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His argument is that a religious sensibility has “crawled into existence” on “errant
paths of reason”. Although it may have been endangered by a scientific way of
thinking at a point in its development, religion has survived by mendaciously
absorbing a philosophical doctrine into its system of belief. This is a “trick” of
theology we can see at work in early Christianity where we encounter “the religion of a learned age saturated with philosophy”, and from this there has been
generated superstitions concerning a “sensus allegoricus” (HH 110). Regarding
the second point, Nietzsche argues that philosophers have frequently practised
philosophy either under the direct influence of religious habits or under the
ancient hereditary power of the metaphysical need, so arriving at doctrines that
can appear strikingly similar to beliefs we find in Jewish, Christian, and Indian
religious systems. Now, however, Nietzsche thinks humanity will make progress
in its quest for maturity if philosophers stop spinning fables about a family
resemblance between religion and scientifically-minded philosophy.
In Christianity Nietzsche locates a curious psychology of salvation: it seeks to
crush and shatter the human being, to sink them into slimy depths; then as if by a
miracle, in the midst of this feeling of complete depravity, there shines the gleam
of a divine compassion [Mitleid], “so that someone surprised and stunned by
grace let out a cry of rapture and for a moment believed that he bore the whole of
Heaven within him” (HH 114). All the psychological discoveries of Christianity,
Nietzsche notes, are made to work on this pathological excess of feeling: “it wants
to destroy, shatter, stun, intoxicate; there is only one thing it does not want:
measure, and hence it is, when understood most profoundly, barbaric, Asiatic,
ignoble, non-Greek” (HH 114). For Nietzsche, then, a false psychology, including
a fantasizing in the interpretation of motives and events, “is the necessary prerequisite for becoming a Christian and feeling the need for salvation” (HH 135).
Nietzsche is attempting to develop a purely psychological explanation of the
religious states, including the need for salvation, one that will be free of mythology (HH 132). He notes that it is by comparing himself with a superhuman being,
one capable of so-called purely unegoistical actions and who lives in perpetual
consciousness of an unselfish way of thinking, and with a god, that the religious
person looks upon his or her human nature so gloomily, as if it were deformed. To
arrive at such a way of being, which also includes the perception of a god full of
wrath and menace, a god as judge and executioner, is not, Nietzsche insists, due to
guilt or sin but solely the result of a series of errors in reasoning: “It was the fault
of the mirror if their nature appeared to them so gloomy and hateful, and that
mirror was their work, the very imperfect work of human imagination and judgment” (HH 133). The first error is to suppose that there exists a being capable of
purely unegoistical actions since this is even more fantastic than the phoenix.
Such an idea is neither clear nor distinct and cannot withstand close examination.
Nietzsche notes that informing an action is always some personal motive or need,
hence the ego cannot act without ego. Second, is the error of supposing a god who
Nietzsche on Religion and Christianity
is wholly love. Here Nietzsche draws on the ideas of Georg Lichtenberg who asks
us to consider whether love without some corresponding pleasure of the self is
possible. The whole psychology of love needs exposing:
even if some human being should wish to be just like that god, to be love,
to do and to want everything for others, nothing for himself, it would be
impossible, if only because he must do a great deal for himself just to be
able to do some things for the sake of others. And then it presupposes that
the other person is enough of egoist to accept that sacrifice, that living for
him, over and over again: so that loving, self-sacrificing people have an
interest in the continued existence of egoists who are without love and
incapable of self-sacrifice, and in order for the highest morality to be able
to persist, it would really have to force immorality to exist (whereby it would
admittedly negate itself) (HH 133)
The Christian, then, experiences self-contempt owing to errors of reasoning, “that
is, due to a false, unscientific interpretation of his actions and sensations.” Is it not
the case that the feeling of contempt, and of displeasure in general, does not persist, “how hours occasionally arrive when all this is blown away from his soul, and
he once again feels himself free and courageous”? What has carried off the victory
is in part his own strength (combined with the necessary decrease in every profound stimulation), but the new self-love the Christian experiences strikes him or
her as something unbelievable and has to be seen as the unmerited radiance on
them of some luminous grace from above. Where the Christian previously saw
warnings, threats, and punishments, he or she now reads divine goodness into
their experiences: the judge-like god is now a merciful god. In truth, Nietzsche
argues, what is called grace and a prelude to salvation is really self-pardoning and
self-redemption.
In Human, All Too Human137 Nietzsche seeks to explain “defiance of oneself”
and the ascetic forms it takes in terms of the need to exercise a passion for power
[Gewalt] and domination [Herrschsucht] (in HH 142 Nietzsche speaks of “the feeling of power [das Gefühl der Macht]”). Where this lacks objects, it can be turned
on the self, that is, on certain parts of one’s nature. The shattering of oneself,
including the mockery of one’s own nature, is, Nietzsche contends, a “very high
degree of vanity.” A large part of morality and its success can be explained in these
terms:
The whole morality of the Sermon on the Mount fits in here: people have a
genuine pleasure in violating themselves with excessive demands and then
idolizing this tyrannically demanding something in their souls afterward.
In every ascetic morality [Moral] people worship a part of themselves as a
god and therefore need to diabolize the remaining part (HH 142)
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In Human, All Too Human 138 Nietzsche seeks to show that acts of self-denial
are basically not moral actions as they are taken to be, in which they are carried
out strictly with regard to others. He begins by noting that human beings are not
equally moral at all times and that if we judge a person’s morality by their aptitude
for great, self-sacrificing resolve and self-renunciation (what is called “holiness”),
then, “they are the most moral in regard to affect.” Some increase in the level of
simulation presents a person with new motives, ones that they would consider
themselves to be capable of in their ordinary sober state. In Human, All Too
Human 139 Nietzsche seeks to invert our typical appreciation of the saintly existence as a phenomenon of some heroic feat of morality. He notes that the relinquishing of the will once and for all is, in fact, easier than relinquishing it
occasionally, just as the renunciation of a desire is easier than keeping it within
measure and unconditional obedience is more convenient than a conditional
kind. Therefore, the saint makes their life easier by renouncing his or her personality. Indeed, subordination carried out in this manner can be a powerful means
of achieving self-mastery, “we are occupied, hence not bored, and yet have no
wilful or passionate impulses; after carrying out an action, the feeling of responsibility and hence the agony of regret are absent.” However, the most common
means that the saint and the ascetic have at their disposal as a way of making their
lives endurable is that of occasionally waging war on themselves, locating the
enemy within, so alternating between victory and defeat:
He makes use especially of his proclivity for vanity, ambition, and love of
power, and then of his sensual desires, in allowing himself to look upon his
life as an ongoing battle and himself as a battlefield on which good and evil
spirits struggle with varying success … It was in their interest to maintain
this battle at some level of intensity because through it … their empty lives
were sustained (HH 141)
By battling and overcoming this enemy within the saint is able to present themself
ever anew to the non-saint as a supernatural being:
Their upward and downward fluctuations of the scales of pride and humility entertained their brooding heads just as well as the alternation between
desire and tranquility of soul. Back them psychology served not only to
make everything human seem suspicious, but also to slander, to flagellate,
to crucify; people wanted to consider themselves as bad and evil as possible,
they sought out anxiety about the soul’s salvation, despair of their own
strength (HH 141)
As Nietzsche astutely notes, giving the example of the erotic, everything natural to
which humanity attaches ideas of badness and sinfulness, serves to trouble and
Nietzsche on Religion and Christianity
darken the imagination and makes us uncertain and mistrustful: “even our dreams
assume an aftertaste of the tormented conscience” (HH 141). He makes the simple
point, almost exasperatedly, that our suffering in this manner from what is
natural — sensual desire, for example — “is wholly ungrounded in the reality of
things” and is the result of our opinions about things. It is a trick of religion and metaphysicians to make nature seem so suspect: “Living for a long time in what is natural,
they gradually feel themselves oppressed by such a burden of sins that supernatural
powers become necessary for lifting this burden; and with this, the aforementioned
need for salvation enters the scene” and corresponding only to an imagined sinfulness
(HH 141). Nietzsche even contends that the aim in Christianity is not to make people
moral, since it profits much more from them considering themselves to be as sinful as
possible. If in the world of antiquity ingenuity was expended in an effort to increase
the joy in life through festivals and festive cults, then in the Christian era, a huge
amount of spirit has been spent on making people feel sinful in every way. Nietzsche
speculates that such a stimulation and invigoration of the affects may be the sign of an
enervated and over-cultivated time or age. In a situation where the circle of natural
sensations had been run through dozens of times and the soul had grown tired of
them, the saint and the ascetic discover a new class of enlivening stimulants:
The eye of the saint, directed upon the significance, dreadful in every
respect, of a brief earthly existence, upon the nearness of the final judgment concerning endless new stretches of life, this scorching eye in a halfdestroyed body made the people of the ancient world tremble to their
depths; to look, shudderingly to look away, to sense anew the stimulating
attraction of the spectacle, to give in to it, to sate oneself with it until the
soul trembles with fever and chills — that was the final pleasure that antiquity
discovered after it had itself grown indifferent to the sight of contests
between animals or between men (HH 141)
It is not what the saint is but what he or she has meant to non-saints that has given
the saint a “world-historical value” (HH 143). It is people’s mistaken perception of
saints that has allowed them to assume a superhuman appearance, beings that
were neither especially good nor wise but that reached beyond human measure in
goodness and wisdom. The saint has been devoid of self-knowledge, he or she did
not understand themself: “What was perverse and sick in his nature, with its coupling together of spiritual poverty, faulty knowledge, ruined health, and overexcited nerves, remained as hidden from his own glance as from those contemplating
him” (HH 143). So long as the belief in the saint is maintained there is belief in
divine and miraculous things and in a religious meaning for all existence, including
an imminent, final, Day of Judgment.
In the final section of this part of the book Nietzsche acknowledges that a different, more pleasing picture of the saint could be drawn if one also considered the
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Indian saints. He also mentions Christ as the begotten son of God and who felt himself to be without sin and who thus reached the same goal that we now obtain though
science: the “complete freedom from responsibility” for our nature (HH 144).
For Nietzsche, then, religion has its sources in human ills. Instead of identifying
the cause of an ill we concentrate on the effect and attempt to reinterpret it and
change the effect it produces on our sensibilities. Religious priests in fact live on
the narcotizing of human ills (HH 108).
One of Nietzsche’s most important aphorisms in Human, All Too Human concerns the origin [Ursprung] of the religious cult (HH 111). If we transport ourselves back to the ages when the religious life flourished most vigorously, we
discover a deep conviction that we no longer share and that shows that this way of
life is now closed to us, namely, our traffic with nature. In short, Nietzsche’s argument is that here any notion of “natural causality” is lacking; early humans know
nothing of natural laws, and events are not constrained by any compulsion: a
season, sunshine, or rain may come or fail to come. When we row a ship, it is not
the rowing that moves the ship but a magical ceremony that compels a demon to
move it. Illness and death are not natural events but the result of magical influences. We only see the idea of a natural occurrence coming into human consciousness in a late phase of humanity, with the older Greek civilizations and the
conception of “Moira” (fate) that is enthroned above the gods. If we look at the old
religious sensibility, then we encounter a world that we no longer recognize, a
world in which artifacts and the whole domain of nature are treated as being alive
with spirits and with irrational forces at work (i.e. forces that transcend what we
can understand as humans): “In the conception of religious people, all of nature
is a sum of actions of conscious and intentional beings, a colossus complex of
arbitrary actions.” Whereas the human is the domain of the rule, nature is taken
to be the domain of irregularity because it is irrational or arbitrary (its logic
exceeds the human grasp).
The difference between our modern sensibility and that of ancient peoples is
enormous, according to Nietzsche in Human, All Too Human. On the one hand,
they are determined themselves by law and by tradition, in which the individual
is tied to these almost automatically and moves with the regularity of a pendulum.
On the other hand, nature appears as mysterious, something to be dreaded and
something that cannot be comprehended. To engage with it, recourse to magic
and sorcery is required. Nature is seen as a domain of freedom, that is, of caprice,
a higher power, something like a superhuman mode or stage of existence, such as
a god. The challenge for early humans is how to exert an influence over these terrible, unknown powers, in order to fetter this immense domain of freedom. It is
here that the religious cult is born. The idea arises that constraint can be exercised
on the powers of nature through prayers, pleadings, and ceremonies, through
submission, through the giving of gifts, sacrifices, and flattering glorifications.
Nietzsche on Religion and Christianity
It is in the religious cult that Nietzsche in fact locates the origins of law, such as
treaties, the pledging of securities, and the exchange of oaths. Many of our nobler
ideas have their sources in this context, such as relations of sympathy between
human beings, the existence of goodwill and gratitude, treaties between enemies,
and so on. Nietzsche also holds that the cult is the source of the feeling of the
sublime [der erhabenen]. The inner world of the sublime — affected, tremulous,
contrite, expectant states — is, he contends, born in the human being through the
cult (HH 130).
Today, however, our feelings about nature are clearly different. As Nietzsche
points out, for us nature is now regular, and can be made subject to control: we
see nature as something that is characterized by uniformity. Today we go to
nature for composure and its inspiration, not out of fear; we seek to incorporate
the uniformity of nature into ourselves as a way of coming to an enjoyment of
ourselves. This approach signifies that we have developed a new feeling for
nature. This difference in feeling becomes evident in Dawn, where, for example,
Nietzsche makes reference to Rousseau on this point and to his experience of
walking in mountains, which we moderns find beautiful, and not terrifying or
aimless. Rousseau is credited with introducing us into a new emotion that
amounts to a “love of nature” (D 427). Nietzsche also uses a series of garden
metaphors in Dawn that further reflect his recognition of humanity’s ongoing
development of a love for nature (see e.g. D 56, 174, 248, 382, 560). In Dawn,
Nietzsche analyzes thinking in terms of the metaphor of gardens and gardening
(D 382), as well as feelings (D 174).1 For the moment, we turn to the analysis of
religion and especially of Christianity we find in Dawn in light of this point on
the significance of feeling.
Nietzsche on Christianity in Dawn
One prejudice Nietzsche attacks in Dawn is that of “pure spirit” (D 39). He seeks
to expose the costs to the health of the body of a teaching of pure spirituality. By
definition, such a teaching is excessive and, in the process, destroys much nervous
energy: “it taught one to despise, ignore, or torment the body and, on account of
all one’s drives, to torment and despise oneself” (D 39). The teaching succeeds in
producing human beings who feel melancholy and oppressed and conclude that
the cause of their distress and anxiety must reside in the body, which continues to
flourish. As Nietzsche points out, in such cases it is in fact the body that registers
a protest against such derision (D 39). Once again, he draws attention to the irrational mode of existence that spiritual excess results in: “A pervasive, chronic
hyper-excitability was eventually the lot of these virtuous pure spirits” since “the
only pleasure they could muster was in the form of ecstasy and other harbingers
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of madness” (D 39). Their mode or system of being or existence thus reaches an
apogee when ecstasy is accepted as the highest goal in life and the as the standard
by which all earthly pleasures and things are condemned.
This kind of approach to so-called “religious phenomena” also informs
Nietzsche’s appraisal of Christianity as a religion. Nietzsche construes Christianity
as a religion of the affects and as a popular protest against philosophy, which
teaches rational mastery of the affects (D 58). He claims that Christianity “disallows all moral value to virtue as it was conceived of by philosophers … condemns
rationality altogether,” and wants the affects to be revealed in their utmost
strength, for example, as “love of God,” “fear before God,” “fanatical faith in God,”
and as “blindest hope for God” (D 58). Nietzsche points out that Christianity is
said to possess a “hunter’s instinct” for those who can be brought to despair in life
and over life (D 64). And he notes wittily that Pascal attempted through his wagerexperiment to find out whether everyone, “aided by the most incisive knowledge,”
could be brought to despair — “the experiment miscarried, to his second despair”
(D 64).
Pascal held that, even if the Christian faith was not capable of proof, it is the
fearful possibility that it is in fact true that should compel us to prudently become
Christian. Pascal is a figure that fascinates Nietzsche. In Assorted Opinions and
Maxims 408 Nietzsche mentions him as one of several figures from whom he will
accept judgment,2 while in Ecce Homo (“Why I am so Clever” 3) he describes him
as “the most instructive victim of Christianity” and in a note from 1887 as “the
admirable logician of Christianity” (WP 388). Pascal embodies in his intellectual
being what characterizes Christian faith from the start, as Nietzsche makes clear
in Beyond Good and Evil 46: “a sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence
of the spirit,” and, at the same time, “self-mockery, self-mutilation.” The Christian
faith is marked by a cruelty and self-mutilation, “religious Phoenicianism,” which
afflicts a conscience that is over-ripe, manifold, and pampered (BGE 46). Here we
have a peculiarly religious psychology in which, Nietzsche says, “the subjection of
the spirit” must hurt indescribably3 In Dawn 86, Nietzsche notes how Pascal
sought to interpret physiological phenomena, such as the stomach, the beating of
the heart, the nerves, the bile, and the semen, as moral and religious phenomenon, asking whether salvation or damnation was to be discovered in them, and
how this led him to twist and torment his system of thought and himself so as to
be in the right (see also D 9, 83).
Nietzsche claims that Christianity has brought into the world “a completely
new and unlimited imperilment,” creating new securities, enjoyments, recreations,
and evaluations. Although we moderns may be in the process of emancipating
ourselves from such an imperilment, we keep dragging into our existence the old
habits associated with these securities and evaluations, even into our noblest arts
and philosophies (D 57). Christianity, he suggests, has sought to transform the
Nietzsche on Religion and Christianity
great passions and powers, such as Eros and Aphrodite, which are capable of
idealization, into “infernal kobolds and phantoms of deceit,” arousing in the
conscience of the believer tremendous torments at the slightest sexual excitation
(D 76). The result is to fill human beings with a feeling of dread at the sight of
their natural animal conditions of existence, making necessary and regularly
recurring sensations into a source of inner misery to the point where inner misery
becomes a necessary and regularly recurring phenomenon in human beings. This
may even be a misery we keep secret and is more deeply rooted than we care to
admit (Nietzsche mentions in this regard Shakespeare’s confession of Christian
gloominess in the Sonnets). Christianity has contempt for the world and makes a
new virtue of ignorance, namely “innocence,” the most frequent result of which
is the feeling of guilt and despair: “a virtue which leads to Heaven via the detour
through Hell” (D 321; see also D 89).4
In Dawn 70 Nietzsche considers the fact that the Christian church is “an encyclopaedia of prehistoric cults and viewpoints of the most diverse origin,” which makes
it highly suitable for proselytizing. He even contends that the reason for its spread
as a world religion lies not in what is Christian in it but rather in the “universal
heathenism of its rituals” (D 70). Christianity proclaims itself to be, and is often
taken to be, a universal religion proclaiming universal notions and doctrines, such
as the inviolability of the individual, the sanctity of life, and the brotherhood of
men. Nietzsche notes that from the very beginning its tenets are rooted in Jewish
and Hellenic traditions but it has succeeded in transcending racial and national
boundaries as if all such distinctions between peoples were merely “prejudices.”
On the one hand, he suggests, there is something to admire in this force or power
that has enabled the most disparate elements to grow into one another and entwine;
on the other hand, however, he thinks there is a contemptible quality to this power,
which is evident in the crude self-satisfaction of the intellect during the age in
which the Christian church was being formed, accepting in its process of formation “every sort of fare and thus to digest oppositions like gravel” (D 70).
In Dawn 38, Nietzsche has sought to establish that considered in themselves
drives are neither moral nor immoral but only become so through being subject to
the power of custom. It is, for example, under the reproach of custom that a drive
may develop into a painful feeling of cowardice, while under the influence of a
Christian custom or more the same drive can be declared to be good and so transform it into a feeling of humility. Both a clean and a guilty conscience can thus be
forced onto a drive. However, as Nietzsche points out, “[a]s with every drive, it, per se,
has neither these nor any other moral character nor name whatsoever nor even a
definite accompanying feeling of pleasure or displeasure” (D 38). Rather, he
thinks, it acquires its “second nature” only when it comes into relation to other
drives that have been baptized good or evil, in short, with a system of moral evaluations. Nietzsche also notes that the Greeks felt very differently about envy than
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we moderns do, so that Hesiod could reckon envy as among the effects of the good
and benevolent Eris and in which there was nothing offensive in it to the gods
(D 38). As Nietzsche acknowledges, this evaluation of envy by the Greeks operated
of course in the cultural context of the agon or contest, where competition was
evaluated as good.5 As he claims, unlike we moderns, the Greeks considered hope
to be something blind and even malicious; the Jews considered wrath something
holy and created a wrathful, holy Jehovah in the image of their wrathful and holy
prophets (D 38).
In Dawn 76, Nietzsche continues with this kind of treatment by arguing that to
think something evil is to make it evil. Christianity, he suggests here, is to be taken
to task for transforming necessary affects and sensations — sexual awakenings
being an obvious example — into a source of inner misery; it even wants this
inner misery to be the normal state for every single human being as part of their
lot on earth (D 76). Once again, Nietzsche’s appeals to philosophical reason and
Enlightenment over this religious decline into self-torment:
Must we then always label anything evil that we have to struggle to keep
under control or, if need be, banish altogether from our thoughts! Is it not
the way of base souls always to think that their enemy has to be evil! And
ought one to call Eros an enemy! (D 76)
Nietzsche seeks to revalue sexual feelings by arguing that, like feelings of sympathy and worship, a pleasure is transferred from one person to another on the basis
of giving oneself pleasure, and such a benevolent arrangement is all too rare in
nature (D 76). Is this not a good reason for thus valuing such feelings? Instead
Christianity has enjoined to them the guilty conscience and demonized Eros.6 But
as a result of this censorship, the Church has only succeeded in making the erotic
more interesting to people than all the saints and angels put together, and
Nietzsche points out the comedy of this: “to this very day, the effect of such secretiveness has been that the love story became the only real interest that all circles
have in common — and to an excess inconceivable in antiquity, an excess that
will, at a later date, elicit laughter” (D 76).
In Dawn 78 Nietzsche notes that while today we have a new sensibility with
respect to torments of the body — we cry with indignation and rage whenever
something inflicts torment on another’s body, be it a person or an animal — we
have not yet extended such a sensibility to torments of the soul. This is another
reason for his objection to Christianity, which according to him is the supreme
religion when it comes to such torments. Christianity, he claims, has put these
torments to use to an unprecedented and shocking degree. The Christian religion
has succeeded in making of the earth a wretched place, “merely by erecting the
crucifix everywhere, thereby branding the earth as the place ‘where the righteous
are tortured to death!’” (D 78). It is Christianity that has turned the deathbed into
Nietzsche on Religion and Christianity
a bed of torment, and against which Nietzsche espouses in his middle and late
periods the virtue of the rational or free death (we shall examine this in Chapter 7).
In short, Christianity has robbed the misfortune of life of its innocence, as
Nietzsche makes clear in the next aphorism where he contrasts it unfavorably
with Greek religion. The passage is worth citing at some length:
Misfortune and guilt — Christianity has placed these two things on one
scale: such that whenever the misfortune ensuing from an instance of guilt
is great, the greatness of the guilt itself is then apportioned, completely
involuntarily, in relation to the misfortune. This is, however, not antique,
which is why Greek tragedy, which deals with misfortune and guilt so often
and yet in such a different sense, is one of the greatest liberators of mind
and spirit … They had remained harmless enough not to establish an
“appropriate relationship” between guilt and misfortune. The guilt of their
tragic heroes is indeed the tiny stone over which they stumble and, as such,
the reason why they indeed do break an arm or put out an eye, at which
point the antique sensibility responded: “Yes, he should have made his way
a bit more cautiously and a bit less presumptuously.” But it was left up to
Christianity to say for the first time: “There is a grave misfortune here, and
underneath it there must lie hidden a grave, equally grave guilt, even if we
don’t yet see it clearly. If you, misfortunate one, don’t feel this way, then
you are obdurate — you will have even worse things to go through!” (D 78)
Nietzsche’s fundamental claim here, then, is that although misfortune existed in
Greek antiquity it was deemed innocent; it is only with Christianity that the
becoming of life loses its innocent quality and everything becomes instead punishment, even well-deserved punishment. With every malady, the sufferer now
feels morally reprehensible and depraved.
Nietzsche is also keen to take Christianity to task for the poor philology or art of
interpretation of its scribes and scholars. It fails to foster the sense of integrity and
justice that is necessary to the practice of good philology, replacing this with the
advancement of conjectures presented as dogmas:
Again and again they claim “I am right, for it is written —” and then follows
such a brazenly arbitrary explication that, upon hearing it, a philologist,
caught in the middle between outrage and laughter, stops dead in his tracks
and asks himself again and again: Is this possible! Is this honest? Is it actually
event decent? (D 84)
The congregation is thus trained in all forms of “the art of reading badly.”
Nietzsche holds that we should not really be surprised by this sorry state of
affairs, since not much is to be expected from the after-effects of a religion that
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performed “a scandalous philological farce” on the Old Testament. By this he
means, he tells us, “the attempt to snatch the Old Testament right from under the
Jews’ very noses by claiming that it contains nothing but Christian teachings and
belongs to the Christians as the true people of Israel: whereas the Jews had only
usurped this role for themselves” (D 84). Against the protest of Jewish scholars,
the Old Testament was said to speak everywhere of Christ and only of Christ,
especially Christ on the cross: “wherever a piece of wood, a rod, a ladder, a twig,
a tree, a willow, a staff turns up, that signifies a prophesying of the wood of the
cross” (D 84). Nietzsche points to further distortions and philological connivances on the part of the Christian founders, pointing out that what was being
engaged upon was a “battle” over interpretation in which “one thought about the
enemy and not about integrity” (D 84). Christianity shows itself to be an enemy
of truth when it declares doubt to be a sin: “Void of reason, one is supposed to be
tossed into faith by a miracle and then to swim in it as if it were the clearest and
most uncomplicated of elements … What is wanted are blindness and delirium
and an eternal psalm above the waves in which reason has drowned” (D 89).
Although some people may find life unendurable without the idea of a god, this
says nothing as to the rational nature of it. It may simply be that we have grown
so accustomed to such ideas that we cannot desire a life without them — and
while such ideas may seem to be necessary for a person and their preservation,
such a fact indicates nothing about the truth of the matter. As Nietzsche exclaims,
“As if my preservation were something necessary!” (D 90).
Christianity is also taken to task by Nietzsche on account of the way it “reads”
into life “the moral miracle,” and involves the sudden and often inexplicable alteration of value judgments and the sudden abandonment of all habits (D 87). The
appeal to the miracle, of course, blocks off proper inquiry and adequate explanation. At the same time Christianity must teach the impossibility of morality except
as a ceaseless striving of the flawed or sinful individual: “The New Testament sets
up a canon of virtue, of the fulfilled law: but only such that it is the canon of
impossible virtue,” so that faced with it those who strive to be moral are made to
learn that they are always farther and farther from their goal, leading to despair at
virtue and “then at last to cast themselves on the bosom of the God of mercy”
(D 87). The pursuit of such a melancholy endeavor prepares the individual for the
moral miracle or the awakening into grace. This is not to say, however, that the
struggle for morality and virtue is necessary. As Nietzsche notes, the miracle often
overtakes the sinner when he is “leprous with sin,” and in which it even seems
that the leap out of the forlorn state into its opposite is both easier and, as proof of
the miracle, more desirable. At the end of the aphorism, Nietzsche indicates a
naturalist or materialist inquiry into such a phenomenon: what the sudden
irrational reversal, the amazing switch from profound misery to profound bliss,
indicates physiologically is best left for the psychiatrist to ponder — for example,
Nietzsche on Religion and Christianity
is it disguised epilepsy? — and who have plenty of opportunities to observe
“‘miracles’ of this sort” (D 87).
Nietzsche attempts a balanced assessment of Christianity, and does not wish to
be unjust to it. He notes, quite seriously, that Christianity has wanted to free human
beings from the burden of the demands of sober morality by showing a shorter way
to perfection, perhaps imitating philosophers who wanted a “royal road to truth”
that would avoid wearisome and tedious dialectics or the gathering of rigorously
tested facts. In both cases, a profound error is at work, even though such an error
has provided comfort to those caught exhausted and despairing in the wilderness
of existence (D 59). Christianity has emerged from a “rustic rudeness” by incorporating the spirit of countless people whose need is to take joy in submission, “all
those subtle and crude enthusiasts of self-mortification and other-idolization”
(D 59). As a result, he contends, Christianity has evolved into a “very spirited
religion” that has made European humanity something sharp-witted and not only
theologically cunning (D 60). The creation of a mode of life that tames the beast in
man, which is the noble end of Christianity, has succeeded in keeping awake “the
feeling of a superhuman mission” in the soul and in the body. Here one takes pride
in obeying, which, Nietzsche notes, is the distinguishing mark of all aristocrats.
Given Nietzsche’s remarks on the importance of obedience as a contemporary
virtue in his remarks on knowledge (and one to be challenged by free-spirited
inquiry), for example, in Dawn 207 it seems plausible to understand aristocrats
temporally as well as spiritually. Nietzsche’s example here is of lords spiritual: as he
claims, it is with their “surpassing beauty and refinement” that the princes of the
church prove to the people the church’s “truth,” which is itself the result of a
harmony between figure, spirit, and task (D 60). Nietzsche then asks whether this
attempt at an aristocratic harmony must also go to grave with the end of religions:
“can nothing higher be attained, or even imagined?” (D 60).
It is important to note that Christianity, as well as free-spirited alternatives to it,
depends on affects (D 58, 60). When Nietzsche invites sensitive people who are still
Christians from the heart to attempt for once the experiment of living without
Christianity, he is in search of an authentic mode of life that is similarly dependent
on body and affects, not only conceptual understanding: “they owe it to their faith in
this way for once to sojourn ‘in the wilderness’ — if only to win for themselves the
right to a voice on the question whether Christianity is necessary. For the present
they cling to their native soil and thence revile the world beyond it” (D 61). After such
a wandering beyond his little corner of existence, a Christian may return home, not
out of homesickness, but out of sound and honest judgment. In this example of an
experiment with life in the wilderness, Nietzsche sees a model for future human
beings who will one day live in this way with respect to all evaluations of the past:
“one must voluntarily live through them once again, and likewise their opposite — in
order, in the final analysis, to have the right to let them fall through the sieve” (D 62).
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The closing aphorisms of book one of Dawn indicate that Nietzsche thinks that
Christianity is a religion facing its eventual demise and self-surpassing. There are
various reasons for this. On the one hand, he holds, genuinely active people today
are inwardly without Christianity, while the more moderate people of the spiritual middle class possess a “wondrously simplified Christianity” (D 92). What
remains of Christianity at its best and most vital are meekness and resignation
elevated to a godhead. But this means that it has passed over into a “gentle moralism,” and this signals, he thinks, its euthanasia (D 92). New skeptical inquiry is
also leading to Christianity’s waning of influence: God in this context is no longer
understood as truth, but as “the vanity, the lust for power, the impatience, the terror, the chilling and enchanting delusion of humankind” (D 93). Nietzsche regards
historical refutation as the decisive form of refutation. Today, the task is to not to
prove or disprove God’s existence, but rather to demonstrate how belief in his
existence could arise, and by what means such belief gained in gravity and importance. Viewing the task in these terms means that a counter proof to God’s existence in effect becomes superfluous: atheists today are becoming better skilled at
making a clean sweep (D 95). In the final aphorism of book one, Nietzsche, as we
have seen, maintains that, with respect to religious matters, Europe needs to catch
up with the free-minded naiveté of the ancient Brahmans (D 96). The Brahmans
taught that priests were more powerful than the gods and that their power rested
with the observances: they never tired of praising them as the true bestowers of all
things good, such as payers, ceremonies, sacrifices, hymns, and verses. To go one
step further, Nietzsche thinks, is to cast aside the gods altogether — “which
Europe must also do one day!” (D 96). Even one more step further and one no
longer needs the priests and mediators; Nietzsche thinks this step was actually
taken in India with the appearance of Buddha, the teacher of “the religion of selfredemption” (D 96). This is an extremely rare and beautiful level of culture, one
which Europe lacks, and into which it needs to grow. When it has been attained,
morality in the old or conventional sense of the word will have died.7 Nietzsche
asks: What will come then? (D 96). He doesn’t answer the question — it is clear
that in the rest of the book he will place the stress on experimental living — but
rather encourages Europe to catch up with India on the level of culture. An initial
step forward is for those millions of people who no longer believe in a god to make
a sign to one another, and forge a new power in Europe.
Nietzsche on the First Christian
Dawn 68 is one of the longest aphorisms in book one, in which Nietzsche discusses the apostle Paul as the founder of Christianity and without whose intervention and influence it may have remained a little known Jewish sect. Nietzsche
entitles the aphorism “the first Christian,” but begins by noting that the Bible is a
Nietzsche on Religion and Christianity
book that people read so as to edify themselves, reading oneself into and out if it,
finding in one’s great or small personal distress the wink of solace or consolation.
But how many know, Nietzsche asks, that the Bible also portrays the story of an
ambitious and importunate soul, of a superstitious and cunning mind? The treatment of Paul is one with the concerns of the book as a whole: Nietzsche’s emphasis is on exposing Paul’s states of “intoxication” and his “fanaticism.” He argues
that without this “peculiar story” and the confusions of such a mind, there would
be no Christianity. He appeals to Enlightenment reason as a way of exposing the
real nature of Paul’s scriptures, which need to be “read, really read, not as the
revelations of the ‘Holy Spirit’ but instead, with an honest and open mind and
without thinking about all our personal needs in the process” (D 68). The success
of the ship of Christianity, which threw a good portion of what Nietzsche calls
Jewish ballast overboard, and reached out to the heathens, is bound to the story of
one man, who Nietzsche describes as “very tortured, very pitiable, very unpleasant,” even to himself. It is not simply that he suffered under a fixed idea but rather
under an ever-present fixed question, namely, what is stake in the Jewish law and
its fulfillment? In his youth, Nietzsche notes, Paul was keen to do all he could to
satisfy it and was ravenous for the highest distinction Jews can imagine: “this
people, which pushed the fantasy of moral sublimeness [Erhabenheit] higher than
any other people and which alone succeeded in creating a holy God, along with
the idea of sin as an offence against his holiness” (D 68). It was Paul who became
the fanatical defender and the honor guard of such a god as well as of his law: he
devoted his life to lying in wait for the transgressors and doubters of the law, being
brutal and malicious to them and in favor of the most extreme of punishments. At
some point, Paul discovered something disconcerting about himself — that he too
was unable to fulfill the law. Nietzsche analyzes Paul’s psychology by raising the
following question: “Is it really the carnality of ‘flesh’ which turned him into a
transgressor over and over again?8 And not rather, as he later suspected, what lay
behind it, the law itself, which must prove constantly its unfulfillability and which
lures with irresistible magic to transgression?” (D 68). It is the Jewish law that
afflicts Paul: “The law was the cross on which he felt himself nailed: how he hated
it! How resentfully he dragged it along behind! How he searched about to find a
means of destroying it — of no longer having to fulfil it himself!”9
It is in this context of the problem of the law and the difficulty of fulfilling it that
Nietzsche understands Paul’s redemption and conversion:
And finally the redeeming thought flashed before him, simultaneously
with a vision, as could only have been the case with this epileptic: to him,
the raging zealot for the law, who was dead tired of it inwardly, there
appeared on a lonely road that Christ, the light of the Heavenly Father
streaming from his face, and Paul heard the words: “why persecutest
thou me?” (D 68)
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Up to the point of his conversion, Paul had considered Christ’s ignominious death
on the cross to be a principal argument against the messianism preached by the
adherents of the new teaching; now he had discovered in it a means to abolish the
law. It is the suddenness of the decision that arouses Nietzsche’s psychological
interest and suspicion: “Afflicted by the most injured pride, he feels himself, in
one fell swoop, completely recovered, the moral despair gone, as if blown away,
for morality has been blown away, destroyed — or rather fulfilled, there on the
cross!” (D 68). Thus, “with one stroke,” Paul becomes the happiest person on
earth, now “the fate of the Jews, no, of all humanity seems to him bound together
with this insight, this his instant of sudden, flashing illumination”; now he possesses the thought of thoughts, the key of keys, and the light of lights; he has
solved the riddle of his, of humankind’s, existence and now history will turn
around him alone. His fate is to become “the teacher of the destruction of the law!”
(D 68). Thus, to become one with Christ is to have become with him the destroyer
of the law and to have died with him is to have withdrawn from the law. One is
now outside the law:10
If I now wanted to take up the law again and subject myself to it, then I
would turn Christ into the accomplice of sin: for the law was only there
that people might sin, it always induces sin … God would never have
decided for the death of Christ if, without this death, any fulfilment of the
law whatsoever had been possible; now, not only is all guilt carried away,
but guilt as such has been destroyed; now the law is dead, now the carnality
of flesh in which it lives is dead (D 68)
For Paul, then, Christ represents or signifies the end of the law as a way of righteousness and there is now a new “law,” the law of Christ.11 In the Colossians it is
stated that Christ “has cancelled the bond which pledged us to the decrees of the
law. It stood against us, but he has set it aside, nailing it to the cross” (Col 2. 14).
For Paul, the old law is the law of sin and death. With such insights, Paul’s intoxication, Nietzsche says, reaches its summit and “with the idea of becoming-one,
every shame, every subordination, every barrier is removed from it, and the
untameable will to lust for domination reveals itself as an anticipatory revelry in
divine splendours” (D 68). Paul has a desire for control; the irony is that it is this
desire that sends him out of control and into transgression.12
As should be evident, Nietzsche’s analysis of the phenomenon of Paul is essentially psychological in character. He is concerned with how the problem of the law
afflicts Paul and is a human, all too human, story of the torment of the body and
the soul. Paul’s salvation is presented in the Bible as if it amounted to a miracle of
conversion, involving sudden transformations and decisions of the heart.
Nietzsche cannot find in the story the “foundation of universalism,”13 as
Nietzsche on Religion and Christianity
Alain Badiou (2003) has construed Paul’s teachings, because of the human
psychology involved in it; it has a different lesson to teach us, namely, how the
mind can be led to experiencing such a state owing to a misreading of its bodily
condition and how the body is made to suffer through the severe demands place
on it and the affects by such a strict regime of the law. Behind all of Paul’s strivings
and conversion is a “lust for domination,” the need to control other people. As
Christa Davis Acampora has pointed out, Saul has a thirst for power that the law
constrains; in search of his freedom he becomes Paul, “pursuing his liberation
through the revenge of overturning the law.”14
Later, in The Anti-Christ (1888), Nietzsche depicts Paul unfavorably with Christ.
For Nietzsche, Christ is a great symbolist for whom the whole of reality, the whole
of nature, language itself, possess merely the value of a sign and a metaphor.
Christ (and not Paul) is in a sense a “free spirit” who cares nothing for what is
“fixed” (the word kills because everything fixed kills), and both the concept and
experience of “life” for him is opposed to any kind of formula, law, faith, or
dogma.15 Nietzsche insists that Christ did not bring into the world a new religion
and a church but rather the “true evangelic practice.” Here, “blessedness is not
promised, it is not tied to any conditions: it is the only reality - the rest is signs
speaking for it” (A 33). In the Gospel of Jesus, then, there is no guilt and punishment, no sin and redemption. The “glad tidings” speak of every kind of distancing
relation between God and man having been abolished. There is no message from
the “beyond,” the beyond is here and now and consists in living a life of renunciation (including the renunciation of judgment): “A new way of living, not a new
belief … the kingdom of God is not something one waits for, it has no yesterday or
tomorrow…it is an experience within the heart” (A 33). This is why Nietzsche
stresses that the bringer of glad tidings died as he lived and taught — not to
redeem mankind but to show how one ought to live. Thus, what he bequeathed to
mankind is his “practice”: his bearing before the judges, before his accusers and
every kind of calumny and mockery, his bearing on the cross. He does not resist,
he does not defend his rights, he takes no step to avert the worst that can happen
to him, and so on.
Indeed, in his middle writings, Nietzsche had advised his readers to be inspired
by Christ’s example and not to judge but instead strive to be just (AOM 33). In
Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche speaks of a new habit forming within ourselves in which we no longer love or hate, such is the increase in our knowledge
(see HH 133, 292). This theme continues in Assorted Opinions and Maxims, where
Nietzsche once again stresses our non-accountability (as pieces of nature and
necessity) and refers to Christ as providing a model for the future human being: a
being that does not judge but instead seeks to be just. The advancement we are to
make in our knowledge and self-enlightenment can only lead in the direction of a
growing appreciation of our ignorance with respect to the sources of morality
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(HH 107). Nietzsche is continuing this theme in the analysis he offers in Dawn:
Schopenhauer and other moral philosophers have no right to posit a “moral”
significance to the world on the basis of their insights into character or human
nature. Humanity will now struggle with the problem of accountability (the
scapegoat problem): someone has to be culpable; there must be someone or something to blame. Must there not be sinners and judges and executioners? The philosopher, then, has to be like Christ, and proclaim, “judge not but be just.”
Nietzsche qualifies this praise of Christ in The Wanderer and His Shadow 81,
where he acknowledges that the founder of Christianity wanted to abolish secular
justice and remove judging and punishing from the world, but only because all
guilt is conceived as sin, that is, an offense against God and not the world.
The history of Christianity is for Nietzsche, then, the history of a progressively
crude misunderstanding of an original symbolism. The Christian Church is the
morbid barbarism that has assumed power. It expresses a mortal hostility to all
integrity, to all loftiness of soul, to discipline of spirit, to all open-ended and benevolent humanity. Therefore, according to Nietzsche, to use the word “Christianity”
is already a misunderstanding, for in reality there has only been one Christian and
he died on the cross (A 39). Nietzsche names Paul as the key figure who invents
Christianity as a metaphysics and a morality: the lie of the resurrected Jesus and
the belief in immortality. Nietzsche writes on this point: “on the heels of the glad
tidings there then came the worst of all — Paul, the genius of hatred” (A 42).
Through Paul and the lie of the equality of all souls before God, Christianity wages
a war against every feeling of reverence and distance between human beings, that
is, against the preconditions of every elevation and increase in culture, it wages a
war against everything noble, joyful, and high-spirited (A 43). Nietzsche says that
“immortality,” now granted to every Peter and Paul, has been the greatest and most
malicious outrage on noble mankind ever committed (A 43).
An important point to note is that, on Nietzsche’s account, Paul and Christianity
both stand in opposition to science. According to Nietzsche, Christianity is said to
be a religion out of touch with reality and is mortally opposed to the wisdom of
the world or to “science”; furthermore, “it will approve of anything that can poison, slander, or discredit discipline of spirit, integrity or spiritual rigour of conscience, or noble assurance and freedom of the spirit” (A 47). It is this focus on
science, including the skeptical methods of science, that Nietzsche promotes in
Dawn. In The Anti-Christ, the ire of Nietzsche’s intellectual conscience is focused
on Paul:
Paul understood that lying — that “belief” was necessary; later, the church
understood Paul. — The “God” Paul invented for himself, a God who “confounds all worldly wisdom” (to be exact, the two great rivals of all superstition, philology and medicine) is in truth just Paul’s firm decision to do it
himself: to call his own will “God”, Torah, that is Jewish to the core. Paul
Nietzsche on Religion and Christianity
wants to confound all “wisdom of the world”; his enemies are the good
philologists and doctors from the Alexandrian schools —, he wages war on
them. In fact, you cannot be a philologist or doctor without being antiChristian at the same time. This is because philologists look behind the
“holy books”, and doctors see behind the physiological depravity of the
typical Christian. The doctor says “incurable”, the philologist says “fraud”
(A 47; see also A 49)
As we have already discussed, Nietzsche suggests that experimentation as a means
to knowing is possible both through the sciences and through our ways of living.
Obedience, which Nietzsche challenges as a virtue in, for example, D 207 and
which he contrasts with experimentation, is identifiable as a characteristic of
Paul’s approach in this remark from The Anti-Christ 47. The “obedience toward a
person” that Nietzsche takes to characterize contemporary German virtue in
Dawn 207, and about which he raises concerns, is here identifiable as Paul’s obedience to Paul’s own will. Hence, in his search for liberation from the law, one
reason why Paul fails to be a Nietzschean free spirit becomes clearer: Paul fails to
express what Nietzsche calls “freedom of feeling,” and which he aligns with
Mediterranean skepticism (D 207).
The real difference between Nietzsche and Paul concerns the nature of the
event. Although in his late writings Nietzsche constructs himself on the model of
a Pauline figure — as the event of the conjuring of a decision, as a decision that
will split humanity into two (those who come before and those who come after),
as the founder of true “great politics” (the mastery of the earth) — in his middle
writings, Nietzsche entertains no such grandiose ambitions or fantasies of inauguration. The “event” depicted in Dawn — the event of a new plow, cleaving the
ground and “rendering it fruitful for all” — is one of a long durée involving a slow
therapy and carefully administered small doses. In Dawn, Nietzsche does not
develop as a rival to Christianity his own “thought of thoughts,” or an exemplar of
a life to rival the story of Christ. Neither does he rule out universal interests
emerging or growing out of the new, free-spirited, ways of living with which he
encourages experimentation. His idea of a new plowshare turning over the earth
with a promise of flourishing explicitly allows for the possibility of “universal
interests” emerging through the difficult and slow, painful labor that plowing
entails (D 146). As Nietzsche discusses toward the end of this aphorism, a key part
of this slow labor involves our examining whether or not we can “get beyond our
compassion,” and whether, through sacrifice, we could “strengthen and elevate
the general feeling of human power” (D 146). Compassion, one of the chief legacies of the history of Christianity with which the history of the pursuit of knowledge is entwined in European thought, emerges as one of Nietzsche’s chief targets
in his critical engagement with the presumptions of morality in Dawn, alongside
the question of whether treating compassion skeptically is even possible for us.
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Notes
1 On garden metaphors in Dawn, see Rebecca Bamford, “Health and Self-cultivation
in Dawn,” in Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Philosophy, ed. Rebecca Bamford (London:
Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015), 85–109.
2 Nietzsche mentions eight figures in all, divided into four pairs: Epicurus and
Montaigne, Goethe and Spinoza, Plato and Rousseau, Pascal and Schopenhauer.
3 Without the Christian faith, Pascal thought, we would become, no less than nature
and history, “a monster and chaos,” and this requires our negation of nature,
history, and man (WP 83). Pascal employs moral skepticism as a means of exciting
the need for faith and for it to be justified. In short, Christianity breaks the
strongest and noblest souls and Nietzsche says in a note of 1887–88 that he cannot
forgive Christianity for having destroyed a man like Pascal (WP 252; see also WP
276 on the gloominess of the strong, such as Pascal and Schopenhauer).
4 On two senses of innocence in Nietzsche, one of which is critically interpreted as we
see in Dawn 321, and the other of which — the innocence of b
ecoming —
Nietzsche affirms, see Joanne Faulkner. 2008. “The Innocence of Victimhood Versus
the ‘Innocence of Becoming’: Nietzsche, 9/11, and the ‘Falling Man’.” Journal of
Nietzsche Studies 35(1): 67–85.
5 On contest in Nietzsche, see e.g. Christa Davis Acampora, Contesting Nietzsche
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
6 For broader discussions of Eros in Nietzsche, see Babette E. Babich. 2000.
“Nietzsche and Eros Between the Devil and God’s Deep Blue Sea: The Problem of
the Artist as Actor–Jew–Woman.” Continental Philosophy Review 33: 159–88; and
Laurence D. Cooper, Eros in Plato, Rousseau, and Nietzsche: The Politics of Infinity
(University Park: The Pennsylvania University Press, 2010).
7 In Chapter 2, we differentiate between Nietzsche as engaged in a critique of
morality in its entirety in Dawn, and as engaged in a critique of morality as we
currently understand it, based on social customs. On this issue, see Simon
Robertson, “The Scope Problem — Nietzsche, The Moral, Ethical, and QuasiAesthetic,” in Nietzsche, Naturalism, and Normativity, ed. Christopher Janaway
and Simon Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 81–110.
8 See 2 Corinthians 12: 7 and Paul’s famous “thorn of the flesh.”
9 At this time, Nietzsche had been studying Hermann Lüdermann’s, The Apostle
Paul’s Anthropology and its Position within his Doctrine of Salvation of 1872. More
recent studies bear out his interpretation of Paul. Sandmel writes of Paul, for
example: “It is not his Christian convictions which raise the Law as a problem for
him, but rather it is his problem with the Law that brings him ultimately to his
Christian convictions,” quoted in Michael Grant, Saint Paul (London: Orion,
2000), 76.
Nietzsche on Religion and Christianity
10 See Romans 6: 14: “For sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not
under the law, but under grace.”
11 See Romans 3:31: “Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid: yea,
we establish the law.”
12 Nietzsche uses the word Herrschsucht for domination and the root “herrsch” is
the same word as for control. See Brittain Smith, note to Dawn (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2011).
13 The full title of Badiou’s book is, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism,
trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).
14 Christa Davis Acampora. 2002. “Nietzsche Contra Homer, Socrates, and Paul.”
Journal of Nietzsche Studies 24: 25–53. See also Acampora, Contesting Nietzsche
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), especially chapter 4.
15 Acampora “Nietzsche Contra Homer, Socrates, and Paul,” 37.
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