Leithart
Hart has previously discussed various postmodernism options for aesthetics, showing how postmodernism reduces to an ontology of violence or a discourse of the sublime. Now he turns to Nietzsche to ask whether he provides a possible future for thought.
III. The Will to Power.
Hart suggests that in Nietzsche, the church faces ?a philosophical adversary whose critique of Christianity appears to be as radical as the kerygma it denounces.?EMore than even the ancient opponents of Christianity like Celsus, Nietzsche has grasped how thoroughly Christianity subverted the values of antiquity, and this allows ?theology to glimpse something of its own depths in the mirror of his contempt.?ENietzsche thus ?does faith honor?Ewhile attacking it.
At the same time that theology recognizes the value of Nietzsche?s critique of Christianity, it should also respond to his challenge. While doing this, theology must recognize the character of Nietzsche?s attack, which is ?first and foremost a virtuoso performance, a rhetorical tour de force?Erather than a reasoned argument. Hart examines Nietzsche?s development of three points: his attack on Christian morality; his views on the person of Christ; and finally an assessment of the force of his critique. This response does not focus on the historical accuracy of Nietzsche?s critique, since the force of the critique does not depend on accuracy but upon the rhetorical power of the narrative subversion that Nietzsche attempts. The church must meet Nietzsche?s challenge on the field of rhetoric and narrative.
Christian morality. Nietzsche objection to Christianity is not so much intellectual as aesthetic; it is a matter of taste. Christianity inverts all noble values of antiquity, and represents a strategy of ressentiment, the resentment of the weak against the strong. Christianity is an enemy of life, natural life with all its urges and pains and violences; Christianity is a withdrawal from the world, a poor man?s Platonism that urges men to see life here as impure and to yearn instead for eternity. It is the religion of masculation. Christianity is an enemy of life, false to the world, a cruel denial of sensuality and joy.
As an alternative, Nietzsche offers Dionysus, the god of ecstasy, life, power, joy. Dionysus represents the celebration of life as it is, while the cross of Christ represents the condemnation of this life as it is. For the Dionysian, being needs no justification, it is in Nietzsche?s words ?holy enough to justify even a monstrous amount of suffering.?EThe cross renders life guilty and unjust, while the suffering of Dionysus, his dismemberment and restoration, is the justice of being.
Christianity thus arises from a slave mentality, where the weak undermine the values of nobility in favor of the their own values ?Ethe values of pity, relief, comfort, and consolation. A specifically Jewish spite for the strong thus drives Christian morality, a kind of ?aggressive impotence.?EHart points out how effectively Nietzsche evokes the psychology of resentment, exploiting a specifically Christian tendency to examine and suspect motives, and to anticipate hypocrisy lurking in even the purest hearts.
Positively, Nietzsche claims that ?life simply is will to power.?EMan is to conform to nature, and nature teaches continuous agon. Suppression of this natural strife is the work of world-despising priests, the villains of Nietzsche?s narrative (as also, curiously, of the liberal Protestant narrative). Consonance with nature is the standard against which all moralities are judged, Christianity especially; and Christianity is an inversion of nature. (Hart acknowledges Jaspers?s point that Nietzsche may be self-contradictory at this point, since he presents an ?absolute?Estandard in the course of attacking absolutes.)
Christianity?s invention of the soul ?Ea stable presence underlying action and change ?Eas the greatest inversion of nature brought to man. The invention of the soul created a ?moral interval?Ebetween force and its exercise; the notion of a soul leads to a divided self, such that the pursuit of natural instincts and the will to power has to be ?checked against?Ethe underlying reality of soul. The invention of soul gives a man the opportunity to withdraw from his act, ?recoil from his own force.?EA man with a soul might be guilty of pursuing his natural force. But the moral interval is not naturally there, Nietzsche claims, but is an invention of priests. Birds of prey is not free to be passive, nor is it guilty for preying on its prey. Civilization depends on sublimating the will to power into socially constructive uses ?Esacrifice, self-discipline, the internalization of law. This sublimation is actually necessary for the full development of power. Of this sublimation, however, Christianity is a parody, sublimating aggression not into socially useful pursuits but creating bad conscience, the internalization of morality that involves man?s most aggressive instincts being turned against himself. Christianity further refuses to acknowledge that it is involves in this dissumlation, refuses to acknowledge that Christianity is itself a manifestation of the will to power. Priests rule ?through the invention of sin.?E
Hart offers a series of criticisms of this genealogy of morals. First, there is a contradiction at the heart of Nietzsche?s account, in that he speaks of ?life?Eand ?nature?Eand ?instinct?Eas if they were absolutes, all the while claiming that all truths are culturally contingent. Second, Nietzsche?s construct depends on an absolute metaphysics in which life is ?essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering.?ENietzsche, in short, is evangelizing for an ontology of violence of a basic kind. For Hart, this is no more ?natural?Ethan an ontology of peace and gift; Nietzsche?s preference for the agon is simply an aesthetic preference, a matter of taste. Third, while Christianity early on adopted a Platonic language, it quickly found that it could not maintain it in its original form. Already with Plotinus, in fact, Platonism had moved in a ?Christian?Edirection, in that Plotinus substituted emanation for the original Platonic notion of a ?specular relationship between the apparent world of chaotic materiality and the ideal world it imperfectly imitates.?EFor Plotinus, the infinite was no longer fearful or chaotic, but the ?positive plenitude of the goodness of the One.?EChristianity pressed further, declaring the Trinity to be equal persons in perichoretic unity, thus undermining the Neoplatonic hierarchy of diminishing being and destroying finall the ?last trace of an ontological space of the simulacral.?EChristianity thus affirmed that created difference is good. Fourth, for the church fathers, the fact that creation means the formation of another difference is not the same as creation as the formation of ?another world.?EChristianity does not really teach that there are ?two worlds,?Eeternity and time, but rather that the world is much larger and more expansive than we realize. Were this not the case, Christianity could not have spoken of the world as good, as participation in the good, or as manifesting the glory of God. Prior to modern Protestantism, only gnostics spoke of ?another world?Eof ?spiritual (or existential) interiority.?EFor ancient Christianity, the cosmos joined heaven and earth seamlessly.
Fifth, the church can actually join Nietzsche in his enmity to every faith that distracts from or hates life, but this view, however often it manifested itself in Christianity, actually arose within ancient paganism. By the time of Christianity?s appearance, it had been recognized that ancient religion was a religion of strife, and two alternatives presented themselves ?Eempire, which would suppress strife by the triumph of one god or power, and retreat from the world. Insofar as Nietzsche?s critique applies to the church, it really applies to gnosticism, which the church rejected long before Nietzsche. Christianity, by contrast, came onto the scene affirmi
ng flesh in all kinds of unseemly ways ?Eincarnation, resurrection of the body, transfiguration of the cosmos. Christianity came on the scene claiming, with Judaism, that the world was good, a manifestation of the glory of God. Nietzsche never grasps Christianity?s view of creation, nor the corollary that evil is not a substance. Even the cross is not a renunciation of the world; Christ renounced wine as he went to the cross, and with wine he rejected all the abundance and joy of creation, but he renounced with the promise that he would drink it new in the kingdom. In a brilliant excursus, Hart suggests that the whole contrast of Dionysus and Christ can be summarized through a consideration of wine. For Dionysus, wine is ?repeatedly associated with madness, anthropophagy, slaughter, warfare, and rapine,?Ewhile the wine of Christianity is ?the wine of agape and the feast of fellowship.?EBut how would Nietzsche know the difference? He ?was a teetotaler and could not judge the merit of either vintage.?E
Sixth, what of the soul? Citing Milbank, Hart suggests that there is no need to project moral judgment to a permanent ?self?Eunderlying action, since ?within ?noble?Eactions there is always already a metaphorical tension.?EThat is, the noble are always already formed by cultural codes, by narratives, by mimesis of some totem. The slaves who challenge noble morality might simply recognize the metaphorical nature, that is the contingency, of noble morality and wish to offer an alternative metaphor. Nietzsche, Milbank recognizes, cares little about the codes that function within ?noble?Esocieties, taking them, contradictorily, as an expression of pure nature.
This suggests, further, that Nietzsche is operating with an anthropology every bit as essentialist as Descartes. If the warrior is nothing but his own actions, and each action is an immediate expression of the self, ?what would he be other than an egological substance?E If there is no interval between action and identity, then ?is this not still the concrete reality of a self, invariable and absolute, the Cartesian ego transposed into a phenomenalist key??EA soul that is at the surface, even if it is called an ?event?Erather than a substance, is still a mythical, and a phenomenalized substance is still a substance. The moral interval that Nietzsche wants to reject is actually a delay or opening that divides the will, reason, and desire, and where the self ?finds itself always subject to the bearing over (METAPHEREIN) of metaphor.?EChristianity?s interiority is ?an inward fold of an outward surface,?Ea place where the self might be reinterpreted and rewritten. Against Nietzsche, ?only an essential self could be immutable and resistant to every renarration.?ENature and totemism arise together, metaphor is always present, and therefore there is no tracing back beyond culture and language. This means that within human action, there is always an absence within every presence (because of the ?gap?Eopened by metaphor). Nietzsche again is merely declaring his preference for certain kinds of totems.
What of the charge that Christianity is so bound up with an account of the self that the postmodern destruction of the subject is a frontal attack on Christianity? Hart suggests that Christianity is in fact a much more radical critic of an invariable, essential self than Nietzsche is. Nietzsche, after all, finds will to power and only will to power in every surface intention that he examines; he always seeks something deeper than the surface, and each time the depths are the same. Admiration of saints is for Nietzsche only an admiration for their will to power. Hart points out that saints can evoke a whole range of responses, and might open the viewer to the form of Christ that has shaped the saint. Nietzsche?s account is reductive, and hence essentialist; interiority is a fixed reality, fixated on power.
Early Christianity did not in fact invent or even teach that the self is a timeless substance that remains fixed and stable despite all eternal changes. For Augustine, often cited as the inventor of subjectivity, the self has no center in itself, but is constituted by its longing for an infinite that it cannot possess. The imago Dei is in fact precisely this, not a possession so much as a desire for the infinity of God, a hope. For Gregory of Nyssa, the soul is ?an always outstretched, open, and changing motion, an infinite exodus from nothingness into God?s inexhaustible transcendence.?E
In the end, the main charge against Nietzsche?s historicist genealogy is that ?it simply is not nearly historicist enough.?E
Jesus. Exposing the fact that Nietzsche?s historical accounts are guided by a monist metaphysical position does not really undermine his critique. Again, aesthetics is the key. Nietzsche takes the position that ?truth?Eis in service to evaluation, and his goal is to identify an aesthetic disposition (noble virtue) from which to wage a war of stories. Christianity has long understood this, that it cannot offer any more fundamental ?argument?Efor the faith than the form of Christ Himself, than the narrative of the gospel. Thus, while Christianity can acknowledge that its own history has been in some measure a history of apostasy, it cannot accept an assault on the form of Christ. Hence we come to Nietzsche?s account of Jesus.
Nietzsche finds it difficult to fit Jesus into his story of will to power and ressentiment. Jesus renounces power, but not out of resentment. What to do with him? Nietzsche makes two key moves, first cutting off Jesus from the church and asserting his utter uniqueness, and second arguing that Jesus was decadent and life-denying to begin with.
Nietzsche?s account of Jesus depends heavily on the biblical scholarship of his time, but is more honest that he is pursuing an imaginative construct of Jesus, rather than what he considers an inaccessible historical Jesus. He attempts to describe the psychology of Jesus, but he does so without much real attention to the gospels?Eaccount of Jesus. With the gospels no more than a palimpsest, Nietzsche is free to create a Jesus for his own purposes. Hart argues that Nietzsche?s account is ?exceeded in every direction by the uncanniness of the Christ of the Gospels.?EJesus outfoxes Nietzsche.
What kind of psyche does Jesus possess? He has no capacity for enmity, and therefore cannot be a hero. Instead, he ?lived in a sweet delerium, in which a life of eternal love seemed present in each moment, in which all men appeared as equal, the children of God; an inner world of his own creation, one to which he fled principally on account of his excessive sensitivity to touch and abrasion, his morbid dread of reality?s sting; his was a child?s evangel, an exhortation to simple faith, a devotion to an inner light and an immunity to all concrete realities.?EThis Jesus is not Jewish; he is not an apocalyptic prophet; he is not one to drive money-changers from the temple. All such sharpness and edginess is a Jewish falsification of the gospel. Nietzsche?s Jesus is the Jesus of liberal Protestantism, the beautiful soul of Hegel, operating by a kind of angelistic retreat from the world. This is amazing: Nietzsche finds nothing in the gospels except what is given by liberal Protestantism. Nietzsche even repeats the liberal Protestant separation of Jesus and Paul. Jesus was the first and only Christian, but Paul restores Jewish resentment to Christianity in his interpretation of the cross, in an effort to assert his sacerdotal control of the masses. Radical? Harumph.
Hart charges that Nietzsche?s Jesus is not only an historical failure, but more importantly an imaginative one. His psychology is formed simplistically between the poles of action and reaction, and he cannot imagine a responsiveness that is creative, which is precisely the Christian notion of agape. Even if Jesus is the dreamer that Nietzsche claims, this is not necessarily at the expense of creativity, suggesting instead that ?a certain distance and oneiric cast of mind, is required for any cre
ative action; a new practice requires a new imagination of the world.?EJesus was re-imagining the world not according to the grammar of power but the grammar of agape. The church is the social realization of this re-imagining of the world, ?a partial realization and imperfect enactment of this new creation.?EBut this is precisely what Nietzsche cannot allow. Perhaps there can be one man who renounces the will to power with sincerity, but if there is a community that is governed by love rather than power, Nietzsche?s ontology of violence, his monism of the will to power, must be false. The very existence of the church gives the lie to Nietzsche?s metaphysics.
Force of Critique. Nietzsche in the end serves the ?wisdom of totality,?Ealbeit a totality that, like Dionysus, rends itself in order to be reborn. But Christ sends tremors through totality, subverting both Dionysus and Apollo, and showing that ?every claim to power and to rights [is] not only provisional, not only false, but quite simply absurd.?EThe Christian claim that the beauty of Christ appears among the outcasts and slaves is not a sop of comfort nor an endorsement of weakness or ugliness; the beauty of Christ radiates from the slaves because Christ dwells in them. If this is to be believed, it will require a far more radical antiessentialism and historicism than Nietzsche?s: ?it would require the belief that nothing in the world so essentially determines the nature of humanity or the scope of the human soul that there is no possibility of being reborn.?E
Again, taste is the key issue. Nietzsche?s disdain for Christianity does not follow from his critique; it is the force of the critique. Postmodern disciples of Nietzsche thus fail to mount so serious a challenge as their master when they focus on his metaphysics rather than his evangelistic rhetoric. And his aesthetic preferences run against the preferences and tastes of the gospels. Nietzsche finds it ?laughable?Ethat the gospels show God interested in and involved with ?the pettiest troubles?Eof the fishermen and petty officials of the gospels. He is most offended that the gospels could record Peter?s tears after his denial as if they were meaningful or profound. No self-respecting ancient writer would have shown a fisherman?s tears without mocking them. The gospels thus mark a revolution indeed, a revolution of taste, and this is where the battle between Nietzsche and Christianity must be joined: ?The most potent reply a Christian can make to Nietzsche?s critique is to accuse him of a defect of sensibility ?Eof bad taste.?E
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