Nietzsche & Christianity

by Andreas Saugstad


June 20, 2000

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is considered as being one of the most important and original thinkers in the history of Western thought. He grew up as the son of a Lutheran pastor, and attended some of the best schools in Germany at that time. Only 25 years old, he was appointed professor in philology at the University of Basel. At the age of twenty, he wrote a poem to "the unknown God:" "I want to know you -- even to serve you."

"God is dead"

But Nietzsche turned his back on the unknown one. He became one of the most significant critics of religion in general, and Christianity in particular. Nietzsche is famous for having invented the phrase "God is dead." In a parable in The Happy Science, Nietzsche lets the "madman" say: "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him!" Now if God is dead, he must have been alive once.

Nietzsche's famous slogan may therefore be interpreted as an attempt to say that God as an object for human faith is dead. Scholars have thought that Nietzsche was describing Europe in the 19th century where people no longer believe in God, where faith in God did not easily fit in to life anymore. But "God is dead" also seems to imply not only that it is impossible to believe in God, but that there is no God. As G.E. Morgan writes: "Beyond question, the major premise in Nietzsche's philosophy is atheism." Nietzsche is what we may call a "naturalist," i.e. he believes that nothing more than nature exists and than human beings are advanced animals.

When God is dead, we lack something to hold on to in life. All absolutes disappear from human life, if God is dead. As one Nietzsche scholar, Alistair Kee, writes, this leads to existential terror. Nietzsche was painfully aware of the fact that as human beings we are in search for meaning, and that we want to answer the many questions we have, and understand the sufferings we go through in life. But when God is dead we don't have any absolutes, what regulates us in immanent life are the thoughts and perspectives we manage to produce. This godless universe is a scene where humans must project their own meanings into the act, but, as Nietzsche says, there are eternally many perspectives on reality and every human being may with the help of will and motives produce his or her own perspective on reality.

The criticism of empathy and love Nietzsche challenged some of the main thoughts within Christianity in a very concrete way. Sometimes he seems to admire Jesus, and claims that the church made a picture of Jesus which is not veridical. He is skeptical to the church and its ideology, and claimed that the existential perversion which, according to him, Christianity represents, does not stem from Jesus himself, but from the church. According to Nietzsche there has only been one Christian, and he died on the cross. Nevertheless the teachings of Jesus that we find in the Gospels, are attacked by Nietzsche.

The Russian author, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, claimed that pity was the essence of Christianity. In Matthew we read about Jesus that "When he saw the multitudes, he was moved by compassion for them." (Matt 9:36) Nietzsche was critical to the ideal of compassion in Christianity. In Anti-Christ he wrote that "Christianity is the religion of pity." The German thinker, claimed that pity had a depressive effect, and that this quality is opposed to those emotions and attitudes which lead to the promotion of life.

Pity & Pietism
Pity and pietism both create slaves, he thought. The alternative to the Christian psychology Nietzsche found in what he called "the will to power." One must try to affirm one's actual nature through willpower, not try to create some church-made identity which limits one's personal development. As an autonomous being one is not to limit oneself with such destructive emotions, but rather acknowledge one's natural motives and feelings. "Egoism is not evil" Nietzsche writes somewhere, and opposed to Paul in his letter to Galatians, Nietzsche believes that one should say "Yes!" to one's own nature, and self-assertion is not sin or immoral in any objective sense.

But is Nietzsche's psychology acceptable? Nietzsche was well aware of the evolutionary theory that developed in the 19th century, and although he has written some critical comments on Darwin, some of of his thought may be regarded as a "vulgar Darwinism." What is interesting here is that sociobiologists now acknowledge empathy as a fundamental human ability, and that the ability to show sympathy with others is important for the survival of the human species. More importantly, psychologists claim that living an authentic life is impossible without developing empathy. We know that mothers have a special compassion for their children. But it is also claimed, for instance by Heinz Kohut, that empathy is a fundamental ability for being able to develop relationships with other people, and thus develop one's personality.

Pity in Christianity is connected to agape divine love. In the Bible we see that Jesus claimed that love is the most important moral quality. Jesus taught that if someone forces you to go a mile, go two miles with him (Matt. 5:41), and on the compassionate Samaritan (Luke 10:15-37) that is sacrifice for the sake of others. In 1 Corinthians 13:7 Paul writes that love does not seek its own.
(Continues)

Heh...the end of the article brings up a good, but unfair point- Nietzsche would've wanted to be simply killed than live a life of such indignity. If you couldn't support yourself, you shouldn't be supported at all.

Christianity, the faith of the petty and of the weak. The faith of the "Slave" morality(which this article has woefully neglected, but fear not! I can get explanations..).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master-Slave_Morality

Yes, it's wikipedia...deal with it.

Actually he did refer to the slave mentality. Excerpt from OP: "Pity & Pietism
Pity and pietism both create slaves, he thought. The alternative to the Christian psychology Nietzsche found in what he called "the will to power."

I'm aware of the Slave/Master Morality article. I would follow-up that Wiki link with this discussion into that segway from the OP. A relevant segway, no doubt.

Edit to add this table/ Link, relative to the "Master Slave Morality" reference.

Very good.

Oh, and for future reference-

First person to call Nietzsche a Nazi, will bring forth an assault by which even the beaches of Normandy haven't seen...

The book "Will to Power" was not written by Nietzsche, it was a collection of quotes and notes, tainted with Anti-semitism by his sister, and sold. It was the Nazi-Manifesto until Hitler wrote Mein Kampf..

Interesting article. I like Nietzsche very much.


I think Nietzsche's statement is purely figurative speech and not referring to an actual, dead diety...


Wait, what?
Why should God be the ultimate thing to "hold on in life"? To state that without God, life has no meaning, is absurd. In my life, for instance, there is no room for God, and I still live a great life. Even without any specific "meaning".
I think the phrase "carpe diem" (seize the day) is so great; "live in the present".


Correct.


Christianity is the religion of self-denial. It wants us to deny all our basic wants and needs. Just because someone thinks about himself, doesn't automatically means he or she is evil and is forgetting about everybody else.
To give up your self is to give up your entire life essence and that is exactly the strive of Christianty. And other monotheistical teachings.


Pity is not the same as love!
And yes, compassion is crucial, but it doesn't mean that Christianity holds the monopoly to it.

As for the rest of the article, it holds a rather cynical, Christian conclusion that God is so absolute, that any critical views against the teaching are completely irrelevant.

I don't read Nietzsche's philosophy in this piece, that way at all. If it were true that critical views against the teachings are irrelevant, in Nietzie's frame, then I dare say he would not have had so much in his work that criticized christiainity, christians and their god. Rather, I think if one reads the included link to the Master Slave Morality, they may gain the insight that the teachings are irrelevant to the christian believer, because they are incapable of thinking past the box they've allowed themselves to enter, in subservients to the christian ideology. So, in effect, it would be pointless to try to reason with the unreasonable. And that, the survival of the human species, was a reflection early on that it was accomplished because humanity was devoid of the christian philosophy, because of it's method in teaching self-sacrifice. (*From the link below* Nietzsche's second answer was that humanity had escaped utter degeneration and destruction because, despite its dominance as a theory of action, few men actually practiced Christianity. It was next to impossible, he said, to find a single man who, literally and absolutely, obeyed the teachings of Christ.((21)) There were plenty of men who thought they were doing so, but all of them were yielding in only a partial manner. Absolute Christianity meant absolute disregard of self. It was obvious that a man who reached this state of mind would be unable to follow any gainful occupation, and so would find it impossible to preserve his own life or the lives of his children. In brief, said Nietzsche, an actual and utter Christian would perish today just as Christ perished, and so, in his own fate, would provide a conclusive argument against Christianity. )



These excerpts from the article: H.L. Mencken's The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche:
Nietzsche the Philosopher, may assist to further that line of discussion.


*Christianity, says Nietzsche, is the most dangerous system of slave-morality the world has ever known. "It has waged a deadly war against the highest type of man. It has put a ban on all his fundamental instincts. It has distilled evil out of these instincts. It makes the strong and efficient man its typical outcast man. It has taken the part of the weak and the low; it has made an ideal out of its antagonism to the very instincts which tend to preserve life and well-being.... It has taught men to regard their highest impulses as sinful - as temptations."((10)) In a word, it tends to rob mankind of all those qualities which fit any living organism to survive in the struggle for existence.

*Nietzsche maintains that Christianity urges a man to make no such efforts to insure his personal survival in the struggle for existence. The beatitudes require, he says, that, instead of trying to do so, the Christian shall devote his energies to helping others and shall give no thought to himself. Instead of exalting himself as much as possible above the common herd and thus raising his chances of surviving, and those of his children, above those of the average man, he is required to lift up this average man. Now, it is plain that every time he lifts up some one else, he must, at the same time, decrease his own store, because his own store is the only stock from which he can draw. Therefore, the tendency of the Christian philosophy of humility is to make men voluntarily throw away their own chances of surviving, which means their own sense of efficiency, which means their own "feeling of increasing power," which means their own happiness. As a substitute for this natural happiness, Christianity offers the happiness derived from the belief that the deity will help those who make the sacrifice and so restore them to their old superiority. This belief, as Nietzsche shows, is no more borne out by known facts than the old belief in witches. It is, in fact, proved to be an utter absurdity by all human experience.

You mean there's still existentialists that aren't in University?

Shhhhh