Redeeming Nietzsche

On the Piety of Unbelief

Giles Fraser

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134483105
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Best known for having declared the death of God, Nietzsche was a thinker thoroughly absorbed in the Christian tradition in which he was born and raised. Yet while the atheist Nietzsche is well known, the pious Nietzsche is seldom recognized and rarely understood. Redeeming Nietzsche examines the residual theologian in the most vociferous of atheists.
Giles Fraser demonstrates that although Nietzsche rejected God, he remained obsessed with the question of human salvation. Examining his accounts of art, truth, morality and eternity, Nietzsche's thought is revealed to be

1 Holy Nietzsche

I condemn Christianity, I bring against the Christian Church the most terrible charge any prosecutor has ever uttered. To me it is the extremest thinkable form of corruption . . . Wherever there are walls I shall inscribe this eternal accusation against Christianity upon them – I can write in letters which make even the blind see . . . I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct for revenge for which no expedient is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, petty – I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind.

Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, p. 62

In search of God?

In the last few months before his final mental breakdown Nietzsche wrote of his fear that some day he would be pronounced ‘holy’. One could be forgiven for thinking this a strange fear from one who is remembered most of all for having broken the news of God’s death and then for proceeding to dance at His wake. Nonetheless, there have been a considerable number of thinkers who have seen in this dance patterns of movement that remind them of the religion whose demise is being celebrated. Heidegger called Nietzsche ‘that passionate seeker after God and the last German philosopher’¹ – a reference, no doubt, to the fact that the madman who proclaims God’s death enters the market place crying out ‘I seek God! I seek God!’ Julian Young has gone as far as to suggest that Nietzsche’s intellectual quest can be characterised as ‘proving that God, after all, exists’. And yet, of course, Nietzsche was one of the most emphatic and militant of all ‘atheists’. His condemnations of Christianity are, arguably, unrivalled in their ferocity and vitriol. One of the challenges facing those who seek to come to grips with Nietzsche’s work is finding a way of making sense of these seemingly conflicting drives. Erich Heller, for instance, suggests the following:

He is, by the very texture of his soul and mind, one of the most radically religious natures that the nineteenth century brought forth, but is endowed with an intellect which guards, with the aggressive jealousy of a watchdog, all approaches to the temple.²

In what follows I will be proposing an answer to why it is that Nietzsche manages to come across simultaneously as both atheistic and pious. My basic argument will be this. Nietzsche is obsessed with the question of human salvation. It is an obsession that is formed in his childhood through the Pietistic upbringing given to him by family and teachers. And despite the fact that he becomes an atheist, he continues passionately to explore different ways in which the same basic instinct for redemption can be expressed in a world without God. He could well have had himself in mind when he wrote of European culture in general: ‘it seems to me that the religious instinct is indeed in vigorous growth – but that it rejects the theistic answer with profound mistrust.’³ Nietzsche’s work, as I understand it, is a series of experiments in redemption. That is, Nietzsche’s work is primarily soteriology: experiments to design a form of redemption that would work for a post-theistic age.

Having established the priority of soteriology in Nietzsche’s thought I proceed to examine a number of his central doctrines as successive attempts to square the circle of post-theistic soteriology – that is, as experiments in redemption. First I will offer a reading of The Birth of Tragedy as an attempt to articulate salvation as art: ‘life is only justified as an aesthetic phenomenon'⁴ is the best known summary of this position. Next, I will look at Nietzsche’s attack upon Christian soteriology as developed in On the Genealogy of Morals and The Anti-Christ. Here we begin to see Nietzsche advance the idea of the Übermensch as his own version of what redeemed humanity ought to look like. This leads on into an examination of what is arguably the pinnacle of Nietzsche’s soteriological experimentation, the enigmatic eternal recurrence of the same. With the development of the eternal recurrence, Nietzsche believes himself to have given birth to an idea capable of offering genuine redemption, albeit to a very few, and those not yet born. In his thought of the eternal recurrence, Nietzsche imagines a doctrine sufficient to survive the death of God and capable of replacing the soteriology of the Christian past.

As I go along, reflecting upon these different experiments, I will seek to draw attention to the extent to which Nietzsche is involved in a complex and sophisticated process of theological sampling, repeating the patterns of thought that animated his early childhood faith. Although designed to be atheistic, Nietzsche borrows a great deal from the Christian past he eschews. This will be my answer to why there is a double textured quality to Nietzsche’s attitude to Christianity, why the ‘conflicting drives’. Nietzsche’s a-theology may reject Christian soteriology, but it borrows substantially from it nonetheless.

In the last three chapters I will turn from interpretation to assessment. There I will seek to explore why Nietzsche’s experiments in redemption come to fail. Furthermore, my aim is to assess these experiments in Nietzsche’s own terms My overall point will be that Nietzsche fails to appreciate the full horror of human suffering. For although he envisions redemption as being achieved by some almost super-human act of heroic affirmation, ‘Yes saying’ to life in all its horrific fulness, the truth is that Nietzsche’s conception of horror, of suffering and indeed of the nihil itself are the imaginings of the comfortably off bourgeoisie. ‘An armchair philosopher of human riskiness’ is what Martha Nussbaum has called him, and I, for somewhat different reasons to Nussbaum, will be claiming much the same.

So much for where the argument is going. Before I get on to the main part of the argument we need to do a certain amount of stage setting. The ‘theological’ Nietzsche has been misread from a variety of different perspectives and these threads need to be unpicked before further progress can be made. The rest of this chapter will be concerned to review something of the theological Rezeptionsgeschichte of Nietzsche’s work with the aim of excavating the foundations of various misreadings, as well as indicating those readings which anticipate my own.

All of this, I hope, will be a long way from claiming Nietzsche himself to be ‘holy’. Indeed those most in danger of constructing a holy Nietzsche are not those who claim that Nietzsche remained indebted to Christianity despite his ‘atheism’ but rather those who have come to construct hagiographies around his anti-Christianity. It is ironic that though Nietzsche insisted that he did not want ‘believers’ or ‘followers’, every subsequent generation has thrown them up; from the development of the various Nietzsche cults at the turn of the twentieth century to his becoming a fetish of post-modern credibility, Nietzsche is always in danger from those who most admire him. ‘May your name be holy to future generations’ pronounced Nietzsche’s friend Peter Gast at his funeral.⁵ In challenging the ideological purity of Nietzsche’s ‘atheism’ one is not making Nietzsche holy. One may indeed be saving him from an unwanted secular saintliness.

Early appropriations of Nietzschean `religiosity'

Early attempts to make sense of Nietzsche’s ‘religiosity’ often had ‘a crackpot, fringe quality about them’.⁶ Though the vast majority of Christians who read Nietzsche saw a Nietzscheanised Christianity or Christianised Nietzscheanism as an impossible and monstrous idea, there were some, mostly Protestants, who sought to appropriate something of the energy of Nietzsche’s philosophy as a way of re-invigorating what they perceived as a religion in decline. Albert Kalthoff (1850–1906), a reasonably well-known and influential Protestant pastor in Bremen, gave a series of what he called ‘Zarathustra Sermons’ in which he contrasted a Nietzschean Christianity of vitalism and will with an analysis of the sterile and life-denying theology inherent in the Church. Kalthoff’s vision was of a world ‘in which everything unliving, unfree, dying, weakly and sick in man is eliminated’.⁷ It cannot pass without comment that an understanding of faith that had incorporated such clearly eugenic language in the search for a Christian völkisch revival was systematically weakening the capacity of Christianity to resist the holocaust which was to come. Kalthoff’s free-floating ‘radicalism’ sought to establish that Christianity and Nietzscheanism originated in the same impulse: as Jesus was to the Pharisees, so Nietzsche is to the contemporary Church; Nietzsche has ‘more morality, this antichrist, more Christianity than those who blaspheme him’.⁸

Though Nietzschean ideas were equally attractive to left wing and right wing groups (Kalthoff was himself a Marxist), it was those who sought to promote nationalist ideology who were most successful in harnessing the cultural authority of Nietzsche’s image. For thinkers like Arthur Bonus writing just before the First World War, a cross-pollination of Christianity and Nietzsche was seen to produce a specifically German Christianity centred not upon guilt and weakness but on power and strength. Nietzsche’s German ‘religiosity’ became a lens through which Christianity was refracted into nationalism. Redirecting the Christian tradition meant breaking the power of the established Church as mediator of the Gospel message and linking the emergent spirituality with the history of the Volk itself. The feasibility of this transformation was, however, only apparent to a few; more commonly, Nietzschean religiosity was understood in opposition to Christianity. According to the influential Horneffer brothers, editors at the Nietzsche Archive, Nietzschean spirituality was pagan in origin, it expressed and celebrated the explosive potential of Nordic energy and individual heroism. It believed not in God but above all in itself, and in particular (following Nietzsche’s dictum ‘remain true to the earth’) in the blood and soil of the German people. This particular use of Nietzsche was to find its fullest expression in the infamous Deutsche Glaubensbewegung, the German Faith movement. Avowedly Nietzschean and anti-Christian, the German Faith movement saw itself as the spiritual wing of the Nazi revolution. It was, according to its founding figure Jakob Hauer, ‘an eruption from the biological and spiritual depths of the nation’. Increasingly Nietzsche’s language of health and weakness was used as the moral basis of a movement keen to contrast its own strength with the weakness and decadence of the Christian past. ‘Can there be a higher value than the health of a Volk which unconditionally demands the extermination of bad instincts and criminal drives?’ asks Hauer ominously.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

But just as Nietzsche was claimed by those who sought to provide the spiritual justification of Nazism, so too was he to have a significant influence upon one of the most celebrated Christian opponents of the Nazi regime, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. ‘Bonhoeffer’, his biographer and friend Eberhard Bethge writes ‘read all of Nietzsche very carefully’ and was clearly indebted to his thought.⁹ In particular Bonhoeffer saw in Nietzsche’s phrase ‘beyond good and evil’ an approach to ethics that he believed to be at the very heart of Protestant theology and central to a proper understanding of the Gospel. Thus in his Barcelona lecture of 1929 Bonhoeffer claims:

The Christian gospel stands beyond good and evil. Nor could it be otherwise; for, were the grace of God to be subordinated to human criteria of good and evil, this would establish a human claim on God incompatible with the uniqueness of God’s power and honour. There is a profound significance in the Biblical attribution of the fall to humanity’s eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The original – one might say childlike – community of humans stands beyond their knowing of good and evil; it rests on the knowledge of one thing alone, God’s limitless love for humanity. Thus it was by no means Fr. Nietzsche who first penetrated ‘beyond good and evil’, even though it was on this basis that he denounced the ‘moral poison’ of Christianity. But, however much it may have come to be obscured, this insight belongs to the patrimony of the gospel itself.¹⁰

Nietzsche himself seems to interpret Jesus’ attitude towards good and evil in these terms when he writes in Beyond Good and Evil: ‘Jesus said to his Jews: “The law was made for servants – love God as I love him, as his son! What do we sons of God have to do with morality!”’¹¹

This aphorism does seem to suggest that Nietzsche is claiming an affinity with Jesus’ teaching (both denouncing ‘morality’) – an affinity which is the basis of Bonhoeffer’s Nietzscheanism. For Bonhoeffer the freedom and free-spiritedness of the Übermensch, a freedom that is made possible by the capacity of the Übermensch to operate beyond the dictates of morality, is remarkably similar the freedom of the Christian, who is likewise able to operate beyond conventional morality because of his or her life in Christ.¹² In this Bonhoeffer is simply seeking to restate what he takes to be ‘orthodox’ Lutheran theology; namely, that freedom is the very essence of salvation, and salvation is only possible ‘beyond good and evil’, beyond, that is, the devious delusions of ethical self-righteousness. Like Nietzsche, Bonhoeffer believes all ethics, and so-called Christian ethics no less, to be dangerous corruptions. For Bonhoeffer the knowledge of good and evil takes humanity further away from our original unity with God: ‘The knowledge of good and evil shows that he [humanity] is no longer one with his origin.’¹³ In a telling passage in The Anti-Christ Nietzsche himself tells of a pre-lapsarian community ‘at one’ with its God and with itself.¹⁴ The ‘fall’ from this idyllic community is for Nietzsche co-temporal with the introduction of morality, and it is not too much of an oversimplification of Nietzsche’s complex genealogy of Christianity to suggest that, for him, the transformation of Yahweh into a ‘moral God’ is the source of all the trouble. To this extent both Nietzsche and Bonhoeffer conceive of ‘salvation’ as some sort of reversal of the original ‘moral’ fall: both envisage salvation as looking something like the sort of life led by Adam and Eve before the fall; that is, before the introduction of good and evil. We will explore this particular ‘experiment in redemption’ in more detail later on.

Bonhoeffer is perhaps best known for his attempts to articulate what he calls ‘Religionless Christianity’. ‘We are moving towards a completely religionless time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious any more.’¹⁵ Bonhoeffer thinks it is both foolish and unnecessary to resist changing attitudes towards religiosity. Just as St. Paul attacks the idea of circumcision being a precondition of salvation, so likewise Bonhoeffer attacks the idea of ‘religiosity’ being a precondition of salvation. Thus the central theological task, the task of articulating ‘who is Jesus Christ for us today?’ involves asking:

How do we speak of God without religion, i.e. without the temporally conditioned presuppositions of metaphysics, inwardness, and so on? How do we speak (or perhaps we cannot now even ‘speak’ as we used to) in a secular way about ‘God’? In what way are we ‘religionless secular’ Christians, in what way are we εκ-κλησια, those who are called forth, not regarding ourselves from a religious point of view as specially favoured, but rather as belonging wholly to the world.¹⁶

Too often Bonhoeffer’s talk of ‘God without religion’ is interpreted as something like God without Church, or God without all the ecclesiastical ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgement
• 1 Holy Nietzsch
• 2 The orientation of Nietzsche's question of God
• 3 Facing the truth, outfacing the horror
• 4 Redeeming redemption
• 5 Parables of innocence and judgement
• 6 Salvation, kitsch and the denial of shit
• 7 Sacrifice and the logic of exclusion
• 8 Fear of the other
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index