SINCE COPERNICUS:

How Nietzsche Found Jesus: Was the antichrist really religious? (Stephen N. Williams, November/December 2003, Books & Culture)

What if we need to correct our account of Nietzsche? What if the literature has avoided or missed important and positive things he has to say about religion, even about Christianity? What if Nietzsche found a friend in Jesus? Alistair Kee, of the University of Edinburgh, strikes out in the direction of answering these questions in his provocative book, Nietzsche Against the Crucified.

Seven chapters conduct us quickly through some of the major Nietzschean themes. God is dead and, with God, Truth. Morality is gone and aesthetics is applied physiology. Christianity offers the ultimate in decadent resistance to a proper will-to-power. Then comes a hinge chapter, dealing with Nietzsche's thought on eternal recurrence. Here, Kee's thesis that Nietzsche is a fundamentally religious thinker, comes into its own, as he interprets this notoriously controverted teaching as a sign that the numinous mantle of mystical religious experience had settled on his subject.

The way is opened for some reassessments. Nietzsche was a man of faith, a philosophical faith akin to religious faith. He even passes the christological test. For Nietzsche not only called Jesus the noblest human being‚ he meant it. He not only said that, from the earliest times, Jesus'
followers had corrupted his message‚ he meant that, too, but, more significant still, he thought it important actually to say it. Why bother to do so unless you want to make a point of rehabilitating Jesus?

Nor does Nietzsche embrace a free and independent human Jesus in the context of sheer godlessness. There is a concept of deity worth entertaining, the holy storm-God Jehovah, wreathed not in the holiness of moral goodness or of aesthetic beauty, but in a dreadful uncanniness. Believe in him or not, at least he would be a worthwhile character, president of an order that is neither benign nor moral, an order adequately represented in religion only by the God beyond good and evil that Nietzsche discerns in parts of the Old Testament. Cut it as you will, you will therefore find a religious thinker, if you take Nietzsche at his word. Indeed, Nietzsche is re-opening the question of religion for us‚ and on terms that are counter to the postmodernism foisted on him by familiar contemporary description. The bottom line is that Nietzsche experienced some kind of revelation that led him to perceive the natural order as religiously colored at its very roots. His is a knowing form of natural, pagan religion.

My account is cryptic, but it just summarizes where the author more or less leaves his readers, with swirling waters surrounding Nietzsche's own position. Kee bequeaths to us the task of ordering our religious life and constructing our religious thought with the aid of Nietzsche's insights. This book is an example of those projects that seek both to separate the inspiration of Jesus from what later Christianity has made of him and to requisition the thoughts of a putative opponent of religious faith for the service of religion.

It's all too easy to take "God is dead" as a shout of triumph, rather than to hear the undertone of lament that Nietzsche may have intended, On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemical Tract: Third Essay: What is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals? (Friedrich Nietzsche, 1887, Translated by Ian Johnston):

Isn't it the case that since Copernicus the self-diminution of human beings and their will to self-diminution have made inexorable progress? Alas, the faith in their dignity, their uniqueness, their irreplaceable position in the chain of being has gone. The human being has become an animal, not a metaphorical animal, but absolutely and unconditionally—the one who in his earlier faith was almost God ("child of God," "God-man" [Gottmensch]) . . . Since Copernicus human beings seem to have reached an inclined plane. They're now rolling at an accelerating rate past the mid-point. But where to? Into nothingness? Into the "penetrating sense of their own nothingness"? . . .Well, then, wouldn't this be precisely the way into the old ideal? . . .

All scientific knowledge (and not just astronomy, whose humbling and destructive effects Kant understood remarkably well, "it destroys my importance". . . )—all scientific knowledge, natural as well as unnatural (the name I give to the self-criticism of knowledge) is nowadays keen to talk human beings out of the respect they used to have for themselves, as if that was nothing more than a bizarre arrogance about themselves. In this matter we could even say scientific knowledge has its own pride, its characteristically acrid form of stoical ataraxia [indifference], this laboriously attained self-contempt for human beings as its ultimate, most serious demand for respect, for the right to hold itself erect on its own (and, in fact, that's justified, for the one who despises is always still one more person who "has not forgotten respect" . . .). Does that really work against the ascetic ideal? Do people really think in all seriousness (as theologians imagined for quite a while) that somehow Kant's victory over dogmatic theological concepts ("God," "Soul," "Freedom," "Immortality") succeeded in breaking up that ideal?

In asking that question, it's not our concern at the moment whether Kant himself had anything like that in mind. What is certain is that all sorts of transcendentalists since Kant have once more won the game. They've become emancipated from the theologians. What a stroke of luck! Kant showed them a secret path by which they could now, on their own initiative and with the most sincere scientific decency, follow their "hearts' desires". And similarly who could now hold anything against the agnostics, if they, as admirers of what is inherently unknown and secret, worship the question mark itself as their God? (Xaver Doudan once spoke of the ravages brought on by "l'habitude d'admirer l'inintelligible au lieu de rester tout simplement dans l'inconnu" [the habit of admiring the unintelligible instead of simply staying in the unknown]; he claimed that the ancients had not done this). If everything human beings "know" does not satisfy their wishes and, beyond that, contradicts them and makes human beings shudder, what a divine excuse to be allowed to seek the blame for this not in "wishes" but in "knowledge"! . . . "There is no knowledge. Consequently, there is a God"—what a new elegantia syllogismi [syllogistic excellence]! What a triumph of the ascetic ideal!

Indeed, who that cares about the dignity of Man, as Nietzsche unquestionably did, could celebrate such self-dimunition?

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 25, 2003 9:01 AM