Nietzsche, Dissidence, and Christianity

The aim of this piece is to reconcile what current dissidents call ‘vitalism’ (of the Nietzschean type) with classical Christian faith (of an aristocratic bent), whilst acknowledging the current weakness found within the remnants of a shattered Christendom. 

To this end, I drew on the most important ideas of my doctoral thesis, ‘Nietzche’s Christian Philosophy.’ 

But before I turn to philosophy, some contemporary observations first... 

An acquaintance of mine is a teacher at an elite boys’ boarding school in South Africa, which is officially a church school. From time to time, he tells me about the diversity seminars he is required to attend. At one such event, he told his colleagues that they should remember that their school is not only a school, but a bearer of culture, a culture unique to South Africa and their region. A colleague responded: But some cultures deserve to die. 

This will to death is in many of our schools and mirrors the longer historical processes at work within other institutions explicitly founded to preserve and pass on the Christian faith: I think here of Harvard and Oxford. 

The Thanatos spirit is also in the churches themselves, the spirit Pope Paul VI described as ‘the smoke of Satan’. What did the churches do or say when they were banned in 2020 from giving last rites, preaching in person, or sharing the Eucharist? Nothing. 

You can go to mainline Protestant services and hear preachers criticize Paul’s attitude to women, sorcery, and homosexuality. I recently came across a sermon that declared we need to be more Christian than Jesus because of how he spoke to the Canaanite woman. 

We have seen Popes urge vaccinations; vaccinations developed via aborted fetal embryos. Pope Francis declares that borders should be wide open. He echoes the words of many liberals who make statements that their own, privileged culture should be allowed to die. Recently, he even allowed Amazon idols into the Vatican. 

Christian charities facilitate not only illegal immigration, but often LGBT activism. The German Catholic Church being notorious in this regard. 

Richard Greenhorn, the scandalously neglected author of ‘Empire of Hatred’, writes of the central problem facing the church today, the problem within, the problem of what he calls the Christian bugman. This bugman wills his selfhood to be eviscerated for social consensus. He gives up the notion of personal morality for the sake of utilitarian public policy.  

Greenhorn writes, that in this new order, ‘Man’s soul is too weak for real sacrifice, but his backbone is strong enough to bear the brunt of tyrannical government.’ In the name of emancipation, in the name of Christian values, we come to a social order of suffocation and tyranny, as the faith willingly empties itself of all content besides what is fashionable. As Johnny Cash sang, ‘They say they want the kingdom, but they don’t want God in it.’ 

The perhaps more august Kierkegaard foresaw this much earlier than Cash when he wrote in ‘Practice in Christianity’: 

If, on the other hand, someone could feel drawn to Christ and love him only in his abasement, if such a person wanted to hear nothing about his loftiness, when power and honour and glory are his; if he (what sad perversity!) with the impatience of a restless spirit, bored, as he would no doubt say, with the good and victorious days of Christendom, if he longed only for scenes of horror, to be with him when he was being insulted and persecuted – then the vision of such a person is also confused; he does not recognize Christ and therefore does not love him either.  

Italian postmodernist Gianni Vattimo states that this longing for horror is indeed the telos of Christianity, because the only message of the faith is ‘kenosis’. An emptying secularization is the entire point of it all. We come therefore to the end of culture, the end of ‘cult’ and a sense of the incarnational hallowing of ancestry and land.  

Now, is it any wonder therefore, that we are seeing within the Dissident Right a turn to Nietzsche and his great critique of Christianity as being ‘slave morality’, an ascendant post-Christian opposition to the regime? 

The notion of slave morality is Nietzsche’s belief that metaphysics and religion are primarily genealogical phenomena. The weak and defeated create a fabricated world in which their weakness and lowliness can be recast as divine, wherein ‘the ascetic ideal’ becomes priestly power. Christianity is, for Nietzsche, merely ‘Platonism for the people’. We despise this world, so we invent another. We deprive reality of its worth, and we attack the roots of life.  

Thus, we are led, according to Nietzsche, in ‘Beyond Good and Evil’ 

...to a point in the history of society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining “punishment” and “being supposed to punish” hurts it, arouses fear in it. “Is it not enough to render him undangerous? Why still punish? Punishing itself is terrible.” With this question, herd morality, the morality of timidity, draws its ultimate consequence. 

But even if Christian slave morality has led the West here, for Nietzsche it only gets worse in the modern age. Once slave morality triumphs, its ‘will to truth’ loses its vitality. Its metaphysics shrivel and die. And with it, so does God. And in the ebbing away of the waters of religion, only swamps and stagnant pools are left behind. We enter the age of the last men, who consciously reject life itself, and no longer simply to gain power. They choose herd life. They become tarantulas governed by a desire for revenge upon the entire world, a great will to equality that would attack and destroy any difference, any mark of nobility. This is why Nietzsche accurately predicted the 20^th century would be an age of nihilistic destruction. 

The problem Christians face, therefore, is that Nietzsche seems a highly accurate diagnostician of our culture’s great decadence, indeed, of Christian decadence. Yet, on the other hand, we must disagree with his absolute condemnation of our faith, what for many of us is most precious. And to many of those without that faith, it is equally obvious the riches this faith has given our culture. 

My contention is that we cannot ignore Nietzsche. And we cannot merely denounce him. We must engage with him, because of his prescience. But I go even further than that. I suggest that in our post-Christian age, Nietzsche can even be something akin to the pre-Christian ‘virtuous pagans’, whom the early church held to be inchoate witnesses to the soon-arriving faith. Could we consider him a kind of Aristotle for postmodernity, a kind of Virgil chosen to guide us through the horrors of an earthly Inferno?  

I think so. But how is this possible given the disdain Nietzsche has for Christianity? Let me offer some hints before I delve into a proper argument. 

First, there is an interesting moment in Nietzsche, when he says that he could only believe in a god who dances. Intriguingly, the word that the great Church Father, John Damascene uses for the rotation and interpenetration of the Trinity, is ‘perichoresis’, the great dance.  

Second, one of Nietzsche’s masterpieces is ‘Beyond Good and Evil’. Well, what is beyond good and evil? Close readers will know what the book says: ‘That which is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.’ Of course, it was the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil which provoked the Fall. What was beyond that tree? The Tree of Life.