Christianity, priests and the need to worship

Brandes says that Nietzsche rejected both historical optimism and Schopenhauer's renouncing pessimism, seeking in the Greeks a pessimism of strength and exuberant power; read from his later standpoint, the Dionysian was already his counter-principle to a morality hostile to Nature and to Christianity.

The Dionysian is conceived as the artistic principle farthest removed from Christianity's anti-natural morality.

Brandes reports Nietzsche's account that morality was long mere obedience to venerable custom, that cruelty was humanity's oldest festal joy, offered even to the gods, whence self-torture came to be valued, and that Christianity unceasingly preached the torture of souls.

Christianity continued the morality of cruelty as the torture of souls and the terror of the passions.

Brandes reports that Nietzsche traces false modern morality to spite, envy and rancune, which renamed impotence as goodness, baseness as humility, submission as obedience, and hatred as the hope for God's kingdom and the victory of righteousness.

Christian virtues of humility, forgiveness, love of enemies and hope of the kingdom are read as disguised spite.

Brandes judges that as a picture of historical Christianity Nietzsche's account is an eighteenth-century-style caricature, but that it does hit a type of apostle of spite-morality and vigorously unmasks the self-deception beneath moral preaching.

Brandes weighs the account as unfair to Christianity historically yet psychologically telling.

Brandes sets out Nietzsche's hypothesis that the bad conscience arose when warlike instincts, imprisoned by a state founded through conquest, turned inward; guilt then became debt to ancestors and gods, culminating in the Christian God, original sin and the God who pays the debt with his own blood, so that man's Nay to his nature becomes a Yea to God and the Beyond.

Christianity is the culmination of guilt-as-debt, self-torture reinterpreted as sin before God.

Brandes reports Nietzsche's account of the ascetic ideal as a sick life's device for self-preservation: the sick ascetic priest herds the despairing, redirects their resentment inward by reinterpreting suffering as sin, and drugs them with apathy, labour, small joys and congregation; as yet the ideal has no real assailant, though a new ideal is forming that sees suffering as a condition of happiness.

The priest as herdsman of the sick in the Church, reinterpreting suffering as sin.

Förster-Nietzsche argues that 'rearing the Superman' means transforming man by new, higher values that must replace the Christian valuations born of the resentment of the weak; the Superman is not a remote fancy or a new Darwinian species but a possibility present men could realise by adopting the new values, just as Christianity once transvalued Graeco-Roman values within a short time.

Presents Christianity as a product of the resentment of the weak that undermined life-promoting qualities, and as the model of a successful revaluation.

Mencken argues that Nietzsche's works of 1878-1882 were purely destructive preparation, showing that moral ideas are vulnerable, that the Christian ideal of humility weakens mankind, and that all notions of good and evil are mutable, so that the ground was cleared for a reconstruction.

Names the Christian ideal of humility as the rotten core of the old morality Nietzsche undermined.

Mencken describes Zarathustra as a remote sage attended by a snake and an eagle whose discourses recall the biblical rhapsodists, and argues that toward the end Nietzsche indulges in blasphemy, with a parody of the last supper, the disciples' worship of a jackass, and Wagner and other enemies appearing thinly veiled as buffoons.

Reads the supper and the ass-worship of Part IV as deliberate blasphemous parody of Christian ritual.

Mencken argues that Nietzsche called himself an immoralist because progress depends on truth, and pictures the ideal immoralist, the 'blond beast', as guided by instinct and intelligence rather than god and commandments, free of sin and hell, and thus a powerful force for truth against superstition.

Casts fixed theology and morality as the cause of lost centuries of alchemy and heretic-burning.

Mencken argues that Nietzsche's chief service was not historical or dogmatic criticism but his answer to the claim that Christianity made the world better: Nietzsche held it made the world worse, being cruel, degrading and the most dangerous system of slave-morality, which bans the fundamental instincts of the highest type of man.

Frames Nietzsche's attack as directed at Christianity's moral effects rather than its historical truth.

Mencken reads Nietzsche as seeing that Christian self-sacrifice defies natural selection and weakens the race, that mankind survives only because almost no one practises Christianity absolutely, and that abandoning self-sacrifice would yield a race of supermen who say 'yes' to the world.

Christian virtues are cast as an open defiance of nature that a literal practitioner could not survive.

Mencken reports Nietzsche's account of Christianity as the revenge of the Jews, who foisted their slave-morality on their masters, and judges this idea 'sheer lunacy', an instance of wild German speculation.

Concerns the origin, not the effects, of Christian morality.

Mencken explains that Nietzsche rejected free will, holding that responsibility was invented to justify punishment and that Christianity is 'a hangman's metaphysic', and that denying God and responsibility restores the innocence of man's existence.

Theology is blamed for tainting man's innocence with guilt and punishment.

Mencken argues that critics who condemn Nietzsche as blasphemous miss the point, since Nietzsche deliberately made his accusations against Christian morality as offensive as possible to provoke a public defence.

Presents Nietzsche's offensiveness toward Christianity as a conscious polemical strategy.

Mencken reviews critics who defend Christian charity and humility (Bennett Hume, Fouillée, Violet Paget) and argues that scientific humanitarianism owes nothing to the church, that strength grows by use, and that Paget's humility is really intelligent egoism, which Nietzsche's higher man, knowing times for truce and guile, does not oppose.

Argues the creed must be judged by the church's practical effects.

Mencken argues, following Nietzsche, that there is no 'natural morality' engraved on the human heart; brotherly love is merely the moral fashion of the age, and Nietzsche showed that the 'good' of one race and age is the 'bad' of another, so no innate instinct for self-sacrifice bars his philosophy.

The commandment 'that ye love one another' is treated as a historical novelty later mistaken for an eternal law.

Ludovici explains that Nietzsche is a moral relativist for whom good and evil are expedients by which each species or type gains power, that Christian values protect a low type of man, and that history is a war between the master-morality of the strong and the slave-morality of the weak.

Christian morality is an expedient protecting a low type of man.

Ludovici says 'The Land of Culture' epitomises Nietzsche's attack on the scholars of his day as sterile because they believe in nothing, and that its last verses explain his altruism: he rejects Christian pity and neighbour-love both as degenerative slave-values and because he can love only his children's land, redeeming his fathers' errors in his children.

Pity and excessive neighbour-love rejected as slave-values.

Ludovici argues that the spirit of gravity, the dwarf Zarathustra carries and defies, stands for the sense of guilt and sin that Christian and Judaic values have bred into men's instincts, and that Nietzsche can affirm the recurrence of life only once he has cast this dwarf off, announcing the doctrine in defiance of him.

Christian and Judaic valuations, once disciplinary expedients, have become instincts of guilt.

Ludovici explains the last pope's story as Nietzsche's history of Judaism and Christianity: the jealous, revengeful God of a strong warlike race degenerates with his people into a soft, pitiful God of love who sacrifices his Son for us, and this process ends in his being suffocated by his own pity.

Traces the decline from the God of Israel to the Christian God of love.

Ludovici identifies the voluntary beggar with the ideal Buddhist, a decadent religion whose values come from the higher rather than the lower classes, and sees in him Nietzsche's purified portrait of Christ, stripped of the spiteful traits added by apologists.

Compares Buddhism favourably with Christianity and presents a purged image of Christ.

Ludovici explains that the closing paragraphs of 'The Higher Man' protest against democratic seriousness: all that is good is cheerful, being able to joke about one's deepest feelings tests their value, and the greatest sin was the word 'Woe unto them that laugh now!'

Christ's 'woe unto them that laugh' called the greatest sin.

Ludovici reads the higher men's worship of the ass as a warning that thinkers who regain confidence in believing as such fall victim to the narrowest superstitions, alluding to pagan charges that Christians were ass-worshippers and to medieval asinaria festa.

The persistent need to worship survives scepticism and fixes on an absurd object.