Recent Work on Nietzsche and Religion

Introduction

Religion plays an important role in Nietzsche’s thought, but the exact nature of this role is far from clear. Nietzsche was an anti-religious and anti-Christian thinker who was profoundly concerned with the nature of religion in general and Christianity in particular. Wilfrid Sellars observed that, as a “second generation atheist,” he could discuss religion dispassionately: “I had never experienced those theological anxieties which have pushed so many in the direction of philosophy and which tend to distort it into a secular substitute for religion.”^[1] Nietzsche, however, was far from indifferent to religion. On the contrary, he thought both that understanding the Christian inheritance of modern culture was indispensable for understanding this culture and that religion itself was one of the most important human phenomena. Indeed, like Goethe,^[2] Heidegger^[3] and Leo Strauss,^[4] Nietzsche suggested that religion was the most important alternative to philosophy,^[5] which means that although it shares important characteristics with philosophy, without which it would not be an alternative, it is also fundamentally different from, and incompatible with, philosophy. One might trace Nietzsche’s profound concern with religion to the fact that he came from a family line of Protestant clergymen and was passionately Christian as a young boy, even receiving the nickname “the little pastor.”^[6] However, although Nietzsche’s upbringing undoubtedly played a role in shaping the person he became, there are good reasons to examine his account of religion with an open mind, alive to the possibility that one might learn from Nietzsche about the nature and importance of religion, not merely about Nietzsche from his concern with religion.

1. It is often assumed that it was not possible to be an atheist before modernity. If one makes this assumption, one must also assume that the very possibility of atheism was produced unintentionally by developments within religion; secularization may have become a project actively advanced by atheists or religious skeptics, but it began by accident. Occasionally the former assumption is made explicit; thus Charles Taylor says “it was impossible not to believe in God” before modernity: “In those days everyone believed.”^[7] Lucien Febvre argues that to admit the mere possibility of atheism in the middle ages is “like giving Diogenes an umbrella or Mars a machine gun”; just as the material technology for such inventions was unavailable in the ancient world, so the mental technology for radically impious thoughts was unavailable before modernity.^[8] Febvre says that when such thoughts came about in medieval times, they were comparable to a drunkard’s “guffaw”; they were never pursued seriously in an intellectual way.^[9] The mental technology which made serious atheism possible must have been constructed by sincerely religious people, who did not realize the uses to which it would be put and unwittingly made it possible for their children and grandchildren to be atheists. In this spirit, Brad S. Gregory argues that the very possibility of atheism was an unintended consequence of Protestantism.^[10] This religious movement was made up of individuals like Luther and Calvin who wanted to establish one new form of Christianity as the alternative to the Catholic Church. However, it devolved rapidly into sectarian conflict, which in turn resulted in the quest for an independent rational principle which different religious sects could use to adjudicate between them. For Gregory, quite without the early Protestants intending this, this historical process led to the emergence of atheism for the first time in human history.

In Nietzsche’s Protestant Fathers: A Study in Prodigal Christianity, Thomas R. Nevin never says that atheism was an unintentional byproduct of the Reformation. In fact, he describes Protagoras as “the first true atheist,” implying a more complicated attitude toward disbelief than Taylor’s or Febvre’s (206). However, in many respects, his book is in their spirit. Nevin examines four different Protestant German thinkers – Luther, Boehme, Leibniz and Lessing – from a perspective informed by Nietzsche’s account of secularization. Nevin is an Anglican Christian, who regards Anglicanism as the happy medium between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, rather than as a form of the former (as do some high church Anglicans) or the latter (as do many low church Anglicans) (ix). Nevin claims that these figures exemplified a certain free-spirited trend within Protestantism which led ultimately to radical atheism, as exemplified by Nietzsche, although quite against their conscious intentions: “Their devastations of Christian Scripture, staging the gradual murder of God, prepare [Nietzsche’s] way, but only he ascends the mountain top” (260). Nietzsche famously said that the “two-thousand-year discipline in the truth […] finally forbids itself the lie involved in belief in God” (GM III 27), proposing that the focus on self-examination and unsparing honesty inculcated by Christianity led eventually to its overcoming from within.^[11] Although Nietzsche does not say this, it is quite easy to take this to mean that the mere possibility of atheism was produced by Christianity through the psychological momentum it created.

However, Nietzsche does not share the widely held opinion that atheism was impossible before modernity. It is true that one can find it in his notebooks if one looks hard enough; the closest thing is a remark from 1880, where he says: “For a millennium it was not possible for the most free-spirited minds to imagine a non-religious form of thought; now we possess the same” (Nachlass 1880, 3[70], KSA 9.65). Here Nietzsche seems to anticipate Taylor and Febvre. But this remark is not only unusual, but inconsistent with many other things he says. In HH I 125, he claims that Homer, Aeschylus, Aristophanes and Shakespeare were “profoundly irreligious” and did not believe in “their gods” (in Shakespeare’s case, there was only one, but in triune form). In HH I 475, he claims that Jewish “free thinkers” preserved European free thought during “the darkest medieval times.” Even in his first book, he claims that antiquity was populated by “mocking Lucians” (BT 10). In his later period, Nietzsche expresses the view that Plato may have been a radical skeptic (Nachlass 1885, 34[195], KSA 11.486–7); he also says that Plato regarded the doctrine of the immortality of the soul as a noble lie (Nachlass 1888, KSA 14[116], KSA 13.293). While Febvre claims that free thought was impossible in times which did not enjoy free speech, Nietzsche by contrast claims that thought could more easily enjoy greater freedom when there was less free speech and instead fear of “disapproving glances,” “persecution” and “exile” on the one hand and “eternal damnation” on the other, while free speech poses a danger to free thought (Nachlass 1885, 34[65], KSA 11.440).^[12]

This is relevant to Nevin’s book for two reasons: First, it qualifies his understanding of secularization. Nietzsche believed that one cause of atheism was sincere Christians taking the demand for self-examination so seriously that it undermined their faith. Ironically, given Nevin’s Christian commitments, it is here where Nietzsche’s historical thesis implies a judgment of Christianity as self-deluded. A Christian cannot hold that sufficiently rigorous searching of the soul will lead to atheism; if it does lead to atheism, it must have missed the traces of divine creation which the Christian is committed to finding in the soul. If self-examination produces atheism, it must be insufficiently rigorous and/or misdirected by egoistic concerns. However, as a historical claim about the recorded past, that atheism was possible in the ages where Christianity was dominant is something which the Christian can accept. Indeed, the view that atheism was impossible before modernity is arguably less consistent with Christianity than the alternative. For the Catholic, even the grace which made Mary sinless does not take away the free will with which she accepted it; something similar could be said about many Protestant views of the relation between faith and good works, although Luther, it is true, frankly denied free will. To summarize this complex point, one can say that Nevin is alive to the synchronic, but not the diachronic, dimension of Nietzsche’s account of secularization.

Secondly, of the figures whom Nevin discusses, while two (Luther and Boehme) are sincere Christians, the other two (Leibniz and Lessing) have a more ambiguous relation to religion. One must note that Nietzsche, like Leo Strauss, but unlike most significant thinkers of the twentieth century (e. g., Heidegger, Foucault or Deleuze), thought an important factor in the emergence of modernity was the choice of philosophers to seek to undermine Christianity publicly. In the preface to Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Nietzsche speaks of the fight against Christianity in the early modern era (he claims Jesuitism is a reaction to this fight, implying an unusually early date for its existence), while in BGE 54, he speaks of modern philosophy as an “epistemological skepticism” which is “covertly or overtly [versteckt oder offen]” anti-Christian. While Luther and Boehme may have contributed unwittingly to secularization, some writers contributed to it consciously. From a Nietzschean perspective, Leibniz and Lessing can be viewed, not necessarily as unbelievers who consciously advanced the project of secularization (in many ways, Leibniz sought to decelerate it), but as unbelievers who consciously responded to it, rather than – as Nevin claims – sincere believers who unconsciously advanced it. Nevin regards Lessing as a breaking point in the dialectic of secularization, where Christianity begins to give way to deism: “Lessing’s final views on Christianity remain teasingly unclear” (211). But Lessing is arguably far more clear-sightedly impious than this formulation suggests.

Nevin’s book is written in an elegant and readable, albeit slightly pretentious, style. The chapter on Luther is interesting and perceptive, although occasionally Nevin’s fluid prose distracts the inattentive reader from a lack of rigour. Two examples will have to suffice: First, Nevin says that Luther falsely claimed that the Qur’an includes depictions of the afterlife as sensual, but such depictions come only in interpretations of the Qur’an in later Islamic tradition (32). This is a very strange remark. The Qur’an contains many detailed descriptions of the afterlife as involving sensual pleasures. These descriptions have sometimes been interpreted in later Islamic tradition as analogies for spiritual experiences, and one may affirm that such interpretations are correct. But to say that there are no sensual depictions of paradise in the Qur’an is manifestly false. Secondly, Nevin says that Paul was not “a Christian,” but rather “a Christianizing Jew,” between which there is “a substantial difference” (47). This polemical remark is supported only by a reference to Pamela Eisenbaum’s Paul Was Not A Christian (73, n. 110). But Eisenbaum’s book does not prove this claim.^[13] It merely assumes that being a Christian and a Jew are incompatible, without ever defining what it means to be a Christian – something which a book with this deliberately incendiary title commits itself to doing. Nevin makes a provocative remark he does not explain and justifies it by referring to a book most of his readers will not read and which does not deliver on its promise. Nevin has learned from Nietzsche that if one’s style is effective, the reader is unlikely to insist too strongly on discovering one’s substance. But while Nietzsche uses this insight to make himself seem less rational than he is, Nevin uses it to make himself seem more rational than he is.

Nevin acknowledges that there is no firm evidence Nietzsche read Boehme (116), but speculates that he may have done so when he was young, and that his claim that as a child, prior to becoming an atheist, he claimed that God Himself was the cause of evil (GM, Preface 3), shows that the Christian atmosphere in which he was raised owed something to Boehme. I find this quite speculative, especially as one may doubt whether this intentionally comical remark was even meant as an accurate account of the youthful Nietzsche’s beliefs. Nevin claims that for Nietzsche, suffering is essential to great achievement and draws a parallel with Boehme’s claim that it is through suffering that one becomes a Christian (117–8). This comparison is formal and superficial. Nonetheless, there is value in seeing Nietzsche in the context of heterodox Christian speculation. While Nietzsche never mentions Boehme, he does mention, or allude to, Jan Hus’s terrible death by fire and Giordano Bruno’s similar fate. For Nietzsche, however, these figures call to mind but also differ from the true philosopher – while a heterodox religious thinker, or a crusading secularist, might seek out martyrdom, the philosopher thinks unconventional thoughts but does not seek to be martyred for them (BGE 25).

Nevin laments that Leibniz’s attempt to defend Christian faith using reason actually subverted it: “Men counting themselves Christians did not realize, nor perhaps even sense, that they were abandoning what they purported to uphold. Leibniz is foremost in this endeavor” (140). Nevin’s chapter on Leibniz is more revealing of Nevin’s assumptions than Leibniz’s. Nevin assumes that doubt about revealed religion implies “hostility” toward its public influence (142). However, Leibniz is perhaps the best example in modern European history of the possible disjunction between them. That Leibniz believed revealed religion was a very good thing for most people is undeniable. That he believed philosophical inquiry could be reconciled with sincere faith is highly questionable. Lloyd Strickland notes:

Leibniz did not attend church often, and his scanty church attendance, along with his refusal to take communion, earned him a reputation in Hanover as a non-believer. Locals playfully referred to him as “Glaubenichts,” that is, one who believes in nothing. While it seems farfetched to suppose that Leibniz had no religious beliefs at all, it is far from clear what beliefs he did have.^[14]

Nevin cites Nietzsche’s claim that Leibniz was “hidden under a mask,” but takes this to mean that Leibniz “spent his life feigning or fawning before vain royals,” and dismisses it as “gratuitous” (189). However, Nietzsche’s remark implies a subtle appreciation of Leibniz’s relation to the culture of his time; it is not a trivializing observation about his conduct around royalty. In fact, many writers, such as Bertrand Russell,^[15] or more recently Richard Kennington^[16] and John Wipple,^[17] but also Lessing himself,^[18] have treated Leibniz as an esoteric writer. There is no reference or even allusion to esotericism in Nevin’s chapter on Leibniz. Nevin is correct that Leibniz’s projects were often “grotesquely misconceived” as political endeavours (191); his attempt to establish a “world council of churches” (156), for example, anticipates Hans Küng’s comically absurd Projekt Weltethos. However, Nevin is wrong to assume that such projects supply a transparent window into Leibniz’s mind. Nevin also asserts, naively, that there is no deliberate humour in Leibniz’s writing (169).

Nevin’s account of Lessing is a missed opportunity. He treats Lessing as a complacent deist and bland optimist who hesitates confusedly between regarding Christianity as a form of deism and admitting they cannot be reconciled. Nevin claims that Lessing takes the penultimate step before Nietzsche’s announcement that God is dead; he reduces God to an abstraction, Nietzsche reduces Him to a fiction. Nietzsche had nothing but contempt for deism; he did not even treat it as an interesting mistake, worthy of the polemics he unleashed against Christianity. Why, then, is “Nietzsche’s estimate of Lessing,” as Nevin notes, “generally laudatory and not once deprecatory” (249)? Nevin notes only that this is “curious” (249). Nevin introduces Lessing with a brief discussion of Leucippus and Epicurus. Nevin claims that “their atheism is patent” and their “pseudo-gods” are mere fictions (207). That is probably true. Yet they had enough sensitivity to popular religion to affect a reconciliation with it. Did Lessing have a like attitude? Nevin claims that Lessing believed that Leibniz did not teach eternal punishment as a merely exoteric, popular doctrine; he “defends” (!) Leibniz against the claim that he is an esoteric writer (238). But Lessing says that when Leibniz taught this doctrine, “he did no more and no less than what all the ancient philosophers used to do in their exoteric pronouncements.”^[19] Lessing claims that Leibniz “did indeed subscribe to this doctrine,”^[20] but later in the same essay writes: “Socrates himself believed in all seriousness in such eternal punishment, at least to the extent of considering it helpful to teach it in the most unexceptionable and explicit terms.”^[21] In other words, Socrates believed the doctrine was true in the sense that it is “helpful” to teach it as true even if it is false. Lessing attributes esotericism to Leibniz and engages in it himself, which should come as no surprise given that he criticized his contemporaries for not doing so: “[Leibniz] displayed a sagacity which our most recent philosophers have, of course, become far too wise to employ.”^[22] Had Nevin approached Lessing with this in mind, he might have understood why Nietzsche held him in high regard. Nevin may still have regarded Lessing as an “accomplice” to the murder of God (245), but not as extremely confused.

Nevin’s book has deficiencies the revision of which would require that he write a very different book. Nonetheless, he gives us a broad picture of the historical context into which Nietzsche fits – not the immediate context of his teachers at Schulpforta or the books he read by contemporaries such as Friedrich Albert Lange, Paul Rée or Gustav Teichmüller, but the broader context of German Protestantism and its successive transformations. Like Nevin, Nietzsche – after his brief career as a philologist – always took a broad view and never lost himself in the quarrels of scholarly pedants, even if Nietzsche’s sense for detail was far more acute than Nevin’s. Unfortunately, Nevin does not appreciate how much irony and indirection there is on the surface of Nietzsche’s texts; for this reason, he rushes too quickly to psychoanalyze their depths. Nevin asks: “Did Nietzsche ever sense that by attacking Paul and official Christendom in Der Antichrist, he might be making his readers more sympathetic to both?” (218) The answer is: of course he did.

Nevin claims that Nietzsche provides a “vital tonic” to Christians (260). One wonders what effect he believes Nietzsche ought to have on their faith. Nevin claims that Christians can learn from him that a stance truly in harmony with Jesus dispenses with all speech about immortality (268). Is that really a middle way between Catholicism and Protestantism? Is that not rather the most liberal kind of Protestantism? Doesn’t that imply a repudiation of centuries of Christian tradition and a view of the Gospels themselves as involving immense distortions and even lies? Nevin also claims it is “pointless” to debate whether Jesus was resurrected from the dead: “What matters is the drama in which every stumbling Christian is placed” (226). This is a strange admission from someone who regards the dialectic of secularization in Protestantism as a reductio of the latter. If Nevin views this question as beside the point, he has absorbed a great deal of secularism into his faith. No ancient or medieval Christian theologian regarded the facticity of Jesus’ resurrection as irrelevant; neither did Nietzsche, who denied it unambiguously. I conclude with Paul’s words: “If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith” (Corinthians 15:14).

2. It is unclear if Sampsa Saarinen knows exactly what he wants to achieve in his interesting but uneven Nietzsche, Religion, and Mood. In the early parts of the book, there are extensive methodological discussions about Nietzsche’s approach to religion. However, when Saarinen finally turns to a chronological survey of texts, we find a number of interesting observations about the free spirit trilogy and Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–85), but not the systematic account of Nietzsche’s treatment of religion we expect. Saarinen’s focus on “mood” (Stimmung), while unobjectionable, is not as pathbreaking as he claims. He says Nietzsche wants to communicate a new mood which accompanies philosophy as a way of life which takes joy in skeptical questioning. The mood Nietzsche wants to communicate is neither that of the atheism of optimistic belief in progress nor that of the atheism of melancholy at the absence of God, but a different kind of atheism, which is joyful but not complacent. These are convincing claims, but wouldn’t many commentators on Nietzsche agree? It does not seem that a methodological focus on mood is necessary to reach these conclusions.

Most importantly, Saarinen owes the reader an account of how his two major topics – Nietzsche on religion and Nietzsche on the philosophical life as a life of skepticism – relate to each other. While the connection should have been elucidated clearly at the outset, it remains somewhat obscure throughout. Sometimes Saarinen seems to assume that religious consciousness is distinctive of pre-modern culture and atheism is an achievement of modernity, but Nietzsche understood it in a unique way. Other times Saarinen seems to assume that religion and philosophical skepticism are themselves perennial alternatives. Saarinen should have been clearer about where he stands and why.

Saarinen says he takes a middle way between the “constructionism” dominating academic theorists of religion and “essentialism.” One wonders whether “essentialism” is much more than a straw man. Although Nietzsche was concerned with the differences between religions, what interested him was the differences between them considered as religions, i. e. the fact that the same kind of phenomenon could manifest itself in perplexingly different forms. While Nietzsche tends to contrast Christian monotheism unfavourably with Greek polytheism, what he finds interesting about Greek religion is how it demonstrates that religion itself can take what he regards as “life-affirming” forms. Similarly, Buddhism appears to him far more “realistic” than Christianity (A 20), despite being no less a form of religion. Nietzsche regards the common characteristics of religions as recurring patterns in human phenomena, but has there ever been an “essentialist” who thinks otherwise?

Saarinen says “mood” is essential to religion (15), but Christianity understands subjective “religious” moods as inherently related to and caused by objective realities, belief in which is essential to religion (therefore Machiavelli says that “unbelieving” is the “quality” opposite “religious”).^[23] Saarinen thus takes a reductionist approach to religion, as do Nietzsche and the “constructionists” he discusses, rather than the neutral approach he claims to take. The difference between Nietzsche and contemporary theorists of religion is not that they are reductionists and he is not, but that he believes in first philosophy (BGE 23) and ascribes to philosophy a “masterly task” (BGE 204) and they do not. Nietzsche is self-consciously secular; his study of religion presupposes that it is based on illusion. However, the claim that all illusions are “religious” strips the term of precise meaning, as Saarinen emphasizes. Thus, one must determine which illusions Nietzsche regards as specifically religious. BGE 53, which makes clear that religion is not for him necessarily theistic, is crucial for understanding what he means by religion; Saarinen does not discuss this aphorism. He also fails to discuss Nietzsche’s account of religious instinct as “god-forming instinct” in a note (Nachlass 1888, 17[4], KSA 13.523–6), which should also be addressed in a monograph about Nietzsche on religion.

The standard monograph on the subject in English remains, unfortunately, Julian Young’s Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Religion (2006).^[24] Young argues that far from being an atheist, Nietzsche is fundamentally a religious thinker; Young bizarrely assumes that it is impossible to think religion is salutary but false, and thus takes statements in Nietzsche to the effect that it is salutary (for some people)^[25] to indicate that he was religious. Saarinen soberly recognizes that Nietzsche is an atheist. Saarinen spends too much time refuting views which are not worth considering in detail. As well as his detailed repudiation of Young, Saarinen devotes much space to views which find in Nietzsche’s famous madman aphorism (GS 125) a repressed “desire for God,” before rejecting them as speculative: “Did mister Nietzsche have an acute desire for God that defines his philosophical pursuits? The only scholarly answer that can be given to the question is that this cannot be known for sure, since it is ultimately a question of interpreting Nietzsche’s inmost desires” (158). While Saarinen’s conclusion is sound, a detailed discussion of psychobiographical questions which comes to an inevitably inconclusive answer is unnecessary. It is better to focus on GS 125 as a drama staged by Nietzsche and to examine the characters, dialogue and plot, with a view to what he wants to tell us by means of them.

Saarinen says that his study is directed against the view that for Nietzsche the only way to overcome melancholy is through a new religion: “There has certainly been no lack of biographical studies that have treated Nietzsche as if he really aspired to be the founder of a religion” (3). But could Nietzsche not have regarded himself as the founder of a religion he did not believe in? Speaking of Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes: “Here no ‘prophet’ is speaking, none of those gruesome hybrids of sickness and will to power whom people call founders of religions” (EH, Preface 4). Saarinen takes this at face value. But could this statement not have been ironic? In the same book, Nietzsche notes: “I myself […] am far from blaming individuals for the calamity of millennia” (EH, Wise 7). But Nietzsche often does just that! Think of Nietzsche’s attack on Plato in the preface to Beyond Good and Evil, where he blames Plato for inventing the pure mind and the good in itself and claims that these inventions of one individual had catastrophic consequences for European culture even well into modernity.

Saarinen notes: “Not only does Zarathustra’s communication differ from that of saints, redeemers and their kind, but he ‘is’ different because he does not want believers” (191). But James Conant cites Zarathustra’s claim to his disciples that “only when you have all denied me, will I return to you” (Z I, The Bestowing Virtue 3) and notes: “Nietzsche is at his most seductive at moments such as this, in which he bids us to renounce him. He knows that an admiration for a teacher who claims he wants no followers can nurture a false sense of independence. He knows that the gesture of rejecting the reader will attract her.”^[26] When Nietzsche claims he is not the founder of a religion, he knows that this gesture will “nurture a false sense of independence” in his readers and render them more likely to trust him as the founder of a new religion for those who pride themselves on being free-spirited; indeed, Nietzsche’s denial that he is founding a new religion is more likely to make his teachings effective as a religion. Accordingly, Saarinen’s remark must be qualified: “The mood that Nietzsche sought to communicate was one that would rather make the recipient more instead of less sceptical of authority” (242). An appreciation of the frequently self-referential and ironic character of Nietzsche’s anti-religious rhetoric would sharpen Saarinen’s approach and dovetail with his insight that while Nietzsche is an atheist, he is critical of most forms of modern atheism; Nietzsche is also critical of the dogmatic “Nietzscheanism” he anticipates his books will produce. One must be attentive not only to the difference between Nietzsche’s atheism and the optimistic and melancholy forms he rejects but also to the difference between Nietzsche himself and the “masks” he wears. Dogmatic Nietzscheanism is a kind of atheistic religion founded by Nietzsche himself.

Saarinen refers to Martin Hägglund’s distinction between “traditional atheism,” which rejects the existence of God but does not deny that we have desires for God and immortality, and “radical atheism,” which denies that these desires really exist (even if they seem to), and claims that it “maps on perfectly” to the difference between Nietzsche’s atheism and other forms (229). A common Christian argument is that we have a desire for eternity which only God and immortality could satisfy. C. S. Lewis writes: “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world could satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”^[27] More pithily and apodictically, William Blake suggests: “The desire of Man being Infinite, the possession is Infinite & himself Infinite.”^[28] But from Nietzsche’s perspective, Hägglund shares a utopian view of desire with his Christian antagonists. Nietzsche would claim that Hägglund, like Lewis and Blake, assumes that our deepest desire must be fulfillable. For Hägglund, the desire for eternity is really a self-misinterpreting desire for the continuation of temporal existence, for “survival.” I will not address the question of whether the distinction between the sempiternal character of human immortality and the eternity of God meets Hägglund’s objection. The important interpretive point is that for Nietzsche, it does not matter if all or some human beings have a desire for eternity. Philosophical reflection involves radical criticism of desire itself. This can be seen most clearly in this passage from the penultimate work which Nietzsche wrote:

Would […] pleasure – ever be a proof of truth? This is so far from being the case that it is practically a counter-proof, but in any event there is the greatest suspicion against “truth” when pleasurable sensations are invoked to answer the question “What is true?” The proof of “pleasure” is a proof of “pleasure,” nothing more; how in the world could it ever be established that true judgments are more enjoyable than false ones […]? The experience of all rigorous, of all profoundly constituted spirits teaches the opposite. We have had to wring the truth out of ourselves every step of the way, we have had to give up almost everything that our heart, our love, our trust in life relied on (A 50).

Hägglund claims that “immortality is […] equivalent to absolute death” (234). But Nietzsche’s argument does not rely on this putative conceptual equivalence, but on the more straightforward claim that immortality is a fantasy. However, Nietzsche does seem to claim that we all desire eternity. Zarathustra says: “All desire wants eternity [alle Lust will Ewigkeit]” (Z III, The Other Dance Song 3). Saarinen interprets this as follows: “Instead of pointing to a specific human desire for what is eternal it rather expresses a desire for becoming within all desire” (236). This interpretation seems forced to me, violating the surface meaning of the text without adequate justification. Further, in the presentation of the eternal return in GS 341, Nietzsche responds directly to the human desire for the eternal with a doctrine which claims that this life, which seems transient, is eternal. However, Nietzsche’s claim in BGE 96 that “one should depart from life as Odysseus departed from Nausica, blessing it rather than in love with it” suggests that his own perspective on eternity is very different.

Saarinen writes: “Traditionally atheists have concentrated on the question of the existence of God and not on the existential question concerning the desirability of God” (232). There are many exceptions. Aristophanes’ Clouds presents Socrates as saying “Zeus doesn’t even exist” (οὐδ᾽ ἔστι Ζεύς, Clouds 367).^[29] This “even” (expressed in Greek by using οὐδὲ rather than οὐκ) is important. Socrates does not only deny the existence of Zeus, but he also rejects the view of the divine which he represents – he imposes laws on others which he does not follow himself and is governed by passions unworthy of a god, as the Unjust Speech points out (Clouds 1079–82), and to top it all, he does not even exist. Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity, the dominant religion in his time and place as Greek polytheism was in Socrates’s, as not only a false teaching but also a faulty ideal belongs to an ancient tradition.

Although I have focused on the limitations of Saarinen’s presentation, I have done so not because his book is not valuable, but because it serves as a starting point for a conversation about Nietzsche rather than as an authoritative treatment of his thought about religion. While the book falls short of its ambition, is organized in a somewhat scattershot way, and is sometimes too wordy (a good editor would have eliminated many of Saarinen’s qualifications and reduced the length by at least a fifth), it is also admirably free of jargon and aims for a wide audience, not being directed narrowly toward analytic or continental philosophers, or anybody else. Furthermore, it contains many perceptive and illuminating observations. Saarinen is correct that Nietzsche “suggests a life in pursuit of knowledge need not be a life of melancholy toil, but can, when conducted in a certain way, be a life of joy and laughter” (179). Saarinen is also correct that Nietzsche suggests that the philosopher who does without the comfort of resting in a conviction has a joyful strength absent from the psyche of the religious believer who needs the certainty of a definite conviction to face life. He notes that Nietzsche “thinks the philosopher and the religious person are intimately related in that both have extraordinary experiences, but […] also […] that they are nevertheless distinct” (218). It would have been welcome had Saarinen expanded on this interesting and suggestive remark.

3. Russell and Santini’s volume Nietzsche’s Gods contains studies of Nietzsche’s understanding of the divine, divided into four sections dealing with Greek polytheism, Christianity, Nietzsche’s own theology and his “future gods.” The book begins with David Leo Tracey’s Nietzsche’s Apollo. This is an understudied theme; scholars generally focus on Dionysus. Tracey assumes that the “artist’s metaphysics,” as Nietzsche later called it (BT, Attempt 2), affirmed by the Dionysian enthusiast is Nietzsche’s own “claim about the basic nature of reality” (12). This is at least doubtful. Tracey comments: “Nietzsche allows himself to make a speculative metaphysical hypothesis” (11). But the quotation he cites does not support this strong claim. Nietzsche says carefully that “the more [he becomes] aware of these all-powerful drives in nature,” the more he “feels himself driven” to make a certain claim (BT 4). This is not the same as saying that this claim is true. One might say, e. g., “whenever I hear Bach’s Mass in B Minor, it is so beautiful that I feel driven to believe in a transcendent world,” without believing that such a world exists. After a performance of Beethoven, Lenin said: “I can’t listen to music too often […]. It makes me want to say kind, stupid things, and pat the heads of people. But now you have to beat them in the head, and beat them without mercy.”^[30] One cannot conclude that Lenin believed in the existence of a metaphysical imperative to pat people on the head. The tragic celebrant believes in the real presence of Dionysus during every performance (BT 8), a belief Nietzsche (unless we take him to be a believer in the Greek pantheon as an assembly of real persons) regards as a beautiful illusion. This contradicts Tracey’s claim that in tragedy, Apollo allows the truth about reality to shine through the illusions, making clear that they are illusions. Incisively, Tracey points out that for Nietzsche, Apollo is the father of the entire Greek pantheon (15), but he does not notice that this means that “Apollo,” i. e., the drive for semblance, is also the father of “Dionysus,” i. e., the drive for intoxication.

Philip S. Groff’s The Return of the Epicurean Gods deals with Nietzsche’s appropriation of Epicurus’s theology. Groff assumes that Epicurus was a believer in the Greek pantheon, and that Nietzsche assumed, too, that Epicurus accepted the existence of these gods on no better authority than that of the priests and the poets, even as he understood their nature in accordance with Epicurean physics. “Epicurus has often been misrepresented as an atheist” (35, n. 29); Groff assumes either that Epicurus could not possibly have been lying or, at least, that there is no reason to suspect this. Not all interpreters in antiquity agreed. Cicero reports that some thought that Epicurus only pretended to believe in the gods, to avoid popular rage: “I am aware that according to some people’s view Epicurus really abolished the gods but nominally retained them in order not to offend the people of Athens” (De Natura Deorum 1.85).^[31] Sextus Empiricus says: “Epicurus, according to some, admits a god when speaking to the many, but as far as the nature of things is concerned, not by any means” (Against the Physicists 1:58).^[32] Concerning Nietzsche’s view of Epicurus’ theology, he says that Homer and Aeschylus dealt with the gods with such freedom and irreverence that they could not possibly have believed in their existence (HH I 125). It is possible that Nietzsche believed that Epicurus believed in the Greek gods while Homer and Aeschylus did not, but this is unlikely. Groff’s account of the Epicurean gods as “exemplars of a good human life” (39) which Nietzsche found inspiring would be enriched by the thought that Nietzsche may have believed that Epicurus, rather than being circumscribed in his thoughts by the conventions of his epoch, made playful and skeptical use of them, just as he believed that Homer and Aeschylus did.

Carlotta Santini explores a neglected topic in Friedrich Nietzsche on the Greek Mysteries. She highlights how Nietzsche’s categorization of the mysteries is more capacious, but more historically imprecise, than that of recent historians (54). She shows that Nietzsche did not reflect on the mysteries only in his early period, as a kind of Dionysian phenomenon connected with “Oriental spirituality, which was once a model for him” (59), but also later, as he began to regard the anticipations of Christianity in the mystery cults more negatively. In a remark from 1875, Nietzsche claims drily that Wagner wanted to create a mystery cult of his own, anticipating his later criticisms of Wagner (59). I add that Nietzsche’s attitude toward “Oriental spirituality” and Dionysus himself was already ambivalent in his early period. In a famous text from 1868–69, On Schopenhauer, Nietzsche was unsparingly critical of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, while in 1870, he refers to Christianity itself as a Dionysian phenomenon which was “already present” among the Greeks (Nachlass 1870/71, 7[3], KSA 7.137). Furthermore, when Dionysus returns in Nietzsche’s later writings, starting with BGE 295, his name is spelled with an “o” (Dionysos) rather than a “u” (Dionysus), a subtle indication that he no longer has the same phenomenon in mind. The account of Dionysos as “the genius of the heart” in BGE 295 is very different from the longing for primordial unity which receives the name Dionysus in The Birth of Tragedy (1872).

The section on Christianity begins with David Simonin’s The Apostle Paul’s Conception of Sarx and Nietzsche’s Feeling of Power, which treats of Nietzsche’s account of Paul in D 68. Nietzsche hypothesized that powerlessness can itself be employed to heighten the feeling of power; this is central to his analysis of Paul. However, I am not convinced that sarx – often translated “flesh,” but with various meanings in Paul (75–6) – is the key to Nietzsche’s account of Paul’s psychology. Furthermore, when Simonin raises the question of whether in Nietzsche’s view Paul really “overcame” the flesh or only believed he had done so, it is unclear what he means (88). Nietzsche does not believe it is possible really to overcome the flesh through religious elevation, but he can differentiate phenomenologically between someone who has ceased to experience the “fleshly” desires of his youth and someone who merely controls or suppresses them.

Stelio de Carvalho Neto’s Conversion and Convalescence: Matters of Grace contrasts Pascalian submission to the divine will with Nietzschean amor fati and convalescence: “The convalescent wants to love life as he experiences it immediately, while the converted longs for an afterlife of eternal joy” (103). Neto enters sympathetically into the Christian experience in a way that is unusual for a Nietzsche scholar. Neto notes that several times in his correspondence, Nietzsche compares amor fati, humorously but seriously, to “submission to the divine will” (101–2). Neto notes that the principled believer and the Nietzschean convalescent are both unusual individuals, dissatisfied with mere escape from quotidian reality. They both aim “for the overcoming of the normal condition of the human animal that is […] a sick condition” (103). Yet this is also at the root of their fundamental difference. Insightfully, Neto sees that Nietzsche’s eternal return is a response to Pascal’s wager. Neto’s account would usefully be supplemented by consideration of D 60, where Nietzsche describes the Catholic priesthood as “perhaps the most refined figures in human society that have ever existed” due to the “constant ebb and flow” in their lives of the two “species of happiness,” “the feeling of power” and “the feeling of surrender [Ergebung].” Nietzschean convalescence involves an analogous but different interplay of these characteristics; the idea that there is an element of surrender in happiness anticipates the doctrine of amor fati.

In Life-Affirmation and Disgust with Humanity in the Wake of the Death of God, Michael J. McNeal deals with disgust, “an underappreciated concern in Nietzsche’s œuvre” (124). I note two points unclearly articulated in McNeal’s generally able presentation. First, although McNeal discusses, e. g., the role of disgust in ancient Greece in tragedy and comedy (139), he is insufficiently clear that for Nietzsche disgust is a permanent problem which takes peculiar forms in modernity. McNeal fails to discuss BGE 26,^[33] an early draft of which bears the title On the Overcoming of Disgust. BGE 26 treats this overcoming as “a necessary part of the life-history of every philosopher,” not just the modern philosopher. Nietzsche praises many ancient figures but also speaks with disgust of “the pestiferous swamps” of the “ancient world” (BGE 28). Secondly, McNeal speaks in general terms about strong or noble individuals without bringing out the importance of knowledge. Nietzsche does regard “the passion for knowledge” (D 429, 482) as noble, and thus comparable to other noble passions (GS 2). But while the latter require a certain blindness to the nature of the noble, the passion for knowledge can be fulfilled only if one faces up unsqueamishly to the truth. The disgust produced by the love of knowledge is very different from that produced by, e. g., love of artistic beauty in a predominantly ugly, vulgar world.

Yannick Souladié’s The Concept of “Antichrist”: Twilight or Renewal of Atheism has two main purposes. First, it treats of Nietzsche’s parodic use of the concept “Antichrist.” Secondly, it suggests that calling Nietzsche an “Antichrist” is more accurate than calling him a “rational atheist.” Souladié is successful in the first point, but not the second. His account of the origin of the term “Antichrist” as one of three possible translations of the Greek Antikristos in the New Testament (with Endchrist and Widerchrist) and the different scholarly and popular valences of these terms is illuminating. Particularly insightful is Souladié’s claim “Nietzsche’s Antichrist does not try to fool the Christians, but instead openly presents himself as their enemy” (151). One might compare the Catholic convert John Lukacs’s observation: “The Anti-Christ will be well-combed and smiling and popular, not someone with disrespectable ideas, crazy hair and a spiky Luciferian goatee.”^[34] However, Souladié fails to show that Nietzsche rejects “rational atheism.” It is true that Nietzsche thought that many atheists were in the grip of foolish modern ideologies and that he rejects the Christian God as the expression of a faulty ideal, not simply as non-existent. Calling Nietzsche a self-conceived “rational atheist” does not get us very far. But it is an indispensable starting-point. Nietzsche believed that God did not exist for what he took to be good reasons. One should not allow oneself to be seduced by his rhetoric away from trying to determine them. Doing so is more in the spirit of Nietzsche himself than refusing, as his aphorism on intellectual conscience (GS 2) makes clear.

The first essay on Nietzsche’s own “theologies” is Daniel Coyle’s Nietzsche’s (Experimental) Perspectival Poly-Pantheisms, which finds in his texts the outlines of a “perspectival pantheism” (167). Coyle claims that Zarathustra’s remark that he could believe in “a god who could dance” shows that Nietzsche affirms the existence of dancing gods – and “Dionysus and Ariadne are dancing gods par excellence” (168). This claim expresses the spirit of Coyle’s piece. Remarks like the one about “a god who could dance” are frequent in Nietzsche’s work. One can take them, as Coyle does, as indications of Nietzsche’s manner of believing in the divine. If Nietzsche likes dancing, he believes in a god who can dance. But this approach seems incompatible with the virtue of Redlichkeit or “probity” (BGE 227), which requires an unsparing rejection of wishful thinking. One might rather take remarks like the former as indications of Nietzsche’s attentiveness to the poetry and the politics of writing, not as evidence that he believes desire produces its objects.

Andrea Rehberg’s Intoxication, Ecstasy, Death examines Nietzsche’s approach to states which can be said to be “divine” in a way that traditional religions associated with the presence of God or gods but need not be so associated. In this context, Rehberg discusses the ascetic ideal as a ruse of nature to preserve life in decline; for Nietzsche, artists, philosophers, scholars, women, “the physiologically deformed,” saints and priests “form […] an ascending scale of nihilistic investment” (189). I note there is an element of irony in Nietzsche’s critique of the ascetic ideal when it comes to philosophers. While they form the second term in Rehberg’s list of progressively more “nihilistic” forms of ascetic idealists, they arguably do not belong on the list all:

It is quite possible that their dominating intellectuality had first to put a check on an unrestrained and irritable pride or a wanton sensuality […]. But it did it, precisely because it was the dominating instinct whose demands prevailed against those of all the other instincts […]. There is thus nothing of “virtue” in this (GM III 8).

Sebastian Nino Cocever’s Religion in the Light of Good Conscience argues that both a positive and a negative conception of religion can be found in Nietzsche. This is surely correct. Many passages pro and contra could be cited, but the pair BGE 61 and 62 sum up many of the good and bad characteristics of religion in Nietzsche’s eyes. Cocever’s claim that “for Nietzsche, psychological functions cannot be organised in a hierarchical order,” however, is simply wrong (200). Even in his phenomenology of the most basic acts of the will in BGE 19, he says, “in every act of the will there is a ruling thought” and “what happens here is what happens in every happy and well-constructed commonwealth; namely, the governing class identifies itself with the successes of the commonwealth.” Cocever appears to be affected by the dislike of hierarchy Nietzsche claims has “forced its way […] into the strictest, apparently most objective sciences” (GM II 12). One of the purposes of Nietzsche’s writing is to help us overcome this dislike in the face of a relentlessly egalitarian culture that encourages it.

Niklas Corall’s The Greatest Advantage of Polytheism concerns pre-Christian Greek religion. Rhetoric praising polytheism over “mono-tono-theism” (TI, Reason 1) appears throughout Nietzsche’s writings. Corall’s generally sober and precise account shows that for Nietzsche, polytheism originates as a people’s “natural” relation to its own “necessary attributes and goals” (222) and monotheism involves a break. However, Corall’s account of Nietzsche’s critique of “a society based on the belief in truth” (227), putatively anticipated by monotheistic belief in unity, tacitly assumes that Nietzsche, like Marx, thought that the demands of society and the individual are fundamentally the same. An important aspect of Nietzsche’s thought is the politically relevant tension between them. The exceptional individual may be able to stomach a great deal more truth than society in general. Nietzsche thinks that the Enlightenment has conducted an all-out assault on many traditional illusions. While praise of polytheism is one way to criticize monotheism, as a belief-system polytheism is no longer a living option, at least for most people in the Western world, while monotheistic religions remain vital, albeit embattled.

Marinete Araujo da Silva Fobister’s The Moderate Man and the Weak God: Nietzsche, Vattimo and Nihilism Today is an attempt, drawing on Gianni Vattimo, to use Nietzsche’s distinction between master and slave morality to defend the left-wing political stance of embracing migrants as masterly against the (usually right-wing, but sometimes left-wing, e. g., Sahra Wagenknecht in Germany or Mette Frederiksen in Denmark) stance of insisting on restrictions to immigration as slavish. The idea is that slaves negate those who are different while masters affirm them, migrants from outside Europe are different from Europeans, so opposition to unlimited migration is slavish and embracing it is masterly. This argument is purely formal and empty. It suffices to mention that Nietzsche says that masters abuse, torture and humiliate slaves, such that the relation of masters to slaves can be compared with that of birds of prey to lambs (GM I 13). Nietzsche writes: “‘Compassion for all’ – would mean harshness and tyranny for you, my neighbour!” (BGE 82) This short aphorism says more about what Nietzsche would have thought about lifting all restrictions on immigration to Europe than does Fobister’s essay.

Alan Watt’s Bataille’s Word: ‘Dieu soit mort’ (God be Dead) is about Georges Bataille’s interpretation of Nietzsche. On Bataille’s reading, the one who kills God in Nietzsche’s madman speech (GS 125) is not an atheist, because atheists believe in progress, but a “god-sacrificer” (263). Nietzsche’s point is that we should not be “caught up in the logic of projects, progress towards a better future” (263). There are two difficulties here. First, Nietzsche does not think that belief in progress is a necessary correlate of atheism. Secondly, it is however true that the madman urges his listeners to live in a new way “for the sake of this deed [um dieser Tat willen].” This implies orientation to the future. The “madman” indeed suggests a project to modern atheists, who are either too wrapped up in their own petty concerns to believe in any such project or believe only in base, lowly projects, like making living conditions more comfortable. Watt concludes that Bataille is more concerned than Nietzsche himself with developing a post-theistic sense of the sacred. The distance between them is greater than Watt suggests. Watt cites Bataille: “One of the most significant traits of Nietzsche’s work is its glorification of Dionysian values, that is, infinite intoxication and enthusiasm” (269). Bataille reproduces a common misunderstanding of Nietzsche, who says “it is not the strength, but the duration, of exalted sensations which makes for exalted human beings” (BGE 72). Such a thought would not have been penned by someone who thought that intoxication and enthusiasm were more worthwhile than “seeing clearly into what is” (BGE 39). Bataille must have read Nietzsche’s famous aphorism on intellectual conscience (GS 2), but he failed to digest it.

The volume concludes with Feren Barrios’s The Corpse in the Machine: Outlining a Genealogical Approach to the Technological Revolution. Barrios supplies a cartoonish account of early history, employing the Nietzschean concepts of master, priest and slave, before conceding that Nietzsche’s account in the Genealogy is “not scientific, if we are rigorous in the evaluation of known historical facts” and claiming that the value of his approach is his thesis that “all changes in the dominant set of values are caused by some kind of violence” (278). If that is Nietzsche’s main point, why did he not avoid speculations about early history? I believe a more convincing interpretation of Nietzsche’s narrative could be given, but it would be uncharitable to focus there. Barrios’s essay is really a reflection on technology and modernity as secular manifestations of the “slavish” spirit of Christianity which is related only tangentially to Nietzsche. Unfortunately, as such it is too enamoured of grandiose abstract formulations, as opposed to fine-grained accounts of particular phenomena, to be very illuminating.

This collection varies in quality but contains a number of useful and illuminating essays about the roles which religion plays in Nietzsche’s thought.

4. The collection Nietzsche on Morality and the Affirmation of Life brings together some of the most prominent Nietzsche scholars in the Anglo-American analytic tradition, such as Ken Gemes, Christopher Janaway and Tom Stern. Although only Daniel Came’s and Edward Kanterian’s essays are explicitly about Nietzsche’s relationship to religion, all are relevant to his thought about religion. Nietzsche criticized Christianity for “negating” rather than “affirming” life, but what does this seductive, but strangely abstract terminology mean? Came’s introduction discusses the conceptual problems it raises with helpful clarity and depth.

Ken Gemes’ Nietzsche, Nihilism and the Paradox of Affirmation is a rich essay which touches on many themes. Gemes observes that interpretations which address metaphysics and epistemology are in line with “the interests of typical Anglo-American philosophers,” but those which focus on nihilism reflect Nietzsche’s own concerns (16). This must be qualified: Nietzsche’s distinctive perspective on “the strange simplification and falsification in which the human being lives” (BGE 24) can only be achieved through epistemological reflection. Gemes notes that Bernard Reginster’s distinction between nihilisms of disorientation and despair uses one word to refer to two quite different phenomena – the convictions that there are no ultimate values (disorientation) and that there are such values which however cannot be realized (despair). Gemes notes that Nietzsche also refers to Christianity as a form of nihilism, even though it is nihilistic in neither sense. Gemes’ suggestion that all three phenomena share a disposition to turn against one’s drives, “affective nihilism,” is subtle and persuasive (22–3). In fact, Nietzsche juxtaposes Christianity with “disorientation” and claims the former is certainly nihilistic while the latter might be: “‘Either abolish your reverences or – yourselves!’ The latter would be nihilism; but would not the former also be – nihilism? This is our question mark” (GS 346). Nietzsche’s central problem is how to “abolish one’s reverences” without succumbing to despair, like the “courageous” but despairing investigators of BGE 10 for whom he uses the word “nihilism” for the first time in his books. One might say that his entire corpus is a reflection on this problem. Gemes distinguishes the ancient masters’ unreflective affirmation from the reflective form possible in modernity and claims that the latter is vastly inferior: “Reflection on life […] only arises when things have already gone seriously wrong” (29). This is too large an issue to address here. I note only that Gemes, like many commentators, assumes that Nietzsche prefers the unreflective to the reflective, but this is open to question. Finally, like Heinrich Meier in his recent interpretation,^[35] Gemes claims that the early Nietzsche is primarily interested in cultural renewal while the later Nietzsche is avowedly elitist and therefore much less interested in establishing a culture to elevate the masses. There is something to this, but Gemes draws the distinction too sharply. Extreme “elitism” can be found in the early Nietzsche^[36] and concern with cultural renewal can be found in the later Nietzsche.^[37] It would perhaps be better to say that Nietzsche learned to distinguish cultural renewal from philosophical self-cultivation more clearly, so he could subordinate the former to the latter in his own mind, even as he fused them in his rhetoric.

Daniel Came’s Nietzsche as a Christian Thinker argues that Nietzsche’s basic concern is the Christian one of theodicy: “He takes over and develops a non-traditional, secularized version of the problem. The task Nietzsche sets himself is […] to vindicate the goodness or desirability of life in the face of suffering” (41). Came cites Brian Leiter’s objection that Nietzsche would then be a thinker of theodicy in a psychological, rather than a metaphysical sense. Came responds that while this is true, Nietzsche inhabits the same psychological framework as the Christian; the attempt to redeem oneself from theodicy is analogous to the attempt to redeem oneself through theodicy. Came is correct that Nietzsche and the Christian both want to affirm life as good despite facing up to suffering. Furthermore, this is not a merely formal commonality; given that Nietzsche also characterizes Christianity as life-denying and “nihilistic,” one must ask: how does he understand the continuity between these alternative forms of affirmation? However, Came is too quick to assume that Nietzsche believes that they are completely different. In BGE 2, Nietzsche describes the “fundamental faith” of metaphysicians as a faith in value-opposites, while in BGE 24, he says that there are no “opposites” but “only many degrees and subtleties of gradation.” For Nietzsche, it is the Christian who insists on an absolute difference between himself and the anti-Christian. Nietzsche seeks to achieve a critical, self-conscious distance on the illusions inherent in “the strange simplification and falsification in which the human being lives” (BGE 24) within the empirical realm itself. Nietzsche thereby proposes a conception of the philosopher equidistant from the Platonic image of the philosopher as transcending empirical reality altogether and the Aristotelian image of the philosopher as merely rendering common sense reflectively explicit. Whether Nietzsche succeeds in articulating this conception coherently is another question.

Bernard Reginster’s Ressentiment, Power and Value focuses on ressentiment which it treats as related essentially to will to power: “Ressentiment differs from regret and resentment […] in virtue of being focused on the agent’s inability to get what he wills […]. Ressentiment is thus a response to frustration understood as an injury to the feeling of power” (71). Reginster rejects the view that free will is a stratagem invented consciously to trick the masters into feeling guilty for their rapacious behaviour because both priests and slaves “internalize the new values” created by ressentiment (62, n.1), but his account only touches on free will in passing. If one recognizes its centrality, one is faced with the problem that Nietzsche’s account of free will as an invention at a particular point in recorded history (whether as a conscious stratagem to deceive others or, as Reginster persuasively argues, as an unconscious self-deception) in GM I conflicts with his account of free will as a fundamental error that is “almost part of the basic endowment of the species” in GS 110 and elsewhere. One must then either claim that Nietzsche is inconsistent or view the narrative about the conflict between masters and slaves as deliberately overdrawn and even (in Nietzsche’s own words) “calculated to mislead” (EH, GM 2). Finally, I note that by using the catch-all word ressentiment, Nietzsche elides the commonsensical distinction between indignation at injustice and mere resentment. In a famous soliloquy, Shakespeare’s Hamlet shifts insensibly from “th’ oppressor’s wrong” and “the proud man’s contumely,” objects of indignation at injustice, to “the pangs of dispriz’d love,” something which nobody but the angriest of incels would regard as a kind of injustice, at least in a reflective moment when not caught up in passion (Hamlet 3.1.7–72). Shakespeare shows us how easy it is for indignation at injustice to shade into anger at having one’s desires frustrated. Nietzsche’s artistry mimics this conflation while implicitly highlighting both its problematic character and its significance for understanding moral affects generally. This helps us to understand why he employs ressentiment as a “term of art,” as Reginster observes (60).

Maudemarie Clark’s On the “Meaning” of the Ascetic Ideal: A Normative Interpretation of GM III is extraordinarily ambitious; she claims that all prior interpretations of the titular question in GM III, What Do Ascetic Ideals Mean? have mistakenly assumed that it asks after “what explains the acceptance, endorsement of, or attraction to the ascetic ideal,” while it is really asking after its value, a “possibility that no-one has considered until now” (82). The traditional reading is that Nietzsche is addressing a problem inherent in his principles: if the ascetic ideal negates life as it is lived in nature and history, how then to explain its amazing success? (This is how Tom Stern understands GM III in his essay; 183–4). Now, Nietzsche is perfectly willing to speak of value in similar contexts; at the end of the preface to On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), in a famous passage Nietzsche speaks of “the value of these values,” i. e. “moral values” (GM, Preface 6), which must be called into question. If Nietzsche’s formulation in the title of GM III is deliberately misleading, Clark is obligated to explain why; her general remark about Nietzsche’s deceptive writing (109), while accurate, does not explain this particular piece of alleged equivocation. If the title is misleading, then, it would appear to be accidentally, not deliberately so. Clark’s reading compels us to speak either of gross literary incompetence on Nietzsche’s part or scholarly incompetence on Clark’s part. The reader must decide which is more likely.

In Organic Unity and the Heroic: Nietzsche’s Aestheticization of Suffering, Patrick Hassan treats the problem of suffering. The Christian teaching is that human life without any suffering at all is possible (in the afterlife). Nietzsche regards this as a fiction. Nietzsche objects to the humanistic project of creating a world without suffering on this earth as accepting this fiction while rejecting the afterlife, a combination which leads to political utopianism. The Christian view is that suffering is not good in itself, but only insofar as it leads to assimilation to God, e. g., through renunciation or endurance. Nietzsche affirms suffering as good in itself, but he is motivated by his rejection of the ideal of life without suffering as a fantasy and his appraisal of this fantasy as “anti-life” because suffering is essential to life. One must be clear about this because otherwise one is led to attribute to Nietzsche the implausible view that suffering is a good which one should add to one’s own life even if one had the choice to affirm the same ends and do without it, rather than the far more plausible view that the greatest goods in this life involve inevitable suffering which one must therefore affirm as good. Hassan objects to Leiter’s view that suffering is a necessary means to desirable ends because suffering would not be essentially, but only accidentally good. Hassan defends a qualified version of Reginster’s alternative that suffering is a necessary part of a good whole. Hassan is aware this is open to an analogous objection; if this whole could be achieved without suffering as one of its parts, this would be preferable. Hassan meets this objection by distinguishing between “an enabling condition, in which the presence of suffering allows for a whole that outweighs its disvalue (X enables Y, which has value)” and “a contributor, in which suffering positively contributes value to the whole (X contributes value to Y)” (112), and arguing that suffering is not an enabling condition, but a contributing good. But why would it still not be better to achieve this whole without suffering as one of its elements, if this were possible? The Christian would maintain that in the afterlife, “heroic striving,” Hassan’s central example, takes place eternally, but without the suffering which accompanies it inevitably in this life; its object is always given to the heroic striver who eternally reaches for the good without the pains of uncertainty, resistance or difficulty. Nietzsche’s view that this ideal is a fiction which is therefore “anti-life” and expresses only exhaustion with this life, the desire for rest, supplies indispensable context for understanding his affirmation of suffering. This view motivates his strange apparent suggestions (e. g., in BGE 225) that one ought deliberately to create more suffering. In fact, Nietzsche never quite says that, although he does say that attempts to abolish suffering are foolish and bound to fail.

Andrew Huddleston’s Affirmation, Admirable Overevaluation, and the Eternal Recurrence treats of the eternal recurrence or return. Huddleston distinguishes what he calls the vindicatory approach, which insists on “affirming everything, down to the smallest detail” (132), from the deflationary, which takes the eternal return in a way “more moderate and less literal,” e. g., as affirming the existence of repeated cycles that contain differences (134). Huddleston acknowledges the texts support a vindicatory reading but argues the deflationary is more plausible philosophically. He also maintains the eternal return is better understood as a thought-experiment than as “a claim on Nietzsche’s part characterizing the actual course of cosmic history” (134). Huddleston’s careful account brings out many of the conceptual difficulties in this notion. I add three observations. First, affirming that one’s life recurs eternally is compatible with indifference to many of its details, even if one acknowledges that these details do repeat. One simply does not feel the need to focus on them because one remains delighted by the thought that one’s life recurs. Secondly, while Huddleston acknowledges that there might be an ironic distance between Nietzsche and his character Zarathustra, he assumes that the eternal return doctrine is sincerely held by Nietzsche himself as “the right evaluative attitude” (145), even if it is a thought-experiment. However, one can raise doubts. BGE 96 runs: “One should depart from life as Odysseus departed from Nausica, blessing it rather than in love with it.” This is very different from the attitude which Nietzsche encourages in the presentation of the eternal return in GS 341! Huddleston begins his article with the world-affirming man “who wants to have what was and is repeated into eternity.” This “ideal” is from BGE 56, the third chapter in the book, which is about religion. The formula ewige Wiederkunft may allude to the Christian notion of the jüngste Wiederkunft of Jesus Christ, suggesting it is an ironic replacement for it. This doctrine may be a proposal for the “ideals” of an atheistic religion, many building blocks of which can be found in Nietzsche’s texts, even as Nietzsche himself retains a philosophical distance from it. Thirdly, while there are good reasons to think that the eternal return is a thought-experiment rather than a cosmological doctrine, it presents, through a popular-mythological image, the cosmological problem which the philosopher must face as a fundamental problem (note BGE 23, which describes psychology as the path to the Grundprobleme, implying that they are not the same as derivative or secondary problems), even if it cannot be resolved.

Christopher Janaway’s Who – or What – Says Yes to Life addresses what Nietzsche means by “Yes-saying” (Ja-sagen) or “affirmation” (bejahen). This terminology has been used so frequently that its meaning is often obscured. Janaway’s attempt to bring clarity is therefore welcome. Janaway observes that Yes-saying can be of a particular phenomenon but can also be general. Usually, it is an individual person who says Yes, but it can be something impersonal, e. g., a drive or instinct, or even the will to life itself. Janaway shows that Nietzsche uses the idea of affirmation to articulate the disparity between one’s unconscious drives and the story one tells oneself; the slaves in GM I believe in free will because their unconscious instinct wants to find a way to affirm their undesirable circumstances. Janaway draws a helpful distinction between reflective and unreflective affirmation, on the one hand, and natural and culturally acquired affirmation, on the other; a culturally acquired affirmation can take unreflective forms. However, Janaway believes Nietzsche privileges the unreflective over the reflective, citing BGE 3 and 6 as evidence. But BGE 3 says that “the greater part” of “even” philosophical thought is an instinctive activity; this implies that it is less likely to be instinctive than other forms of thought, and that some philosophical thought is not purely instinctive. BGE 6 says that the philosopher differs from the scholar, and everybody else, because his “morality” expresses his hierarchy of drives; presumably in every other case the individual’s morality is out of tune with his drives. This is relevant to Janaway’s claim that, for Nietzsche, entire cultures can be Yes-saying. It is doubtful that Nietzsche believes this in anything but a highly restricted sense. I limit myself to one observation. Nietzsche values the free spirit, whom he characterizes as somebody who thinks in a way one wouldn’t expect given his upbringing and environment (HH I 225), over the constrained (gebunden) spirit. Could one imagine a culture whose highest value is questioning its own highest values? If Nietzsche believes the free spirit is the affirmative individual par excellence (as GS 347 suggests), an essentially affirmative culture would for him be impossible, even if some (e. g., that of classical Greece) are more so than others (e. g., that of modern Europe).

Tom Stern is an unusual Nietzsche scholar; while he sometimes presents charitable interpretations of Nietzsche, in Against Nietzsche’s “Theory” of the Drives, he presents a challenge to any interpreter who wants to reconstruct such a theory, arguing through an analysis of relevant passages that it cannot be done because no such theory exists.^[38] To my knowledge, this challenge has not been met, although any interpreter who wants to present a Nietzschean philosophical psychology ought to be able to. Although the essay in this volume, Against Nietzsche’s Theory of Affirmation, has a similar title, it makes an even stronger claim; Nietzsche does have a theory of affirmation, but it is self-contradictory. Someone who affirms everything must also affirm the anti-natural; one must either be a “natural affirmer” or a “total affirmer,” but Nietzsche demands that we be both. There are two ways to resolve this contradiction which Stern does not consider. First, one could maintain that the total affirmer affirms the existence and behaviour of the unnatural person, but not in the same way that he affirms his own activity. Nietzsche says that while the Christian church wants to destroy “we immoralists,” it is in “our” interest that it remains in existence (TI, Morality 3). One would have to elucidate this difference, but it is not clear that this is impossible. Secondly, one could maintain that “total affirmation,” expressed, e. g., through the eternal return doctrine, is an atheistic religious ideal Nietzsche proposes as an alternative to Christianity but from which he reserves an ironic distance. Perhaps “total affirmation” is incompatible with the highest kind of free-spiritedness; it may be a burden “we free, very free spirits” (BGE 44) have no reason voluntarily to bear; perhaps “we” would rather “look away” (GS 276). Finally, I note that Stern’s distinction between the “individualistic” middle Nietzsche who denies that nature can be an objective normative criterion and the late (“1886 onwards”) Nietzsche who adopts nature as “the ultimate source of values” (188) can be problematized if one takes his speech about “natural” values as in part a façon de parler – and, on the other hand, that Nietzsche distinguishes explicitly between nature and life in BGE 9 (see also BGE 49), as Leo Strauss observed,^[39] where he suggests that to be alive is to want to be other than nature, while Stern tends to equate them, at least as normative guarantors. Nevertheless, Stern’s illuminating essay raises real questions which the philosopher who wants to defend Nietzsche must be able to answer.

Edward Kanterian’s Life’s Affirmation and Denial: Nietzsche as a Christian raises the interesting question: “If humans cannot live without logical fictions, the unconditioned and faith, what is there to object to Christianity, or indeed any religion?” (197) However, one can distinguish between salutary and harmful falsehoods, as Nietzsche does when he praises paganism over Christianity (e. g., BGE 49, A 58); he clearly does not think that polytheistic religion is true because it is life-affirming. This raises the questions whether Nietzsche believes in the efficacy of what are traditionally called “noble lies” and whether he engages in this practice himself. On Nietzsche’s own principles, it is not obvious that Christianity ought to be regarded simply as a bad thing. Indeed, Kanterian brings up many passages in which Nietzsche is extremely positive about Christianity; however, these do not constitute evidence that he is a Christian in any substantial sense. Kanterian’s discussion of inconsistencies in Nietzsche’s portrayal of Christianity contains some interesting observations. Kanterian points out that “it is of course not true that Jesus did not preach any doctrines” (208) and that Nietzsche contradicts himself in claiming that Jesus was the only Christian and then, shortly afterwards, claiming that Christianity has been possible throughout the ages. A possible explanation of Nietzsche’s inconsistent statements about Christianity in general and Jesus in particular (e. g., the immoralist of BGE 164, the moralistic inventor of hell of BGE 269 and the quietist of The Antichrist (1888)) is that he did not think it possible to determine the historical genesis of Christianity in the Roman province of Palestine, only to formulate a variety of speculative hypotheses. What Nietzsche did think is possible is to criticize Christianity as a set of dogmas on philosophical grounds. It is in this spirit that he describes “the old soul concept” as the “fundamental presupposition of the Christian teaching,” which “the whole of modern philosophy” attacks (BGE 54). Nietzsche’s rejection of this concept is why he is not a Christian, whatever his varying and perhaps inconsistent remarks about Christianity’s political and cultural value and his different hypotheses about its historical genesis.

All the essays in this volume except Clark’s display the virtues of precision and argumentative rigour associated with the analytic school of philosophy. I do not believe that precision, rigour and clarity are inappropriate for the task of explicating Nietzsche’s thought. Despite appearances to the contrary, Nietzsche prizes these virtues. One should not use the interpretation of Nietzsche as an occasion to oppose the clear and the precise to the vital and the compelling; rather, for Nietzsche, even if they are often in tension, they can be reconciled in the philosophical life (BGE 213). In the preface to the 1886 edition of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche says that it is

clumsy, embarrassing, with a rage for imagery and confused in its imagery, emotional, here and there sugary to the point of effeminacy, uneven in pace, lacking the will to logical cleanliness, very convinced and therefore too arrogant to prove its assertions, mistrustful even of the propriety of proving things (BT, Attempt 3).

But Nietzsche knew that this is exactly how his late works would also seem to many readers. It is the task of the scholar to show that this impression is inaccurate, even as Nietzsche himself cultivated it deliberately.

Concluding Remarks

Coming to grips with Nietzsche involves coming to grips with Christianity. Nietzsche himself wanted it this way; otherwise, he would not have presented his own thought in polemical opposition to Christianity. Yet, Nietzsche’s reasons for not being Christian are not primarily that he believed that he had a deep insight into the affective motivations of the Christian (although he did believe this), but rather because he believed that the Christian teaching rests on illusions, above all the belief in free will; his critique of these putative illusions is the presupposition of his psychology of the Christian believer. It is true that Nietzsche says: “What is now decisive against Christianity is our taste, no longer our reasons” (GS 132). But the first-person plural, not singular, is crucial. Earlier in the same book, he emphasized that “the great majority” do not have an intellectual conscience, do not ask after reasons (GS 2). This majority presumably includes most of those whose “taste” now speaks against Christianity; it does not include Nietzsche himself, as GS 2 itself emphasizes. Further, while Nietzsche directs polemical rhetoric against Christianity, it frequently has an ironic and self-referential character, which makes his true assessment of Christianity as a political and cultural force difficult to determine, as some of the scholarship I have surveyed, such as the essays by Cocever and Kanterian, emphasizes. Nietzsche himself noted: “Attack is in my case a proof of good will, sometimes even of gratitude. I honour, I distinguish by associating my name with that of a cause or a person […]. The most serious Christians have always been favourably disposed towards me” (EH, Wise 7).

I conclude by drawing attention to two curious anomalies which provoke thought about Nietzsche’s complex relation to Christianity. In The Antichrist, Nietzsche describes Christianity as “the one great curse,” “the one great innermost corruption” and “the one immortal blot on humanity” (A 62). He suggests that instead of reckoning time from the birth of Jesus, we ought to reckon time from “the last day” of Christianity, “from today” – suggesting that he wants to abolish Christianity through the publication of this book. But in Twilight of the Idols (1889), Nietzsche had said that the difference between the Christian church and “we immoralists” is that the church wants to eliminate “us” while “we” want the church to remain in existence (TI, Morality 3). Perhaps Nietzsche changed his mind drastically on this issue between September and December 1888, but it is more likely that his assessment of Christianity is more nuanced than his most polemical rhetoric suggests. This supposition is strengthened by the fact that in 1885, Nietzsche used the proceeds from a settlement to purchase a gravestone for his father, a Lutheran minister, inscribed with a quotation from scripture:

Having been awarded seven thousand Swiss francs in a court settlement against his publisher, the first thing he purchased after paying off bookstore debts was an engraved tombstone for his father’s grave – thirty-six years after Ludwig’s death. It appears that it was Nietzsche himself (by now in full swing as the scourge of Christianity) who designed the stone on which is inscribed a quotation from St. Paul: “Love never faileth (I Cor, 13, 8).”^[40]

Perhaps filial love overcame Nietzsche’s personal hostility to Christianity, but it is perhaps rather the case that his polemics against Christianity have an element of deliberate hyperbole, indirection and comedy, the playfulness of a satyr or “buffoon” (Hanswurst), an appreciation of which is crucial for understanding them.^[41]