Nietzsche and Christianity (1 of 2)

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

Nietzsches Ideen zur Geschichte des Christentums [Nietzsche's Ideas on the History of Christianity] (1938) by Ernst Benz (1907-1978) and Nietzsche und das Christentum [Nietzsche and Christianity] (1938) by Karl Jaspers (1883-1969) are two books from the same time concerned with Friedrich Nietzsche's ideas on Christianity and its development. Jaspers' book appeared somewhat later than Benz' and Jaspers references Benz' book favorably. Benz focuses specifically on the intellectual environment and particular sources on which Nietzsche relied in his writing on Christianity, my main interest in reading both books. Jaspers is more focused on critiquing some of the philosophical implications of Nietzsche's work on the Christian religion.

I didn't see until after I had read Benz' book that he became a member of the NSDAP (Nazi Party) in 1937. Jaspers, on the other hand, was married to a Jewish woman at the time and was banned from teaching because of that. Previously, he had been a professor of psychology and after the Second World War was able to return to teaching. Whatever his political convictions or affiliations were, Benz is recognized as an important scholor of mysticism. A prolific writer, he is particularly known for his work on the Eastern Church, Geist und Leben der Ostkirche (1957) and his Beschreibung des Christentums [Description of Christianity].

Benz relies heavily on quotations from The Will to Power, which was not prepared for publication by Nietzsche himself. He uses those quotes in the context of Nietzsche's other writing on Christianity, though.

Nietzsche viewed the Renaissance as a return to a vital classical understanding of human life. He saw Luther and the Reformation as having preserved Christianity in the Church sense because it reversed the trend represented by the Renaissance, both in the Protestant and Catholic Churches. He saw both the Renaissance and the Reformation as attempts of the human spirit to free itself from the dead, dogmatic religion he saw in the Church's Christianity, the Renaissance a vital and true attempt at such a liberation, the Reformation as a negative, reactionary one. Though both movements took the form of looking back in time to recover truth.

Jaspers describes Nietzsche's view of the Renaissance this way:

Fur Nietzsche liegt der Hohepunkt des Menschentums (in dem Glanze gesehen, wie der Christ durch die Evangelien die Fülle der Zeiten erblickt) im vorsokratischen Griechentum; die Möglichkeit unserer eigenen Wahrheit und Wirklichkeit liegt in der Wiederannäherung an dieses Griechentum des tragischen Zeitalters; — die Höhe der Antike ist durch Gifte zerstört, die — alle zusammengefaßt, summiert und überboten im Christentum ... — die Welt in den Ruin brachten, der nach zweitausend Jahren jetzt seinen tiefsten Punkt erreicht hat und endlich zur Umkehr auffordert.

[For Nietzsche, the high point of humanity (seen in the glimpse like the one in which the Christian catches sight of the fullness of time through the Evangelists) lay in pre-Socratic Greek culture; the possibility of our own truth and authenticity lies in again drawing near to this Greek culture of the tragic era; the height of antiquity was destroyed, which - altogether summed up and outdone in Christianity ... - brought the world to ruin, that after 2000 years has not reached its lowest point and finally invites a reversal.

Nietzsche thought Jesus' original Apostles had misunderstood his message and departed from his true teachings immediately after his death on the Cross. Later, he came to blame Saint Paul in particular for that result. He wrote of Paul, "er hat principiell das ursprüngliche Christenthum annulliert ...". (He annulled the original Christianity as a matter of principle.) In line with his own social-psychological theories that Judaism and even more so Christianity were "slave religion" with a strong underlying theme of revenge, he also said, "Paulus war der größte aller Apostel der Rache." (Paul was the greatest of all apostles of revenge.)

Nietzsche saw this early falling-away from the teachings of Jesus himself as a continuation of a decadent trend in ancient culture which began with Plato and continued through the Stoics and the Hellenistic Mystery Religions, a trend which moved away from the life-affirming nature of the Greek religion. "Paulus wusste schwerlich, wie sehr Alles in ihm nach Plato riecht," (Paul hardly knew how much everything in him smells of Plato) according to Nietzsche. This vital nature of the Greek tradition was what Nietzsche saw as the true pagan religion, essentially the same as what Jesus and Buddha had found. Nietzsche called this trend that produced Christianity an "Anti-Heidenthum" (anti-heathenism) movement. He saw Epicurus as one of the classical philosophers who fought against that trend.

Nietzsche criticized Christianity and the Mystery Religions for, among other things, their emphasis on miracles: "gerade das Auszeichnende des Judenthums and des ältesten Christenthums sein Widerwille gegen das Wunder ist, seine relative Rationalität." (Precisely the distinguishing feature of Judaism and the oldest Christianity was their indisposition toward miracles, their relative rationality.) Nevertheless, he believed that Christianity preserved something of that vital essence of the ancient understanding, the "Universal-Heidnische" (universal-heathen), and that it was in fact the underlying reason for the success of Christianity as a world religion, despite all the ecclessiastical accretions and excesses that he so strongly criticized.

Nietzsche actually has a real point when he writes of St. Paul, "Dies ist der erste Christ, der Erfinder der Christlichkeit! Bis dahin gab es nur einige jüdische Sectierer!" (This is the first Christian, the inventor of Christ-likeness! Until then there were only some Jewish sectarians!) Paul was in fact the first great Christian theologian. As with much of Nietzsche's writing, his provocative and polemic style can obscure some perceptive and accurate observations. Paul's theology and remarkable mission activity did lay the groundwork through which Christianity became a world religion and not a brand of Judaism.

Nietzsche did name a number of figures like Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) as people who had managed to extract the essential, pagan/vital thread from Christianity, as distorted as he believed it had been by the Christian ecclesiastical traditon itself. He once described Pascal as "der einzige logische Christ" (the only logical Christian).

Nietzsche accepted the approach of the historical-critical school that had flourished in Germany in particular during the 19th century, which understood the Gospels as the product of the Christian communities that produced them. He interpreted the history of the Church as a continuing falsification and distortion of the original message of Jesus which began with Jesus' own immediate disciples. From his point of treasuring the "heathen" or "pagan" heritage of ancient Greece, Nietzsche declared, "Die Kirche ist die Barbarisierung des Christentums." (The Church is the barbarization of Christianity.)

Benz takes a look at the intellectual influences that seem to have been particularly important to Nietzsche in constructing his own original, provocative theories about these matters.

The Catholic historian Jannsen's Geschichte des deutschen Volkes [History of the German People] influenced Nietzsche's polemic style in his discussions about Church history and about Luther, but Nietzsche's view of Luther was significantly different than that of Jannsen.

Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897) and his Kultur der Renaissance in Italien [Culture of the Renaissance in Italy] (1860)greatly influnced Nietzsche's evaluation of the Renaissance, Benz argues.

Nietzsche's particular view of Luther was supported by a trend within Protestant theology that saw Luther as embodying the medieval spirit of Catholicism. This was known as the "Tübinger" trend and was exemplified by writers like Heinrich Lang (1826-1876), the Protestant theologian and philosopher Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923), and philologist Paul Anton de Lagarde (1827-1891).

Leo Tolstoy was often said to be an influence on Nietzsche. Benz, however, points out a number of ways in which Tolstoy's particular views on Jesus and on Church history differed notably from Nietzsche's. Tolstoy's view of the fall of the Church away from the true Gospel of Jesus was that it began with the Emperor Constantine's adoption of the faith, not with the first disciples of Jesus. Tolstoy shared Nietzsche's view of Paul as decisive for the development of the Christian Church, but Tolstoy had a far more favorable view of the functioning of Paul's theology and its relation to the original message of Jesus. Benz winds up questioning the significance of Tolstoy's rationalist theological views for Nietzsche's particular ideas on Christianity.

Dostojewski was clearly an important influence on Nietzsche's view of Christianity, as Benz explains. Benz argues that because Nietzsche praised Dostojewski most of all for his psychological insight and because in Beck's reading Nietzsche's view of Christianity was primarily a psychological one, that Dostojewski's insight were important to Nietzsche's views on Christianity in the last decade of his active scholarly work, the 1880s, which is when Nietzsche first discovered the Russian's work. But Beck argues that Dostojewski's influence was a negative one, in the sense that Nietzsche saw in Dostojewski the type of Christianity that Nietzsche denigrated, albeit expressed with great psychological insight. "Er [Nietzsche] liebt ihm [Dostowewski] als Enthüller des Gegentypus seines eigenen [Nietzsches] Menschenbildes." (He [Nietzsche] loved him as the revealer of the opposite type of his own [Nietzsche's] image of humanity.) Benz argues that the characters in Dostojewski's novels became for Nietzsche the basis of Nietzsche's psychological understanding of the early Christians, including the disciples, who failed to grasp the real meaning of the life and teachings of Jesus.

Nietzsche's mutual fan, the Left Hegelian Bruno Bauer (1809-1882), was a huge influence on Nietzsche's understanding of early Christianity. And, via Bauer, so was the early Enlightenment thinker and radical Pietist Johann Christian Edelmann (1698-1767). Including the idea of the earliest disciples having misunderstood and falsified the teachings of Jesus and the notion of Christianity being influenced by an historical movement of the kind that Nietzsche called "Anti-Heidnisch", a movement which represented the decadence of Hellenistic civilization. Both Bauer and Nietzsche rejected the central belief of the Christian religion, the Resurrection, and the interpretation of the Crucifixion as a sacrifice to reconcile sinner with God, as false and as "priestly" falsifications of the life and message of Jesus.

Bauer also argued for the intellectual continuity of Plato and the Stoics to Christianity. And he like Nietzsche put great weight on the popularity of Christianity in Rome first among the poor and the dispossessed, as did Ernest Renan in his biography of Paul. Benz makes a good case for the direct influence of Bauer on Nietzsche, as he also does for Nietzsche's friend the Protestant theologian Franz Camille Overbeck (1837-1905). Overbeck's influence seemed to have been more in his interchange of ideas, a "constant give-and-take" with Nietzsche more than Nietzsche adopting Overbeck's positions. Benz found that Overbeck was particularly helpful to Nietzsche in developing his ideas on the development of Christian morality, on the relation of Christianity to Hellenistic thought, on his understanding of Paul's and Luther's theologies, and on the theological assumptions of contemporary biographers of Jesus like David Strauß and Renan. Benz explains that Nietzsche departs significantly from the image of Jesus produced by the successors of Strauß and Bruno Bauer. His view of Church history and of Jesus himself was heavily influenced by the work of Strauss and Bauer in trying to distinguish the historical core of the life of Jesus. But Nietzsche also thought they had constructed their own Jesus in the image of their rationalistic theology, which Nietzsche rejected.

Paul de Lagarde, whose given name was Paul Bötticher, was and philospher and thosophist who became a leading Orientalist. His ideas on Christianity borrowed heavily from the German mystical tradition and Benz documents that Nietzsche was familiar with Lagarde's work on Christianity.

Lagarde was also a noted anti-Semite, representing the mystical/theosophist trend of anti-Semitic thought, which was generally less influential in the 19th century than the pseudoscientific brand of racism. Benz doesn't deal with the issue of anti-Semitism in this 1938 book. Nazi writers very selectively quoted Nietzsche critical comments on Judaism to promote their own anti-Semitism. But 19th-century anti-Semitism was not a trend that had much of any influence on Nietzsche's thinking in any other way but his emphatic condemnation of it. His book Nietzsche contra Wagner provided a lot of disapproving commentary on Richard Wagner's anti-Semitism, the main reason for the break of his earlier friendship with and admiration for the composer. That part of Legarde's thinking did not match up with Nietzsche's. Benz alludes to this when he writes, "Mit den positiven Zielen einer Erneuerung der Kirche, wie sie Lagarde verkündet, hat freilich Nietzsche nichts zu tun ..." (Clearly Nietzsche had no use for the positive goals of a renewal of the Church such as Lagarde had promulgated.) Lagarde notion for "renewal" of the Church had to do with the creation of a "German Church" based in part on anti-Semitic racism and nationalism.

Lagarde shared with Nietzsche the notion that Jesus' own disciples were the first to create a false version of Jesus' true teaching. Like Nietzsche and German mystical/Pietist tradition, he saw the Church itself as chronically hostile to the real message of Jesus. Lagarde shared Nietzsche's harshly critical judgments against St. Paul, and some of their ideas about Martin Luther were similar.

In the case of other thinkers Benz discusses, the direct influence on Nietzsche is less clear. But he draws some interesting analogies, which could indicate direct influence. Or it could be a reflection of the intectual environment in which Nietzsche lived and worked, the things that were "in the air".

For instance, Adolf von Harnack's (1851-1930) work on the Hellenization of Christianity was influential in the 19th century. Nietzsche and Harnack both took seriously the variety of historical and intellectual influences at work in early Christianity, but they drew very different conclusions from that understanding.

The French Orientalist Ernest Renan (1823-1892) was another who was generally influential at the time and whose influence at least was an important force in shaping Nietzsche's intellectual environment, though Nietzsche rejected Renan's disignation of Jesus as a genius and a hero.

Benz argues that Nietzsche's view of Jesus was very much "in dem alten Sinn des deutschen Spiritualismus eines Sebastian Franck [1499-1542] und Valentin Weigel [1533-1588]" (in the old sense of the German mysticism of a Sebastian Franck and Valentin Weigel). He saw Jesus as a figure who was in touch with the real inner life and who led a model outward life, a figure very akin to Buddha. Referring to the influence of Edelmann on Nietzsche via Bruno Bauer, Benz discusses several ways in which Nietzsche's thought was in line with the German mystical/Pietist tradition: their concept of the Church as a decadent institution; the notion that the Christian traditions had relatively early fallen aware from the true teachings of Jesus (Edelmann even dated the falling away to the earliest disciples as Nietzsche did); and, the emphasis on unity of life and belief as they understood Jesus had exemplified.

Benz mentions the historian Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918) only in passing, as someone whose image of Paul of having been the first to really understand the message of Jesus was accepted by Overbeck but rejected diametrically by Nietzsche. Andrés Sánchez Pascual names Wellhausen as a significant influence on Nietzsche in Revista de Occidente Agosto-Septiembre 1973.

Jaspers' book is more focused on some critical observations about Nietzsche's broad views on Christianity. I will discuss it in a separate post tomorrow.

Tags: christianity, karl jaspers, nietzsche