Nietzsche and Christianity

We’ve all met her – the nurse in her late middle age dispensing not only pills, linctuses and internet physio advice but also an unctuous syrup of her own glistening goodness on which she is drunk and of which she is utterly convinced. She is painfully aware of the ‘authority’ conferred on her by her modicum of professional knowledge which makes her bustlingly officious and knows exactly how selfless she is. In spite of this she is brimful of herself. At the weekend she is a much-loved deacon in the local Church of England who reads and occasionally preaches from the pulpit as women are encouraged to do that now. She may be a smouldering hypocrite.

Nietzsche hated Christianity. He hated its endorsement of its ‘Pale Galilean’ bloodlessness and its turning of the other cheek. He hated its competitive and ostentatious selflessness preferring instead his virtue of ‘selfishness’ by which he meant self-possession and the proper distance between people that permits integrity. He hated its ‘idealism’ which postponed this life for another one in another world which let one off full-blooded engagement in this one and gave one a free pass for not actually living. And who wouldn’t applaud Nietzsche in all of this for his vigour, his love of life and his honesty? Nobody likes an obsequious weakling or, still less, a Pharisee.

To utter that last sentence, though, is to evoke a New Testament frame of reference which places all of the ‘Christianity’ described above in a context. The ‘whited sepulchres’ rightly reviled by Nietzsche were characters in the story but they weren’t the only ones and they certainly weren’t the good characters. They were framed within a wider moral context.

William Blake had beaten Nietzsche to it by 60 years in addressing many of the things that the German addressed by writing:

'The modest rose puts forth a thorn,
The humble sheep a threat'ning horn.'
(The Lily)

Blake knew well the dangerous 'ressentiment' of conspicuously and snivellingly humble people.

'I was angry with my friend;
I told my friend, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe;
I told it not my wrath did grow.'
(A Poison Tree)

If Christianity was all of the things that Nietzsche thought it was there are few, including myself and especially in modern times, who would not join him in revulsion for it. But what if it isn’t? In that case Nietzsche would merely have created a massive straw man. We would be hating it for what it is not rather than what it is. There is no explicit enjoinder towards grovelling, slave-mentality hypocrisy in the New Testament. In fact hypocrites, Pharisees, Sadducees and those who burden ordinary people with laws and guilt while rejoicing in their own goodness are the nastiest characters in the story. It is they who are responsible for the judicial murder of the main character who stands over and against them.

Nietzsche thought, perhaps that the New Testament was a prescription for idealism and ressentiment, an ideology or a creed that enjoined it. In fact, although churches have creeds, it was nothing of the sort. It was not a philosophical direction for ethical behaviour. It was simply a record of an event – an event that either did or did not happen and which either had or did not have the significance accorded to it.