The Nietzschean Odyssey: The Anti-Christ
...A Curse on Christianity. And how!
Nietzsche, as you may have guessed by this point, is something of a polemicist. He says things that would get a rise out of people. He is also quite good at this. After all, he gives his books names like "The Anti-Christ." Nietzsche, however, is also a scholar with a very thorough classical background, a love of metaphor, and a knack for the aphoristic method. Thus, his polemics are, as a rule, never what they seem. Take "The Anti-Christ." Near the beginning we find the following statement:
Now that's not very nice, right? It's also one of those statements that is "classic Nietzsche": that is, with no context, no history, no sense of music or of philology in the Nietzschean sense, whatever you think about it is probably wrong and misguided.
So let us uncover what it is about this statement that Nietzsche finds as truth, for this statement really sums up everything you need to know about the book. First, we must recall the Will to Power, that most famous of Nietzschean ideas. It becomes more and more prevalent the later we get in Nietzsche's works. For Nietzsche the Will to Power is a psychological fact of life: life is the seeking of more power (as opposed to, say, Schopenhauer's will to life, where life is merely the continuation of life). More happiness = more power. Of course, different people have different ways of implementing power, and different goals.
The problem with Christianity, then, we can assume probably has to do with its Will to Power. And this is so. For, you see, Christianity is completely, dialectically even, opposed to life. Christianity and life, Christianity and reality, are completely against each other.
Well, that certainly sounds bad, doesn't it? But what makes Nietzsche say that? To answer this requires something of a history of Christianity in terms of the Will to Power, something which Nietzsche gladly offers. First we start with, of course, the first (and by Nietzsche's account, the last and only) Christian, Jesus. Nietzsche has a most curious account of Jesus. Jesus, he says, is a hypersensitive, with an extremely acute sense of suffering. All is pain, and all pain is terrible pain. As a result, Jesus' life is lived completely on the inside. All is internalized. "The Kingdom of God is within each of you," as Nietzsche repeatedly quotes. And, according to Nietzsche, Jesus meant this literally. This is important. It means that Jesus was not talking about a heaven up above, about redemption after death. He was talking about a way of life (Nietzsche emphasizes this emphatically and calls later Christians into error on this account: Jesus proscribed a way of life, not a doctrine), what one must do right now. And that way is love, love even of the enemy, as a way to endure the suffering that is everything outside of one's self.
This, of course, is very much opposed to a policy of yes-saying to life. It looks only within, and discounts reality, which is the world of sense for Nietzsche. An ideal for a sufferer from life, you might say. However, the doctrine of Jesus is not what Nietzsche has his big complaint against (though of course he doesn't agree with it). As Nietzsche says, Jesus' way of life was perfectly acceptable for him. It was his Will to Power acting out, and it did well. Always remember when reading Nietzsche: "right and wrong" are arbitrary, there is only "good and bad," which is to say good for life or bad for life. Jesus' approach was good for his life. However, what came after Jesus was very, very bad for life.
We see, then that the problem is not Christ himself, but the Church. During what follows try to keep in mind The Genealogy of Morals, especially the section on aesthetic priests. We start here with Paul. To Nietzsche, Paul represents everything wrong: he is of the Chandala ("Untouchables" in the Indian caste system), a hater of life, filled with feelings of revenge. He wants revenge, he needs it. His Will to Power demands revenge. Then comes his opportunity, through the death of Jesus. For those who followed Jesus (the first ones to misinterpret his message, it can be said), his death was a wall against everything they had hoped and dreamed for. "What now?" they asked. Paul had the answers: Jesus' death was a death for us, a sacrifice for the Chandala in the world. When he said "The Kingdom of God is in each of you," he made us all equal, aristocrat and plebeian. "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for the rich man to enter heaven" tells us that, really, though all souls are equal, it is us, the weak, those against life, that will be saved. And here Paul's revenge succeeded. The weak lost their sense of place, and started to believe that yes, all are equal in soul, and even more, our position in life makes us better than those above us. Here the doctrines of the Judgment and life after death gave people hope for more, more in a life outside of this one. The priests (the Paulites) have achieved what their Will to Power sought: control, power over the people, revenge over the powerful, with figurative and literal keys to the gates of Heaven and Hell in their hands. The priests give the weak what they need (remember the end of The Genealogy of Morals: a meaning, a purpose to suffering, is what was needed for the sick). In return, the priests' truth is the truth.
We can start to see it now. Christianity is a system of thought that destroys the realities of difference in life. It says that the differences in the real world do not reflect real differences. It says, furthermore, that this life is not the only life. There is another, and the other life, not this one, is the one that matters. Life itself, the life we live, is frankly wrong, and not only wrong, but evil.
This is how the Church of Christianity creates its following, by uniting all those who say No to life through the promise of a better one. In other words, it is a tool to harness the power of the sick, and do so for the benefit of those in charge of the Church, the priests. But this is not the end of the story. For the priests must find ways to keep their hold on power, since surely the higher men will not simply sit idle. How do they do this? Sin. The first sin, the original sin, was that of knowledge: Eve and Adam ate of the apple, and came to understand good and evil. They received the power to judge, and through that the ultimate power: "Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil." So our greatest error, our greatest sin, is knowledge, rising above, becoming creators. The weak, being themselves not creators nor seekers of knowledge, want this. The strong, those who say Yes to life, will be suppressed. Thus, everything the priest stands for is literally backwards. He fights for the sick who should not be fought for, for a world which does not exist, for ideals that oppose life itself, against ideals that are the way through which life becomes what it should. The priest is wrong about everything.
It is these ends, these ends completely opposed to life, that quash the strong and strong ideals and meaning in living in favor of fog and obscurity, that form the problem with Christianity. To make this point Nietzsche examines the Book of Manu, a completely opposite type of book. It is the result of generations of experience: it takes what works to improves society, calls it holy and tells you to ask no further questions, and the end. Does it lie? "A final passage - perhaps a holy lie too -: 'all bodily orifices above the navel are pure, all the ones below are impure. Only in girls is the whole body pure.'" That the Book of Many might (probably does) lie is unimportant - remember that there is no "good in itself," only the Will to Power. What is different here is that the ends are for life, for reality, for the higher man - and that is all that is important.
So that is Christianity: the weakening of every good instinct in man, of every good value, of everything of meaning in the name of something that is itself only the expression of weakness in life. And so, accordingly, Nietzsche indicts the Church on "the most terrible charges an accuser has ever had in his mouth": being opposed to life itself, being a will to nothing, ultimate Nihilism.
Next, as Nietzsche continues to round out his life (and his sanity): Ecce Homo.
Nietzsche, as you may have guessed by this point, is something of a polemicist. He says things that would get a rise out of people. He is also quite good at this. After all, he gives his books names like "The Anti-Christ." Nietzsche, however, is also a scholar with a very thorough classical background, a love of metaphor, and a knack for the aphoristic method. Thus, his polemics are, as a rule, never what they seem. Take "The Anti-Christ." Near the beginning we find the following statement:
Anything a theologian thinks is true must be false: this is practically a criterion of truth.
Now that's not very nice, right? It's also one of those statements that is "classic Nietzsche": that is, with no context, no history, no sense of music or of philology in the Nietzschean sense, whatever you think about it is probably wrong and misguided.
So let us uncover what it is about this statement that Nietzsche finds as truth, for this statement really sums up everything you need to know about the book. First, we must recall the Will to Power, that most famous of Nietzschean ideas. It becomes more and more prevalent the later we get in Nietzsche's works. For Nietzsche the Will to Power is a psychological fact of life: life is the seeking of more power (as opposed to, say, Schopenhauer's will to life, where life is merely the continuation of life). More happiness = more power. Of course, different people have different ways of implementing power, and different goals.
The problem with Christianity, then, we can assume probably has to do with its Will to Power. And this is so. For, you see, Christianity is completely, dialectically even, opposed to life. Christianity and life, Christianity and reality, are completely against each other.
Well, that certainly sounds bad, doesn't it? But what makes Nietzsche say that? To answer this requires something of a history of Christianity in terms of the Will to Power, something which Nietzsche gladly offers. First we start with, of course, the first (and by Nietzsche's account, the last and only) Christian, Jesus. Nietzsche has a most curious account of Jesus. Jesus, he says, is a hypersensitive, with an extremely acute sense of suffering. All is pain, and all pain is terrible pain. As a result, Jesus' life is lived completely on the inside. All is internalized. "The Kingdom of God is within each of you," as Nietzsche repeatedly quotes. And, according to Nietzsche, Jesus meant this literally. This is important. It means that Jesus was not talking about a heaven up above, about redemption after death. He was talking about a way of life (Nietzsche emphasizes this emphatically and calls later Christians into error on this account: Jesus proscribed a way of life, not a doctrine), what one must do right now. And that way is love, love even of the enemy, as a way to endure the suffering that is everything outside of one's self.
This, of course, is very much opposed to a policy of yes-saying to life. It looks only within, and discounts reality, which is the world of sense for Nietzsche. An ideal for a sufferer from life, you might say. However, the doctrine of Jesus is not what Nietzsche has his big complaint against (though of course he doesn't agree with it). As Nietzsche says, Jesus' way of life was perfectly acceptable for him. It was his Will to Power acting out, and it did well. Always remember when reading Nietzsche: "right and wrong" are arbitrary, there is only "good and bad," which is to say good for life or bad for life. Jesus' approach was good for his life. However, what came after Jesus was very, very bad for life.
We see, then that the problem is not Christ himself, but the Church. During what follows try to keep in mind The Genealogy of Morals, especially the section on aesthetic priests. We start here with Paul. To Nietzsche, Paul represents everything wrong: he is of the Chandala ("Untouchables" in the Indian caste system), a hater of life, filled with feelings of revenge. He wants revenge, he needs it. His Will to Power demands revenge. Then comes his opportunity, through the death of Jesus. For those who followed Jesus (the first ones to misinterpret his message, it can be said), his death was a wall against everything they had hoped and dreamed for. "What now?" they asked. Paul had the answers: Jesus' death was a death for us, a sacrifice for the Chandala in the world. When he said "The Kingdom of God is in each of you," he made us all equal, aristocrat and plebeian. "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for the rich man to enter heaven" tells us that, really, though all souls are equal, it is us, the weak, those against life, that will be saved. And here Paul's revenge succeeded. The weak lost their sense of place, and started to believe that yes, all are equal in soul, and even more, our position in life makes us better than those above us. Here the doctrines of the Judgment and life after death gave people hope for more, more in a life outside of this one. The priests (the Paulites) have achieved what their Will to Power sought: control, power over the people, revenge over the powerful, with figurative and literal keys to the gates of Heaven and Hell in their hands. The priests give the weak what they need (remember the end of The Genealogy of Morals: a meaning, a purpose to suffering, is what was needed for the sick). In return, the priests' truth is the truth.
We can start to see it now. Christianity is a system of thought that destroys the realities of difference in life. It says that the differences in the real world do not reflect real differences. It says, furthermore, that this life is not the only life. There is another, and the other life, not this one, is the one that matters. Life itself, the life we live, is frankly wrong, and not only wrong, but evil.
This is how the Church of Christianity creates its following, by uniting all those who say No to life through the promise of a better one. In other words, it is a tool to harness the power of the sick, and do so for the benefit of those in charge of the Church, the priests. But this is not the end of the story. For the priests must find ways to keep their hold on power, since surely the higher men will not simply sit idle. How do they do this? Sin. The first sin, the original sin, was that of knowledge: Eve and Adam ate of the apple, and came to understand good and evil. They received the power to judge, and through that the ultimate power: "Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil." So our greatest error, our greatest sin, is knowledge, rising above, becoming creators. The weak, being themselves not creators nor seekers of knowledge, want this. The strong, those who say Yes to life, will be suppressed. Thus, everything the priest stands for is literally backwards. He fights for the sick who should not be fought for, for a world which does not exist, for ideals that oppose life itself, against ideals that are the way through which life becomes what it should. The priest is wrong about everything.
It is these ends, these ends completely opposed to life, that quash the strong and strong ideals and meaning in living in favor of fog and obscurity, that form the problem with Christianity. To make this point Nietzsche examines the Book of Manu, a completely opposite type of book. It is the result of generations of experience: it takes what works to improves society, calls it holy and tells you to ask no further questions, and the end. Does it lie? "A final passage - perhaps a holy lie too -: 'all bodily orifices above the navel are pure, all the ones below are impure. Only in girls is the whole body pure.'" That the Book of Many might (probably does) lie is unimportant - remember that there is no "good in itself," only the Will to Power. What is different here is that the ends are for life, for reality, for the higher man - and that is all that is important.
So that is Christianity: the weakening of every good instinct in man, of every good value, of everything of meaning in the name of something that is itself only the expression of weakness in life. And so, accordingly, Nietzsche indicts the Church on "the most terrible charges an accuser has ever had in his mouth": being opposed to life itself, being a will to nothing, ultimate Nihilism.
Next, as Nietzsche continues to round out his life (and his sanity): Ecce Homo.
posted by Derek at 1:19 PM
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