In Praise of the Anti-Christ
F.N. History's only true atheist
Nietzsche is, to my mind, the greatest philosopher ever. Most great figures must kill their symbolic father; Nietzsche was prepared to kill God. And we passionately agree, he and I, that “if you give up the Christian faith, you pull the right to Christian morality from under your feet”. Woe to those who declare thank you for the ethics but we want nothing to do with this Jesus Christ fellow! We must not slavishly follow the unthinking mass, the crowd, “the herd”. On this we agree, too. Think for yourself, he said. Good and evil, he argued, are only relative terms. Never allow anyone else to be their arbiters, especially not priests! He believed in the individual. And he rescued philosophy from those systemising creeds in which you and I, as Hegel believed must be “sacrificed and surrendered”. Rather, he declared, we must create our own values in their joyous pursuit and “say yes to life”! He was philosophy’s answer to a forest fire. All that is worn-out, banal is consumed as deadwood. Become, instead, oneself, new green shoots bursting through the earth, “a night of dark trees”!
And it was ripe for the flames, the Christianity of his day. The blind faith in progress, the official morality, the utilitarian “religion of comfortableness”, the “last men” who believe they have “invented happiness”, who declare “all the world was formerly mad”. No to this. No to the safe, liberal, humanistic mush! But that was not enough for him, the fire. For something new to emerge he believed Christianity had to be poisoned at its root. So he attacked the Judaic root, the religion of “that priestly people, who in opposing their enemies and conquerors were ultimately satisfied with nothing less than a radical re-evaluation of their enemies’ values, that is to say, an act of the most spiritual revenge”. But the Christian, he said, was “threefold the Jew” in the continuation of the “war to the death against the higher type of man”. The values of what he called the masters – noble, powerful, cruel – were usurped by this “slave morality” of Christianity, which declared, according to him, that “the wretched, the poor, the weak, the lowly, are alone the good”. Two millennia later and the slave rebellion is so complete we no longer smell the lingering whiff of cordite!
He was prepared to attack this morality of the “common vulgar man and low people” because he, like no other, was prepared to deal with the consequences of its annihilation. He longed for the return of the “mythic home, the mythic womb”; for the return of the age of heroes; for the resurrection of the Dionysian spirit of the pre-Socratic Greeks that “wants to convince us of the eternal delight of existence”. And if that required the crushing of the weak by the strong, then so be it. The “magnificent blond beast avidly prowling round for spoil and victory” would be let loose and humanity would once again declare that “whatever is bad is weakness…that whatever is good heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself”. He alone was ready – like the madman in his parable – to reckon with the “death of God”. The bloody deed was done, but had “not yet reached the ears of men”, except for his ears alone. And how right he was when he said that rather than come to terms with his “tremendous event” men would “continue to seek their shattered God, and for His sake love the very serpents that dwell among His ruins”. How true that remains!
He was a prophet of his own religion, Nietzsche. Think of all the artists and philosophers who bathed in the light of this “dancing star”. Innumerable souls he awakened from their slumber! And what did this prophet declare? The coming of the ubermensch, the “superman”, for whom the “last man” would be but a “rope stretched between the animal and him – a rope over the abyss”. And who was the superman? Nothing less than the very “meaning of the earth”. He would speak not of the heavenly world-to-come – this superman – but love this life only; he would create his own values and abandon them the second they no longer suited the passions of his soul; he would find earthly meaning in suffering. The humility of Nietzsche! He was not the superman, he said, only the “untimely” one who, like John the Baptist, announced his coming. But how he longed to be the superman, this most brilliant of men! Nietzsche who said of himself, “I am no man, I am dynamite”! The man who declared his Thus Spoke Zarathustra, with no hint of irony, “the fifth gospel”! The man who christened himself the Antichrist!
But, then, what of Christ? Nietzsche, the son of a Lutheran pastor, knew him well. Christ’s kingdom, he believed, was not to come “beyond the world”, but is rather to be found “within you”; it is a creed to be lived, in other words, in the here and now. It was Saint Paul who, with his priestly “genius for hatred”, converted this “bearer of glad tidings” into the bringer of universal salvation. Nietzsche’s Christ, by contrast, “died as he lived, as he taught – not to “redeem mankind” but to demonstrate how one ought to live”. Christ, according to Nietzsche, lived his soul; Christ suffered and died for his “glad tidings”. And how Christ-like Nietzsche can be! When he condemns the smug, puritanical morality of his day he sounds like another Christ who himself declared: “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones”! And how Christ-like he is when he smashes apart the decadent German culture of his hour, like him who chased the money-changers out of the temple with a whip and declared they had turned his Father’s house into a “den of thieves”!
Christ, after all, is the Nietzschean superman. Yet where the ubermensch revels in the fulfilment of his earthly power, Christ surrendered his completely. “No man has greater love than this”, he said, “than to lay down his life for his friends”. So Christ was nailed upon the cross. And where we might have had the ubermensch, we have a dead body. Like the superman, in the figure of the dead Christ, humanity became god-like, just as Nietzsche longed for. Except in this case God lowered himself, humbled himself, incarnated himself, in human frailty, human suffering, human weakness; he manifested himself not as the superman who would crush the weak beneath his foot, but as friend and lover to a humanity redeemed through his sacrifice. And the profundity of this sacrifice, it drove Nietzsche mad! What superman, after all, could be equal to this? What human being, before or since, has even come close? Nietzsche, I think, better than any other philosopher, knew this. Yet he refused it, and perhaps we should praise him – for this reason – as the world’s first and only true atheist. “Blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended in Me”, said Christ. This most brilliant of philosophers was, indeed, offended, and thus proved himself to be human, all-too-human.
Ezekiel David is a writer who lives in Athens. The essay above is an excerpt from his collection “Speak I To Them”, published in 2022 by Demeter Books.