Program / Course 19: Modern Challenges / Lesson 5.2
What you will learn
- State Nietzsche’s critique of Christian morality as he intended it, including the idea of slave morality and ressentiment.
- Explain what he meant by the death of God, and why he saw it as a danger.
- Identify the points in his critique that Christians have taken seriously.
- Describe the main Christian replies and the difficulties each faces.
The big idea
Friedrich Nietzsche did not mainly argue that God does not exist. He assumed that belief in God was fading, and asked what would follow. His critique had two parts. First, he claimed that Christian morality, with its praise of humility, pity and meekness, grew from the resentment of the weak against the strong. Second, he warned that when belief in God died, the morality built on it would lose its ground, and Europe would face nihilism. Christians who read him honestly find a hostile critic who saw some things clearly.
Key terms
- Death of God
- Nietzsche’s phrase for the cultural fact that belief in the Christian God had lost its power over European life. It is not a claim that a God once lived.
- Genealogy of morals
- Nietzsche’s method of asking where moral values came from historically and psychologically, and whose interests they served.
- Ressentiment
- A French word Nietzsche used for a festering resentment of the weak against the strong that turns into a moral judgment.
- Master and slave morality
- Nietzsche’s contrast between a morality of noble self-affirmation (good and bad) and a morality born of the weak’s resentment (good and evil).
- Nihilism
- In Nietzsche, the condition in which the highest values lose their worth and nothing seems to matter.
- Ubermensch
- Often translated overman or superman. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a figure who creates his own values. Its meaning is disputed.
- Will to power
- A term Nietzsche used for a basic drive to grow, overcome and express strength. How far it is a theory of reality is disputed among scholars.
Background
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 to 1900) was a German philologist, the son and grandson of Lutheran pastors, who left a professorship because of poor health and wrote his major works in his thirties and forties. He ended his life in mental collapse. His books, such as The Gay Science (1882), Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil (1886), On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) and The Antichrist, are written in aphorisms and essays. Readers disagree about what he meant, and his sister’s later editing of his notes tied his name to ideas he disliked, including anti-Semitism, which he explicitly rejected.
The famous phrase appears in The Gay Science. A madman runs into a market and cries that God is dead and that people have killed him. The people laugh. He says that he has come too early, and that the deed has not yet reached their ears. The point is not a boast. The madman asks how the killers of God will comfort themselves and whether they must become gods to be worthy of the deed.
Step-by-step explanation
Step 1: The critique of Christian morality
In the first essay of On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche argues that the Jewish and Christian valuation of the poor, meek and suffering reversed an older aristocratic standard in which strength and nobility were good. The weak, he said, could not take revenge by force, so they took it by redefining their weakness as virtue and their oppressors as evil. He called this a slave revolt in morality, and said that Christianity carried it through.
He also objected that Christianity taught guilt and self-denial, turning human drives against themselves, and that it despised this world for the sake of another. He said that it was a religion against life. This is a charge about the effects of belief, and in his view it was not refuted by argument but by looking at what the belief does.
Step 2: The death of God
Nietzsche observed that the educated classes of Europe no longer believed in God in the old way. He said that this event would have enormous consequences. The values of Europe, such as equality, compassion and the dignity of every person, had rested on Christian faith. If the faith were gone, the values would soon be questioned.
He was scornful of those who wanted to keep the morality and drop the God, such as the English novelist George Eliot. He saw this as a failure of nerve. He thought that a person must either find a new basis for values or fall into nihilism.
Step 3: What Christians take seriously in Nietzsche
Many Christian thinkers think that Nietzsche saw something real. He saw that morality and belief are connected, and that a culture may live on borrowed capital. He saw that some religiosity is pretext for cowardice or hatred, and that pity can be condescending. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and others spoke of cheap grace, a faith that costs nothing, which has something in common with his complaint.
They also note that he wrote with brilliance about the nature of suffering and the need for meaning. He said that humans can bear almost any how if they have a why. Viktor Frankl, a survivor of the camps, quoted him. A Christian can honor the question while denying the answer.
Step 4: Christian replies
The first reply is that Nietzsche misdescribes Christian ethics. The Gospels do not praise weakness as such. Jesus rebukes the powerful, but he also tells the disciples to be wise as serpents and shows great strength under pressure. The Beatitudes honor those who are poor in spirit, and not weak for the sake of being weak. Christians have been great builders, scholars and martyrs, and humility in the Christian sense is truthfulness about one’s creaturely condition.
A second reply is that the genealogy, even if its history were right, would not show that the values are false. A third is that Nietzsche’s own replacement values are hard to defend. He rejected equality, yet most readers, including most of his admirers, would not accept his contempt for the weak. A fourth reply, which Nietzsche would resist, is that the Christian account of the human person explains why every person deserves care.
- Am I reading Nietzsche’s own words or a slogan about him?
- Is he describing a fact about culture, or arguing that God does not exist?
- Does his account of Christian morality fit the Gospels and the saints, or only some forms of religion?
- What values does he propose, and could anyone live by them?
- What in his critique applies to my own faith?
- What would be lost if the Christian roots of equality were removed?
Examples
A pious pretext
A man tells his workers to be humble and content. He is himself proud and well fed. Nietzsche would say that this is morality as a mask for interests. A Christian should agree that it is a distortion, and note that the Gospels condemn it. (A constructed example.)
Borrowed values
A university lecturer holds that all people have equal worth and that the weak must be protected. When asked why, she gives reasons from tolerance and from human experience. A Nietzschean friend asks whether these reasons would exist without a long Christian history. She says she believes they would. They disagree, and each has an argument. (A constructed example.)
Different perspectives
Nietzschean
Nietzsche’s admirers say that he understood that values must be justified, and that he refused easy comfort. They say that he did not despise compassion as such but a pity that enfeebles both giver and receiver. They read his call to create values as a demand for authenticity and creativity, and not for cruelty.
Catholic
Catholic thinkers such as Henri de Lubac, in The Drama of Atheist Humanism, and Pope Benedict XVI have taken Nietzsche seriously as a prophet of what happens when God is removed. They say that Nietzsche is right that human dignity depends on a religious ground, and wrong about Christianity. They add that Christian charity is a strength of the will, and not a weakness.
Orthodox
Russian Orthodox thinkers such as Dostoevsky, who wrote before Nietzsche’s most famous works, anticipated the problem expressed in the line that if there is no God, everything is permitted, and in The Brothers Karamazov and Demons painted its consequences. Berdyaev and Frank answered Nietzsche with a vision of the human person as made in the divine image and called to freedom in love, not in domination.
Protestant
Protestant theologians such as Karl Barth, and in a different way Bonhoeffer, treated Nietzsche’s critique as a challenge to a comfortable church, and spoke of God’s strength in apparent weakness (1 Corinthians 1:25). Others, such as the philosopher Merold Westphal, argue that Nietzsche is a useful master of suspicion for Christians because he teaches them to examine their own motives.
Why it matters
Nietzsche asks whether the moral convictions that most people in the West share can survive without the faith that gave them birth. Christians and non-Christians alike must face the question. A student who can state his argument fairly will be able to talk to anyone who has read him, and to find the truth in his charges against hypocritical religion.
Common misunderstandings
Misunderstanding: Nietzsche argued that God does not exist.
Correction: He mostly took unbelief for granted among educated people and asked about the consequences. His main arguments concern the origin and effects of Christian morality.
Misunderstanding: Nietzsche was a Nazi ideologue.
Correction: He died in 1900, and rejected anti-Semitism and German nationalism. His work was misused by later writers, helped by his sister’s editing, but its meaning is still contested.
Misunderstanding: He wanted people to be cruel.
Correction: Readers differ. He praised strength, creativity and self-overcoming and attacked pity of a certain kind. He did not simply call for cruelty, though some passages can be read harshly.
Misunderstanding: Christians should dismiss him as an atheist.
Correction: Many Christian thinkers have learned from him, and he foresaw cultural changes that others missed.
Knowledge check
What did Nietzsche mean by the death of God?
He meant that belief in the Christian God had lost its hold on educated European culture, not that a god had once lived and died. He thought this had enormous consequences, since European values had rested on that belief. He warned that without a new basis for values, nihilism would follow.
Summarize his genealogy of Christian morality.
In the first essay of On the Genealogy of Morals he claims that an older aristocratic morality of strength was overturned by the resentment of the weak, who redefined their weakness as virtue and their oppressors as evil. He said that Judaism and Christianity carried this revolt through. The account is a historical and psychological claim that scholars debate.
What do Christians find valuable in Nietzsche?
They note that he saw the link between morality and belief, that he exposed religion used as a mask for fear or hatred, and that he understood the human need for meaning. Bonhoeffer’s cheap grace has something in common with his complaint. Christians can accept these points while rejecting his account of the gospel.
Give two Christian replies to Nietzsche.
One is that he misdescribes Christian ethics. The Gospels do not praise weakness as such, and Christians have shown great courage and creativity. Another is that his proposed replacement, the creation of values by the strong, is hard to defend, and almost no one, including his admirers, accepts his contempt for the weak. He might reply that his critics lack nerve.
Think it through
- Which of his charges against Christian morality, if any, has some truth in your experience?
- Can values survive without the beliefs that first supported them?
- How does the Christian idea of humility differ from the weakness Nietzsche attacks?
- What would you say to a friend who quotes Nietzsche against the faith?
Independent assignment
Reading the madman
In your notebook, find the passage in The Gay Science about the madman and the death of God, and read it in its context. Write 400 to 600 words stating what the madman says and what Nietzsche wants his readers to feel. Then write 200 words on what a Christian should say in reply. Do not send it.
Further study
- Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals Read the first essay.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom (The Gay Science) Find the passage on the death of God and read it in context.
- Blaise Pascal, Pensées Read selectively for another account of human greatness and misery.
- Augustine of Hippo, The City of God Read selectively on pride and the will to dominate.
- 1 Corinthians 1:25 The weakness of God is stronger than men.
- Matthew 5:3 Blessed are the poor in spirit.
- Philippians 2:6 Christ took the form of a servant.