Nietzsche’s diatribe against bad
conscience as a ‘disease’ may sound overstated, if it is generalized against
all Christianity across the board, but the experience of many Evangelical
churches in America, of which I can judge from personal experience, shows ‘bad
conscience’ turned into such a caricature that I doubt that even his vivid
imagination could ever have caught up with the horrifyingly ludicrous reality
of testimonies given by those weeping, self-abusing ‘invalid-sinners’ joyously
and tearfully spilling their diseased guts in a most sick, gruesome, revolting
detail in front of the appreciative Sunday-dressed audiences, little children
and all, every Sunday morning in every Christian church all around the
nation.
As a matter of fact, I have read
tons of books of literature with depictions and references to Tartuffery and
self-deprecating orgies, but none of those can rival the ugly reality of my
personal observations. Nothing of this sort exists in the Russian church. The
Catholic churches, where I also had some experience, are much more subdued,
even when talking of the horrors of sin and the curse of the Fall. Wherever
Nietzsche finds the source of his own experience, I cannot say for sure, but if
that was something comparable, I would not blame him for his fiery condemnation
and nausea-driven contempt.
But let me stop now, and make a
confession that I may have been unfair in singling out modern American
churches. The above-described revolting sickness in Christianity goes back a
long way virtually to its early days, and Nietzsche, for one, had a lot of its
clinical history to draw from.
Incidentally, I have almost
forgotten, but now remember those passages from Tertullian, and even Thomas
Aquinas, quoted somewhere among my fragments, revoltingly promising the
wretched Christian sufferers of their time, and by extension of all time, that
incomparable bliss of eternally watching the
spectacle of God’s enemies eternally tortured in Hell! These horror things are worth each other,
what was I thinking?!
There is an obvious connection
here between the sickness of the Dark Ages, and the more recent Christian
practices. When sickness is seen as the norm, it encourages imitation, and this
is where things are getting really ugly.
It is clear to me now that those
Church Fathers who promised their fellow Christians the bliss of watching other
people’s eternal suffering were very sick men, the type of invalid Nietzsche is
talking about. The key worry here, in general, aside from the sickness of the
sick minds, is the hypocrisy of the not-so-sick. Their tearful
testimonies are too often not an expression of pathology, but oftentimes a
calculated tribute to other people’s sickness, and a recognition of this
general cult and culture of sickness as the norm, to which they obligingly
defer, in their public confessions.
To put it in a nutshell, whatever
Nietzsche says about Christianity, even in the strongest disparaging terms, may
be a perfectly legitimate expression of his utter disgust for the abnormal and
unnatural practices of all these men and women who have sadly come to represent
the faith and practice of Christianity, supposedly, the highest achievement of
our Western civilization.
Summing it up, there are
perfectly legitimate aspects in Nietzsche’s criticism of Christianity but
whether he was indeed anti-Christ in the sense that he was opposed not
just to the questionable practices but also to the legitimate basic principles
of Christianity is a more difficult question. He probably repudiated the dogma
as formulated by Apostle Paul in the New Testament Epistles, but he
could not possibly be unsympathetic to the person of Jesus Christ, as some of
his Christ references strongly indicate. In our next entry, aptly titled Nietzsche
The Covert Christian, we shall continue this discussion, with the clear
understanding that, so far, the main question in the title of the present entry
has not been answered with any degree of satisfaction.
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