Nietzsche - Godless Heathen or Misunderstood Zealot?
Introduction
One of the more divisive thinkers and writers of the 19th century is Friedrich Nietzsche; his work encompasses philosophical essays, poetry, cultural criticism, fiction and more. The writing touches upon a large body of subjects like the arts, culture, religion, history, philology, and science. Nietzsche remains controversial to this day, and a big reason for that is the posthumous editing his sister did to a large part of his work. She inserted her own ultranationalist and anti-semitic ideas into the work of her then-dead brother and published her own writing under his name. While this is now well-known information, at the time, and for some time after his death, this writing was falsely attributed to Nietzsche and his name to this day is still stained with these ideas.
His writing remains controversial but also misunderstood. Nietzsche’s writing isn’t straightforward; it’s drenched in irony, filled with aphorisms, and wrapped in aesthetic and poetic flair. His writings are often used to justify egotism, selfishness, nationalism, and he’s often misinterpreted as a nihilistic atheist. He’s famous for his criticism of Christian morality and religion, but today we ask the question whether that’s the right interpretation or whether it’s another commonly misinterpreted part of his work.
Nietzsche often contradicts himself, and cohesion is clearly not of great importance to him in his writing. He valued aesthetics more, and most of his writing read like philosophical polemics driven through myth and poetry. His writing is valuable to anyone philosophically inclined, and to agnostics and believers alike. To Christians, if nothing else, he represents one view of Christianity that Christians should be able to intellectually address. To understand the basis for Nietzsche’s criticism, we also need to take a closer look at his idea of Christianity.
His criticism is highly contextual and historical. Nietzsche’s experience of Christianity was 19th-century German Catholicism and Protestantism. He saw and experienced a lot of hypocrisy from the Church and viewed it as a rich and powerful institution preying on the existential and spiritual needs of people. While a lot of his writing is filled with both spite and colours, some readers find Nietzsche to be somewhat mystical in his own enigmatic way. He was no doubt hypocritical, often criticising the asceticism of Christianity, but similarly leading a relatively poor and isolated life himself. As Nietzsche himself understood all philosophy to be autobiographical, it’s worth remembering this while looking at his work.
From my personal understanding and reading of his work, I find it to be inspired; it teeters on the brink of mysticism, and surely his own unique conditions gave rise to some profound truths about the human condition. However, he was also a man plagued by darkness. He wrote about Christianity offering a solution to a lot of the problems he was facing, but refused to accept it himself, and a lot of his struggles highlight that personal and mental battle.
While Christian ascetic traditions have hundreds of years of traditions and writings about dealing with and overcoming the hardships that isolation brings, not only physically but also mentally and spiritually, Nietzsche didn’t study any of these texts, and presumably only familiarised himself with two denominations of Christianity; he went looking for solutions on his own, to some success. Just like religious ascetics, he dedicated his life to his work and ideology. However, also suffering from physical ills, he came to use large doses of opium, and eventually suffered severe mental illness. In these psychotic episodes, he became more and more alienated and lost touch with friends and loved ones, and at the end of his life, he signed his letters as both Dionysus and “The Crucified One”.
To better answer the question of whether Nietzsche was a man of faith or a man with none, we will delve a little deeper into some of his writings and aphorisms, and while he often writes negatively about Christianity and its morals, it’s clear his critique isn’t always directed at the the teachings of Jesus but rather the Church of his time and place.
“In truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.” - Friedrich Nietzsche
To Nietzsche, Jesus Christ was the only truly genuine Christian because he lived and died by his radical, life-affirming principles. He admired Christ’s personal power, integrity and willingness to give his life for his belief. While institutional Christianity became a corrupt, hypocritical system of dogma, pity, and slave morality, misrepresenting Christ’s original message and true self.
God is Dead
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” - Nietzsche, The Joyous Wisdom
Epistemology is the study of knowledge - asking questions like: “What do we know?”, “How do we know what we know?” And “What is knowledge?” This is perhaps Nietzsche’s biggest shortcoming, and is a field where most philosophers fall short of the mark. The first pillar of his epistemology is perspectivism - the idea that there is no objective truth and that all knowledge is derived from personal perspective. While he rejects truth as an objective thing, he does embrace it as a useful human construct which motivates people to live meaningful lives. Nietzsche viewed all human knowledge as deriving from the “Will to Power”, which he sees as a fundamental human need to interpret, categorise and impose meaning on things. It’s our will to have power over things in our lives that makes us desire to know things, even if that knowledge can never be verified or found to be objectively true. This sort of relativism isn’t uncommon in modern thought, and despite it, Nietzsche still criticises people for having different truths than his own. His critique of church dogma largely stems from his encouragement to view the world through “a set of different eyes” and to approach the world with a more open mind to get a fuller understanding of it. Ironically, he never gives himself fully to another perspective; instead focuses entirely on what he views as the negatives of schools of thought which he dislikes.
This kind of hypocrisy is especially common when it comes to philosophers trying to establish subjectivity and any kind of relativism as objectivity. Nietzsche’s epistemology is about as vibe-based and intuitive as a lot of religious dogma, and in some ways, he can be viewed as a theist, but one who, in an example of poignant irony, is reacting against the world’s false imagination of a “God”. Indeed, he views this false imagination as hypocritical and selfish, an entity conjured up by people to fit our base purposes and to strengthen our own shortcomings and to function as an excuse so we do not have to take accountability.
In the quote above about the death of “God”, Nietzsche takes the opportunity to call to action and, in his own misguided way, creates a divine entity out of his own concept of the Will to Power. This pervasive and Unnameable Phenomenon seeks to fulfil the metaphysical qualities of a greater force moving things towards the order in which they find themselves, and we have to not only reconcile with the fact that we have “killed” God, but also have to enter into that new covenant with Nietzsche’s metaphysics to fill the role which religion has held throughout human history.
As a student of history and human thought, Nietzsche wasn’t blind to the importance of religion, and in fact, often warned about the consequences of a life guided neither by philosophy nor religion. Nietzsche is often wrongly mislabeled as a nihilist, but in fact, he was actively trying to prevent nihilism; he saw a rise of uncaring, meaningless philosophy in the world, and that religion couldn’t maintain the ethics and meaning it had previously provided, largely due to its own shortcomings and hypocrisy. In the vacuum of that space, man needed to reinvent the rules of life by himself, and Nietzsche viewed himself as one of the philosophers to do that.
In this way, Nietzsche becomes a zealot, not for an already established religion, but rather his own philosophy. For man to be liberated from the falsehoods of the man-made religions, he would have to create his own truths. “God is dead” means that the idea of God can no longer provide the values humans need. To Nietzsche, this paradigm shift causes a reevaluation of values, and to avoid relapsing into other-worldliness: Platonic idealism, Christian beliefs or asceticism, these new values would have to be of this-worldliness - a philosophy which would be life-affirming and creative according to Nietzsche. The ‘other-worldliness’ which he constantly critiques is concepts of heaven, hell or any concept of life outside of this immediate material life.
This is to me, perhaps Nietzsche’s biggest personal shortcoming: the failure to see what materialism and hedonism lead to. I believe the spiritual and mental weakness Nietzsche saw around him was inherently caused by the material world and our desire to cling to it. The nihilism which we so fervently fought against is also a symptom of this-worldliness. Christianity didn’t bring with it nihilism, but as Christianity became a staple of ancient culture and thought, and replaced the old pagan ideals, nihilism was brought to the forefront. Whereas ancient man had hid away from it through hedonism, war and countless other distractions, with a culture embracing a set of new values and ideals, then new challenges rose up. Nihilism remains a mental and spiritual struggle to this day, and it was something Nietzsche wanted to find a new way to combat.
In the end, however, Nietzsche adopted, like Christianity, a life-affirming transcendent value-system visible in his “Yes-saying” and “Amor Fati” (Love your fate). Central to Christian theology is the concept of God’s Will and Grace, and to some denominations, the suffering one experiences is part of that grace, and learning to love that suffering as a way to build character is probably something which would have resonated with Nietzsche.
There have been several books, articles and more written about Nietzsche and his connections to Christianity as well as other religions like Buddhism. Ultimately, we can’t know, but it’s clear that a lot of the criticism Nietzsche wrote about wasn’t only directed at individual Christians but rather large institutions like the Church and the State. Both of which Nietzsche was highly critical of and expressed contempt for. In that way, one thing which he has in common with a lot of Christians is that both understand the fundamental flaws of a secular government.
For the last part of this text, I want to offer another look at Nietzsche - this time through the eyes of an orthodox monk. One of Nietzsche’s biggest qualms with the faith was its asceticism, and while it’s not clear to what extent Nietzsche understood Eastern Orthodoxy, we do know that he became familiar with the work of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, to whom he felt an immediate kinship, and referred to the Russian author as “the only psychologist from whom I have anything to learn”. While both Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky were both greatly concerned with the rise of nihilism, Dostoyevsky remained a devout Orthodox Christian throughout his life, and saw that devotion as the way to tackle the intellectual and spiritual ails which befell modern man.
An Orthodox Monk’s Answer
Born Eugene Dennis Rose in California, Seraphim Rose was an American Hieromonk of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia and co-founded the Saint Herman of Alaska Monastery in Platina, California.
Before becoming a monk, Eugene went to study philosophy and eventually aligned himself with a bohemian lifestyle, and went searching for meaning in eastern schools of thought, whose philosophy and theology taught that God was impersonal. Before Eugene converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity, he would read Nietzsche extensively, and he would try to intellectualise his way to truth through his mind, later describing this part of his life as “being in hell”.
Eugene, later, after having converted, wrote an essay called “Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age, where he once again faced his past and especially reflected on his readings of Nietzsche. Writing the following in the book:
“Atheism, true ‘existential’ atheism burning with hatred of a seemingly unjust or unmerciful God, is a spiritual state; it is a real attempt to grapple with the true God.… Nietzsche, in calling himself Antichrist, proved thereby his intense hunger for Christ.”
To describe the philosopher, he uses religious terminology, referring to him as a “prophet, but Rose warns that Nietzsche was a prophet of nihilism - a faith devoid of meaning and truth, and instead some twisted falsehood which uses relativity to justify all kinds of evils. Rose also argued that the ‘Christianity’ Nietzsche rebelled against was a Christianity that had been diluted by Liberal humanism, a Christianity which had replaced uncompromising love and loyalty to an absolute truth with a modern sense of relative and subjective truth. A Christianity which had become nothing more than a moral idealism tinged with aesthetic sentiment.
Ultimately, to Rose, however, Nietzsche was a soul misled and someone who was blinded by his own egotism. This made him incapable of ever getting closer to the truth than what he did. However, he did recognise those struggles within himself as a longing for God, and that the streams of atheistic philosophy and nihilism are spiritual struggles in the modern world, and are symptoms rather than causes of something fundamental in humanity.
Final Words
While it’s obvious Nietzsche isn’t religious in the traditional sense, people from all walks of life continue to interpret his work as somewhat mystical and zealous in nature. Perhaps it’s his choice of aesthetics, or perhaps it’s invoked because of his satirical and ironic writing, which uses a lot of religious terminology. To others, Nietzsche represents a certain archetype of the religious person - a tormented soul, who has to come to terms with their faith and is incapable of doing so and suffers a great existential tragedy because of it.
If we are to disregard doing as Nietzsche did and instead only listen to his words of advice, then perhaps we should approach different world views with a more open mind. Nietzsche was often guilty of the same narrow-mindedness and dogmatic thinking he criticised others for, and perhaps if he had approached others’ thoughts and feelings a bit more openly, he would have experienced a profound shift in his own life. Similarly, Seraphim Rose, who was studying Eastern Orthodoxy as just another tradition to be studied and examined, wasn’t long after having entered an Orthodox church that he was overcome with a strong sense of belonging, and ultimately ended up converting to the Christian faith.
While Rose was sceptical of Nietzsche and his philosophy, he ultimately saw a man who was wrestling with difficult questions, and he saw somebody whose thirst for truth and God ultimately led them to reject the notion entirely. Perhaps it was easier that way. Nietzsche might have presented as a godless heathen, but he was also someone with a strong sense of conviction, and if his life had been a bit different, perhaps he would have been a zealous priest or monk.
