Nietzsche does not level his charges at the philosophical justification for god, his basis for evaluation of Christianity is psychology, and his charge that Christianity produces 'sick' people. His description of Christianity brings a number of contentious value judgements:

1. The Jesus teaching was vastly different to Paul's. Traditionally this would not have been conceived of, but today a number of scholars would hold not only that Jesus teaching of the Kingdom of God uses a different terminology to Paul's teaching of the Resurrection, but that they actually teach things, eg Paul taught of a future state of redemption while Jesus taught of no future state, that eternal life was now.
2. That Christianity is a teaching of the poor and sick, a teaching based on resentment and a pulling down of all that is great and noble in man. Because of the vast divergence of Christianity this needs a lot more 'unfolding'. Nietzsche could cite cases of Christians closing down Baths, or burning libraries but can he also account for Michaelangelo and Pascal ?
3. Nietzsche claims that Christianity favours the masses, and is responsible for the doctrine of the equal rights of man, but this was a result of the Enlightenment: Thomas Pain, Mary Woolstonecraft, etc were not representative of the views of the church. Nietzsche seems to get these problems by a conceptual difficulty: how do you relate a body of thought to a certain culture ? We can't have Christianity as a machine that churns out certain types of people, but on the other hand it can't be ignored. The solution is to see Christianity as not having an essence which must appear in all Christians, but having a dynamic within which certain traits are dominant.

   Thus I can concede that nowadays certain groups of politicised Christians will justify human rights from a theological argument, but I can't see how historically the established Christianity fought for the oppressed. What needs to be included within a critique of western culture are the various systems of thought, not least of which is the ever recurring neo-platonic/aristotlian dialectic, in addition to which a new set of experiences needs a new discourse to articulate it, even though that discourse steals from discourses of the past. It is more likely that democracy comes from Greece than Jerusalem, but to identify the origin of a set of values the historical conjuncture has to be investigated.

4. That Christianity 'grows out of' Judaism. Of course this is a traditional Christian claim, that Jesus fulfils all the prophecies for the Jewish messiah, that his criticisms of the Pharisees, Saducees and Torah were all valid, etc. With Nietzsche the claim is inverted- Judaism was good, Christianity is better becomes Judaism was bad, Christianity is worse. His evaluation of Judaism, like his attitude to all non-Christian forms of religion, is partly ambiguous, but he certainly likes it a lot less than most other religions he refers to (eg Islam, Buddhism etc).

Having identified these three problems for Nietzsche, what are we to make of attempts to replace Christianity ? Nietzsche claimed that he might live at the time of the last Christian; clearly he didn't believe that all forms of Christian practise would die out overnight, but more likely that the knowledge required to live in the 20th century would be incompatible with Christian belief, yet people would still lie to themselves about this contradiction. It is a pre-condition of Post-Modernism that the subject must hold compartmentalised viewpoints, unable or uninterested in uniting them. In using the symbol 'Christian' or 'Believer in God' as a self-referent, what are we attempting to communicate (to ourselves) ?

To answer this question it will be useful to look at particular cases:

1. The religious radical. The Christian CND supporter, or the Christian Socialist, or the Christian Pacifist or the Christian fighting for freedom for third world peoples all conceive of God as a God of justice, which grounds their critique in an objective moral order, whereby they have both a justification for their political actions and a set of values for fighting 'evil' (appeal to public conscience, dissemination of information, symbolic actions, possibly holy wars in the case of S. America).
2. The religious conservative. Finding that they cannot understand the modern world, religious conservatism seeks to stop change. The problem arises with the split between the elite and the masses (which has existed for centuries in the west), and the responsibility the masses are now expected to have in ordering the world, means that there exists an elite culture that the masses now have access to, but which they fail to understand, but yet which they feel they must have an attitude towards. The attitude invariably taken is thus one of hostility to the unknown. Ignorance of modern thought, ignorance of contemporary history, ignorance of modern art, ignorance of other races, ignorance of alternative sexual preferences all meet with a feeling of isolation and uncertainty in the conservative. The need to label and dispense with the 'modern' is given satisfaction in religious conservatism: a small vocabulary in which it is possible to confront the huge unknown and 'make sense' of it in terms of their own reactions. They FEEL it to be evil/alien/immoral and thus a discourse that confirms that initial reaction, that says that it REALLY IS LIKE THAT,

... and that a 'silent majority' think like they do, indeed that God (reality) agrees with them fulfils a very deep need. Two other points:

1. The apocalyptic part of religious conservatism recognises that we cannot turn back the clock, that its aims are unrealisable, but justifies them on the basis that the world is about to end (or may be about to end) and therefore it is not necessary to be realistic, or aim for the achievable, or worry about any bad consequences of our actions. It soothes the fear of impotence.
2. Why does religious conservatism contain two groups who should be able to adapt to change: youth and ex-radicals ? Although each case would have to be individually examined, it is generally the case that certain people are confident and able when given specific tasks, but are anxious when the 'rules' are not clearly defined, where the result is open ended, or not quantifiable. This is where a fundamentalism (and not just conservative fundamentalism) has its appeal because it does not contain any difficult, open-ended questions left unresolved. For someone who has little routine, order or structure to their lives, fundamentalism may offer a simple solution.
3. The religious artist. TS Eliot, Blake, Wordsworth, Renaissance artists etc all use religious themes to express themselves, can artists ever express the world truly, can they leave the world as they find it ? This is too large a subject to enter into, the only point I would make is that artists must look at any 'object' (or pre-objects or abjects etc) in an artistic manner and hence be concerned with balance, grain, form etc and not necessarily with truth. Unless Nietzsche is against any sort of allegory or metaphor (re: Zarathrustra, obviously not) he cannot oppose the simple use of religion by art but can only object on grounds such as the use to which the art is put. In cases such as Pascal, Nietzsche argues that Christianity spoilt Pascal, that he would have been even better without it. This seems rather speculative and not really important for the main case Nietzsche is putting.

   What are we to make of Nietzsche's 'Anti-Christ' ? It isn't simply a matter of pointing out that all 'small-bigots' aren't Christians, we have to look at whether there is a sick-bloodline running through the Christian psyche, and if Christian thought/belief is responsible for this.

   The crux of Nietzsche's argument that must be recognised before a clear assessment can begin is how he defines Christianity. With something so big it is easy to counter any example of sickness with one of health. Where can the meaning of Christianity be found ? An attempt could be made to list certain 'facts' about Christianity and then see how the pros and cons balance. For example, There IS a shallowness of thought which accepts simplistic solutions and explanations, or rather is not concerned with finding a solution as much as reinforcing a prejudice. Christianity's exclusivist claims result in a bigoted mentality, IF no other relativising beliefs are present. The world of first century Israel was light years away from the pragmatic world of Rome, any attempt to 'live it' today with any seriousness leaves the believer cocooned from reality. etc etc However Nietzsche's method is more sweeping. He looks at Christianity on the basis of World-History. When did the course of World-History change

   and what part did Christianity play in that change ? Nietzsche is able to identify at least four 'moments':

   1. The Fall of the Roman Empire, and the ancient world. The Ancient World had the basis for thousands of years of progress. The foundations had been laid for Art, Science, Government and Wealth to progress, yet they were all destroyed. The reason is the 'worm' of Christianity which weakened the Empire and allowed it to be sacked.
   2. The Civilisation of the Moors was another attempt of health, beauty, and culture to re-establish itself, but was again defeated by the Christian Crusaders.
   3. The Renaissance was an effort from within to overthrow Christianity and re-establish the ancient world of art, civilisation, philosophy, and nobility. The establishment of Caesar Borgia as Pope was the replacing of the Christian sickness with Life. However Luther and Protestantism again turned the West back to decadent mediocrity.
   4. Our current age is again one in which the West is attempting to throw off Christianity and restore Life: the attempts at science, art etc are still poisoned by Christian influences (Nietzsche identifies Socialism as the main enemy, the attempt to stir up the mediocre masses rather than let the elite rule).

   The 'success' of Christianity Nietzsche credits to Paul. He says that the vision Paul saw was of nihilism: placing the meaning of life outside life. It was this ability to render life meaningless that made Christianity able to feed off the other cultic mystery religions of the time and wield them together into a political, powerful whole, to mobilise the sick into power.

   Nietzsche's attitude to religion is interesting, in that he not only sounds very religious (eg Zarathrustra) and seems to give a lot of importance to whether people are religious or not, but that his idea of a perfect society seems to have religions in it (eg Islam, Renaissance Catholicism, Imperial Rome). He divides society into the masses, who have rights, but not the same rights as the elite. They have the right to work, to be craftsmen, artists etc, but the fact that they are mediocre means that they will be happy to be mediocre. Does part of this mediocre life style include a religion of sorts ?

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   Festival of Doubt
   1. The 'Will to Power' must be understood both as a term and as it is applied: as a term in means some sort of positive mental energy, and passion for life, in its application Nietzsche distinguishes between uncontrolled Will to Power, as in barbarians and animals (would anthropologists agree with that ?) and sublimated Will to Power. Nietzsche's ideas on sublimated passions are related to Freud's sublimated sexual energy: it is an energy whose cause is not its object. Nietzsche saw in the Greek games a type of warfare, and speculated that this is where the inspiration and motivation for participating in the games comes from, further observations convinced him that the sublimation of the warring instinct produced the noble and sublime Greek culture, thus Nietzsche's great insight was not that naked force is all powerful, but sublimated will to power drives noble and sublime instincts.
   2. Morality has two sources, according to Nietzsche. There is the slave morality and the master morality, and the important thing to remember is that Nietzsche doesn't actually wholeheartedly support the master morality, rather he explains how it came to be, however he certainly prefers it to the slave morality. Both moralities come from the experience of those who believe in those moralities: the master morality distinguishes between good and bad, that which is good is that which serves the ruling class (the 'masters') and that which is bad is that which seeks to weaken or overthrow the ruling class; the slave morality distinguishes between good and evil, it begins not with what is good (like the master morality) but out of resentment, out of what it doesn't like, its initial instinct is for pulling down, not building up, and the good becomes the opposite of this 'evil'. As in most of Nietzches's explanations the emphasis is on the USE to which beliefs are put rather than the objective truth or falsity of those beliefs.

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   Nietzsche and Unemployment

   The empty voices drain the air. Gog and MaGog they drift like seaweed on broken ships... we gaze into the sky, flat on our backs we crawl and cry, trees stripped bare from the ACID in the air

   we know and do not know that action suffering love are beneath the object, trees ripped bare too much ACID in the air

   they lie outside this sliding nexus of social fiction, a simulacrum breathing badly, slime from the supplement no more morbidity and useless certainty we are released from this green craving...

   Within the structures of power and weakness, domination and suppressing, nothing is excluded, no factor unemployed. The streets are kept clear by a binary division of cause and effect, force and destruction. Unlike the goblins of subjectivity that plot rituals of deception and deceit the eternal recurrence of the same has no conception of the 'missing' the 'useless' the 'reserve' the lumpenproletariat was not in the differential equation: refine the forces of production to the Nth degree. From the racist conjuncture of Good/Bad, White/Black, Atheist/Theist we recognise that the bourgeoisie imperialised thought, though they didn't create the concept they 'naturalised' the conception of thought as hierarchical, the power of imperialism became the paradigm for the power of thought - to round up, colonise, conquer, defeat, subject to interrogation, extract confession etc.

   Within this metaphysics, every concept is swept into a labour camp, chained to a machine of ideological production. From what perspective did Nietzsche view this colonisation ? We must separate what Nietzsche describes from what he prescribes - he recognises the weakness of Christianity and western ethical explanations, and theorises the more primal will to power which was showing itself historically to be superior to post-Christian humanism. He did not wish to repeal this move, but to go beyond it. What is after the colonisation of thought ? Power is not itself a subject but is parasitical on subjects, as each new metaphysics is conquered and subjected - regimented - the identity of the bourgeoisie becomes invisible, their image contains only watery examples of the past (including their own past). Nietzsche romanticised this fragmentation of world culture into a 'free market' individualisation where everyone chooses themselves. He failed to understand that the distribution of fragmentation is uneven - the high density of fragments within the ruling ideology causes a schiziod culture allowing any numbers of mental disorders to become ruling ideologies (pathological, paranoid, hysterical etc) the IMPLOSION of modernism. Similarly the low density of fragmentation within the masses does not result in a 'more natural' culture - it is all fragmented - but rather a banal, repetitive social behavourism driven by the simple sexual/aggressive drives and articulated in the language of the schiziod mass media. The dark stains of the World Spirit appear within our bodies. Our senses unable to shut down they drink in the putrid chatter of capital like we were fed by a drip. Babies sucking on the media's milk, we cry for more...

   Can we dig up Nietzsche today, when millions who lived in his time lie dead ? What remains of his body ? A few pages of existence crumpled on an eternal rubbish pile, soon they will curl and perish.

   Unemployed smiled like a heavenly mountain rising from the sea
   what light shines on you, angels of the sun ?

   The breeze from your idle bones shakes through our deserted cities
   Last of the watchers you craved silence from all this crap
   Eaten by belligerence we denied you even that.

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   The Simulacrum of Nihilism

   Something that moves from the night of SHOUT and the masses slumber within their shell-like orifices... they have no mind, no desire, do they want power- the 'Christian' intellectuals fill them with promises, but who actually bothers to fight for something, a few 'revolutionary' workers, the students... why are the masses not ALWAYS quiet, isn't there always a rebellion, a revolution, perhaps we can say 'yes, there is unrest, the slaves in Rome had their moods, was Rome then always ruled by the mob ?' where does self-government come from... is it from lack of food, housing, comforts ? What if the masses had just entertainment ? what then ? Do they have to be productive ? what if they are just quiet and happy ? What is good, what is true ? Is democracy just universal boredom ? Why doesn't the TV flicker keep everyone down. Some, the truckers, the miners, the dockers, the railwaymen must be re-educated so that they will look for other ways, find other happinesses. When they act, is it with any intelligence, any poetry, any art ? What are we to make of the claim that the people have 'inner' culture, some hidden creativity that they yearn to release ? This is certainly not expressed in a political manner, if they wish to read poetry they can, if they wish to write a book they may, however in general these works will be mediocre and harmless. Who determines who the elite are ? Is there some institute within which all the elites exist: the philosophers, writers, sociologists, physicists, architects, politicians... but do each group have the power of self-government - how did it occur in Rome, in Greece ?? What if the art the people wish to develop is not film-making, not photography, but terrorism ? There is a bulk of people who don't fit this mould, but are they the mediocre ? In that case they may be easily duped, they may be lied to, terrorised, have traps prepared for them... Nietzsche does not like lies, he doesn't seem to realise that is what we need, a sort of sophisticated self entertainment, we suspend our disbelief for years at a time... just to have the entertainment of thinking 'we are not alone' or 'we will bury you' it's all just part of the show.

   What does Nietzsche want ? Will he exclude anyone on the basis of race, creed, sexuality ? What is the Will to Power ? It is Anti- German. It is Anti-West. Psychological insights are the last resort of the incompetent, its like waking up over and over again, we just forget to do it every day, look the seagull lives in the eyes of fools and the Russian Novel makes a comeback as a 1000 tabloids everyday - scandal and power, like suffering had to be made sense of because otherwise we would feel afraid. Tic tic tic the image explodes in our faces and we don't flinch as the patterns re-programme our mind, we not expect this sort of treatment everyday, self-punishment and attempts to 'live through' the worst nightmare, put yourself through it over and over again. In what way does Socialism put forward the Christian-Nihilist case of meaning being based outside life ? By life we now move from the metaphysical distinction between living and dead, to the conceptual distinction between everyday, empirical existence and a possible existence: from bourgeois existence to a radical world-historical existence. The Nietzschian must find the meaning of his life in the struggle for greatness, is every Nietzschian a Superman ? What can we make of Dostoyevsky's attack on the superman as a self-deception practised by the weak ? Is it sick, is it a temptation to make the centre of life outside life ? How do we define life ? Simply that which makes up our everyday existence, for if we everyday attempt to live for heaven , or everyday attempt to sell more political papers, or organise more demonstrations or support more strikes are we acting for the pleasure of those activities, or for some great purpose. The Nietzschian will not act for tomorrow but only for daily pleasure, daily gain. Is investment, training, study a metaphysics ? Perhaps Nietzsche just means living for objects that already exist in the world ? Thus it is acceptable to work for knowledge, for that is part of existence, similarly to work for a marathon or for profit, but to work for heaven or a revolution, this is 'outside' of life, hence it drains life of meaning. Thus the Christian foundation of 'hope', the radically new, is made the basis of the rejection of Christianity.

   What examples can be given of the master/slave morality ? Perhaps it could be shown that in certain border line cases class determines a morality, or perhaps sociologically it could be shown that the working class have a collective morality, while the bourgeois have an individual morality, but this is just a 'first level' or intuitive reaction to a given situation, could the two not be discussed, surely they both pre-suppose that an agreement could be reached ?

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   © John Mann 1984