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.

            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

 a theological grip to it.  But one could easily point to many and thorough Christian/Judaic views of theology that fundamentally affirm the world and body in their very soteriology.  If the body is the starting point, and there are ample theologies that share Nietzsche’s starting point, then Nietzsche’s particular attack has no grip on those theologies.  In fact, the apostle Paul himself could be easily demonstrated to make the same attack on Platonic syncretism in Christianity as Nietzsche attributes to the whole of Christianity.[2]

            This leaves us with the two prongs of Nietzsche’s scorn.  On the one prong, there is the possibility that Nietzsche is describing a Christianity that exists, but is anomalously outside the teachings of the sacred texts (i.e. desperately anti-somatic).   The other prong of his attack suffers from the possibility that Nietzsche’s particularized theology has become an attack on a straw cathedral.  It aims at a specific development of dogma-from-denial and ends up striking at nothing.

            If Nietzsche’s essential Christianity turns out to be an fundamentally unclaimed theology, then his attack fundamentally fails because it does not capture what is considered essential to historic Christianity.  If his attack smacks at a claimed theology, then that theology must be reconciled to the somatic and world-reclaiming nature of the sacred texts.  As N.T. Wright recently referenced in a rebuff of Gnostic strands within John’s Gospel, “John did not write, ‘God so hated the world that he sent his only son, so that all the pre-existent sparks of light might discover their true identity and be rescued for a disembodied salvation.”[3]  While it is easy to claim world-flight, it may prove too rough to substantiate from the sacred texts of Christianity.

[1] James Arwin Overbeck, “History Against Theology: An Analysis of the Life and Thought of Franz Overbeck.”, 114.

[2] In 1 Corinthians chapter 6, the focus is on the body as it now is in reference to what it will be.  The body is portrayed throughout the Gospels and Pauline corpus as persevering through eternity.  This is the basis for moral action today, not that the body will be left.  Also see Matthew 24, Luke 17, and 1 Corinthians 15.

[3] N.T. Wright, Belden Noble Lecture Series, Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, MA: http://www.memorialchurch.harvard.edu/publications/archive.shtml, 2006.

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.

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 Nietzsche interacted with Overbeck’s ideas and vice versa. Finally, we will attempt to determine if Nietzsche could have adopted Overbeck’s thinking about the nature of Christianity in part or in whole.

First, it is fair to say that beyond the practical aspects of relationship, Nietzsche considered Overbeck a comrade in arms in his struggle against modern German scholarship. In a letter to Rodhe (1873), Nietzsche says of Overbeck, “Besides, he is a radical, and I can no longer get along with people who are not radicals.” In later correspondence, he writes that Overbeck is, “… my friend and brother-in-mind … the most independent theologian now alive according to my knowledge and in any case the greatest scholar of church history… .”

This is no small statement from Nietzsche at that particular time in his career. Overbeck’s public reception confirms what Nietzsche says. After the release of On the Christian Character of Our Present-Day Theology, Overbeck admits in a letter that he had, “embroiled himself in an irresolvable conflict with the dominant theological current in the German Empire and in consequence was condemned to exile.”

Nietzsche and Overbeck identified with each other intellectually. They were both taking on the stalwarts of German academia: philology and theology. Both were avidly opposed to what they saw as the false dichotomy of liberalism, personified in David Strauss, and conservatism epitomized by the old Prussian church.

However, they were not averse to disagreement between them. Overbeck did believe in the spirituality of the ancient church and that there was a true faith. Overbeck was extremely concerned with the study of history while Nietzsche was clearly focused on the future, though admitting the need for some historical analysis.

There is no direct overlap in their thinking and/or their approach to history, culture, or philosophy. There is, however, an ongoing critical interaction that respects one another and values each other’s input. James Overbeck (no relation to Franz) cites this example as representative of their critical relationship concerning Beyond Good and Evil: “Nietzsche suggested that Overbeck read the new book cover to cover, and not become embittered or hostile because of it. He warned him that the book might be unbearable, but that he should find at least a hundred particulars that were bearable.” But James Overbeck reports that Nietzsche also showed enthusiasm in that Overbeck and he knew each other intimately and that he could rely on Overbeck’s historical grounding to fund Nietzsche’s project.

Just this brief foray into their relationship shows a strong friendship that fueled critical scholarship between the two. Nietzsche’s identification with Overbeck as a fellow-radical and their continual submission of texts to one another gives us ample reason to believe that Nietzsche may have garnered some particularized views of essential Christianity from Franz Overbeck. Now turning to Nietzsche’s view, we must ask if there is legitimate coincidental thinking or merely the appearance of similitude between the two scholars?

Refer to:

• Lionel Gossman, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 200).
• Carl Albrecht Bernoulli, Overbeck und Nietzsche: Eine Freundschaft, (Leipzig: 1916).
• Letter from Nietzsche to Overbeck dated August 28, 1883.

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 dispel the mythos of Christianity and had called for theology to be a scientific enterprise of sorts.

Overbeck took a hostile disposition toward the majority liberal theology pervading the university faculties. But he was equally dissenting toward the old conservative faith as well. He was a radical; a third party in a theological/cultural war of extremes. But he was an extremist as well. He had rejected the church and its authority because of peculiar doctrines he had developed and held exclusively.

The binding nature of Overbeck’s doctrine could be summarized as this: world-fleeing. For Overbeck, the nature of the faith is quiescent in the earliest kernel of the church. The church was in its burgeoning apostolic expansion when Christianity was at its most spiritual stage of development. The characteristic feature of that spiritual Christianity was that adherents held to a world-fleeing mentality (as opposed to the ensuing Alexandrian mentality).

This world-fleeing mentality was solely due to the anticipated return of the Messiah. Christians were fervently spreading the faith, proclaiming “Christ as Lord” rather than particular doctrines. These early Christians were utterly dependent on the Holy Spirit to guide them until Christ’s returned. What interested Overbeck is why the early church did not fall apart when the return of Christ grew more unlikely over time? To this he writes:

We must emphatically deny… that original Christianity’s expectation of the early return of Christ after its factual nonfufillment in the church only stepped into the background, and so we also especially deny that the world-fleeing character of original Christianity disappeared in the ancient church. Otherwise one must forever remain with the unsolvable enigma that a belief whose whole view of the world depended on its physical fulfillment was not dashed to pieces on its nonfulfillment.

What happened when Jesus did not actually return? According to Overbeck, their world-fleeing mentality was transformed into asceticism in the church; which is just another type of world-fleeing mentality. Theology, which is a questionable enterprise for Overbeck, proceded from the ennui of the church trying to justify itself to different cultures upon the ‘nonfulfillment’ of The Return.

The spiritual thrust of the apostolic church left in nonfulfillment had to be parlayed into a new form. That new form became dogma, per Overbeck. This is what he refers to as the Alexandrian shift in the church. Again, Overbeck sees this move into formal exposition of doctrine as having a fundamentally negative effect on the spirituality of the early church. Even more, the “apologetic theology” of the church was the death’s nail for any hope of a faithfully spiritual church. Clement of Alexandria is symptomatic of this apologetic bent, where he tried to reconcile the Greek philosophers against Old Testament theology. For Overbeck, the question became, “How could the church recapture its essential world-fleeing mentality when the apologists were constantly seeking to tie the church to the world in arguing from pagan contexts in order to justify the religion?”

From there, the church entered a “paganizing” phase where art, beauty and all cultural phenomena were recaptured for the life of the church. Ecclesiastical ritual absconded true world-fleeing spirituality. The world-denying character of the faith is even used to fund the martyrdom of Christians, which is yet another avenue of refusing identification with this world.

In what appears ironic, Overbeck mirrors Nietzsche’s early attitude toward the explanatory power of art beyond Alexandrian explication. The problem with dogma is that propositional analysis cannot capture the essential faith without remainder. Overbeck says in a lecture on John’s Gospel, “In every century where Christian faith has been a living faith, church history is full of holy poetry.” For Overbeck, the subduing and domestication of the arts for ritual and instantiation of the church’s novel Alexandrian doctrine runs counter to the world-fleeing spirit of the apostolic spirituality. But Overbeck believes that the nature of the world-fleeing church must be unapologetically (in both senses of the word) expressed. That expression, since it is attempting to express essential spirituality, will have a heightened sense of “holy poetry”.

Any attempt by the church to affirm the world is seen as an attempt to rob Christianity of its very soul. “The matter is different only when one realizes that world-denial is the inmost soul of Christianity, that for Christianity the world is no longer a possible and worthy place for religion.” Not even the Reformation is spared from his rebuke where Overbeck says, “It allowed the use and enjoyment of a world it could not annihilate… .”

In the stead of popular theologies, Overbeck commends a new theology: critical theology. “Critical theology will prevent such theologies from dragging through the world an unreal thing they call Christianity, from which has been taken its soul. Namely the denial of world.” Overbeck sets out to describe a new field that will study historic Christianity historically. It will be strictly historical, meaning that it will focus only on what Christianity was and thereby is not restricted to interacting with what Christianity is.

Franz Overbeck brings a unique understanding of essential Christianity to 19th century German scholarship. Essential Christianity, per Overbeck, centers on the denial of this world in favor of the immanent return of Christ. That essential spirituality was perverted as world-denial took on the form of dogma, asceticism, and martyrdom. Further, every act of apologetic engagement of the world, commandeering art, and/or development of ritual further instantiated the church’s identification with the very world from which it ought to take flight.

• Franz Overbeck, On the Christianity of Theology, Translated by John Elbert Wilson (Pickwick Publications: San Jose, CA, 2002).
• James Arwin Overbeck (no relation to Franz), “History Against Theology: An Analysis of the Life and Thought of Franz Overbeck.” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1975).

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, Nietzsche appears to partially develop his view of Christian pity from his anti-somatic perception of the religion. The question for this essay is where, exactly, did Nietzsche derive this particularized view of Christian theology.

While populist tendencies will always share the same air, world-denial and/or anti-somaticism were not necessarily the prevailing doctrines of the Prussian church, neither Lutheran nor Roman Catholic. Neither were they an accurate representation of the somatic doctrine of the sacred texts. The sum of these indicators begs the question as to where Nietzsche developed and/or sustained such an uncritical analysis of Christian theology en toto.

It will be the thesis of this series that Nietzsche, in part or whole, derived much of his esoteric Christian theology from his friend Franz Overbeck. Specifically, Nietzsche finds particular parts of Overbeck’s world-fleeing theology for support of his more general attacks on Christianity. If this is correct, then almost all of Nietzsche’s attack on Christianity takes on Christian theology that has, in fact, strayed to the point that Nietzsche describes (i.e. anti-somatic, Platonic, etc.). His attempt to capture the center of all Christian dogma ultimately fails if it does not accurately represent the actual center of the historic Faith; rather, a peculiar outlying vantage of Christianity.

We will begin by looking at Overbeck’s particularized theology of the ancient church. We will then need to consider how strong of an intellectual camaraderie was present between these two housemates. Specifically, it will necessary to demonstrate that Nietzsche could accept any of Overbeck’s theology as plausible. Next we will begin to reconstruct Nietzsche’s view of Christian theology through Overbeck’s lens. Finally, we will reconsider both prongs of Nietzsche’s attack against the religion called Christianity.

 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.

2. Alcoholic Poisoning of Europe

3. Syphilis

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

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 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