DEUS MAXIMUS

In my earlier commentary on Section 19 of this 2^nd Essay, I already stated some of my reasons for holding back the critics of Nietzsche’s attack on the Christian God. Here is yet another pertinent passage from his Section 20, with my annotations within and following the text itself (From Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals; 2^nd Essay [20]):

“The advent of the Christian God, as the maximum god obtained so far (this thesis is questionable enough already to require a stop right here. Let us consider the great religion of Islam, which in its origin postdates Christianity and considers itself the highest of the three steps, the first (and lowest!) being God’s revelation to the Jews in Judaism. The Moslems insist on Jesus being a Prophet of God, whereas Mohammed was the Prophet of the last Revelation, and therefore, in a sense, the greatest of all Prophets. Needless to say, when we talk of the Jewish God, the Christian God and Allah, the God of Islam, He is the same God; in Christian theology He is God the Father, but our distinction refers to the differences in specific religions, rather than in the nature of God. Of course, we might immediately object, insisting that the Trinity of the Christians is an entirely different quality of God, and therefore the previous argument is not valid, however even according to the strictest interpreters of the Christian dogma, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, in addition to God The Father, do not splinter the Oneness of God, they are merely different manifestations of One God, making Him more comprehensible to the believers; and, again, One God is the same in the three great religions. My point however is that even if this may indeed seem so to us Christians, the idea that our God is the maximum god, even though it is undoubtedly the most intricate of all ideas of the Deity, is more representative of our religious Credo, than a universally established fact. On the other hand, if we are simply stating here that the maximum god represents the maximum culture, known as the Western Civilization, that would be a totally different story, but, even then, it would fail to qualify as a universally established fact!), was accompanied by the maximum feeling of guilty indebtedness on earth. Presuming we have gradually entered upon the reverse course, there is no small probability that with the irresistible decline of faith in the Christian God (history may already have proved to us that the decline of faith, which Nietzsche is referring to, and quite correctly, may have been a temporary phenomenon, the ebb of a tide!) there is now also a considerable decline in mankind’s feeling of guilt, indeed, the prospect cannot be dismissed that the complete victory of atheism might free mankind of this whole feeling of indebtedness toward its origin, its causa prima. (In every instance of using the word mankind, I wonder what Nietzsche actually means. Europe, or, perhaps, Nietzsche’s familiar, explored world, may be a more appropriate way of saying it. The age of colonialism may have created in Europe such a sense of European superiority over the rest of the world that the word mankind must be taken with this caveat, even when Nietzsche ipse uses it.) Atheism and a kind of second innocence belong together.”

I have too much respect for Nietzsche to suspect him of ignorance in certain matters, but especially, of his inadvertent confusion of religion and philosophy. However, I need to point to the bigger picture, where the socio-philosophical imperative of establishing the authority of One God overrules the ‘atheistic’ alternative. Atheism is not about to happen any time soon, which means never, because the historical development of great cultures, their conflicts, the decline of some and the ascent of others, leads to a continual renewal of the God concept, a renewal of God, coming from the ascending ambitious new cultures, rooted in the God of their religions, and all passionately eager to demonstrate to the rest of the world the ascendancy not of some sexless, neutered, non-cultural mutated form called atheism, but of a vigorous, youthful, nationalistic God of the newcomer, or possibly, a rejuvenated, reinvigorated returner on the world stage, now coming into his own. Atheism cannot triumph in the world any time soon because it is, in effect, a Globalist, Internationalist (in the sense of being anti-nationalist) weapon of disarming the nations by destroying their peculiar cultures, their peculiar worship of God, in accordance with their nationalistic tradition, so that they can all reassemble “under a new ownership,” a new management, a new, superimposed acultural identity of a new Globalist Universe, at the expense, and to the detriment, of individual cultural identities, and to the advantage of the capable managerial minority, who would rather sacrifice their own culture by destroying all culture, so that they can win their snug room at the top, than allow any majority culture to prosper and keep them politically always reduced to a subservient minority status.

I can thus only sympathize with Nietzsche’s self-evident frustration: not with God, but with the degeneration of established religion, the same frustration which before him motivated Kierkegaard, in his denunciation of Christianity as being corrupted by its own political power, and then later the Russians who were so determined, and in retrospect so successful in their experiment of religious purification known as their national history in the twentieth century.