When I wrote a book about God and love, I chose for an epigraph a line from Friedrich Nietzsche’s polemic The Anti-Christ: “God on the Cross—is the fearful hidden meaning behind this symbol still understood?” (51). To my knowledge, this choice has not garnered much attention, perhaps because epigraphs are tucked away in the pages at the outset of a book, pages that we hurry past in our haste to get to things that matter. But for me that epigraph was meant to signal that this book was part of a many-decades-long conversation that I have been having with Nietzsche. I bring lots of other people into the conversation at various points—Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, Julian of Norwich and Catherine of Siena, Thomas Hobbes and John Henry Newman—but the main argument is between me and Nietzsche. And that is because reading Nietzsche as an undergraduate was an experience that shook me to my core, and I have ever since heard his voice, whispering in the back of my head, saying “maybe Christianity isn’t what it says it is . . . Maybe we have forgotten the fearful meaning of God on a Cross.”
To encounter Nietzsche is to encounter a critic who hates Christianity not because it is filled with hypocrites who do not practice what they preach, or because it is contrary to modern science, or because its morality is old fashioned and unenlightened, but because in Christians practicing what they preached they had given birth to modern science and morality, and so had undermined all that was good and noble about human beings, turning them into mealy-mouthed little moralists who sought to exact vengeance on the strong by exalting weakness, indeed by deifying death itself. Thus Nietzsche’s remark about the fearful, hidden meaning of God on the Cross.
In what follows I want to spell out, at some length, what I take Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity to be, then say what I think is true about it and what is worth learning from, and finally to suggest as an alternative to what he calls the “will to power” there might be a kind of “will to weakness.”
The Will to Power and the Morality of Lambs
Nietzsche holds that all of life is a manifestation of the will to power, by which he means not simply that we human beings have desires that we will to fulfill, but rather that we are constituted by our willing, and the human will desires nothing other than its own exercise; we do not, as Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas would tell us, will whatever is good, but rather the good is whatever we will; it is our willing that creates values like “good” and “evil.” Will is not so much our ability to make choices as it is a force that courses through us, that creates us, that ceaselessly asserts itself.
In his late work The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche sums up the heart of his philosophy:
What is good?—All that increases the feeling of power, will to power, power itself, in man.
What is bad?—All that proceeds from weakness.
What is happiness?—The feeling that power increases—that a resistance is overcome (§2).
For Nietzsche, the will to power is the universal force behind all human activity. It is not something that subjects exercise but is what makes us subjects; it has no goal or purpose apart from its activity. In those who are strong it manifests itself in the sort of deeds of power that forged the great civilizations and cultures of the past, that creates great art or enduring works of genius. In those who are weak, those whom Nietzsche calls “the herd,” it manifests itself in ressentiment against the strong. The strong, rejecting the morality of the herd, are those who have “seized the right to create values” (On the Genealogy of Morals, Essay I §2). But everyone—weak or strong—is driven by the will to power.
The weak, however, have learned that in order to exercise their will to power they must mask it, because in open contest they will inevitably be bested by the strong. They are the lambs and the strong are the predatory raptors, and it seems to be in the nature of things that raptors eat lambs. So the lambs supply in cunning what they lack in strength, saying, “These birds of prey are evil; and whoever is least like a bird of prey, but rather its opposite, a lamb—would he not be good?” (Genealogy of Morals, Essay I §13). This too is a matter of creating values. Indeed, it is what Nietzsche calls a transvaluation of values: what was merely bad—the suffering of the weak at the hands of the strong (which is undeniably bad for the weak, though not for the strong)—now becomes what is evil, what is morally prohibited, and in so doing transforms the value of “good.” What if the raptors suffer moral harm in hunting lambs? Would it not be an act of love to point this to them? To get them to repent of their deeds? To make them feel guilt? Would this guilt not be good?
So the mask that the weak put on their will to power is morality—at least initially religious morality, reinforced by religious metaphysics. This involves the invention of the fiction of another life beyond this life, a life that we cannot now see except through faith but which is promised to those who eschew the evil wrought by raptors, a life promised to the meek for which a blessedness is claimed that makes this life seem like a realm of shadows.
When the center of gravity of life is placed, not in life, but in the “other world”—in nothingness—life has in reality been deprived of its center of gravity. The great lie of personal immortality destroys all reason, all naturalness in instinct;—all that is beneficent, that is life-furthering, that pledges for the future in instincts, henceforth excites mistrust (Anti-Christ n. 43).
Heaven for Nietzsche is nothing but a slander against this life, but the weak herd defeats the strong individual by convincing him that heavenly life is the true life, and it is one that we gain not through strength but through meekness. So the will to power manifests itself in the creation of forms of religion intended to defeat the strong by infecting them with guilt and commending values of pity and mercy, a morality of and for slaves: “The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values” (Genealogy of Morals, Essay I §10). This slave morality defeats the master, tames the beast, by convincing him of the holiness of slavery and submission.
Nietzsche sees the origins of this slave morality in Judaism, which glories in the slavery from which it was saved by a power not its own, and which, in seeing itself as God’s chosen people, creates a system of value that is the antithesis of all that is good and natural:
It was the Jews who, with awe inspiring consistency, dared to invert the aristocratic value-equation (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = beloved of God) and to hang onto this inversion with their teeth, the teeth of the most abysmal hatred (the hatred of impotence), saying, “the wretched alone are the good; the suffering, deprived, sick, ugly alone are pious, alone are blessed by God . . . and you, the powerful and noble, are on the contrary the evil, the cruel, the lustful, the insatiable, the godless to all eternity, and you shall be in all eternity the unblessed, the accursed, and damned!” (Genealogy of Morals, Essay I §7).
All of this is, of course, a fiction in Nietzsche’s eyes. But the problem with the Jewish God is not his unreality—even an unreal god can serve the cause of life, as the gods of antiquity. The problem is this God’s preference for the weak, his choosing of slaves to be his people, his love of the “ill-constituted”: “Jacob I loved but Esau I hated” (Mal 1:2-3). Moreover, the Jews make being God’s slave the height of human goodness.
Unlike the typical anti-Semite of his day, who sought to distance Christianity from its Jewish roots, seeing it as a more enlightened morality freed from Jewish legalism, Nietzsche saw in Christianity the culmination of the religious impulse of Judaism:
Christianity can only be understood if one understands the soil out of which it has grown—it is not a counter-movement to Jewish instinct, it is rather the logical consequence of it, a further inference in its awe inspiring logic (Anti-Christ §24).
The Jewish priest shades imperceptibly into the Christian priest as the shrewd deployer of morality and metaphysics. The Jewish God who loves the weak is surpassed by the God who takes weakness upon himself on the cross, the God whom the church proclaims as savior of the weak, the God-become-Lamb whose death the priest blames on those strong raptors.
But, Nietzsche says, the crucified one himself saw things differently: “The church is precisely that against which Jesus preached—and against which he taught his disciples to fight” (The Will to Power §168). For Nietzsche, Jesus was a distinct psychological type: the neurasthenic who is weary of life but free from ressentiment, not because of his nobility, but because of his decadence, the depletion of his will to power. He is a figure, Nietzsche says, most often found in Russian novels or in Buddhist tales. His teaching had nothing to do with life in some other world, but about how to live in this world; it was not about redemption into another life, but about reconciliation with this life through acceptance. What Jesus practiced, and encouraged his followers to practice, was “a kind of inner detachment that outwardly leaves everything as it was” (Will to Power §210). The “Christianity” of Jesus, “is a way of life, not a system of beliefs. It tells us how to act, not what we ought to believe” (Will to Power §212). And what is that way of life?
Whoever says today: “I will not be a soldier,” “I care nothing for the courts,” “I shall not claim the services of the police,” “I will do nothing that may disturb the peace within me: and if I must suffer on that account, nothing will serve better to maintain my peace than suffering”—he would be a Christian (Will to Power §212).
But, of course, none who claim the name Christian actually do any of this. The way of Jesus is not Christian practice as we understand it, for Jesus was free of the ressentiment that is at the heart of Judeo-Christian morality. This is why Nietzsche wrote, “In reality there has been only one Christian, and he died on the cross” (Anti-Christ §39). Jesus was the Lamb of God who said to the raptors, without resentment, “have at it.”
It is not Jesus, Nietzsche says, but Paul who can properly be called the founder of Christianity as we know it. In Paul, unlike Jesus, the ressentiment that generates slave-morality lives on. All that would follow as the Christian Church develops—notions of a future life with a transcendent God, which could be obtained by grace coming through faith in Jesus, mediated by a priestly hierarchy—is an invention of Paul, an invention, moreover, utterly contrary to the intentions of Jesus. In the hands of Paul, the unique individual that is the figure of Jesus is transformed into the shepherd of the flock, the loving guardian of the herd, the creator of a new civilization. The very notion of a Christian civilization, for which Paul lays the foundation, would have been anathema to Jesus.
But what allows such a civilization to persist? Slave morality is so profoundly counter to all natural healthy instincts in the human animal that it requires a remedy that will allow the herd to function as a culture. The injunction to love of neighbor is seen by Nietzsche as a kind of safety valve invented by the priestly caste to allow for a limited release of the pent-up will to power, allowing some within the herd to lift themselves up above those whom they serve in the name of Christian love. “The happiness of ‘slight superiority,’ involved in all doing good, being useful, helping, and rewarding, is the most effective means of consolation for the psychologically inhibited. . . . Otherwise they hurt one another, obedient, of course, to the same basic instinct” (Genealogy of Morals, Essay III §18). This is why early Christianity is characterized by things like charity to the poor and injunctions to mutual aid; it too is simply the will to power at work, allowing the weak to feel power in ministering to the “poor unfortunates.” And as Christianity evolves it manages to re-occupy some of the civilizational achievements forged by higher types of human beings:
The type “Christian” resumes step by step everything that it originally negated. . . . The Christian becomes citizen, soldier, judge, worker, merchant, scholar, theologian, priest, philosopher, farmer, artist, patriot, politician, “prince.” . . . The whole life of the Christian is at last exactly the life from which Christ preached deliverance (Will to Power §213).
The lamb condemns the raptor, but on some level still wants to be one.
Ultimately, however, Nietzsche will not completely exonerate Jesus. It is his quasi-Buddhist decadence, fused with Paul’s Jewish ressentiment, that becomes a particularly toxic brew. Jesus and Paul become collaborators: “They have led astray, to the point of destruction, the brave, magnanimous, daring, excessive inclinations of the strong soul” (Will to Power §205). They have together promoted a “God” who is love and who asks of us nothing but love in return. But for Nietzsche love is a kind hallucinogen:
Love is the state in which man sees things most of all as they are not. The illusion-creating force is there at its height, likewise the sweetening for transforming force. One endures more when in love than one otherwise would; one tolerates everything (Anti-Christ §23).
Under the hallucinogenic power of love, the nature-defying nonsense that is Christianity almost makes sense. And the association of such weakness with God renders a symbol that is infinitely malleable in the hands of the priestly caste, a God who tolerates even crucifixion out of love, and whose very tolerance imperiously commands the strong to become weak through the mechanism of guilt, to become godlike where the most godlike thing has become the self-renunciation of the cross.
The Christian conception of God—God as God of the sick, God as spider, God as spirit—is one of the most corrupt conceptions of God arrived at on earth: perhaps it even represents the low-water mark in the descending development of the God type. God degenerated to the contradiction of life, instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yes! In God a declaration of hostility towards life, nature, the will to life! (Anti-Christ §18).
In a strange psychological twist, the suppression by Jewish-Christian morality of humanity’s animal nature results in a degradation of the mind to a sub-human level through guilt—an infinite debt to the infinite that no amount of human suffering can repay. “Oh this insane, pathetic beast—man! What ideas he has, what unnaturalness, what paroxysms of nonsense, what bestiality of thought erupts as soon as he is prevented just a little from being a beast in deed” (Genealogy of Morals, Essay II §22). And this notion of infinite, un-atonable guilt taints all Christian talk about love, because the paradigm of love becomes the infinite God’s self-torture on the cross. “The sacrifice for guilty and just in its most repugnant and barbarous form, the sacrifice of the innocent for the sins of the guilty! What a horrifying heathenism!” (Anti-Christ §41).
What Nietzsche Can Teach Ya
So here is the charge: Christianity originates in weakness—the weakness of its Messiah; in deifying its Messiah it deifies weakness, and in deifying weakness it unleashes the ressentiment of the herd by masking the will to power in a will to weakness. Christianity is like a disease that has afflicted Western culture, sapping its vitality, and constantly mutating in order to survive. It proposes to us a will to weakness instead of the will to power, and love is the drug that makes such self-refuting nonsense believable. And, for Nietzsche, even putatively secular morality, which thinks it has freed itself from the stricture of Christianity, is still beholden to Christian values of mercy and pity, values that deify weakness.
How compelling is this charge? How seriously should we take Nietzsche’s arguments?
Some of Nietzsche’s arguments seem pretty easy to dismiss. For example, the distance he wishes to create between Jesus and later Christianity, exemplified by Paul, seems rooted largely in fantasy. Nietzsche admits as much, noting that his account of Jesus is based more on a certain “psychological type” and not so much on documents. Indeed, it is only because he has decided ahead of time upon the type of figure that Jesus is that he can separate him from the theological overlay that one finds already in the Gospels. The only thing that separates Nietzsche from those, before and after him, who have sought the “true” Jesus of history hiding behind the documents of the New Testament is the honesty with which he admits that this is more a journey of invention than of discovery. He has decided before any sifting of the evidence that Jesus stands apart from both Judaism and later Christianity, and that therefore Christianity is at its root a matter of concealment and betrayal. Any suggestion that those who followed Jesus during his earthly ministry might not have completely misunderstood or misrepresented him, or that Paul was not entirely unconcerned with the human being named Jesus of Nazareth, never gets any sort of hearing.
But, as I have noted, Nietzsche is not really engaged in a historical inquiry into Christianity. He is often identified as the originator of a form of critique called “genealogy,” which seeks to explain some feature of the present by tracing it back to its point of genesis. In the case of Nietzsche, he seeks in the Genealogy of Morals to uncover the origins of modern morality in the ressentiment of the weak against the strong. This can on the surface appear to be a historical argument, but it is not really. It does not begin at some point in the past and then move forward, but it begins in the present, with the unsavory nature of a morality that exalts as virtues what are in fact weaknesses, and then moves back to the herd of lambs who must cower before the predatory birds, until, that is, they light upon the idea: what if this predation is not just bad (for us), but morally evil? These sorts of arguments have become ubiquitous in contemporary academic discourse, trading upon a suspicion that there has been a systematic obscuring of the true origin of our values. But, of course, once you start down the road of suspicion there is no stopping; any suspicious reframing of an issue can itself be reframed suspiciously. Why not do a genealogy of genealogy, an uncovering that finds the origins of this form of critique in those who cannot produce strong arguments as to why one thing might be preferred over another, a weakness that must resort to the academic equivalent of Rudyard Kipling’s Just-So Stories, like “How the Elephant Got His Trunk” or “The Beginning of the Armadillos”? Genealogical arguments can be self-consuming.
Still, though we might find Nietzsche’s depiction of Jesus-as-Buddha or his genealogical method questionable, I am not sure this entirely draws the sting of his critique. Without having to accept dubious claims about the origins of Christianity and Christian morality, do we all at times not wonder whether Christians have not failed to understand—and even betrayed—what Jesus was about? And can we really say that Christians do not often respond to those who differ from us in ways that seem motivated more by resentment than by love? And can we not all think of ways in which putatively Christian morality has been used to engender debilitating guilt in people, to trap them in life-denying cycles in the name of being a good Christian? If we feel any sting as we ponder these questions, then perhaps we have something to learn from Nietzsche.
First, we can learn that Jesus was far stranger than we are usually comfortable with. There is a certain tendency in some corners these days to present Christianity, apart from any question of its truth, as a positive cultural force, as valuable on account of its place in the formation of Western Culture or the American Projects or a just society. But, Nietzsche asks us, was Jesus not just a bit anti-social? The writer Paul Kingsnorth, who is hardly a Nietzschean, recently said:
When we read the life of Jesus of Nazareth, in fact, it is impossible not to see a man who was, in some fundamental sense, uncivilized. He did not tell us to get good jobs and save prudently. He told us to have no thought for the morrow. He did not tell us to generate wealth, so that economic growth could bring about global development. He told us to give everything away. The rich, he said repeatedly, could never attain the Kingdom of Heaven. He did not tell us to defend our frontiers, or to expand them. He told us never to resist evil. He did not tell us to be responsible citizens. He told us to leave our dead fathers unburied and follow him instead. He told us to hate our own parents and to love those who hated us. Every single one of these teachings, were we to follow them, would make the building of a civilization impossible.
These words are no less bracing than Nietzsche’s in their critique of Christianity. But they are spoken by a Christian, who feels that he cannot, as Nietzsche does, simply dismiss Jesus as an example of decadent dissipation. In John’s Gospel Jesus’s listeners are shocked by his rather repulsive words about eating his flesh and drinking his blood, and some walk away, but others do not: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words or everlasting life.” If it as if the very shock of his words woke them from a kind of slumber. We must let Nietzsche show us the strangeness of Jesus, not in order to walk away from him, but to reveal to us a fascination that is something more than having our fancies tickled by business as usual. To be a Christian is to let this strange, wild, uncivilized figure haunt our lives, constantly overturning the tables at which we try to exchange the gold of the Gospel for some more readily accepted currency.
Second, we can recognize how talk about love can be weaponized in the service of resentment. Nietzsche took a certain glee in quoting Church Fathers like Tertullian who spoke of the spectacle of Hell’s eternal torment as one of the entertainments that the blessed in heaven will enjoy, because he saw this as revealing the true spirit that lurked within so-called “Christian love.” While we might be able to give some sort of acceptable spin to remarks like those of Tertullian (human ingenuity knows no bounds), we should probably admit that we do know people who think this way, who let love of enemies be a way to establish their own moral superiority, who treat love as the shovel with which they heap coals of condemnation upon the heads of their enemies. We should probably admit that we sometimes think this way ourselves, seeing the cosmos as a giant system of vengeance in which our enemies lack of appropriate response to our proffered love is just enough rope for them to hang themselves with. Love may be, as Dostoevsky said, a harsh and dreadful thing, but we should see it as harsh and dreadful for ourselves, not for others.
Third, we ought seriously to consider Nietzsche’s point about how hope for the next life might drain this life of all significance. Nietzsche puts his finger on a certain sort of dour Christianity that seems suspicious of joy, that demands that this world be a wasteland in order that the world to come might shine more brightly. Without in any way denying the sadness and horror of this world, or naturalizing it in the way that Nietzsche did, and without denying that we need a savior, we might still consider whether we have too readily identified virtue with a prim denial of life rather than its joyous affirmation. Nietzsche wrote, “They would have to sing better songs for me to learn to have faith in their Redeemer; and his disciples would have to look more redeemed!” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pt. II, “On priests”). We should feel the sting of this; all too often Christians seem more fearful of sin than grateful for salvation. Perhaps the least effective case for Christianity is made by those who forget that Christ came not to bring guilt and death but to bring joy and life.
The Will to Weakness
Still, there remains something missing from Nietzsche. As much as we might learn from him about Christianity, these is a certain blindness to his vision. This blindness, I would argue, is that he cannot accommodate weakness. Recall his words from The Anti-Christ:
What is good?—All that increases the feeling of power, will to power, power itself, in man.
What is bad?—All that proceeds from weakness.
What is happiness?—The feeling that power increases—that a resistance is overcome (§2).
In this view of things, one would never—could never—willingly take on weakness. To be weak is not to overcome but to be overcome, not to will but to be subjected to another’s will. Indeed, it makes no sense to speak of willing weakness, since willing is itself a manifestation of power. To will to be weak can, by Nietzsche’s lights, only be a diversion for what is really an exercise of the will to power.
And yet the willing assumption of weakness is at the heart of the Christian story because it is the very meaning of mercy. In Christ God willingly accepts weakness out of mercy for humanity, and bids the followers of Christ to do the same out of mercy for others. To have mercy is to allow another’s misery to wound you. Thomas Aquinas wrote, “It is a quality of mercy to regard another’s distress as one’s own, because to be merciful is to have a heart distressed at the distress of another” (Super Io. §345). In concluding, I would like to draw on Thomas to make an argument for a will to weakness.
In his Summa theologiae (2-2.30.2), Thomas asked whether the act of having mercy implies a weakness [defectus] in the person who has mercy. It is almost as if he anticipated Nietzsche’s critique of Christian love as the revenge of the weak against the strong: we commend mercy because of a defect in ourselves that we desire to spread to others. The first objection that he considers to this notion that mercy implies weakness is that since Christians claim that God is supremely merciful, the idea that mercy implies defect would commit one to a defective God. Again, it seems that Nietzsche would concur. The second objection notes that, as Aristotle pointed out, those who are weak are often the least merciful, which again seems to echo Nietzsche’s point that the weak are actually driven by ressentiment, which they simply mask as mercy. So despite Nietzsche’s frequent claims about the novelty of his critique, Thomas seems to have somewhat anticipated it.
As Thomas goes on to explain his own view, he restates a point he had made earlier: that “mercy is suffering on account of another person’s misery.” But Thomas is pretty realistic about human beings, so he notes that we never suffer from the misery of another purely as other, but only insofar as their misery becomes our own. And he thinks this can happen in two ways. It can happen through our union with that person through love, the love of friendship that makes of the beloved another self, “so that we grieve for our friend’s hurt as though we were hurt ourselves.” But it can also happen through what Thomas calls a “real union,” in which we see the pain of the other as a kind of harbinger of our own potential pain: “People feel pity for others who are like them because it makes them realize that the same thing might happen to them.” And in this second way we find that the old and the wise are more inclined to pity than the young and the foolish, because the old and the wise are aware that they are not immune from misfortune and so are more readily pained by the pain of others.
Now this is an interesting distinction, because it seems to say that there are two different ways in which mercy can be rooted in weakness. In the second sense Thomas describes, it can be rooted in a weakness that we already possess, the awareness of which makes us have a kind of sympathy with those who suffer. Thomas does not say that there is anything wrong with this kind of pity; it can even be a sign of maturity and wisdom inasmuch as it shows our realistic evaluation of our own strengths and weaknesses. But might it not also be a sign of the sort of pusillanimity that Nietzsche condemns in Christianity: my mercy upon a sufferer is really a plea for mercy for myself? Thomas’s reply to the second objection, about the weak being the least merciful, is couched in terms of this sort of pity: those who suffer so much that they could not suffer more will tend to be merciless because there is no additional suffering that they fear.
Furthermore, in his reply to the first objection—about God being merciful but not being weak—Thomas makes clear that it is only the first sort of weakness, the sort that is rooted in the bond of love that is friendship, that can be said to characterize God. God has no weakness except the weakness that he willingly takes on out of love for us, for (as Aristotle says) it is characteristic of friends to want to share a life, and to share one’s life is to accept a certain kind of weakness, a certain kind of risk. This is the mercy shown on the cross. To be sure, there is no “divine weakness” or “divine risk.” God suffers no weakness but our weakness; our weakness becomes his weakness. We might even say that the cross reveals not a covert will to power but a merciful will to weakness, a weakness willed so that we might become God’s friends. This further suggests that we too are called to a kind of mercy that is not rooted in our pre-existing weakness, but which wills weakness as a correlate of love, and so shares in Christ’s redemptive mission. As Paul says, “To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some” (1 Cor 9:22). Salvation somehow involves our friendship with Christ and with each other in Christ, none of which is possible without weakness. Here we see that a mercy that makes us weak is the cost of friendship, but it is a cost that we pay with joy out of love.
Would any of this satisfy Nietzsche? Probably not; his hatred of Christianity ran deep enough that he would no doubt see this as some sort of theological subterfuge of the priestly caste. After all, Nietzsche wrote, “Whatever a theologian regards as true must be false: there you have almost a criterion of truth” (Anti-Christ §9). But I hope I have at least sketched clearly the alternative: on the one hand a will to power that cannot will weakness and on the other hand a will to weakness as the path to joyous friendship with God and each other. And so we are left with Nietzsche’s question: “God on the Cross—is the fearful hidden meaning behind this symbol still understood?”
Seeking the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary through prayer