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 the right idea of these rulers’ dependence on the ruled and on those conditions of order of rank and division of labour which make possible both the individual and the whole.
He also notes that Eastern and Pauline views of the body appear to be “strange testimonies.” This is presumably because Nietzsche understands them to deny the body in some sense (more to come). In utter contrast to his starting point, Nietzsche gives us a clear and unrelenting picture of Christianity’s dilettantish grasp of the body and thereby this world in general. “Christianity was the attempt to overcome, i.e., to negate, the world with it.” To this he asks, “Can one go more dangerously wrong than by despising the body?”
There is no doubt that Nietzsche wants to reorient us away from world-fleeing mentality and toward his embodied and rugged naturalism. But there is the other aspect essential to Christianity that he is equally vitriolic toward: pity. If Christianity is essentially world-fleeing, according to Overbeck and Nietzsche, then from where does pity arise. Nietzsche tells us in Thus Spoke Zarathustra:
It was the sick and decaying who despised body and earth and invented the heavenly realm and the redemptive drops of blood: but they took even these sweet and gloomy poisons from body and earth. They wanted to escape their own misery, and the stars were too far for them. So they sighed: “Would that there were heavenly ways to sneak into another state of being and happiness!” Thus they invented their sneaky ruses and bloody potions. Ungrateful, these people deemed themselves transported from their bodies and this earth. But to whom did they owe the convulsions and raptures of their transport? To their bodies and this earth.
Pity, at its height in the “redemptive drops of blood” and “bloody potions,” is invented from a world-fleeing cast. Here we have Nietzsche’s summary of the problem of Christianity. Because it fundamentally denies the world, even when the world is confronting the body with the reality of decay and misery, the doctrine of pity and redemption arises. In an effort to escape reality, Christianity makes an illogical leap toward temporal pity in order to continue denying reality. This particular sequence of doctrine he assesses by saying, “the ‘negation of life’ as goal of life, goal of development, existence as a great stupidity: such a crazed interpretation is merely the outgrowth of a measuring of life by factors of consciousness.”
Nietzsche does offer an antithesis, or antidote, to this development of Christian doctrine in his notebooks:
On the kind of men who matter to me I wish suffering, isolation, sickness, ill-treatment, degradation – I wish they may become acquainted with deep self-contempt, the torment of self-mistrust, the misery of the overcome: …because I wish them the only thing that today can prove whether a man has any value or not – his ability to stand his ground.
Here, he reiterates what he has already given us in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Pain is essential, not to cause some world-fleeing ideals or to make us create a doctrine of weakness, but rather to be overcome. The very reality of the confrontation of the body and pain are the route toward the Overman.
Lastly, there is another indication from Nietzsche’s notebooks that his thinking about Christianity may have been coextensive to Overbeck. In a section titled “What has been spoiled by the church’s misuse of it”, Nietzsche follows a similar line of reasoning used by Overbeck. The items spoiled are listed and shown how their abuse does not mitigate their proper use (abusus non tollit usum). The items listed are: ascesis, fasting, the cloister, the festival, lack of courage, and death.
These are of interest here because they are all world-fleeing uses in the Christian ritual (sans the “festival”, which Nietzsche finds contradictory to Christian morality). Nietzsche’s point, presumably following Overbeck, is that these are all things that have “natural usefulness” but have been commandeered by Christianity, misappropriated in order to fund projects of pity. In coincidence, Overbeck shows why these abuses became the expression of world-fleeing mentality after the nonfullfilment of Jesus’ return. Now we see Nietzsche also rebuking the church for their improper use.
Overbeck showed how asceticism was the transmogrified expression of a world-fleeing disposition and Nietzsche retools ascesis for the “service of educating the will.” Fasting and cloister are aspects of the monastic life that Overbeck deems the retreat from the apostolic spiritualism. Nietzsche acquires them to hone our enjoyment of the sense and respite respectively.
Finally, Overbeck’s world-fleeing mentality is flatly confronted under the lack of courage in dressing our nerves up and facing death itself. Man’s nature, his very body, must confront him as he must confront its participation in Nietzsche’s eternal cycle of recurrence. The denial of the body, and hence, denying the reality of death itself is the reprehensible act of a Christian per Nietzsche.
