This is an extended quote from Nietzsche’s Late Notebooks (p 116, the italics reflect Nietzsche’s underlining in his hand written notebooks):

What advantages did the Christian moral hypothesis offer?

1. It endowed man with an absolute value, in contrast to his smallness and contingency in the flux of becoming and passing away.

2. It served the advocates of God by conceding to the world, despite suffering and evil, the character of perfection, including that ‘freedom’ – evil seemed full of meaning.

3. It posited that man knows about absolute values, thus giving him adequate knowledge precisely of what is most important.

It shielded man from despising himself as man, from taking sides against life, from despairing of knowledge: it was a means of preservation – in sum, morality was the great antidote to practical and theoretical nihilism.

I take it for granted that points 1 & 2 can both be correct and uncontroversially used to argue for or against Christian morality. However, point 3 is quite remarkable, for I tend to agree with Nietzsche here and see this as a current sin of the Church. My only concern would be that man can know absolute value versus knowing about absolute value. It we take him to mean the Christian morality can equip us with a kind of knowledge that is absolute, then I’m not sure what biblical warrant or situation we will be able to find in support of this.

The great deceit of certainty extends into our sense of the moral and the Body of Christ must be clear as to what our epistemology is like. What sense does it make to say that we can know some moral in an absolute way when every law of morality has to be transgressed in order to maintain its coherence (sans the worship of God)? As I often point out, the command to ‘not murder’ is given by a God who just murder thousands of children and Egyptian soldiers and is planning the systematic slaughter of the people of Canaan. Further, this God gives that commandment through the hands and prayers of a man who is established an enraged murderer himself. What absolute value do we gain from such a narrative and its embedded codes?

If the goal is to walk away from canon with a knowledge of absolute values transferred to your mind, then Nietzsche’s words here ought to cut you to the bone. That kind of knowledge can only act as an illusory antidote to nihilism. But I will suggest that our retort to Nietzsche is to argue against abuse of absolutism in favor of an epistemology that does allow us to know what is moral, but not contain or domesticate that morality. In the end, our morality is based in the worship of Yahweh, His Son through the Spirit given to us. That is, after all, the intent of the first commandment. All attempts at absolutizing morality will rightly fall under Nietzsche’s admonition here.

There is, at the very least, considerable reason given here to suspect that Overbeck’s world-fleeing theology was partially informing Nietzsche’s construct of essential Christianity.  At the fore of this essay, we posited the idea that Nietzsche’s interpretation is a particularized view of essential Christianity; one that Overbeck felt Nietzsche sometimes misrepresented.[1] 

            Nietzsche intends to tear down the idol of Christianity and supplant it with his particular naturalism.  To do this, his critique of Christianity must have

Having outlined Overbeck’s theological project and given substantive reasons to believe it was a possible source for Nietzsche’s project, what strains of Overbeck do we see in Nietzsche’s version of essential Christianity? To be clear, Nietzsche’s characterization of Christianity is broad reaching. This essay is focusing on the world-fleeing aspect of Nietzsche’s portrayal of Christianity, which Overbeck takes to be essential or “spiritual” Christianity.

To begin, Nietzsche’s starting point for his project is the body, which is also his point of contention with Christianity. Why start with the body? Nietzsche explains in his notebooks (August – September, 1885):

What we gain [in starting with the body] is the right idea of the nature of our subject–unity—namely as rulers at the head of a commonwealth, not as ‘souls’ or ‘life forces’ – and likewise

 

Franz Overbeck and Friedrich Nietzsche were most certainly the closest of friends; despite whatever Nietzsche’s sister publicly proposed. The publication of Overbeck’s correspondence with Nietzsche after Overbeck’s death, via Bernoulli, put to rest the many and falsified aspersions of the Nietzsche Archive via Frau Forster-Nietzsche. The matter for this essay is whether their friendship extended into the cultivation of shared intellectualism. First, we will look at how these two scholars considered one another. Then, we will briefly look at how

To understand Overbeck’s radical theology, we must begin with his extreme disdain for what the church had become and what theology had done to the faith. Overbeck’s revile for theology, qua science of the church, stems from what he sees as the misappropriation of the pure spirit of the church in its incipient and apostolic age.

Overbeck was working within a theologically polarized landscape and this must certainly be considered when critiquing his account of theology. Text-critical approaches to philology had spurred the alleged liberalization of theology. The actual belief in the historic figure of Jesus of Nazareth had been transformed into the most likely scenario of the early church’s mythology. David Strauss’ contemporaneous work, The Old Faith and the New, sought to

It was the sick and decaying who despised body and earth and invented the heavenly realm and the redemptive drops of blood …Ungrateful, these people deemed themselves transported from their bodies and this earth.

 

-Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

There is no doubt that Friedrich Nietzsche held 19th century Christianity in contempt. The text above betrays the two supposed aspects of Christianity that especially riled him: 1) despising this world and 2) pity towards humankind. We would be hard pressed to disabuse the reader that Christian theology is funded on pity, or something like pity. However, the anti-somatic tendencies espoused by some sects of Christianity could be shown to be the minority view. But at the very least, anti-somaticism cannot be readily substantiated as the given stance of the sacred texts. As we will see,

Since Nietzsche is clearly the most influential philologist of the last 150 years, if not arguably the most influential philosopher, his definition of Christianity has pervaded the West.  Much of Nietzsche’s conclusions about religion (academic and theological) are peppered throughout our conversations without much of the substance of Nietzsche’s actual critique.  But here in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche is already offering a challenge of defining Christendom.

 Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life’s nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in “another: or “better” life. Hatred of “the world,” condemnations of the passions, fear of beauty and sensuality, a beyond invented the better to slander this life, at bottom a craving for the nothing, for the end, for respite, for “the sabbath of sabbaths”

I will maintain (and provide substantial justification for) that Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity is largely based upon Franz Overbeck’s esoteric view of early Christianity.  He flatly admits as much in his correspondence with his best friend and Christian historian. In the end, it almost does not matter from where Nietzsche derived his esoteric versions of Christianity, the version he critiques took hold.

The Challenge is to assess whether or not his version of Christianity is more aptly termed ‘Gnostic Social Stoicism’.  But even if we can separate out the Jewish Christianity of the sacred texts from Nietzsche’s caricature, the caricature surely fits some flavors of modern Christianity.  The first goal of responding to Nietzsche here is to show how the Euangelion is not the bizarrity of Stoicism he descries.  The second is to be honest and critical regarding the parts of the church that do resemble Christianity as Nietzsche describes it.

1. Christianity

2. Alcoholic Poisoning of Europe

3. Syphilis

(source: Genealogy of Morals, Third Essay, Section 21)

This examination refers to Nietzsche: Writings from the late notebooks, especially p. 56.

Nietzsche’s epistemology of signs seems to be a derivative of his larger project. As what we call “I” is the governor of the commonwealth that is our body, what he calls the “sign” is a token for a much deeper and richer reality. He goes on to say that we have made signs for whole classes of signs. This makes our epistemology narrower. He notes that error is purely a problem for the organic world.

Later in the Notebooks, he writes about the internalization of all movement so that movement itself may just be a sign in our epistemic structure, an abbreviated reaction to pressure or force. But, Nietzsche himself is concerned with what, exactly, is the nature of an error. Clearly, he does not believe that error is a problem with our sensory (body). In defense of Descartes, he says, “This God left aside, the question is permitted whether being deceived is not one of the conditions of life.” Maybe becoming is hidden from us because of our own nature, and we wrongly ascribe that hiddenness and elusiveness to be a form of error on our part, the deception of our bodies. How incredibly perspicacious is this?

With equal clarity, Nietzsche opposes the graspability of reality. He derides those who think they can signify the world around them. We grasp with signs, and signs of signs, in order to avoid error. However, error is a necessary condition of life. Error is not objective falsity; it sits among a hierarchy of errors. So our signs are our errors may be the same thing. Our ego is a ‘becoming collection’, so too is our epistemology, a becoming collection of abbreviations, errors and signs.

As I began to read Nietzsche for the first time (beyond his renowned Thus Spoke Zarathustra), I immediately realized that I was in over my head. I took a seminar on Nietzsche where we read and discussed many of his major works, including the recently published Writings from the Late Notebooks. The more that I read, the more I became enamored with his iconoclastic motivations and bizarres methodology.

As I have shared my enthusiasm for Nietzsche, there is an understandable trend in the reactions. Most people are interacting with Nietzsche very superficially, just as we interact with many of the influential scholars without appreciating the nuances of their approach. This blog is meant to be a resource that would merely motivate people, especially Christians, to give Nietzsche’s work another look. I will offer two juicy quotes as a means of wading into Friedrich’s world:

You ask me what is idiosyncratic about philosophers?… There is, for instance their lack of a sense of history, their hatred for the very notion of becoming, their Egyptianism. They think they are honoring a thing if they de-historicize it, see it sub specie aeterni– if they make a mummy out of it. Everything that philosophers have handled, for thousands of years now, has been a conceptual mummy; nothing real escaped their hands alive. They kill and stuff whatever they worship, these gentlemen who idolize concepts; they endanger the life of whatever they worship.
…Be a philosopher, be a mummy, portray monotono-theism with a gravedigger’s pantomime! — And above all, away with the body, this patheitc [pet idea] of the senses, afflicted with every logical error there is, refuted, even impossible — although it has the nerve to behave as if it were real!” -Twilight of the Idols

“Logic and mechanics can only be applied to what is most superficial, and are really only an art of schematising and abbreviating, a coping with multiplicity through an art of expression – not an ‘understanding’, but a designating in order to make oneself understood. Thinking the world as reduced to its surface means above all making it ‘graspable’.
Logic and mechanics never touch on causality –” -Writing from the Late Notebooks

Resident & Naive Nietzschephile,

Dru