"Black Book of Communism" and Holocaust Denial

Ben Norton tweeted over a month ago about a Holocaust-denier exercise, which first came to my attention this morning:

How the US government, US-funded fact-checking websites, NGOs, and leading media outlets constantly spread discredited death counts that whitewash the genocidal crimes of Nazi Germany in order to demonize communismhttps://t.co/81xSGUCmXJ

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) December 1, 2017

Norton's citation is to his article Why Are the Trump White House and Media Citing an Antisemitic Book's Claims to Demonize Communism? AlterNet 11/22/2017. The book in question is The Black Book of Communism, first published in French as Le Livre noir du communisme: Crimes, terreur, répression in 1997. Norton explains:

The Black Book of Communism is a collection of right-wing essays published in France in 1997, and subsequently translated into English and published by Harvard University Press in 1999. Some of its contributors have admitted that the book’s figures are fabricated or exaggerated. Contributors Jean-Louis Margolin and Nicolas Werth distanced themselves from the text, criticizing the editor Stéphane Courtois and his “obsession to arrive to the 100 million deaths.” When he could not round out the figure to 100 million, Courtois apparently just added numbers.

Perhaps more troubling than The Black Book of Communism’s many egregious errors is the fact that it counts Nazi-collaborating fascists, anti-Semitic White Army fighters and czarist officers who oversaw genocidal pogroms against Jews in its list of “victims of communism.”

The International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania — known popularly as the Wiesel Commission, after Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, who led it — condemned the editor Courtois for “comparative trivialization” of the Nazi Holocaust. In order to portray communism as more evil and murderous than fascism and demonize scholars who refuse to do the same, Courtois fell back on anti-Semitism, “inserting an incriminating insinuation directed at the Jews,” the Wiesel Commission wrote. The commission noted that the editor’s tactics inspired “prestigious intellectuals” to rehash anti-Semitic stereotypes and talking points like “Red Holocaust,” “monopoly on suffering” and “Judeocentrism,” which it noted “are widely popular in radical-right circles.”

These "body-count" controversies are always grim. I find it helpful to keep in mind as an ethical guideline when looking at them that 100 wrongful deaths in one country or under a particular regime doesn't justify even one wrongful death in another country or another regime.

At the same time, invidious comparisons between countries is a standard feature of international relations, including these body-count disputes.

Anti-Communism was always a key part of Nazi ideology. And Holocaust-deniers to this day try to justify the Holocaust and even the German invasion of Russia by saying it was all the Commies' fault.

One of the best analyses and debunking of Holocaust denial I've come across is the 2000 decision written by Mr. Justice Gray in Irving v. Penguin Books Limited, Deborah E. Lipstat [sic[, the case depicted in the movie Denial (2016). The decisions deals with the historical issues at length, and in language accessible to non-attorneys. Because the notorious David Irving was suing Lipstadt in a British court for portraying him in a book as a Holocaust denier, the decision goes into some detail about the nature of the available documentation and what reality-based uses of it requires.

Section 11 is about the Allied bombing of the German city of Dresden in 1945. The section is a case study in how Holocaust deniers take a real historical event, exaggerate facts in the favor of the case they want to make, and make a tendentious historical interpretation that tends to minimize or justify the mass murder of Jews and others in the Holocaust. In this case, it is the Western Allies, not the Communist Soviet Union, whose actions are exaggerated and used to cast the Holocaust in a more favorable light.

There is a website, Holocaust Denial on Trial from Emory University's Tam Institute for Jewish Studies, with historical resources on the Holocaust and Holocaust denial, including transcripts of expert witnesses at the Irving v. Lipstadt trial.

The current (Jan/Feb) issue of Foreign Affairs journal has a set of stories on "The Undead Past: how Nations Confront the Evils of History," with articles focusing on the US, Germany, Russia China, South Africa and Rwanda. In his essay "China's Cover-Up: When Communists Rewrite History," he describes the perspective of Karl Jaspers on how Germans needed to come to grips with the crimes of the Nazi regime:

The man who devised the road map for the expiation of German guilt was the philosopher and psychoanalyst Karl Jaspers, who in 1945 gave a series of influential lectures at the University of Heidelberg that were later collected in a book titled The Question of German Guilt. Even though what happened under Adolf Hitler precipitated something "like a transmutation of our being," said Jaspers, Germans were still "collectively liable." All of those "who knew, or could know" - including those "conveniently closing their eyes to events or permitting themselves to be intoxicated, seduced, or bought with personal advantage, or obeying from fear" - shared responsibility. The "eagerness to obey" and the "unconditionality of blind nationalism," he declared, constituted "moral guilt." Human beings are, said Jaspers, responsible "for every delusion to which we succumb." He put his faith in healing through "the cultivation of truth" and "making amends," a process he believed had to be completely free from any state-sponsored propaganda or manipulation.

"There can be no questions that might not be raised," he declared, "nothing to be fondly taken for granted, no sentimental and no practical lie that would have to be guarded or that would be untouchable." In Jaspers' view, only through historical awareness could Germans ever come to terms with their past and restore themselves to a semblance of moral and societal health.

Jaspers' approach owed a great deal to psychoanalytic theory and the work of Sigmund Freud. For Freud, understanding a patient's past was like "excavating a buried city," as he wrote in 1895. Indeed, he was fond of quoting the Latin expression saxa loquuntur: "The stones speak." Such mental archaeology was important to Freud because he believed that a repressed past inevitably infected the present and the future with neuroses unless given a conscious voice to help fill in what he called "the gaps in memory." In this sense, history and memory were Freud's allies and forgetting was his enemy. [my emphasis in bold]

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

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