Nietzsche and Christianity (2 of 2)

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

This is a continutation of yesterday's post on the two books Nietzsches Ideen zur Geschichte des Christentums [Nietzsche's Ideas on the History of Christianity] (1938) by Ernst [Wilhelm] Benz (1907-1978) and Nietzsche und das Christentum [Nietzsche and Christianity] (1938) by Karl Jaspers (1883-1969).

Jaspers' book is more focused on some critical observations about Nietzsche's broad views on Christianity.

Jaspers makes the argument that some of Nitzsche's key philosophical ideas were essentially Christian. This particular contention doesn't hold up well. Christianity is scarcely the only religion or philosophy that places a high value on truth, for instance, one of the aspects of Nietzsche's thought that Jaspers sees as deriving from Christianity. And the fact that Christianity was a decisive influence on the scienfic outlook that developed in Europe does not mean that science is essentially Christian. For centuries it was the Muslim world that was producing the key scientific developments while Christian Europe was pretty much an underdeveloped backwater in comparison. The revolutionary advances in European science didn't begin until Europeans began to integrate the Aristotlean materialist philosophy and scientific thinking from the Muslim world, to which the Muslim portions of the Iberian Peninsula were a key contact point.

Nietzsche saw Jesus as a special being who practiced a unity of life and belief, someone very like Buddha. But it's hard to see what's specifically Christian about it. A respectful non-Christian view of Jesus would be a better description. Nietzsche rejected the Resurrection as both a physical and spiritual event. He rejected the teaching of Christianity from Jesus' earliest disciples on. He rejected the teachings of St. Paul, the first great Christian theologian. Nietzsche's image of Jesus may be one that fits well in the mystical tradition from which Nietzsche drew so much inspiration. But his Jesus is an ahistorical one. He apparently viewed Jesus as having been scarcely effected by, much less consciously accepting, his own Jewish religion and as being virtually independent of the Christian religion his followers created. Good or bad, brilliant or muddled, it's hard to see how we could call that essentially Christian.

Along with the European concept of science, more specifically the notion that the whole world of existence is a proper object for human study, Jaspers also points to Nietzsche's belief in a fundamental flaw in human beings and to a world-historical vision that explains the movement of history as being beliefs basically derived from Christian thought. The belief in a fundamental flaw in humanity would seem to be the most obvious candidate for Christian roots, in the Augustinian doctrine of Original Sin. But Jaspers devotes only a few paragraphs to that belief of Nietzsche's, and does not specifically link it to Original Sin.

Although his claims for the particularly Christian nature of these parts of Nietzsche's thinking don't hold up very well, his discussions of those issues certainly sheds light on Nietzsche's understanding of Christianity. For example:

Aus dem christlichen Geschichtsgedanken ist durch eine Verwandlung die Geschichtsphilosophie all weltliches Totalwissen hervorgegangen. Herder, Kant, Hegel und Marx stehen in der Descendenz des christlichen Gedankens und mit ihnen auch Nietzsche. Immer ist eine Vision des Ganzen maßgebend, immer ein Bewußtsein des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters als eines bestimmten Ortes im Gesamtablauf, und zwar immer als Krise, als ein alles entscheidender Übergang; immer besteht die Neigung, irgendwo in der Vergangenheit den Höhepunkt, den Heilsursprung zu erblicken und diesen wieder als die Möglichkeit der eigenen Gegenwart zu sehen; immer wird als Grundform des Geschehens gedacht, daß wahre, gesunde Zustande durch ein Gift, durch ein den Menschen sich selbst entfremdendes Geschehen, durch eine Untat, ein Böses ruiniert, zersetzt und verkehrt worden seien und nun widerhergestellt werden müßten. Der Inhalt all dieser Kategorien wechselt, sie selber aber kehren ständig wieder.

[The philosophy of history [that assumes to be] a total science of everything secular came out of Christian thinking on history through a transformation. Herder, Kant, Hegel and Marx stand in the tradition of Christian thought and, with them, Nietzsche also. Always a vision of the whole is standard, always a consciousness of the present age as a particular place in the total order of even, and that always as crisis, as a trasition that will decide everything; there always exists the tendency to see in the past the high point, the holy origin to, and to see it again as the possibility of one's own present; always the basic form of events is conceived as that the true, healthy state has been ruined, corroded and turned upside down by a poison, by events that alienate people from themselves, by a crime, an evil, and now must be restored. The content of all these categories changes, but it itself returns again and again.]

I would note here that the notion of seeing a high point of history in the past would not apply to Karl Marx's view of history, which did not look to restore some ideal state from the past but rather to create a greater future beyond the capitalist stage of economic development.

Jaspers also makes a very perceptive point about understanding Nietzsche's thought. He argues that understanding Nietzsche means to join him in his distinctive critical process of thinking, of looking at ideas and historical processes in their dynamic development and at the many contradictory implications and meanings in them. As he puts it:

Jede Niederschrift, jeder Augenblickseinfall gehören bei Nietzsche zum Werk. Wenn Nietzsche selbst schon die Abgleitungen von seinen besten Gedanken vollzieht, wenn er abfällt in das Fanatische und in das Spielerische, wenn sich in seinen Sätzen ein dichtes Vordergrundsgestrüpp ausbreitet, wenn die Leidenschaft des Augenblicks ihn absichtlich ungerecht werden läßt, so ist alles das um so sichtbarer geworden, weil jede Notiz, auch alles von ihm nicht mehr kritisch Geprüfte, zu seinem Werk gehört, und es kein Mittel gibt, eine Trennnung zu vollziehen. Denn auch die wesentlichsten, ursprünglichsten Gedanken sind gerade in flüchtigen Notizen bewahrt. Man muß stets in dem Bewußtsein lesen, nicht ein Fertiges vor Augen zu haben, sondern in der Gedankenwerkstätte zugegen zu sein, wo das solide Werk und zahllose Splitter zugleich entstehen.

[Everything he wrote down, every brief vagary, belong with Nietzsche to his work. If Nietzsche himself already derives the derivatives from his best though, if he falls off into the fanatical and in the playful, if in his sentences a thick forground of brush spreads itself out, if the passion of the moment interntionally becomes unjust, so has all that become so visible because every note, even everything that was not critically proofread by him, belongs to his work, and there is no means by which one can draw a dividing line [between those and other parts of his work]. Because even the most essential, most original thoughts are evidenced precisely in fleeting notes. One must always read [Nietzsche] in the consciousness that one has not a finished work before one's eyes, but rather to be in the thought workshop where the solid work and innumerable splinters originate at the same time.]

Visiting Nietzsche's workshop and watching him go through the process is a great metaphor. You have to go along for the ride you realize all the places you've seen along the way.

What neither Benz nor Jaspers undertakes in these volumes is to evaluate to what extent Nietzsche's historical arguments about the history of the Christian Church make sense. Just as Nietzsche pointed out that the 19th-century biographers of Jesus substituted their own philosophical/theological notions for the historical Jesus, so Nietzsche envisions the historical Jesus as a kind of Near Eastern Buddha. It's not a fully implausible position. But Nietzsche also seems to picture the historical Jesus as virtually unrelated to the Jewish and Christian religions. And that is thoroughly implausible. Jesus understood himself as a Jewish teacher and his religious conceptions were derived from the Jewish understanding of God and the divine. And however much his later followers may have expressed their ideas of religion differently, the Christian religion was founded on the teachings of Jesus and his followers' belief in his Resurrection.

And key messages of the historical Jesus like the urgency of the coming Kingdom of God and the need for people to decide to change their lives and embrace that kingdom continued into early Christian theology. Certainly it evolved over time. But the idea of a radical break between Jesus and the theology of his earliest disciples or with that of St. Paul is historically more than a little doubtful.

Here Nietzsche's sources may have led him astray with their own perspectives derived from the Christian tradition. Christians of that time, and to a large extent in our own time, saw Jesus' teachings as a radical break from the Jewish religion. Even the more secular-minded practitioners of the historical-critical methodology were to some extent working within that assumption. The emerging Biblical criticism tended to judge the Hebrew Bible as representing a grimmer, more primitive view of God and to blame it for the violent aspects of the Bible. It takes some imagination to view the Book of Revelation as displaying God in a more merciful and kindly mode than the Book of Jonah. But Nietzsche did seem to extract Jesus out of his Jewish religious context.

This may also be reflected in the way Nietzsche viewed the break between Christianity and Jesus himself. He recognized that the Christian religion took over many of its concepts from Judaism. But because he imagined Jesus as virtually standing outside the Jewish religion, the Jewish aspects he saw in Christianity would have looked like a departure from Jesus. But when Jesus is seen as part of his Jewish tradition, that assumption becomes far more problematic. In that aspect of his view of Jesus, Nietzsche may well have been taking a "Christian" view, albeit one of the most problematic of Christian views.

Both books are strong reminders that however sweeping and careless Nietzsche's pronouncements may sometimes seem, his views of Christianity were based on a careful study of contemporary and earlier sources. He was familiar with much of the cutting-edge scholarly work of his time on the history of Christianity. Nietzsche was an intuitive thinker. But he wasn't receiving his intuitions on Christianity out of thin air or from some superficial "village atheist" thinking. Nietzsche pushes the reader to critical thinking. As Jaspers puts it, he constantly pushes us to think carefully, to look for contrary indications to our own conclusions:

Ständig kommt eine Zwei- und Mehrdeutigkeit in Nietzsches Denken. Er gewinnt nicht die Ruhe einer Wahrheit, nicht die Entspannung an einem erreichten Ziel. ...

Dabei schult uns Nietzsche in der Sensibilität eines intuitiven Wahrnehmens, dann im bewußten Auffassen der Zwei- und Vieldeutigkeiten, schließlich in der Beweglichkeit des Denkens ohne Fixierung eines Wissens! Es ist im Umgang mit Nietzsche wie ein Aufgelockertwerden. Möglichkeiten entstehen, aber nicht mehr.

Er zeigt uns nicht den Weg, lehrt uns nicht einen Glauben, stellt uns nicht auf einen Boden. Er läßt uns vielmehr keine Ruhe, quält uns unablässig, jagt uns auf aus jedem Winkel, verwehrt jede Verschleierung.

Er will uns, indem er uns ins Nichts stellt, gerade dadurch die Weite unseres Raumes schaffen; indem er uns der Bodenlosigkeit ansichtig macht, gerade dadurch die Möglichkeit schaffen, unseren echten Grund zu erfassen, aus dem wir kommen.

[A double and multiple interpretation comes regularly in Nietzsche's thought. He doesn't win the rest of a truth, nor the relaxation at a goal achieved. ...

Nietzsche thereby schools us in the sensibility of an intuitive perception, then in conscious comprehension of double and multiple interpretations, finally in the flexibility of though without the fixation of a science! Dealing with Nietzsche is like becoming limber. Possibilities develop, but not more.

He doesn't show us the way, doesn't teach us a faith, doesn't give us a grounding. It's more like he leaves us no rest, distresses us unremittingly, bolts out of every corner, refuses every deception.

He wants us, precisely by leading us into nothingness, to create the breadth of our space; precisely by putting us at variance with bottomlessness, to creat the possibility to acquire our true ground from which he come.]

Tags: christianity, karl jaspers,nietzsche