GOD AND THE DEVIL AS ONE: BLASPHEMY OR A REVELATION?

 

Sometimes I am prone to pushing the limits of my religious reverence, but all for a good cause: in order to enquire into the mystery of free speech, and what it actually means.

In one of such “quizzical” moods, I once asked myself, whether the faint demarcation line, separating our philosophical revelation from an offensive blasphemy is, philosophically speaking, the same line as the one drawn between art and pornography? Indeed, by the same token as the aesthetical being unthinkable as unethical, it has to be the censorship of free thought that needs to be labeled as immoral, rather than free thought herself, a gift from God to us, wherever it may take us in its flight. In a sense, such censorship would be acting as the hot rays of the sun, which melted the wax of Icarus’s wings, turning his free flight into a freefall.

For this reason, I cannot agree with those critics of Nietzsche who find many of his undeniably outrageous remarks offensive. Like the following one, in his Ecce Homo, Beyond Good and Evil Chapter, Section 2:

“Theologically speaking, it was God himself who, at the end of his days’ work, lay down as a serpent under the tree of knowledge: thus he recuperated from being God. He had made everything too beautifully... The devil is merely the leisure of God on that seventh day.”

Here is the consummate Nietzsche,-- beautiful, totally magnificent, original, thought-provoking, unafraid of heights. No, I am not going to either agree or disagree with him here: it would be too simplistic. This is not even my reason for quoting him, as my main point is far more general: Whether one would agree with him, or not, does not really matter, as long as he makes us think!

Such a thinker is never a blasphemer, whatever he utters in his pristine sincerity. Like all God’s prophets, his words are divine revelations, not in the sense of their acceptance literally, which would be tantamount to our renunciation of philosophical freedom to the fetters of superstition, but as an invitation to the sacred act of thinking, in which our intellectual capacity is increased multifold by such an exposure to the infinite; and the truth, in the Socratic/Platonic sense, is thus made more accessible to our senses.

But let us not brush off Nietzsche’s irreverent proposition quoted above. It starts with an important qualifier --theologically speaking! This immediately precludes any silly literal equation of God with the devil. But it raises the highly controversial question which is very much in circulation today, as we know from the opera Jesus Christ Superstar and from the infamous remark of Pastor John Hagee: Is evil, theologically speaking, a tool of God’s destiny for His creation? Was Judas the key enforcer of God’s plan of Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection, as argued in the Andrew Lloyd-Webber/Tim Rice rock opera? Was Hitler, in Hagee’s own incredible words, “God’s hunter,” divinely dispatched to hunt down six million Jews?..

With questions like these being actively raised in our allegedly politically-correct modern times, one must really admire Nietzsche’s philosophical audacity in his coming up with his mother tincture…

...theologically speaking…