It must be said that what Nietzsche calls the “hatred of reality”is basically the Christian conviction that this world, that is reality,has been taken over by Satan, and, hating Satan, it is only natural to make the next step and the next, etc., in the sense of hating all Satan’s domain, which is this world and which is our reality, and therefore Nietzsche is logically correct, but only if he looks at this picture from this one particular angle. As we know, looking at any given picture from different angles may dramatically alter our perception of that picture, hence we can be caught at different times praising the same things that we had so strongly condemned a little while before. We can actually find the best illustrations of this in the realm of proverbs. “Haste makes waste,” but it is “the early bird that catches the worm.” We are advised to sleep on it,but we also know that “vigilance never sleeps.” Go figure whether haste or sleep are good or bad things, but the best answer to this conundrum is to reject dogmatism, and to announce the golden rule that it all depends on the circumstances. (This is of course by no means relativism, but sheer common sense. The relativists actually take it much farther than common sense permits.)
The great service which Nietzsche offers to humanity in his criticism of Christianity, is allowing Christians and non-Christians alike to look at it from a different perspective. It is by ridiculing and condemning the excesses of religious practice that religious practice itself can be purged from such unwelcome elements. I see no contradiction, therefore, between my acceptance of Russian Orthodox Christianity, which of course also suffers from some of the faults noted by Nietzsche, and my admiration nevertheless for Nietzsche’s free spirit, and for the very same diatribes of his, which make other Christians cringe.
And it is true that Christian practice is guilty of many things, but, in order to see what is wrong with it, one must be capable of stepping aside from the uncritical homiletic posture and assume a philosophical stance, with which Nietzsche is offering us an exceptionally valuable assistance.
Here is a magnificent line from Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals; 3rd Essay (20), which may sound cruel, but rings true nevertheless: “For two millennia now we have been condemned to the sight of this new type of invalid, the sinner.” One of the things Christianity has been guilty of is the glorification of the sinner. It should be most useful to look at this matter at a closer range, and as soon as we do it, the incongruence of a particular Christian practice catches our eye.
“Go, and sin no more,” Jesus tells the adulteress, in John 8:11. He does not ‘glorify the sinner’ here, while ‘condemning her sin,’ as they commonly and ecstatically do in the Evangelical Christian churches. He has just saved her from a violent death and lets her go with a stern admonition to sin no more.
True, we all have sinned, but this is not an excuse to glorify the sinner. Turning a private act of repentance into an obscene orgy of public theater is an abomination. Repentance every Sunday, and in large numbers, creates the perpetual sinner, and his or her jazzy release from culpability on a weekly basis seems designed to celebrate not the elusive virtue of triumphant righteousness, but the chronic depravity of sin.
Christianity seems to have given up on sinning no more, and turned a habitually self-confessing scoundrel into its get-real hero.
Why should I be offended by Nietzsche’s anti-Christian invective? He is a philosopher, with all that it entails. He is not offending my sense of religious propriety. Christianity is really not on trial, nor under attack here. Hypocrisy is…
To be continued…
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