IN 1888, Friedrich Nietzsche announced in his autobiography, Ecce Homo, “I’m not a person, I’m dynamite.” As he approached an extended twilight of appalling health and failing eyesight, the claim reflected his celebrated aphorism “That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” Nietzsche’s life had been defined by periods of physical and mental illness for days and weeks on end. These were followed by bouts of recuperation which enabled him to handle deep philosophical problems that, he knew, demanded fresh answers. The challenge that these posed was to prove his vocation and his burden.
Against what he thought to be the prevailing tide of spent and untenable ideas concerning human existence, Christian morality, and metaphysical beliefs, Nietzsche’s self-imposed task was to make a recent start: to strip away dreams and delusions concerning God, and a beyond or hereafter, in an effort to live more intensely in a godless and chaotic world devoid of absolute values.
A parable in his early notebooks made clear his intention: “Once upon a time on a bit star in a distant corner of the universe, clever little animals invented for themselves proud words like truth and goodness. But soon enough the little star cooled, and the little animals needed to die and with them their proud words. But the universe moved on . . . dancing its cosmic dance across infinite skies.”
THIS gently mocking vignette of cosmic indifference to human concerns or ultimate destinies is the work of a person who had once entertained the prospect of following his father as a Lutheran pastor, and who, in 1869, aged only 24, had been appointed Professor of Classical Philology on the University of Basel, in Switzerland.
He was disenchanted with Christianity, which — with what he saw as its negative attitude to this world, and its morbid emphasis on renunciation, sacrifice, and weakness because the crucial concomitants of a future blessedness — had come to represent for him “a hatred against pride, courage, liberty of the spirit, of the fun of the senses, of joy altogether”. But dusty, unrewarding scholarship also left him dissatisfied and unwell. After ten years, he resigned his professorship.
In 1879, now stateless, he began years of restless wandering, sometimes walking for 4 or five hours every day. Seeking love, he experienced only rejection and humiliation by the hands of Lou Salomé, an mental femme fatale. That he managed to jot down the books that might establish his fame and status as a polemicist and contrarian was remarkable: an affidavit not only to his literary genius and elegance (rarely had explosive aphorisms been used so effectively), but additionally due to what he achieved creatively through his suffering.
ADMIRERS hailed him because the daring despiser of Christianity who, in The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, had pronounced “God is dead. . . And we have now killed him.” The avant-garde, disillusioned by the cultural drabness of the day, seized upon Nietzsche’s ideas and person with alacrity. He was likened to the Buddha, or Christ (bookplates carried images of him wearing a crown of thorns). “Nietzsche evenings” were held to debate and disseminate his works. Enthusiasts entertained the hope that at some point these would equal the spread of the Bible.
On the battlefields of the First World War, 150,000 copies of his writings were issued to German soldiers to hold with them for inspiration and consolation. Novels and plays began to include his teachings, as did musical compositions by Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler.
Conventional piety was affronted. Printers initially refused to provide Nietzsche’s books, out of fear of giving offence. Critics labelled him as a nihilist who, in denying God, had robbed lifetime of its meaning and purpose — or, conversely, as a degenerate “who would rave for a season, after which perish”.
Later, others went further, seeing (quite mistakenly) in his teaching on the “will to power” and the projected rise of the Übermensch (Nietzsche’s fabled Superman, who would transcend paltry moral codes and human limitations and change into the master of the earth) the putrid seeds of German nationalism and anti-Semitism. For this misreading, blame may be attached only to Nietzsche’s sister, Elisabeth, who plundered his literary archive after his death for her own ultra-nationalist and anti-Semitic ends.
NIETZSCHE’s fame didn’t wither and fade. As he himself predicted, his long shadow looms ever larger within the West as religion and culture more generally are confronted by the eclipse of God and increasing levels of depression and meaninglessness. His ideas also proceed to be misunderstood and misrepresented.
To be clear, then: in raising objections to the elevation inside Christianity of renunciation above all other human considerations, including joy, Nietzsche exposed in its world-view a persistent dualism that was contrary to much of the Old Testament, and made a troubled world needlessly miserable and gray.
In attesting to the death of God (as others, including Heinrich Heine and Victor Hugo, had done before him), Nietzsche was not proclaiming the demise of the Christian deity because the vindication of atheism, but, reasonably, as a tragedy for humanity because it lost its objective foundation for truth and morality and faced nihilism and despair.
Here, the challenge to theology and the Church in a secular age stays: beyond our emotions and the accepted human need for purpose, explanation, and belief, what sort of living reality encounters us which reason alone cannot grasp, and words — nonetheless sublime — cannot fully articulate?
IN NIETZSCHE’s doctrine of the “will to power and the role of the Übermensch”, he did reject the “slave morality” of Christianity, but not for the aim of starting wars or dominating “inferior” races. Somewhat perplexingly, and without further explanation, he envisaged a significant individual of the long run, who wouldn’t succumb to nihilism and would turn setbacks to his advantage, thereby finding a still point in life, even within the midst of chaos or the absence of God.
After suffering no less than two strokes, Nietzsche died, aged 55, on 25 August 1900. A funeral oration, given by a friend and secretary, included the ascription: “Holy be your name to all future generations.” It is a reputation that also challenges all who take seriously the query what makes for a really authentic life: a thinker acknowledged by Rowan Williams as “some of the overwhelming mental presences within the mind of contemporary Europe”.
Canon Rod Garner is an Anglican priest, author, and theologian.
