of love in Christianity means that we are in danger of seeking an ideal in which to lose ourselves. And this is not just of what one might be tempted to at the political level. “We must keep ourselves from becoming an ideal of another,” Nietzsche writes in around 1880 (Nietzsche 1961: 296). At all costs, then, we must keep a distance on the other and on ourselves. This, however, can only be done by living in and of, and only in and only of, this world. If we run outside it, we not only will deny the actuality of evil (in the name of love) but we will be unable to tolerate the existence of others. We need, he writes in the 1886 preface to HH, “a blindness for two.” Arendt saw this as the basis of amor mundi. Or, as Wallace Stevens wrote in “Of Modern Poetry”:
It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time. It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice. It has
To construct a new stage.
This is where and how we find ourselves.
Notes
1 All citations from Nietzsche’s writings are from KGW. All translations are my own.
2 For the political toleration, see Lenin, “The Attitude of the Workers’ Party towards Religion” Collected Works 15, 402–13; “Socialism and Religion,” Collected Works 10, 83–87.
3 See Breidenthal 1998: 489–503.
4 This understanding of nihilism was present in my doctoral thesis (1968), later my first book (1975). As Cavell says: “Nietzsche was not crazy when he blamed Christianity for most of the world’s ills, although he may have been too crazy about the idea.” That said, Cavell also has a complex respect for Christianity. See Dahl 2010: 931–45.
5 It is worth noting here that some forms of Christianity (original Calvinism, for example) precisely because of an anxiety about a ledger mentality hold that the actuality of redemption is in principle unknowable.
6 Shapiro (2016: 171–72) comments on the same passage.
7 Compare Weber 1968: 23: “Now the gods have been deprived of the magical and mythical but inwardly true qualities that gave them such vivid immediacy.”
8 See Kofman 1991.
9 See Strong 2003.
10 See Kant 1968: 85: “We must not [in love] by an egotistical illusion subtract anything from the authority of the law.” See also Kant 1971: 447. See Baier 1992: 228–42. I am conscious here of Nussbaum, Chapters 13 and 14.
11 See Herman 1993.
12 Walter Kaufmann thinks this refers to Moses.
13 Copleston (1942) expresses the surprise of a Jesuit who cannot quite figure out why Nietzsche seems to dislike Christ. See also Jaspers 1961. One must resist the tendency to assert in a more or less sophisticated fashion the claim that Nietzsche never quite got rid of his childhood and that both his rejection and fascination with Christ are due to that. See Biser (1981) as well as Hohmann: “His existence (Dasein) was a tension between evasion and rebellion” (1984: 69).
14 It is perhaps telling that the transfiguration is followed immediately by the casting out of the evil spirit in a boy.
15 I owe a debt here to the chapter “On Political Evil” in Kateb (1992).
16 See Strong 2001: 221–37.
17 Some material here draws on Kofman 2004.
18 See Heidegger 1961: 632f.
19 This was written in October–November of 1888: note that he is still capable of intentional editing of his work.
20 KGW VIII-3, 411–12: “As long as philosophy continues to speak of happiness and virtue only old ladies will be persuaded to go into philosophy.”
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