Nietzsche and Spiritual Matters: A Reading of The Anti-Christ

Abstract

This essay primarily consists of an interpretation of The Anti-Christ, arguably Nietzsche’s most abrasive and overall least appreciated book. By treating this late work as what it in fact is, on the other hand, namely, the culmination of Nietzsche’s lifelong polemic against Christianity and the source of many of his most explicit and revealing pronouncements on what a “revaluation of all values” ultimately means, this essay argues that this work presents us not only with the philosopher’s definitive position on Christianity, but with the real meaning of his thought as such.

When it comes to spiritual matters, you have to be honest to the point of hardness just to be able to tolerate my seriousness, my passion.1

1. The Crude Nietzsche

The Anti-Christ presents us with Nietzsche’s final position on Christianity. This short essay, finished “on 30 September 1888”, constitutes—as Nietzsche wrote in Twilight of the Idols, penned at the same time—“the first book of the Revaluation of All Values”.2 In Ecce Homo, also written that year, Nietzsche refers to it simply as the Revaluation of All Values, period; for this reason, the work is a “shattering lightning bolt… that will rack the earth with convulsions”.3 If it can be said that the whole trajectory of Nietzsche’s thought orients itself toward this singular task—namely, the task, directed in the first place against Christianity, of revaluation—this “first book” must appear in an even brighter glow. That is, would it not then constitute not only Nietzsche’s definitive statement on Christianity, but that of his thought as such?

On the other hand, is it not obvious that The Anti-Christ is Nietzsche’s most polemical, most exaggerated, even his most superficial work? Does Nietzsche not, to be more specific, relentlessly attack in this work merely a caricature of Christianity—a caricature that he will castigate in the most black and white terms as “anti-nature,” on the basis of an equally outrageous caricature of “nature”? For this reason, a number of estimable readers have dismissed it—for instance, Eugen Fink, who, in his study of Nietzsche’s philosophy, essentially classifies the piece as a worthless tantrum, motivated by an insane hatred that expresses itself principally through insults.4 Or consider the following assessment, made by Aaron Ridley, who, in the editor’s introduction to the standard English translation, states that whereas

Twilight [of the Idols] is graceful, light, and even effervescent in its intensity, The Anti-Christ strikes one as over-emphatic and rather tiring. Nietzsche really hates Christianity, and he makes the reader feel it. But it is surely the degree of his antipathy that has got the better of him here, rather than any diminution of his powers.5

And yet lack of measure, overemphasis, exaggeration, caricaturing, a deep feeling of hatred, even “foam[ing] at the mouth” (Fink)—such do not always or necessarily indicate worthlessness; and, as Ridley admits, “what is exaggerated may be true, or interesting, even when pitched at a level that can seem deranged”.6 Nor do such necessarily indicate an anti- or sub-philosophical position, especially if what Nietzsche himself teaches us is that philosophy is in great measure underwritten by the passions and prejudices of certain fates and ways of seeing, certain dispositions and natures—all of which have their necessary symptoms at the level of style (and this, according to Nietzsche, just is what style means: a symptom that “communicates” an inner state: “To communicate a state, an inner tension of pathos, with signs, including the tempo of these signs—that is the meaning of every style”7). Which is to say, in Nietzschean terms: a philosophy is always that of a specific type of life, which itself always means a certain instinctual evaluation of the world, or fated stance on “what is good” and “what is bad”.

The Nietzsche of The Anti-Christ is the Nietzsche who explicitly evaluates and “takes a stance” on what is good and bad, who reveals on every page exactly what he loves and hates. In this work more than in any other, we encounter in “raw form” the Nietzsche from whose evaluations and passions one is capable of violently recoiling even today. But would this not, then—since it is, according to Nietzsche himself, precisely in what and in how a philosopher evaluates that the truth of a philosophy exposes itself—be the most revealing Nietzsche, and thus, perhaps, the one who remains of most interest for thought? Is it not upon the Nietzsche who, as it were, blazes the hottest that we can best—indeed must—continue to burn our fingers?

Not a few prominent readers have recently come to just this conclusion. In the preface to the second edition of his magnum opus, John Milbank put it this way: “The crude Nietzsche was also the true one—and yet it was the genuinely critical one, following through on the implications of a realization that ‘God’ and ‘the Good’ are but human inventions”.8 For Milbank, the “crude” Nietzsche is evidently not merely the Nietzsche who, in The Anti-Christ paradigmatically, allows antipathy and hatred to derange his style, but Nietzsche the proponent of crude doctrines: of natural slavery and the caste system; of the irreducible inequality of individual natures and races; of the imperative to breed a “more valuable” type of man and, indeed, to genocide. The word “crude,” from the Latin crudus, meaning raw and rough, originally signifies as much ferocity, lack of mercy, and cruelty, as it does undigested vigor and youth. And indeed: the real crudelitas of the Anti-Christ lies not primarily in its style, which is merely a symptom of its “inner state,” but in this inner state itself, the very substance of the work, namely, in the fact that it gathers together and thrusts onto centre-stage, in the most vigorous and unapologetic form possible, the most “unpalatable”—precisely indigestible, raw—elements of Nietzsche’s thought. For this very reason, however—and such is the inevitable consequence of Milbank’s provocative statement—it is the most interesting and perhaps most valuable of Nietzsche’s works, the one from which we learn the most.

Milbank’s intuition—that the crude Nietzsche, in this latter sense, is the true and genuinely critical one—has been masterfully corroborated by Domenico Losurdo’s landmark study, Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel, which runs to over a thousand pages and appears unanswerable.9 Against the mainstream interpretation of Nietzsche as primarily an artistic, metaphorical, and “playful” writer, Losurdo’s book painstakingly demonstrates the seriousness and the literal quality of much of Nietzsche’s thought, and especially those aspects that most of his readers would deem unpalatable and—precisely—crude. According to Losurdo, however, it is these aspects that not only must finally be taken seriously if we are to critically engage or even simply understand this most challenging of thinkers, but provide the principle of the unity of his thought. These aspects—which, to be entirely specific, include an unambiguous and unwavering, from the first texts to the last, approval of slavery; the call for a transformation of modern Europe into a caste society modelled upon the hierarchy of irreducibly “natural” types; the imperative to breed a strong type of human being and at the same time to eliminate the weaker types; and, not least, an aggressive promotion of the idea “that Christianity itself is a kind of supremely cunning Judaic plot, inserting exaggerated Jewish values into Western civilisation through an only apparent rejection of Christ”10—though ubiquitous throughout Nietzsche’s corpus, have been either systematically ignored or, beginning really with Kaufmann and continuing into the postmodern “leftist” appropriation of Nietzsche, “suppressed,” concealed beneath numerous bad-faith attributions to Nietzsche of “allegory” and “metaphor,” even when the text itself could not be more explicit about its literal quality.11 On the basis of this exclusion, an image of Nietzsche emerges that is respectable, or rather “radical” in the right way, so that—to invoke Milbank’s political framing—this “extreme thinker of the far right”12 is made to serve left-wing, “progressive” aims. And yet Losurdo’s work, according to Milbank,

serve[s] to remind us just how erratic was the left-wing appropriation of Nietzsche by Foucault, Deleuze and others in the 1960s: they were only able to appropriate the essentially conservative trope of genealogy as the tracing of decline one-sidedly in a Rousseauian mode …. This idiom brings all of culture under suspicion as a fall from nature, even if pure nature and truth were never really available; such an outlook is given a slightly more positively apocalyptic (and so more outright Rousseauian) character by Giorgio Agamben today. The entire aspect of Nietzsche’s thought that was to do with the positive nurturing of an uncompromising aristocracy, devoted to their own heroic benefit and glory, had to be bracketed.13

That this aspect—alongside those others just mentioned—are both ubiquitous in Nietzsche and central to all of his most basic motivations and arguments, is shown systematically and irrefutably by Losurdo’s study. Needless to say, the Nietzsche one finally encounters, rather than appearing as an ambivalently but essentially “modern” thinker, occupies the most decided stance of opposition in relation not only to his own century, but to modernity as such. For Losurdo, it is in the first place those very aspects of Nietzsche’s thought that have been systematically “interpreted away” that confirm Nietzsche’s fundamentally anti-modern position, or what we will call, positively, his classicism. The entirety of Nietzsche’s mature thought—what Ecce Homo calls the “no-saying” half, which begins after the “yea-saying” of Zarathustra—is in fact comprehensible only as the most violent “no” to modernity.14 According to its author, Beyond Good and Evil, which inaugurates this period, is

in essence a critique of modernity, including modern science, modern art—even modern politics—, along with indications of an opposite type who is as un-modern as possible, a noble, affirmative type. … All the things this age is proud of are viewed as conflicting with this type, almost as bad manners, the famous “objectivity,” for example, “sympathy with all sufferers,” the “historical sense” that subordinates itself to alien tastes, prostrating itself before petits faits, the “scientific attitude”.—15

Of course, it is not merely Beyond Good and Evil that is “as un-modern as possible” but, precisely, the “noble, affirmative type” of human being, which is to say: the real aim of a revaluation of all values. In opposing every moral and political instinct of modernity—not least its social-contract theory, its political “science,” its turn toward democracy, objectivity, equal rights, and individualism “for all”—Nietzsche, as we shall see, sought to clear the ground for a renewed antiquity: for “the imminent return of the Greek spirit,”16 which in the first place means: a classical evaluation, against Christianity and modernity, of what is good and what is bad. It is only when one recognizes in Nietzsche a political philosopher in this sense—and indeed, a paradoxical “activist” of sorts: an “aristocratic rebel” who invested every ounce of strength in attacking modern sensibilities and demolishing their foundations—does the principle that unifies Nietzschean thought, and that makes thinking and writing “in Nietzsche’s wake” something finally meaningful, reveal itself. “Only by not suppressing the element that deeply permeates it, only by keeping permanently in mind the criticism and militant denunciation of revolution and modernity, is it possible to grasp the unity of Nietzsche’s thought and its internal consistency”.17

In general, the crudeness of the Anti-Christ, because it evinces most forcefully and explicitly this “element that deeply permeates” the whole of Nietzsche’s thought, is its inimitable strength: the work uniquely allows us to see a Nietzsche who—even if he does not exactly “foam at the mouth,” as Fink claimed—throws his whole hand on the table. One might even go so far as to say that, if The Anti-Christ uniquely reveals a certain “raw” Nietzsche who is all the more “himself”—all the more honest, and therefore interesting—the more explicit and uninhibited his propositions, then this work might be treated as a certain skeleton key for reading Nietzsche’s other works. For instance, while On the Genealogy of Morality—of which The Anti-Christ is “a concrete, historically more rooted version”18—is more measured by comparison, in tone as well as in definitive “imperatives” and explicit statements of evaluation, it is in fact no less a polemic, as its subtitle indicates, and should be read as such alongside the later work, which renders the true meaning of this polemic very acute. To be precise: whereas one might, somewhat naively, pretend to discover in the Genealogy a simple historical science or psychology of types, with “value” judgments being withheld on what to do with the results (i.e., like the sociologist, “supposedly, the genealogist is quite neutral with respect to the different sorts of value promoted by different historical cultures …”19), one cannot mistake in The Anti-Christ what is truly at stake for Nietzsche in this science, morally and indeed politically, i.e., what the ultimate goal is of good, honest historical sense. Nietzsche is hardly concerned with simply neutral observation, with providing anything like an “objective” account. Rather, as with everything in his work, good historical sense and genealogical science—knowledge as such—is a matter of polemic: a “declaration of war”.

To characterize a work, even a “science,” as polemical is not simply to employ a certain rhetoric on the basis of the fact that, like every act of thinking, it relieves us of certain prejudices and comforting falsehoods. For Nietzsche, the polemical character of thought is not merely the effect of thought. Rather, “polemic,” or writing as warfare, means that the cause of thinking is itself polemical through and through. And this means something entirely specific in Nietzsche, namely: the waging of a grand war against corruption and illness, and therefore in service of a medical vocation that is concerned with both diagnosis and prescription.

The metaphor here—which is in fact no metaphor—is that of life, of a living organism that should be healthy, but has in fact, on the other hand, been intentionally corrupted. When the object of diagnosis and prescription is not merely the particular specimen, but the type and, finally, the species as a whole, that which presents itself in medical and biological terms reveals its aim as political and meta-political. Which is to say: it is politics that ultimately concerns itself with “what is good” and “what is bad”—the ancient questions of political philosophy with which The Anti-Christ opens,20 and which constitute its fundamental problematic from beginning to end—when it comes to European or western humanity, which has revealed itself to be the result of the merely historical victory of a certain type of man; it is meta-politics, however, that will undertake to answer these questions in terms of the meaning of the earth or of nature and thus, necessarily, the meaning of the species “human” as such. In other words, meta-politics coincides with what Nietzsche calls, in Beyond Good and Evil, “great politics,”—i.e., “the struggle for the domination of the earth”21—which, if one examines the context of this remark closely, is only superficially about the future of Europe. Rather, grand or meta-politics is defined as the moment in which Europe “acquire[s] a single will by means of a new caste that would rule over [it]”.22 But what does this “caste rule” ultimately mean? What does the acquisition of a “single will” ultimately inaugurate? In fact, nothing less than the end of Europe. In acquiring “a long, terrible will of its own, that could give itself millennia-long goals … the long, spun-out comedy of Europe’s petty provincialism and its dynastic as well as democratic fragmentation of the will could finally come to an end”.23 Great politics, of which Nietzsche claims to be the inventor,24 means the end of politics—and specifically, of European or “petty” politics, which has thought in terms of nationalities and historical peoples and not in terms of the meaning of the earth and of the species. For Nietzsche, great politics, because it rejects the domain of history as what is ultimate and rediscovers, in its stead, the buried realm of nature, looks rather to “millennia-long goals” that are explicitly physiological and eugenic. What these goals ultimately come down to—as Nietzsche defines them in passage after passage throughout his corpus—can in fact be expressed very simply: “breeding humanity to higher levels” and “the ruthless extermination of everything degenerate and parasitical”.25 If this general articulation from Ecce Homo—where Nietzsche calls this “the greatest task of all”—is treated here as paradigmatic, it is because the context in which it appears is, as we shall presently see, of the highest importance for grasping how Nietzsche viewed not only the meaning of “great politics,” but the meaning of the task of revaluation and, indeed, of his thinking from the very beginning.

2. The Philosopher as Physician

In The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche undertakes a genealogy of morality—which this work primarily calls “Christian virtue”—that, in terms of its form, differs significantly, although not absolutely, from the genealogy of the same undertaken in the eponymous work. In the later work—that is, when it has explicitly become a question of positive revaluation—genealogy becomes strategic warfare, and explicitly presents itself in the style of a grand declaration of war against the most serious of diseases. Still, this is only the negative or destructive aspect of the task. In fact, Nietzsche’s goal is explicitly remedial, and he sees himself as composing a history for the purpose not only of eradicating a disease, but of prescribing the cure. In The Anti-Christ more than in any other work he wrote (but this also means: as in every other work), Nietzsche is explicitly and consistently a partisan of health. Obviously, a certain criterion of health is already indispensable for any talk whatsoever of “disease” and “sickness”; and, inevitably, the attempt to be as honest as possible concerning this criterion leads Nietzsche to his most explicit statements concerning “what is good” and “what is bad”.

It is in this sense, or from the perspective of Nietzsche’s self-assessment as a great physician, that the conclusion suggested by Losurdo’s work—namely, that one only understands Nietzsche the historian, Nietzsche the psychologist, etc., by first understanding Nietzsche the militantly political and meta-political philosopher (“a philosopher totus politicus”26)—is entirely on point. Nietzsche only “does” history, only cares about “knowledge,” for the sake of a certain passion for humanity, a great love of human beings even, which is realized in the fundamental task of the great physician, viz., a revaluation of all values. In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche, by literally equating the terms, declares explicitly what he means by “historical knowledge”: “lisez [read]: revaluation of all values”.27 In The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche’s love of humanity, his task of revaluation—thus his “historical knowledge” and good historical sense—reveal themselves to be nothing other than meta-political concepts: that is, as defined above, concepts that explicitly evaluate what is good and what is bad at the level of the species and for the sake of “millennia-long goals”.

According to Nietzsche’s self-assessment in Ecce Homo, this was in fact already the point, the “hope,” of his first book, namely, The Birth of Tragedy, which, along with the very meaning of “a Dionysian future” and “state,” he unhesitatingly translates into meta-political terms:

A tremendous hope is speaking out from this essay [i.e., The Birth of Tragedy]. Ultimately, I have no reason to take back my hope that music will have a Dionysian future. Let us look forward a century and assume that I have succeeded in my attempts to assassinate two-thousand years of anti-nature and desecration of humanity. The new faction in favour of life that takes on the greatest task of all, that of breeding humanity to higher levels (which includes the ruthless extermination of everything degenerate and parasitical), will make possible a surplus of life on earth that will necessarily regenerate the Dionysian state. … Everything is announced in advance in this essay: the imminent return of the Greek spirit, the need for counter-Alexanders to retie the Gordian knot of Greek culture after it had been undone…28

Ultimately, Nietzsche’s “tremendous hope” (which, as this passage evinces, was already that of his first book) consists in the assertion and concrete establishment of the most extreme meta-political hierarchy, namely, between the more and the less valuable types of human being. The great task of distinguishing between what is high and what is low, what valuable and what worthless, will be fulfilled not merely in theory, in verbis, but by a “faction” harsh enough to take on this “greatest task of all” and made up of world-historical, “Alexandrian” leaders. That a great statesman is named here—rather than a great poet, philosopher, or psychologist—is in no way incidental; and, as we shall see below, it is The Anti-Christ that raises the figure of the noble, political actor to the level of the answer to the revaluation of all values and the resolution of western history, and this in the most explicit and specific way.

As a political and meta-political work—that is, a work that is concerned primarily with the questions of what is good and what is bad—it is unsurprising that The Anti-Christ for this reason concerns itself chiefly with what Nietzsche characterizes as the modern “symptom of disease” par excellence, i.e., the doctrine of equal rights. As we shall soon discover, it is Christianity’s promotion and invention of equal rights that ultimately constitutes its meaning as “the worst thing to happen to humanity so far”.29 Suffice it to say for now that to expose the lie of equality—that is, the lie of equal rights, which flattens the difference in value between distinct types, and thus, via Christianity and modern philosophy and politics, has “waged a war to the death” against the “more valuable type”30: such is the negative element of Nietzsche’s medical vocation, his extirpation of what The Anti-Christ calls “anti-nature,” which is consistently and explicitly translated into the moral and ultimately political term vice (“I use the word ‘vice’ to fight against every type of anti-nature”31; “Every type of anti-nature is a vice”32). But this vocation is evidently just as much political; and in the concept of equal rights, the physiological and the political coincide: “The struggle for equal rights is actually a symptom of disease: every doctor knows this.—”33

On the other hand, the positive element of this vocation—which is its real aim—consists in enacting a return to a certain “naturalism”. Because Nietzsche is hardly interested in—since he does not believe in—a measured or “neutral” approach, but rather in putting concepts to good use, not only must this return be achieved polemically, but “naturalism,” “nature” itself, must be put into play as polemical and, finally, political concepts. To this end, the work exaggerates not only the disease (Christianity) but the cure, i.e., “nature,” to the point of the latter becoming a meta-political ideal, an ultimate criterion for human life.34

The principle of this double-movement of exposing the lie of equal rights, and of inaugurating a new form of meta-political naturalism that would strictly separate the healthy from the sick, is no less that of a philosopher-physician than the task itself—i.e., that to protect the healthy from the sick “ought to be the chief concern on earth”. As Nietzsche put it in his Genealogy:

That the sick should not make the healthy sick … ought to be the chief concern on earth:—but for that, it is essential that the healthy should remain separated from the sick, should even be spared the sight of the sick so that they do not confuse themselves with the sick.35

On the basis of this general principle, which consistently determines Nietzsche’s entire critique of Christianity and modernity, The Anti-Christ evinces a thoroughly naturalist—and thus classical—conception of political health, or “justice”. Against the anti-natural essence of Christianity and modernity, which promulgate the fantasy and “injustice” of equal rights, Nietzsche’s meta-political naturalism, as we shall examine in some detail below, classifies human beings into irreducibly distinct “types,” each with its own sets of rights and duties.

The difference between anti-nature—which Christianity calls “virtue”—and true, i.e., natural virtue, or what the Twilight of the Idols calls “healthy morality,”36 is presented by Nietzsche in absolute terms. In this latter work, Nietzsche in fact refers to this distinction as itself a “principle”:

—I will formulate a principle. Every naturalism in morality—which is to say: every healthy morality—is governed by an instinct of life,—some rule of life is served by a determinate canon of “should” and “should not,” some inhibition and hostility on the path of life is removed this way. But anti-natural morality, on the other hand, which is to say almost every morality that has been taught, revered, or preached so far, explicitly turns its back on the instincts of life,—it condemns these instincts, sometimes in secret, sometimes in loud and impudent tones.37

Nevertheless, what must be grasped, in order to understand what Nietzsche intends with this sharp opposition, is twofold: in the first place,

(1)

“nature” is indeed a polemical concept here, and as such must be read no less as a certain “exaggeration,” an evidently oversimplified view of what motivates and underlies Nietzsche’s thinking as a whole; and yet

(2)

it is nevertheless true, and even the truth of Nietzsche’s thought as such.

What must be grasped, therefore, is that truth is itself a polemical concept, a certain intensification of an ingenious will to power that discovered its concept for the sake of a certain use—that is, discovered that it was of essential value for life. But to which kind of life, which type of being, has “the truth” been valuable for life?

In fact, for the type that Nietzsche, in his Genealogy, refers to as the lamb, which moreover invents the concept of “truth” in order to wield it—in the forms of “objectivity,” “universal standards,” and ultimately the moral aim of all thought and action—as a weapon with which it alienates the bird of prey from its purely immanent and singular existence, or “being,” as pure acting. Strictly speaking, for Nietzsche, to act is to be, and the separation that appears between the act (necessarily singular) and the agent is a later addition that the “actor,” initially (that is, insofar he coincides entirely with his act), does not make. Rather, the addition, which comes from elsewhere, constitutes the creation of a responsible (reflexive) subject, or, in other words, a being that concerns itself with the truth.38 As intimated, a famous image from On the Genealogy of Morality makes this point rather vividly: the type of existence that Nietzsche calls the “bird of prey” is its action. In other words, its action is nothing but the purely immanent being of its natural existence, or what it is. The killing of its prey is not something that it does, but, literally, what it is. This is its sole “truth”. The difference between acting and being is initially condensed to the point of indiscernibility, and a being is consequently neither more nor less than its purely singular acts. Thus, in this purely immanent “state of nature,” a being is always in the truth, always the truth of itself, and therefore incapable of asking the question of its “truth,” which already implies degeneracy and uncertainty—i.e., a separation of the act from itself, into the dualism of act and agent wherein acting and being no longer coincide. To say it another way: with the transformation of the “truth of being” from that which one is into that which one could and ultimately ought to be, “truth” becomes not only a question but a source of immense suffering and confusion. The singular being loses its instincts, its immediate and healthy sense of itself, and becomes that which—to put it “philosophically”—is now compelled to measure its mere particularity against the universal concept or ideal of itself. In Nietzsche’s naturalist view, the moment that truth—whether in the form of an ontological standard or ideal of moral perfection—becomes a “value,” becomes something for which a being is now willing to sacrifice its singularity, the degeneration of healthy, instinctual being—which is, for Nietzsche, what “good” means39—into a confused and “bad” existence sets in. The organism’s being, because it is now experienced as a particular that necessarily falls short of the universal, is experienced as a “mistake”40 and defined by a dissolution of the power of willing, which now stands in need of aid and redemption.

But it’s all a trick! And indeed, a concern with the question of truth is not simply an accident that “happens” to a healthy being that lives by instinct, but is the calculated invention of those who benefit from the confusion and sickness that this question creates. The concept of truth is designed by the weak to confuse and ultimately eradicate the singular instinct and being of the strong—it is an attempt to set this being at odds with itself by compelling it to judge its singularity by the standard of the allegedly universal; “—in this way, they gain the right to make the birds of prey responsible for being birds of prey …”.41 At the risk of repeating ourselves, the introduction of truth as a value coincides with the introduction of the difference between being and acting. This difference is the necessary and sufficient condition of morality, in that now there is a subject of acting that can (and in fact must) “choose” to “act” in a certain way, in accordance with a certain “ideal”—or not. From Nietzsche’s perspective, the victory of the responsible subject divided from itself—the definition of acting as submitted to universal criteria (“truth”), be they dogmatic or rational, rigid or dialectical—is nothing but the victory of the lamb over the bird of prey, the weak over the strong, by way of a calculated effort of confusion. The appearance of “the universal” on earth evinces, therefore, not a divine revelation or the beginning of enlightenment, but the conniving and resentful instinct within those who alone could benefit from it to survive at all costs, and even to finally overpower that which is naturally stronger than them. The latter now finds itself, in its perceived difference from itself, to be the division between singularity and universality, i.e., again, a particular instance of being submitted to a universal law. The bird of prey is compelled—not by singular, positive force (for the weak possess no such clean way of defeating its enemy) but through the indirect and negative compulsion of the invented concept of “truth”—to accept that it, as a merely particular thing, finds its truth (its justice) in a concept, or is itself nothing other than, or ideally, a concept. The singular bird of prey gives way to its concept, its “truth,” from which it is by definition alienated. Negatively said, the bird of prey is forced into a state of confusion that occurs along the axis of the contradiction between the universal and the singular, finally admitting that it is not itself, does not coincide with itself in its acts. Thus is it now compelled, endlessly, to exist as a question to itself, to be not itself but only ever in search of itself.

Here, again, the entire origin and logic of morality is already spelled out, as well as the link—even the identity—between truth and morality: between, that is to say, the value of the concept of truth and the revenge of the weak against the strong (against healthy instinct) and against life in general. In the terms that both The Anti-Christ and Twilight of the Idols frequently invoke: the concept of truth is a paradigmatic instance of anti-nature, a weapon deployed in the face of—and for the sake of eradicating—natural inequalities that are in themselves both healthy and just. The concept of truth first introduced injustice into the world, since it originated as a calculated will to survive on the side of the weakest races, to “[choose] being at any price: [and] this price was the radical falsification of nature, all naturalness, all reality”.42

But what of “truth” in “a nonmoral sense”? What of the truth—for it is indeed truth—that the philosopher of the future, indeed that Nietzsche himself, will discover and mobilize? The philosopher of the future—or what Nietzsche also calls “true philosophers,” those who have overcome morality and the moral conception of truth—will, in a word, unleash truth as will to power, and in this way, will reveal to humanity the “truth about truth”.

The rebirth of truth as will to power in the hands of the “true philosopher” is perhaps the single most difficult thought in Nietzsche. Thus, we will proceed with some care, in order to avoid both the Scylla and the Charybdis of the interpretation of this difficult thought, namely, that Nietzsche is, on the one hand, merely a “relativist,” or that he has, on the other hand, merely discovered “the” truth that every philosopher before him had failed to discover. For, in the former case, one cannot make sense of Nietzsche’s relentless commitment to honesty and, indeed, to truthfulness, while in the latter case, one cannot make sense of Nietzsche’s no less relentless “perspectivism,” which the later works definitively articulate as the identity of “will to truth” and “will to power” and the subordination within this identity of the former to the latter.43

Preliminarily, Nietzsche is entirely explicit about the fact that truth must finally be thought in its relation, and indeed its subordination, to a certain creative and legislating power. In the early essay “On Truth and Lie in a Nonmoral Sense,” Nietzsche initially resolved this relation in terms of the replacement of the values of knowledge (science) and truth with those of art and creation. This resolution was, in a word, somewhat naïve, as it was excessively abusive to the intellect and far too self-satisfied with its brutal reductionism—e.g.,

the obligation to be truthful, which society imposes in order to exist—that is, the obligation to use the customary metaphors, hence morally expressed, the obligation to lie in accordance with a fixed convention, to lie in droves in a style binding for all.44

The early Nietzsche essentially annihilates truth not only as a value but even at the level of statement, e.g., of particular facts—thus at the level at which the most minimal connection between words and things is secured45—reducing especially science, but in fact all knowledge, to the status of “lingering residues of metaphors”.46 Nevertheless, the “mature” Nietzsche by no means does away with this hierarchical relationship between truth and art; but the difference is that, instead of annihilating truth in favor of art (or, at best, absorbing its question into that of art), truth—and especially scientific truth—will now find a place, have a certain role to play, and thus a certain “integrity,” for the “true philosopher” who nevertheless remains, in the first place, an artist.

But let us return to what was said above, namely, that Nietzsche, in attempting to redefine the value of truth, eventually thinks this value in relation to the figure of the legislator. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche redefines the philosopher-artist and creator in terms of—precisely—legislation:

But true philosophers are commanders and legislators: they say “That is how it should be!” they are the ones who first determine the “where to?” and “what for?” of people, which puts at their disposal the preliminary labor of all philosophical laborers, all those who overwhelm the past. True philosophers reach for the future with a creative hand and everything that is and was becomes a means, a tool, a hammer for them. Their “knowing” is creating, their creating is a legislating, their will to truth is—will to power.47

To legislate means both to know and to create—to will both truth and power, and indeed to will truth as power. Legislation is a matter of willing. But what does this really mean? In his Genealogy, Nietzsche had declared that the “future work of the philosopher” would be to “solve the problem of values” and “to decide upon the rank order of values”.48 Resolution, decision: these acts of will become the ground and meaning of truth and will to truth. To solve the problem of values and to decide upon a new rank order of evaluation, namely, of what is “good” and what “bad,” is indeed already implied by the concept of the philosopher as physician. The Nietzschean conception of philosophy differs radically from the traditional philosopher who conceived himself, and most explicitly in the modern period, as primarily a scientist, a laborer for the sake of knowledge (truth “for its own sake”). As mentioned, however, Nietzsche now leaves room for such laborers, but only insofar as their merely theoretical and ultimately servile work and results are to be put into the service of a higher task and, ultimately, a higher type of man, namely, a man capable of decision and command. “All science must, from now on, prepare the way”49 for this work, i.e., the resolution and decision that becomes the prerogative of the philosopher of the future.

It is, therefore, not so much the simple reduction of truth to power that is at hand here—as it arguably was in “On Truth and Lie in a Nonmoral Sense”—as it is the transformation of the former (truth) into the useful object and tool of a creative, impious desire. The philosopher of the future does not deny truth, deny science; rather, he denies the pious conviction that their value for life is self-evident, that this value is contained in truth and knowledge considered in themselves, or that they represent “goods” in themselves. Rather, everything depends on how truth, how knowledge, as both method and result, are interpreted. On this point of interpretation, and the crucial relationship it has to truth and “intellectual honesty,” Leo Strauss put it well:

Nietzsche tried to overcome nihilism by a new creation, but this new creation had to be in harmony with intellectual honesty. Intellectual honesty was a necessary but not a sufficient condition. Intellectual honesty means not to deny the deadly truth of nihilism but to create on the basis of it. Now one formula is this: the distinction between the knower and the noble man. It means this. The objective truth is incomplete, but you cannot possibly leave it at that. You must interpret it, and there are fundamentally only two ways of interpreting it: it’s understood either basely, or else nobly. Basely means uncreatively, and nobly means creatively.50

The base interpretation of truth consists primarily in pretending that truth and knowledge are valuable in themselves, or, to be entirely precise, that their value is self-evident—recall, of course, the attitude of the weak, the lambs, who lie about the self-evidence of this value for the sake of taking revenge on life. The noble interpretation, on the other hand, has in the first place realized that “objective truth” has never been enough—has never, moreover, actually existed outside of an interpretation of its meaning and value—and, in the second place, has for this reason placed it (i.e., truth) in the service of positive, creative ends. The true philosopher—whose “‘knowing’ is creating”—is thus the one who provides a “noble” interpretation of the method, results, and very ideal of truth, thus making noble use of the truth, or using it to create and to “legislate”.

What is “creating”—what does it means to be capable of, in Strauss’s terms, a creative interpretation? In an essay devoted to this question, Giorgio Agamben, citing Deleuze, offers the following definition: “Each act of creation resists something … to resist always means to free a potential of life that was imprisoned or offended”.51 According to Agamben, this definition is ultimately inadequate. Nevertheless, it would seem to capture the meaning of this term in Nietzsche, precisely mirroring the definition given in Twilight of the Idols—already quoted above—of what is involved in an affirmative and ultimately creative, i.e., natural “morality,” namely: “some inhibition and hostility on the path of life is removed this way”.52 Thus when Nietzsche says of the true philosopher that his “‘knowing is creating,” what this means is that to truly know something is to free the vital potential of that thing, or to overcome whichever forces are working to prohibit this potential, this power.

The sense of creating as the freeing of a potential of life by resisting that which itself resists life is immediately evident in Nietzsche’s language of “overcoming,” in the opening pages of The Anti-Christ: “What is happiness?—the feeling that power is growing, that some resistance has been overcome”.53 Here, creation, or the overcoming of resistance, is explicitly linked to happiness. To be truly happy, as is the philosopher’s privilege, one must create—and be capable of creation. The reference to “happiness” is not trivial here: for, in a sense, what Nietzsche everywhere seeks is a creating, and therefore a knowing, that coincides with happiness—a fröhliche Wissenschaft. The true philosopher is happy in his knowing, one should say, because his “knowing is creating,” i.e., the freeing of the vital potential of the thing known. Happiness is the right of the true philosopher. One could thus say that, for the true philosopher, there simply are no “sad” truths.

As we are beginning to see, this definition of knowing-creating is essential for understanding Nietzsche-the-great-physician’s extraordinarily complicated relationship to “truth”. In a word: if Nietzsche imagines himself to be the first philosopher to truly know what truth is—that is, to be the discoverer of “the truth about truth”—then this knowledge of what truth is can be nothing other than a happy—joyful—freeing of the potential for life of the truth, which is to say: a new and affirmative evaluation of what truth is for. So far, “truth” has been in service to—because it ultimately originated with—a slavish or “base” evaluation of the world; on the other hand, what Nietzsche accomplishes is a noble revaluation of truth, i.e., the claiming of truth, and the entire type of life that its pursuit entails, for noble and vital ends.

And yet, does one not inevitably find oneself in need of a critical standard, a certain “meta-criterion,” by which one can adjudicate the difference between these two types of evaluation, these two ways of relating to “truth”? It is surely not enough to say that the noble interpretation creates, is creative, while the base is uncreative. Indeed, is it not the case that some of the most “creative” endeavors and achievements of western humanity have resulted precisely from the “base” interpretation of truth as “valuable in itself”? The “noble” interpretation of truth is not simply “creative,” but—as we shall presently see—virtuous, in the strict sense that it uses truth as a physician uses it, i.e., for the sake of eradicating disease, promoting vitality and health, and even cultivating a kind of natural “perfection”.

And it is here, finally, that we begin to grasp what is, arguably, the key to the fundamental unity of Nietzsche’s thought, namely, that everything is, for him, without exception subordinated to the question of evaluation, or of “what is good”. To know and to will the truth; to diagnose and prescribe; to will and to overcome; to create and to legislate—these all mean the same thing, insofar as they discover their unity and identity in the context of a meta-political project that seeks and affirms a new evaluation of what is good for humanity.

For this reason, the noble interpretation of truth is in need of a meta-criterion against which the base interpretation of truth—its evaluation and use by slaves, which has been the only evaluation thus far—can be measured. In The Anti-Christ, this criterion is nothing other than nature. And this is, again, why Nietzsche can call Christianity—which is the worst disease and “the worst thing to happen to humanity so far”54—“two-thousand years of anti-nature and desecration of humanity,”55 or in a word, “vice,” and why such are, in fact, the principal charges leveled against it (and not only in The Anti-Christ).

What it ultimately means that Nietzsche claims for himself, in the first book of the Revaluation of All Values, the meta-political criterion of “nature,” against which even the value of truth must be measured, we will discover further on. Suffice it to say for now that, whatever nature provides as a “standard,” it will not be sufficient, of course, to simply treat as self-evident its value as a standard—or, indeed, the value of “the standard” as such. Rather, like truth itself, “the standard” is something that has as such been in service to a base interpretation that has treated its value as self-evident. What is required in the first place, then, is that the true philosopher creatively will this standard as the standard—which is to say, grant it noble meaning, or its genuine potential for life. Now, the “traditional” will to truth is—if only because what must be established via the genealogical method must stand in rigorous conformity with the “facts”—certainly necessary for the task of revealing the true significance of Christianity as vice and anti-nature, and thus for the task of reminding humanity of what nature (and, on this basis, of what health and, indeed, justice) in fact are. In other words, the distinction between nature and anti-nature is in no way merely rhetorical. But the will to truth in itself, or the purely scientific, knowledge-seeking, truth-loving man—the man who relates to such things as “nature,” “health,” and “justice” merely intellectually, or as concepts—is not sufficient for the philosopher of the future, who seeks to measure this very man, this nihilist, against the higher criterion of affirmative, i.e., genuinely virtuous life. To again recall Strauss’s assessment: “Intellectual honesty was a necessary but not a sufficient condition”—of what? Of genuine creation, or of a truly noble relation to life. When it comes to a noble relation to life, the fundamental “categories” are not true and false—as if such a relation were strictly intellectual—but healthy and sick, and indeed, good and bad. For, this relation is not primarily an intellectual but a virtuous one—that is, a relation that is not so much “known” or “considered” as lived and willed. Another way of saying this is that Nietzschean honesty—or meta-honesty, i.e., honesty about the value of truth—does not have truth per se as its highest end but, in fact, a conception of the Good. Which is once more merely to say that Nietzschean method is not principally “theoretical” or “scientific,” i.e., does not pursue knowledge for its own sake. On the contrary, Nietzsche criticizes and evaluates, investigates and follows scents, diagnoses and prescribes, reveals and even conceals, creates and legislates—as passionate acts of hatred and love: exposure of cancer and vice; promotion of health and virtue.

3. Diagnosing Corruption

To be “honest to the point of hardness,”56 according to the view that emerges from The Anti-Christ, will mean, on the one hand, to expose and surgically remove the cancer of Christianity, which has declared war against nature with its hatred and denial of the more valuable types and its promotion of “equal rights”; and, on the other hand, to institute a “naturalist” regime that, by promoting and willing the “more valuable type”57 of human, would cleanse the institutions and bodies of European man and, ultimately, the species. In this work, which is the work of revaluation itself, Nietzsche reveals himself to be a hard and ruthless physiologist in the sense in which Ecce Homo will define this vocation in contrast to that of the priest:

The physiologist demands that the degenerate part be cut out, he refuses solidarity with anything degenerate, pity is the last thing on his mind. But what the priests want is precisely the degeneration of the whole, of humanity: that is why they preserve degenerates.58

Nietzsche is explicit that the difference between these two vocations is only possible because the aims and concepts of the priest, as much as those of the physician, can only be understood as physiological:

What do those deceitful concepts mean, the supporting concepts of morality—“soul,” “spirit,” “free will,” “God”—if not the physiological ruin of humanity?… When you divert seriousness from the self-preservation and energy accumulation of the body, which is to say: of life, when you construct an ideal out of anaemia and “salvation of the soul,” out of contempt for the body, what is that if not a recipe for decadence?59

To accomplish his polemical and medical task, to realize his vocation as the greatest lover of the genuine virtue of humanity (and therefore the most vicious despiser of its worst vice), Nietzsche will attempt the most ruthless honesty yet as to what ails human beings and what, indeed, should be the cure. For the sake of establishing as his aim the exposure and eradication of the cause of “why human beings are so corrupt,” Nietzsche defines corruption early on in a very precise way:

I call an animal, a species, an individual corrupt when it loses its instincts, when it chooses, when it prefers things that will harm it. A history of the “higher feelings,” the “ideals of humanity”—and I might have to tell this history—would amount to an explanation of why human beings are so corrupt.60

If we already remarked upon the fact of (the invention of) subjectivity—that is, of the subjectum that is posited as the agent of its acts, with which acts, for this reason, it no longer coincides qua being—and of the detrimental consequences of this invention for life (namely, that its very concept divides a healthy being from itself, from its instincts), here Nietzsche indicates that this fact, this invention and detriment, which is indeed “higher feeling” and the “ideal” of humanity par excellence, have, of course, a definite history that will explain the precise causes of this corruption. The history that explains human corruption is entirely specific, and therefore goes well beyond the somewhat abstract invocation of a general conflict between the strong and the weak. Although this history involves in the first place “the Jews” and, in the second place, the fraudulent transformation of Greek philosophy into “Socratism,” it in fact coincides most explicitly with the history of “Christian disease,” which might be thought to be a certain synthesis of Judaic vengeance and Greek decadence, but which, in The Anti-Christ, appears exclusively as the culmination of the Jewish revaluation of the world. If, as Nietzsche famously wrote, “the slave revolt in morality begins with the Jews,”61 it is certainly Christianity that brings this revolt to completion, i.e., that constitutes the global victory of the race of slaves over the races of masters (“We know who became heir to this Jewish revolution …”62). Thus, Milbank is entirely correct in attributing to Nietzsche the view that Christianity is, again, little more than a “supremely cunning Judaic plot, inserting exaggerated Jewish values into Western civilisation through an only apparent rejection of Christ”.63 In Nietzsche’s own words, the

first proposition for solving this problem [of the origin of Christianity] is: Christianity can only be understood on the soil where it grew,—it is not a counter-movement to the Jewish instinct, it is its natural consequence, a further conclusion drawn by its terrifying logic … [The Jews] created from themselves a counter-concept to natural conditions,—they took religion, cults, morality, history, and psychology, and twisted them around, one after the other, to the point where they were in irreversible contradiction to their natural values.64

Or, as Twilight of the Idols put it:

Christianity, which has sprung from Jewish roots and can only be understood as a plant that has come from this soil, represents the counter-movement to every morality of breeding, race, or privilege:—it is the anti-Aryan religion par excellence: Christianity, the revaluation of all Aryan values, the victory of Chandala values, the gospel preached to the poor and the base, the general revolt of the downtrodden, the miserable, the malformed, the failures, against anyone with “breeding,”—65

Thus, Christianity “grew up on this sort of false soil, where every nature, every natural value, every reality ran counter to the deepest instincts of the ruling class; accordingly, Christianity assumed the form of a deadly hostility to reality, a hostility unsurpassed to this day”.66

As, then, the “ultimate conclusion of Judaism”67—that is, as the culmination, the final truth, of the evaluation of the world that Nietzsche calls “slave morality”—Christianity possesses both a negative and a positive meaning. Negatively, Christianity has declared war against not only noble values but noble natures—again, “has waged a war to the death” against the “higher type of person,” the “more valuable type,” whom “people feared most,” and who “has been practically the paradigm of the terrible”68: in short, the creating or noble type. We will have much to say about this “higher type” shortly. The positive meaning of the Christian evaluation of the world is, on the other hand, the institution of a type of virtue that is anything but virtuous. More than any other act, the institution of Christian virtue bred the human animal to “prefer things that will harm it”.

Fundamentally, this comes down, in The Anti-Christ, to the fact that Christianity is “the religion of pity”.69 Pity is the true meaning or essence of all Christian virtue, and acts as such as the ultimate malignant agent against a purely immanent and vital standard of health that nature herself provides. “What is more harmful than any vice?—Active pity for all failures and weakness—Christianity…”70; or, as Nietzsche wrote in Ecce Homo: “I think of it as an inherent weakness, as a case of being unable to defend yourself against stimuli,—pity is only a virtue for decadents”.71 On the other hand, this immanent and vital, or natural standard, with which Nietzsche explicitly aligns himself, prescribes a virtue that is pitilessly cruel and mercilessly inegalitarian: “The weak and the failures should perish: first principle of our love of humanity. And they should be helped to do this”.72 Christian virtue—or pity, properly called vice and anti-nature—establishes itself in opposition to such “naturalism,” and is thus defined in terms of equality, which is to say, “equal rights”.73 Thus is Christian virtue (so called) in the first place concerned with preserving, against the “law” of nature, what has “been disowned and condemned by life”:

Pity is the opposite of the tonic affects that heighten the energy of vital feelings: pity has a depressive effect. You lose strength when you pity. And pity further intensifies and multiplies the loss of strength which in itself brings suffering to life. Pity makes suffering into something infectious; sometimes it can even cause a total loss of life and of vital energy wildly disproportionate to the magnitude of the cause (—the case of the death of the Nazarene). That is the first point to be made; but there is a more significant one. The mortal dangers of pity will be much more apparent if you measure pity according to the value of the reactions it tends to produce. By and large, pity runs counter to the law of development, which is the law of selection. Pity preserves things that are ripe for decline, it defends things that have been disowned and condemned by life, and it gives a depressive and questionable character to life itself by keeping alive an abundance of failures of every type. People have dared to call pity a virtue (—in every noble morality it is considered a weakness—); people have gone even further, making it into the virtue, the foundation and source of all virtues—74

Nietzsche’s polemic against Christianity and its positive meaning as virtue begins—and ultimately ends—with the identification of an intruder into life: of a foreign and anti-natural element disrupting the natural “law of development,” not only causing sickness and degeneration but, as the last words of Ecce Homo put it, redefining “the concept of the good person”—that is to say, virtue—as “the defence of everything weak, sick, badly formed, suffering from itself, everything that should be destroyed,” or negatively said: as the “defiance of the law of selection”.75 This is how Nietzsche concludes his last work, which, according to Nietzsche himself, is intended to tell humanity who he really is: with a warning against this falsification of what is good, and especially of the “good person”—a falsification that “is the most terrible thing of all”.76 And, indeed, this warning, this unconditional criticism of vice posing as virtue, is who Nietzsche is. In the opening paragraphs of this final book, Nietzsche defines himself negatively precisely in these terms, as someone who stands for and embodies a counter-virtue: “I am absolutely not some evil spirit or monster of morality,—if anything, I am the opposite of the type of person who has traditionally been admired as virtuous”.77

The question, for the philosopher-physician, swiftly becomes one of the ruthless extirpation of this criminal element, which is to say, the overcoming of the worst vice, which has “dared” to call itself virtue. Pity is bad because it is vice, which is to say: because it is contra naturam—because it preserves and defends things that nature has condemned. Christianity, as the historical and spiritual agent of vice, is not “bad” principally because it is false; rather, it is false because it “blasphemes” against life, because it promotes injustice, because it corrupts the species, turning humanity against itself and compelling it to “[prefer] things that will harm it”. The falseness of Christianity (like the falseness of the belief in the existence of God, as we shall see in the final section, below) is not in the first place an intellectual or “scientific” crime, but resides in the fact that it lies about what is valuable.

To tell the story of why humanity “is so corrupt,” to discover the true “history of the ‘higher feelings,’ the ‘ideals of humanity’,”—i.e., to “tell the true history of Christianity”78: such is the first, critical moment of the contemporary task of a revaluation of all values. The slanted polemic through which Nietzsche will accomplish his history; the caricature of Christianity that he will construct; the hammer with which he smashes apart this most “criminal” and “sick” of humanity’s idolatries—: are all justified, since they are all part of the scalpel that he wields, qua physician, over the diseased, pity-ridden body of Europe. Nietzsche’s historical sense coincides with the philosopher’s desire and instinct as a physician and, ultimately, as a creator, as an evaluator, overcoming the most sinister resistance and setting free the genuine potentialities of life. For this reason, Nietzschean historical sense is unlike that of any other historian, and reveals itself to be a truly joyful, i.e., creative science. As Foucault put it, its “perception is slanted, being a deliberate appraisal, affirmation, or negation; it reaches the lingering and poisonous traces in order to prescribe the best antidote”.79 The Anti-Christ cuts open the rotting body of Europe in order to discern, precisely, what is “poisonous,” that the “best antidote” may be prescribed. According to Nietzsche, there is nothing more poisonous than the vice or anti-nature of pity:

In the middle of our unhealthy modernity, nothing is less healthy than Christian pity. To be a doctor here, to be merciless here, to guide the blade here—this is for us to do, this is our love for humanity, this is what makes us philosophers, we Hyperboreans!80

4. From Virtue to Virtù

Since it is pity, as “the virtue, the foundation and source of all virtues,”81 that emerges as the real source of “our unhealthy modernity,” what must be prescribed is in every sense a counter-virtue. As the overcoming of false (Christian) virtue, true virtue will be creative in the exact sense that Deleuze defines creation: a resistance to a force—i.e., pity—that everywhere hinders the potency and possibilities of life. The negative connotation, as it were, of such virtue is evident: it consists in the first place of an overcoming of anti-nature, the practice of the active destruction of a way of thinking and feeling that has been bred into humanity for centuries. This new virtue has its historical precedent in Machiavellian virtù, which—as Nietzsche puts it—is “not virtue, but prowess (virtue in the style of the Renaissance, virtù, moraline-free virtue)”.82 It is out of this difference—precisely along the axis that separates virtù from “virtue,” prowess from morality—that the principal difference in The Anti-Christ between nature and anti-nature must be initially broached.

The locus classicus of the Renaissance, “moraline-free” style of virtue to which Nietzsche refers, and which he claims for himself against Christian vice, is The Prince. Machiavelli’s masterwork of political philosophy is in the first place a recommendation of not only a moraline-free but an even anti-moral virtue. Famously, Machiavelli, posing the question of the virtuous ruler, proposes to consider man as he is, rather than as he allegedly ought to be.83 This method, or starting-point, has the result of entirely redefining the meaning of virtue. Virtù does not mean—to put it very generally—the perfecting of man by means of an unattainable standard. Rather, the standard must emerge out of the immanent and actual being of man—how man actually lives—having no recourse to any ideal or universal (inexistent or imaginary) state. The “perfection” that classical virtue aimed at is replaced by an immanent standard of “success,” so to speak—a standard that has no content other than “ruling,” i.e., the effective use of one’s own individual power. Machiavelli calls this use “prowess”. Indeed, the aim of virtù is prowess itself; virtù means, precisely, to “[make] the most of [one’s] own prowess and prudence”.84 The art of politics—the highest art of evaluation, or of aiming at what is eminently good for human beings (Aristotle)—becomes a singular use of the body, or rather the use the body makes, or is able to make, of language, concepts, opinions, prejudices: of certain “idealities,” indeed of everything that has been called “virtue,” and that operate in the world mostly in the domain of appearances (thus prowess implies skill at the art of making use of appearances).85

Virtù is ultimately measured, therefore, not by an ideal and unattainable (“imaginary”) standard—not transcendently—but immanently, or by reality as it is immediately given: its criterion lies, that is to say, in the relation between the capacity of an individual’s body and what Machiavelli calls “fortune”. In other words, the way in which a man is capable of prowess, of confronting and, indeed, making use of what lies before or is given him, for the sake of his own power (ends), is that which decides to what extent he is a true or effective ruler. Reality is itself ultimately defined in terms of fortune, which coincides with an irreducible factor of necessity; what is truly real is the fact that “[time] sweeps everything along and can bring good as well as evil, evil as well as good”.86 The “gifts” that come in the course of time are the gifts of fortune herself. The ruler is, in a word, a man who has come to realize and affirm this, and who has, for this reason, learned from this fact; thus does he know how to court Lady Fortune, who is the true goddess of this world. A man of prowess knows how to sway and bend with his Lady, to follow her movements, having “a flexible disposition, varying as fortune and circumstances dictate”.87 In general, “fortune is changeable whereas men are obstinate in their ways”; thus, “men prosper so long as fortune and policy are in accord”88—which accordance depends both on a man’s flexible disposition, which is a rare and noble thing, and on his capacity to judge what fortune demands in any given moment, e.g., to proceed, say, “with circumspection” or “impetuously”.89 Ultimately, Machiavelli concludes that “it is better to be impetuous than circumspect; because fortune is a woman and if she is to be submissive it is necessary to beat and coerce her”.90 Fortune—like Wisdom, for Nietzsche, who was the first to discern their intimacy, which philosophy had hardly suspected—desires the bold and the unconcerned, indeed the one who knows how to be indifferently violent91; and experience

shows that she is more often subdued by men who do this [i.e., beat and coerce her] than by those who act coldly. Always, being a woman, she favors young men, because they are less circumspect and more ardent, and because they command her with greater audacity.92

To “beat and coerce” fortune: beneath this dramatic language lies, in fact, a rather classical idea. That the true ruler is a man of prowess means that he has not merely received what he possesses solely or even primarily from his mistress (e.g., inheriting a principality); rather, he “dominates” her as specific form in relation to matter, while she, for this reason, remains nevertheless the indispensable site—the occasion or chance (occasio)—of his goodness and success, the essential significance of his life:

And when we come to examine [the] actions and lives [of true rulers], they do not seem to have had from fortune anything other than opportunity. Fortune, as it were, provided the matter but they gave it its form; without opportunity their process would have been extinguished, and without such prowess the opportunity would have come in vain.93

The two “principles”—if that is what they are—of prowess and fortune, which Nietzsche will express as will and contingency, govern the entire Machiavellian method, the latter (fortune) defining “reality” while the former (prowess) is the decisive factor in how human beings relate to their reality: how they realize their singular fates or become who they are. Ultimately, becoming who one is, on the basis of one’s prowess and in relation to fortune, means revealing whether one is truly a ruler or, on the other hand, a charlatan attempting to wear boots for which one is entirely ill-suited. Prowess means courting fortune, being able to dance in step with her, willing her as the site of one’s power, while never making the mistake of trusting her. Thus is the ruler recommended to be “impetuous” and forward, even violent, that he may prove ready for whatever comes—which will finally mean the unpredictable and the unjust, the cruelly, unspeakably contingent. In other words, the man of prowess feels himself to be at home—and more than just at home: only fully alive—in a world of chance and injustice. But this is not principally because the man of prowess thrives in chaos, or himself has no aim, no direction; rather, it is because he has the ultimate aim, and carries within himself the highest capacity for form.

In Nietzsche, the relation between form and matter is transformed at multiple levels and in various registers, the most significant and prevalent of which is the relationship between the will and history—or what Zarathustra calls “that which has passed away”.94 To “redeem” the “chance and nonsense”95 that, according to Nietzsche, has so far characterized the relationship between form and matter amounts to the reconciliation of the will and that which is now, as it were, a fact of fortune. Yet, as with “truth” itself, while the “fact” is given, the meaning of this fact remains open. As Strauss put it: there remains the possibility—indeed, the necessity—of a noble or base interpretation of the “facts,” and therefore, of history itself. Everything depends on possessing within oneself the capacity to see nobly, i.e., a nature capable of genuine creation. Which is to say, everything depends on their being, as Nietzsche will insist, “new philosophers”. In Beyond Good and Evil, the imperative to redeem intrinsic to this relation—namely, “to re-create all ‘It was’ into a ‘Thus I willed it’”96—takes the form of “gather[ing] the force that compels the will of millennia into new channels”.97 Which is to say: Redeem history, matter, the earth, the given, with your will to power!—Give the form of your will to the “chance and nonsense” of fortune that has everywhere governed! But fortune—history—has so far been not only mere chance and nonsense but, precisely for this reason, a history of decline, the depreciation of the value of humanity, which, in modernity, is culminating in, among other things, democratization and mediocratization. In other words: a complete lack and loss of form. To grasp this, an entirely “different faith” is required:

We who have a different faith—, we who consider the democratic movement to be not merely an abased form of political organization, but rather an abased (more specifically a diminished) form of humanity, a mediocratization and depreciation of humanity in value: where do we reach with our hopes?—Towards new philosophers, there is no alternative; towards spirits who are strong and original enough to give impetus to opposed valuations and initiate a revaluation and reversal of “eternal values”; towards those sent out ahead; towards the men of the future who in the present tie the knots and gather the force that compels the will of millennia into new channels. To teach humanity its future as its will, as dependent on a human will, to prepare for the great risk and wholesale attempt at breeding and cultivation and so put an end to the gruesome rule of chance and nonsense that has passed for “history” so far (the nonsense of the “greatest number” is only its latest form): a new type of philosopher and commander will be needed for this some day, and whatever hidden, dreadful, or benevolent spirits have existed on earth will pale into insignificance beside the image of this type. The image of such leaders hovers before our eyes:—may I say this out loud, you free spirits?98

For Zarathustra, this willing, this commanding, is a striving and composing: the unification, or composition into a unity, of all that is “fragment and riddle and cruel coincidence”:

I walk among human beings as among fragments of the future: the future which I envisage. And this is all my composing and striving, that I compose into one and bring together what is fragment and riddle and cruel coincidence.99

To “compose into one”—what? All that is cruel coincidence, or as Beyond Good and Evil has it, the “gruesome rule of chance and nonsense that has passed for ‘history’ so far”. In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche connects this very saying of Zarathustra’s to what he calls the latter’s “determin[ing] as rigorously as possible what ‘the human’ could be for him,” which is to say: “not an object of love or, even worse, of pity”; rather, “people are for him something unformed, matter, an ugly stone that needs a sculptor”.100 Such is the meaning of Zarathustra’s “will to procreate”; Zarathustra perceives an “image lying asleep in the stone,” an image of what humanity could be, and now his “hammer pounds on its prison with fury and cruelty”.101 Because this is “a Dionysian task,” the precondition “is, most crucially, the hardness of a hammer, the joy even in destruction”.102 In The Gay Science, Nietzsche was already entirely explicit that “greatness,” that great tasks, indeed involve being able to both “inflict great pain” and remain certain of oneself when one “hears the cry of this suffering”.103 In being hard enough to create something out of the mere material that human beings are and have been, the philosopher of the future will lead human beings to the point of being capable, for the first time, of posing the question of what humanity is for as a whole. Again, Ecce Homo:

My task, preparing for humanity’s moment of highest self-examination, a great noon when it will look back and look out, when it will escape from the domination of chance and priests and, for the first time, pose the question “why?”, the question “what for?” as a whole—104

As the passage cited above from Beyond Good and Evil makes clear, the question of what humanity is for, and indeed the answer to this question, must finally be posed physiologically and naturalistically, which is to say: in terms of the “wholesale attempt at breeding and cultivation”. In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche defines breeding [Züchtung] in a very specific way, namely, as “the breeding of a particular race or type”.105 In the section titled “‘Improving’ Humanity,” the “project of breeding a certain species of human” is opposed to the “project of domesticating the human beast,” which is the prerogative of (Christian) priests.106 Nietzsche is quite clear not only about his literal use of “these zoological terms,” but about the fact that what is actually involved in the genuine improvement of human beings are “realities, of course, that the typical proponents of ‘improvement,’ the priests, do not know anything about, do not want to know anything about …”.107 For,

to call the domestication of an animal an “improvement” almost sounds like a joke to us. Anyone who knows what goes on in a zoo will have doubts whether beasts are “improved” there. They become weak, they become less harmful, they are made ill through the use of pain, injury, hunger, and the depressive effect of fear.—The same thing happens with domesticated people who have been “improved” by priests.108

When it comes to breeding, however, Nietzsche expresses his unambiguous approval in relation to a highly specific example:

The most magnificent example can be found in Indian morality, where it is given religious sanction as the “law of Manu”. This law sets the task of breeding no fewer than four races at once: a priestly race, a warrior race, a merchant and agricultural race, and finally a servant race, the Sudras. Clearly, we are not talking about taming animals any more: even to conceive of a breeding scheme like this presupposes a type of person who is a hundred times gentler and more reasonable [than the Christian priest]. You breathe freely again when you leave the Christian atmosphere of disease and dungeon and enter this healthier, higher, more expansive world.109

But who is this gentler and more reasonable type? Could it be Nietzsche himself? Or Zarathustra? The philosopher of the future?

In any case, Nietzsche the meta-political physician at least considered himself to be uniquely capable of grasping and posing the problem:

The problem I am posing is not what should replace humanity in the order of being (—the human is an endpoint—): but instead what type of human should be bred, should be willed as having a greater value, as being more deserving of life, as being more certain of a future.110

Thankfully, Nietzsche does not leave us in any doubt as to what he has in mind when he speaks of this “more valuable type” that has appeared here and there, as a “stroke of luck”111—even if, as Nietzsche predicted of his readers (who have by and large proved themselves incredulous), it would hardly be believed: “If I whisper to people that this type would look more like a Cesare Borgia than a Parsifal, they do not believe their ears.—”112

5. Staging the Revaluation of All Values

It is unsurprising that The Anti-Christ, which opens in the starkest fashion with Nietzsche’s reclaiming of “Renaissance virtue,” therefore closes with an extended consideration of Cesare Borgia, the Prince who, as is well known, served as the model for Machiavellian prowess.113 Indeed, one must say that if the work begins with Nietzsche setting the stage for the dramatic defeat of Christian virtue, it ends by bringing the production to its climactic moment, wherein virtù herself steps onto the stage, in the form of the Prince. For Nietzsche, virtù must enter the scene at this point, since she stands opposed in every way—and is the proper historical alternative—to the levelling “virtues” of pity, meekness, poverty of spirit, a pious concern for “truth” and “justice,” the revolt against privilege, “equal rights”114—in short, everything that the New Testament promotes.115 Thus, in the same way that, for Machiavelli, prowess was not an abstract ideal but uniquely exemplified in a real man (a man he knew personally and who was understood by him better than most), for Nietzsche, virtù, as the immediate counter-strategy to Judeo-Christian “virtue,” was in the same way—nay, in the most radical way—embodied at a world-historical level by the Prince himself (the very same!). In The Anti-Christ, Cesare’s singular staging of virtù stands as the utterly inimitable event—“so divine, so diabolically divine that you will look in vain through millennia for a second possibility like this”116—that, historically and concretely, came closest to the revaluation of values around which the entirety of Nietzsche’s thought orients itself. But who—or what—is this historical occurrence, this man, this prince, whom Nietzsche describes as “the triumph of life!”117—?

In the first place, Cesare is the paradigm of health—“immortally healthy, immortally cheerful and well constituted”.118 Which is to say, the figure of the Prince comes closest to what Nietzsche consistently defines as health, namely, a maximum of identity between one’s singular instincts and one’s conception of “the good”. Corruption, we recall, is when a being “loses its instincts,” and thus chooses and prefers that which harms it; in the corrupt individual, one no longer possesses healthy instincts, or really any instincts whatsoever, relying for one’s nature and desires, one’s “sense of the good,” on external and abstract standards, ideals. In philosophical terms: the corrupt individual has entirely lost its sense as an individual, as a singular being and will, and has thereby allowed its existence to be entirely taken over, interpreted for it, by the “universal”. By contrast, Cesare Borgia, uniquely virtuous, had the most extreme sense of himself as a singular will, and subordinated in actu every allegedly “universal” criterion or moral limitation with which his enemies, one and all weaker than him, attempted to reign him in. Sarah Bradford concludes her striking, tragic portrait of Cesare Borgia with the following words:

Few men are born, as he was, with a sense of their own destiny and a will to achieve it so strong that they are prepared to sacrifice anything to that end …. The lust for power is as strong and all-consuming as the compulsion of creative genius. Cesare was ruthless, amoral, in many ways a political gangster, if a brilliant one, but the single-minded drive and ability with which he pursued his destiny gave him the qualities of genius. The essence of the man who was Cesare Borgia is expressed in his own prophetic motto: “Either Caesar or nothing”.119

In this definitive passage, the essential terms are destiny and will: it is in relation to a destiny, and due to his sense of and for destiny, that Cesare’s will, predisposed to even the highest sacrifice, achieves “genius”. What Machiavelli saw in Cesare—the model of the prince whose will and prowess were ideally suited for tarrying with the whims of fortune, and therefore, for ruling—stands as a certain historical paradigm of virtù. To say it another way, Cesare combines in his body and acts the twin forces of fortune and prowess, which forces Nietzsche expresses—as intimated above—as history and will. Such a combination consists, again, in the words of Zarathustra, as “composing … into one and bring[ing] together what is fragment and riddle and cruel coincidence,”120 and in this case, in fact—as we shall see—“gather[s] the force that compels the will of millennia into new channels”.121

And yet, when it comes to staging virtù, these analogies and conceptual pairings, these generalities, can only go so far. Like Machiavelli, Nietzsche’s real interest in Cesare is not as a mere model of virtù, but as this singular man. Not as a paradigm or ideal, but as the man and singular will to power that he was, historically and by nature, Cesare Borgia alone came closest to the concrete “revaluation of all values” around which Nietzsche’s mature thinking orients itself, i.e., the overturning of Judeo-Christian slave morality from within.

Here one discovers one of the most singular or historically specific claims in Nietzsche’s mature thought. In the first place, one must note that, insofar as Nietzsche attributes to Cesare Borgia the highest possible significance regarding the concrete, historical achievement of a “revaluation of all values,” the assessment of the prince, in the final pages of the first book of A Revaluation of All Values, is the culminating image of not only The Anti-Christ but of the task of revaluation as such—the task that defines Nietzsche’s thought from the ground up. In the second place, and to this end, it is literally impossible to overemphasize how much importance Nietzsche gives to this possibility, i.e., of a noble virtue triumphing at this singular moment and through this singular man over the Judeo-Christian evaluation of the world:

Do people finally understand, do they want to understand what the Renaissance was? The revaluation of all Christian values, an attempt using all means, all instincts, all genius, to allow opposite values, noble values to triumph … So far, there has only been this one great war, so far, there has not been any question more decisive than that of the Renaissance,—my question is its question—: there has also never been a form of attack where the whole front was led more fundamentally, directly, and strenuously against the centre! Attacking at the decisive spot, at the seat of Christianity itself, putting noble values on the throne, I mean into the instincts, inside the most basic needs and desires of the people sitting there…122

For Nietzsche, it is necessary that Christianity be overcome from within, on the basis of its own self-overcoming (as he demonstrates in his Genealogy), and to this end, he describes this near-victory—“so divine, so diabolically divine that you will look in vain through millennia for a second possibility like this”—in the most historically specific possible terms: “Cesare Borgia as Pope”.123 It is thus that in the declaration: “my question is its question,” what “it” means here is the Renaissance as “revaluation of all Christian values,” whose ultimate expression would have been the “perfect, super-terrestrial” possibility of the Prince seizing control of the Church, of reshaping the Church in the image of his own virtù. For Nietzsche, the Renaissance, the last truly “great age”—for all the reasons just given—was truly “an end”.124

One can articulate this result somewhat formally: the revaluation of all Christian values that would have occurred in Cesare Borgia’s Papacy would have had the general form of an overcoming of Christianity from within, and the specific form of a church reimagined from the ground up on the basis of noble values. Concretely, and in the first place: the Church would have been overcome in the moment of its transformation into a fully militarized institution governed by a hereditary monarchy. The installation of the son of the then-current Pope, Alexander VI, would have spelled, immediately, the end of the electoral process through which the spiritual leader of the world is chosen with reference to Divine Providence. Rather, this spiritual leader would be cultivated—would be born and bred for a seat that would not only control the spiritual fate of the entire world, but would in addition be the greatest military and political power yet seen on earth. The political and, indeed, meta-political meaning of this imagined transformation is evident: the Church would have become a global institution that combined, in an unprecedented way, spiritual and material power in itself, in order to reinstitute a classical and natural order. Cesare Borgia as Pope—this means: the beginning of grand politics; the breaking of history in two; an evaluation of the meaning of the earth—of the human being itself—as new as it is classical, as dependent upon the will of a single great man as it is guaranteed by nature, or by what Nietzsche calls the “supreme law of life,” namely, a meta-political “order of rank” that “is necessary for the preservation of society, to make the higher and highest types possible”.125

Well then, that would have been the victory that I am the only one demanding these days—: with this, Christianity was abolished!—What happened?126

6. “A Victorious Church”

Nietzsche’s evaluation in The Anti-Christ of the Renaissance in general, of Cesare Borgia specifically, and of the “perfect, super-terrestrial” possibility that was latent in the synthesis of this historical moment with the will and virtue of this singular man, allows us to grasp rather concretely what Nietzsche has in mind when he speaks about what the Germans—i.e., the Protestants, modern Christians par excellence—destroyed with their own “reforming” of the Church. As with the “interpretation” of history, and that of truth itself, the interpretation of what a church is for—and, therefore, of how and to what end to reform it—is indeed subject to a duality of possibilities, namely: the noble reformation, i.e., “Cesare Borgia as Pope,” which remains (due to the Germans, Nietzsche tells us) the painfully unrealized possibility of history; and the base reformation, which actually took place and in the aftermath of which humanity continues to languish.

The Reformation, which erupted shortly after the reign of the Pope Alexander VI, Cesare’s father, was for Nietzsche primarily the renewed revenge of slavish and peasant taste over noble virtue; the victory of Christianity and Jewish values, in their most degenerate (i.e., modern) form reaffirmed over the possibility of a New Antiquity; and, ultimately, the victory of corruption and anti-nature over health and life. But the Reformation was not merely an “instance” of this: rather, it was in the domain of spirit what the French Revolution was in politics: modernity’s most decisive victory on behalf of slave morality against the still lingering possibility of an historical revaluation of values, the overturning of Christian ressentiment and, ultimately, of the lie of the equality of human beings—which “lie” can, again, be directly translated as the lie of subjectivity, of the “universal” and responsible subject. If, as Nietzsche claims, “there has not been any question more decisive than that of the Renaissance,”127 then the Reformation, as the concrete defeat of the Renaissance and, thus, the annihilation of its question, must stand as the ultimate crime of modernity. The lie of subjectivity, already latent in the earliest appearances of slave morality, comes into its own in modernity, thanks in large part to Luther and to the Germans.

For Nietzsche, the difference between German peasant morality—shameless, plebeian, Christian, Jewish—and the noble virtue of the Borgias, divided Europe geographically and, indeed, climatically. As such, the designation of a philosopher as suited to northern or southern climates often appears as a highly significant difference.128 Nietzsche frequently locates the opposition between the philosopher of the future, and the “moral,” i.e., German-Christian philosopher, along the same axis that separates a “Southern freedom and liberality of the mind” from the “crude, naively narrow-minded” North.129 Cesare Borgia, as a Spanish nobleman, exemplifies a southern, “Mediterranean” spirit in which alone thought is capable of dancing and soaring, of taking cruel and cheerful—creative—flight. Conversely, in his forceful remarks against the Germans, the most important condemnation is of their having invented, as northerners, the most diseased form of Christianity: the disease of the disease, as it were. The Germans “have on their conscience the most unclean type of Christianity that there is, the most incurable, the most irrefutable, Protestantism …”.130 So: what happened?

A German monk, Luther, came to Rome. This monk, whose body had all the vindicative instincts of a wounded priest, flew into a rage in Rome against the Renaissance … Instead of feeling the most profound gratitude at the scale of what had taken place, the fact that Christianity had been overcome at its source—, his hatred only saw how it could feed itself on this spectacle. Religious people only think about themselves.—Luther saw the corruption of the papacy when precisely the opposite was palpable: the old corruption, the peccatum originale, Christianity, was not sitting on the papal seat any more! But rather, life! Rather, the triumph of life! The great yes to all high, beautiful, daring things!131

At the origin of Protestantism stands a monstrous crime. The spiritual aim to which, according to Nietzsche, the Renaissance was ultimately driving, and which appears before us in the sublime possibility of “Ceasare Borgia as Pope,” was defeated by the modern renewal of Christianity; and this ought to be a memory “a hundred times more embarrassing for the Germans” than their general Christianity and “alcohol,” which are already “the two great means of corruption”.132

Paradoxically, it is in fact because they created this most unclean form of Christianity—which, of course, not only destroyed the Renaissance and its sublime possibility but introduced the greatest rupture into the institution of the Church—that they missed the point of the Church, which at its best was something noble. One of Nietzsche’s generally unnoticed and yet most interesting criticisms of the Germans, surprisingly enough, is that “the Germans do not understand the nature of a church”; they are “not spiritual enough for that,” and “not mistrustful enough”.133 To be spiritual and mistrustful in the right way are accordingly southern qualities. The Borgias, who came to Italy from Spain, when they assumed power over the Roman Church, understood what a church was, what it was for. By contrast, the German spirit, which for Nietzsche was epitomized by “the Lutheran Reformation,”

failed to understand the expression of a victorious church and saw only corruption; one misunderstands the noble scepticism, that luxury of scepticism and tolerance which every victorious, self-confident power permits itself.134

For Nietzsche, Luther could not see that precisely what he diagnosed as the sickness of the Church was its victory, its greatest health. The northern spirit could not grasp this, since it embodied uniquely “that plebeianism of the spirit that is peculiar to the last two centuries”.135 Thus,

“modern ideas” also belong to this peasant rebellion [i.e., the Reformation] of the North against the colder, more ambiguous, mistrustful spirit of the South that built its greatest monument in the Christian Church. Let us not forget in the end what a church is, specifically as opposed to any “state”. A church is above all a structure for ruling that secures the highest rank to the more spiritual human beings and that believes in the power of spirituality to the extent of forbidding itself the use of all cruder instruments of force; and on that score alone the Church is under all circumstances a nobler institution than the state.136

In The Anti-Christ, the historical moment in which this “nobler institution” was truly “victorious,” or on the verge of being victorious—not merely as a political institution, or “state,” but as a spiritual and meta-political power—was, of course, during the papacy of Alexander VI, which, according to Nietzsche, should have given way to the reign of his son, Cesare. The Nietzschean concept of a “victorious church”—that is, the Church in Borgia hands—has three distinct yet overlapping senses:

(1)

it was on the verge of becoming victorious over itself, which would have made it not merely the “heir” but the actualization of “Europe’s most protracted and bravest self-overcoming”137;

(2)

it was on the verge of being victorious as itself, in the sense of the culmination, as the “monument” and greatest creation of the Southern spirit, of Rome itself; and, finally, for these very reasons:

(3)

it was on the verge of ushering in the victory of a revaluation of all values not only against itself, but against the crudity of the North and of “modern ideas,” which brought against the victorious Church the most vicious revenge of slave morality, which is to say: the most extreme form of the Christian doctrine of the “equality of all souls before God”. Indeed, if Luther could ever be summarized in a single sentiment, it would be precisely such radical, individualist equality. (Perhaps the most extreme symptoms of such individualism and equality are the double-debasement of the twin pillars of the Church as an institution, namely, the Bible and the priesthood; thus Luther “surrendered the holy books to everyone” and stipulated: “Everyone his own priest”! Yet: “behind such formulas and their peasant cunning was hidden in Luther the abysmal hatred of ‘the higher human beings’ and the dominion of ‘the higher human beings’ as conceived by the Church”.138)

In each of these senses—namely, the Church’s victory over itself, as itself, and for the sake of a noble interpretation of the meaning of the earth—what is at stake is an act of creation, or the overcoming of that which holds back the potential of life. Because there was so much to be victorious over (and it is this first sense that is the most essential to emphasize), the meaning of creation here is principally negative, in the sense that it primarily amounts to resistance and struggle: that of the Church against itself and against the “northern” spirit threatening to flatten and consume its potential for life.

Nevertheless, the victory of the Church’s struggle against itself would have brought with it a fundamentally positive result, in that it would have been the victory at every level of a noble way of evaluating the world—thus, as Nietzsche suggests, a genuine revaluation of all values—including and especially the rebirth of classical institutions and hierarchies: a noble culture or, better, regime of cultivation. Against anti-nature and its “culture” of decadence, the Church, fully transfigured as a noble institution, would have meant the rebirth of a classical and natural order: an aristocratic order rooted in nature—in reality rather than ideals, in how men are, rather than how one imagines they ought to be—wherein rights are unequal, and the best and noble natures, the men of prowess as much as the most spiritual natures, rule over the worst and base.

It is in such a vision alone that atheism—the genuine aim of Christianity as the religion of self-overcoming or “self-sublimation”139—possesses, as it does not possess in our time, an actual meaning, namely: the meta-political annihilation of Christian anti-nature, which immanently realizes itself as the point by point replacement of institutions and practices of equality and pity with institutions and practices of inequality and pitiless hierarchy. “Atheism” is, for Nietzsche, not so much a “position” that is asserted or believed—it is, finally, as the “death of God” also is not, nothing intellectual—as it is a will that puts into practice, that assumes and institutes the concrete and positive consequences of, the absolute godlessness of nature. “God”—what has been called “God”—is for Nietzsche not a being whose existence must be disproven or denied, but the highest ideal of a corrupt relation to life, of a way of evaluating life, that must be concretely and globally defeated in the material practice and cultivation of an entirely opposed evaluation.

7. Nature and the Meaning of Atheism

I talk about a “return to nature” too, although it is not really a going-back as much as a coming-towards—towards a high, free, even terrible nature and naturalness, the sort of nature that plays, that can play, with great tasks…140

In a work that directs the whole of its efforts against Christianity, one must suppose that one of its chief ends would be “atheism,” an exposing of the lie of the existence of God. In fact, The Anti-Christ has this as an end only indirectly. Nietzsche is not really concerned with Christianity’s lying about the existence of God per se; what he really cares about is the fact that these lies have uniquely served to make humanity sick. Everything lies. And thus “it makes a difference why you are lying: whether you are lying in order to sustain or to destroy”.141 Not everything recognizes this fact, and in such recognition achieves a good conscience—not everything assumes this fact as a power to be used for the sake of justice and good ends, i.e., for the sake of a noble interpretation of life. In a passage from Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche frames the use of falsity positively, indeed as a virtue for the preservation and cultivation of “the type”:

We do not consider the falsity of a judgment as itself an objection to a judgment; this is perhaps where our new language will sound most foreign. The question is how far the judgment promotes and preserves life, how well it preserves, and perhaps even cultivates, the type.142

The (Machiavellian143) use of falsehoods and lies becomes good judgment when it comes to cultivating “the type”. Evidently, a good judgment and a true judgment are not the same thing. Moreover, their non-identity reveals a hierarchy, wherein good judgment possesses clear priority over a merely true judgment. In a word: what is good is of greater importance than what is true—which recalls, of course, our discussion above concerning the relationship between truth and the evaluation of truth, namely, a resolution and decision concerning the meaning of both truth and the will to truth.

The hierarchy between the good and the true, in favor of the former, has a noble precedent in Plato, where one can think especially of Socrates’ argument, in the Republic, for the breeding of men and women in accordance with the requirements of the most just and best regime, wherein the institution of a rigged lottery—a system of lies—will ensure that only the best breed with each other, while the worst are prevented from breeding. This use of falsehood is enthusiastically endorsed by Glaucon, since the benefit and health of the true regime depends on the hard evaluation that “the quality of the herd … be as high as we can make it”.144 The best men receive “generous permission to sleep with the women,” their children transferred to an elite “nursing pen,” whereas the “children of inferior parents, on the other hand, or any deformed specimen born to the other group, will be removed from sight into some secret and hidden place, as is right”. Which is to say, exposed.

For Nietzsche, who would entirely approve of this method—not least because he everywhere asserts the necessity of lies and illusion for life and certainly for the vast majority of humanity—Christianity is objectionable not because it is false, but because its use of falsity, its real aim, “the purpose the lie is supposed to serve,” is poisonous, rotten, “bad”:

In the end, it comes down to the purpose the lie is supposed to serve. The fact that “holy” purposes are lacking in Christianity is my objection to its means. Only bad purposes: poison, slander, negation of life, hatred of the body, the degradation and self-violation of humans through the concept of sin,—consequently its means are bad as well.145

By contrast, not least to the Bible, which is “psychological corruption raised to an art”—and which should be handled with gloves146—the Hindu Laws of Manu, no less filled with lies of every kind, is “an incomparably spiritual and superior work”.147 Why?

You see it immediately: there is a genuine philosophy behind it, in it, not just a foul-smelling Judain of rabbinism and superstition … And do not forget the central point, the fundamental difference between it and every type of Bible: it lets the noble classes, the philosopher and the warriors, stand above the crowd; noble values everywhere, a feeling of perfection, saying yes to life, a triumphant sense of well-being both for its own sake and for the sake of life,—the sun shines over the entire book.148

It shines, even though it is nothing but “a holy lie too”. But it is a holy lie because it promotes a noble evaluation of the world, a feeling of perfection, saying yes to life, well-being for the sake of life. In short, it promotes nature. Such does not exclude—in fact it so much exemplifies it, that Nietzsche includes only the following passages as examples of its “naturalness”—for instance, the way in which

these old men and saints have a way of minding their manners in front of women that has perhaps never been surpassed. “The mouth of a woman,” it says at one point, “the breasts of a girl, the prayer of a child, the smoke of a sacrifice are always pure”. Another passage: “there is absolutely nothing more pure than the light of the sun, the shadow of a cow, air, water, fire, and the breath of a girl”. A final passage—perhaps a holy lie too—: “all bodily orifices above the navel are pure, all the ones below are impure. Only in girls is the whole body pure”.149

And yet, what is truly valuable and “clean,” for Nietzsche, about the Laws of Manu is, as quoted above, that “it lets the noble classes, the philosophers and the warriors, stand above the crowd”. What is truly valuable, in other words, is the justice that the laws—which, in the guise of Manu’s decrees, assume the form of noble lies—evince, a justice that grows organically out of nature herself, that roots itself in the “joints of nature,” in the irreducible standard that she provides in assigning different types of people to different classes and ranks on the base of their unequal natures.

Nature, not Manu, separates out predominantly spiritual people from people characterized by muscular and temperamental strength from a third group of people who are not distinguished in either way, the mediocre,—the latter being the great number, the first being the exceptions.150

We discover, here, the point at which Nietzsche’s secret (though perhaps not all that secret) proximity to Plato becomes even more obvious: for, the three classes, or castes, which he discerns and approves of here as natural classifications of human beings, essentially correspond to Plato’s philosopher kings and queens (“predominantly spiritual people”), his auxiliaries (“people characterized by muscular and temperamental strength”), and his artisans and laborers (“the mediocre”), who are slaves—i.e., money makers, driven principally by their appetites and bodies, like animals—by nature. For both Plato and Nietzsche, it is just that such a nature be ruled by the more spiritual and more honorable types. What Nietzsche saw, already in “The Greek State” (1871/2), as the hallmark of Plato’s genius was, for this reason, the “total concept of the Platonic state”—which, with a brutal consistency and at the very origin of western political philosophy, drew all the consequences of the fact that “‘man as such,’ absolute man, possesses neither dignity, nor rights, nor duties; [and that] only as a completely determined being, serving unconscious purposes, can man excuse his existence”.151 Thus is

Plato’s perfect state … certainly something even greater than is believed by his warmest-blooded admirers themselves, to say nothing of the superior smirk with which our ‘historically’-educated reject such a fruit of antiquity.152

What “The Greek State” unequivocally affirms is that the majority of humanity is worthless in itself, that existence is as such nothing valuable, but that humanity and existence both may be conferred value, may be “redeemed,” by those few artists and geniuses of the spirit, those few who—like Cesare Borgia—are alone capable of true individuality. That is, the existence of the noble individual not only justifies the existence of the indistinguishable many, which serve as the material basis and, indeed, as the “living tools” (Aristotle) of the noble few, but presupposes that the majority of human beings remain in a state of slavery, both physically and spiritually. As Losurdo put it, in connection to the “debates” surrounding the modern notions of individuality and freedom:

only Nietzsche realised that the freedom or fullness of the individual he celebrated presupposed slavery and the reduction to instruments of a mass of individuals or rather of beings by definition inherently incapable of individuality.153

Individuality: which is to say, culture, of which only a few are positively capable; for the rest, they justify their existence as its merely negative condition. For Nietzsche, this is no mere “description” of a potentially lamentable but in any case necessary state of affairs. When Nietzsche writes, in the same early work, that “we must learn to identify as a cruel-sounding truth the fact that slavery belongs to the essence of a culture,” which constitutes “a truth … that leaves open no doubt about the absolute value of existence,”154 he is not merely describing or relating what “the Greeks” thought, or simply taking a “hard look” at the conditions of human institutions. On the contrary—and as is always the case—Nietzsche is a physician of both the species and of his own contemporary political situation, discovering and making use of such “hard truths” for the sake of diagnosis and prescription, warning and reawakening:

The enormous social problems of today are engendered by the excessive sensitivity of modern man, not by true and deep pity for that misery [of the slave]; and even if it were true that the Greeks were ruined because they kept slaves, the opposite is even more certain, that we will be destroyed by the lack of slavery…155

In the same way, when Nietzsche depicts, nearly two decades later, in The Anti-Christ, a certain “state of nature,” wherein rigid inequality and castes are sanctioned at the very origin, by nature herself, only the most bad faith reading could avoid noticing that he is, again, not merely describing or relating what the Laws of Manu prescribe, but explicitly appropriating this description, in order to present what he considers to be the “the supreme law of life itself,” which law is the condition and authority of a “healthy society”.156 In the natural inequality of the caste system, with its rigid separation of three (in fact four, as Twilight of the Idols recognizes157) distinct natures, Nietzsche is absolutely explicit that

there is nothing arbitrary, nothing “contrived” [about such a system]; anything different is contrived,—contrived to put nature to shame … Caste-order, order of rank, is just a formula for the supreme law of life itself…158

What is contrived, what puts nature to shame, is Christianity and its virtue of pitying, its compassion for the Chandala. The Chandala were not strictly speaking a part of the natural order of things, they were not even the lowest caste, but were “the unbred people, the human hodgepodge,” against which the most brutal, most inhumane struggle was necessary.159 The Chandala, the “untouchables,” were, in every sense, that which nature had condemned, excluded, “the fruits of adultery, incest and crime”.160

In guiding his blade into the roots of Christian “anti-nature”—which turned criminals and degenerates into exemplars and saints, which dared to say that the Chandala, not the truly spiritual castes, were beloved of God and would inherit the Kingdom of God—Nietzsche knows that, in order to extirpate this disease, it is essential to rediscover nature herself. What even the most superficial reading of The Anti-Christ—not to mention of Twilight and of Ecce Homo—discovers is a Nietzsche who explicitly and in the strongest terms, indeed as his culminating gesture, reclaims nature as the only criterion, the irreducible standard, of “what is good” and “what is bad”. According to Strauss, the trajectory from “history” to “nature,” or rather, from mere historicism to a rediscovery of the domain of nature, indeed characterizes Nietzsche’s critical sensibilities as such:

Today natural right is generally rejected on the basis of the view that all right is historical. Nature has been replaced by history in the course of the nineteenth century. Nietzsche started from this fundamental change. He started from historicism, the view that all human thought is essentially and radically historical, but he saw in this view (which had become almost trivial by the nineteenth century, at least in Europe) a problem. Therefore, he tried to return from history to nature. To this extent, Nietzsche was on the way to the restoration of natural right as distinguished from mere historicism.161

The move from historicism, “back” to nature, emerges out of Nietzsche’s “admiration for the Greeks”.162 Nietzsche’s “classicism” consists in the fact that culture—that is, a regime of human cultivation—remained the fundamental problem and aim. But culture, cultivation, inevitably refers itself to nature. Thus, as a Greek, Nietzsche never stopped

conceiv[ing] of culture as idealized nature, one is tempted to say perfected nature. The problem then is this: on the one hand, the truth—the truth about man, the truth about justice, the truth about right—had to have for [Nietzsche] the character of a free project, of a free creation; on the other hand, he held that it is necessary that this goal of man must have its root in nature, nay, that it must be nature. This is Nietzsche’s fundamental problem: to find a way back to nature, but on the basis of the modern difficulty of conceiving of nature as the standard.163

The resolution of this problem, however, is the same as that of the problem of the value of truth itself, namely, that the standard exists but must now be willed as the standard, must be valued and creatively made use of as the standard. “The truth is a free project”164—and one should indeed say the same of nature; but this does not change the fact that it is truth, that it is nature. In the same way that the true philosopher uses the methods and ideals of the scientist, as well as his “results,” uses truth, knowledge, “facts,” for the sake of creative ends—ends pertaining to the question of the good, i.e., that concern the “rank order of values”—one can say that Nietzsche discovers the standard of truth and justice in nature and, since this discovery is necessary but not sufficient (since even the objectivity of nature has no meaning, no value, today), wills this standard as the standard. To will the natural standard qua standard is to decide that it means something—indeed everything—: that natural standards both exist and are binding. This willing of the standard (but not the standard in itself) is a creative act, an act of evaluating, of deciding that nature is authoritative when it comes to the question of what is good and bad.

Against the moderns, Nietzsche’s classicism resides principally in the fact that he places before us, however, not only a doctrine of natural right, but a doctrine of natural duties. The meaning of natural law, as caste order, is the prescription by nature of a fixed classification of various types and their proper duties. This is a classical idea: “The premodern natural law doctrines taught the duties of man; if they paid any attention at all to his rights, they conceived of them as essentially derivative from his duties”165; “Since men are then unequal in regard to human perfection, i.e., in the decisive respect, equal rights for all appeared to the classics as most unjust. They contended that some men are by nature superior to others and therefore, according to natural right, the rulers of others”.166 Because duties, prescribed by nature according to caste, ultimately precede rights, and because caste order is rank order—radically unequal—the only rights that Nietzsche acknowledges are themselves unequal: “Unequal rights are the condition for any rights at all.—A right is a privilege. Everyone finds his privilege in his own type of being”167; “The rights that a man claims for himself are proportionate to the duties which he assumes and the tasks he feels up to. The vast majority of men have no right to exist, but are a misfortune to their betters: I do not give the ill-constituted that right. There are also ill-constituted peoples”168; “We do not believe in a right one has no power to enforce”169; “For life itself recognizes no solidarity, no ‘equal rights’ between the healthy and degenerate parts of an organism; the latter must be excised—lest the whole perish. … [To] demand equal rights for the ill-constituted, would be profoundly immoral; it would be to take what is contrary to nature for morality itself!”170 In short, Nietzsche proposes a radical return to classical political philosophy—which pulls modern political philosophy up from its roots—wherein duties precede right on the basis of the natural inequality and natural hierarchies that exist between human beings.

In The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche discovers the paradigm of a healthy natural order—wherein natural duties precede rights and the latter are the privilege of those whose natures allow for them—in the caste order of India:

Caste-order, the most supreme, domineering law, is just the sanction of a natural order, natural lawfulness par excellence—chance and “modern ideas” have no sway over it. In every healthy society, three mutually conditioning physiological types separate out and gravitate in different directions, each one having its own hygiene, its own area of work, its own feelings of perfection and field of mastery. Nature, not Manu, separates out predominantly spiritual people from people characterized by muscular and temperamental strength from a third group of people who are not distinguished in either way, the mediocre,—the latter being the great number, the first being the exceptions. The highest caste—which I call the few—, being the perfect caste, also has the privilege of the few: this includes representing happiness, beauty, goodness on earth. Only the most spiritual human beings are allowed to be beautiful: only among them is goodness not a weakness. Pulchrum est paucorum hominum: goodness is a privilege. … They do not rule because they want to, but rather because they exist, they are not free to be second.—The ones who are second: these are the custodians of the law, the guardians of order and security, these are the noble warriors, this is above all the king, as the highest formula of the warrior, judge, and preserver of the law. The ones who are second are the executives of the most spiritual people; they are closest to them, belong to them, and take over everything crude in the work of ruling—they are their attendants, their right hand, their best pupils.—In all of this, to say it again, there is nothing arbitrary, nothing “contrived”; anything different is contrived,—contrived to put nature to shame … Caste-order, order of rank, is just a formula for the supreme law of life itself, splitting off into three types is necessary for the preservation of society, to make the higher and highest types possible,—unequal rights are the condition for any rights at all.—A right is a privilege. Everyone finds his privilege in his own type of being.171

In Twilight of the Idols, which merely confirms what The Anti-Christ already establishes, this caste order is held up as that which “present[s] us with Aryan humanity for once, in its pure and primordial form,” and is for this reason that which “Christianity, which has sprung from Jewish roots,” despises most of all.172 For Nietzsche, the crime of Christianity is its “Chandala morality,” its compassion for the “untouchables”: “born of ressentiment and impotent revenge,”173 it declares war against the natural order of things. Christianity consists not only in the compassion for, but in the revolt of, that which nature has herself condemned: not those of the lowest caste—which have their own proper duties and therefore their own proper dignity—but those excluded from the order of nature as such, those to whom one could not even give water without committing a crime,174 that is, a crime against nature, and to whom even the women of the lowest class are not allowed to give aid. For, who but these would desire a revaluation of all values, to make what is natural seem perverse, and what is perverse seem natural?

Here, the invention of the subject is once more revealed for what it is: a fiction propagated by the weakest race, in this case the untouchables, outcasts, degenerate forms, who desired to confuse the well-constituted and beautifully-formed into thinking that the natural inequality between them was accidental, even “unnatural”—not, at least, in accord with the divine order of things—and thus could (and should!), in principle, be changed. To be a subject means: one can change one’s “nature”—indeed, one can hardly be said to possess a proper nature—since one’s acts, and in the first place one’s duties and rights, are no longer who one is but merely what one does (or, better said, happens to do). In other words—and again—the bird of prey, in its domination of the lamb, is, as a subject, not identical to its actions, but becomes free to act or not act in such a way. Underlying its actions is, allegedly, its fundamental equality with the lamb, “before God”; on this plain, both have the same rights and both will be judged in the same way, namely, as subjects responsible to both each other and to “God”. And this notion, which was first religious, of course underlies the moral and political doctrines of equality that progressively characterize the modern world:

Another, no less mad, Christian notion which has been even more deeply incorporated into the tissue of modernity is that of the equality of all souls before God. It is the prototype of all theories of equal rights. Mankind was first taught to babble the principle of equality in a religious way; later, a morality was made out of it; and no wonder man ends up taking it in a serious sense, taking it in a practical sense! That is, a political, democratic, socialistic, indignantly pessimistic sense…175

For Nietzsche, the caste system that nature is reveals the lie of subjectivity—that is, of the moral and political as much as the religious doctrines of equality—in exactly this sense: “The decision is given, nobody is free to have any choice here. Either you are a Chandala or you are not …”.176 As the Laws themselves put it: “A man born of a bad womb shares his father’s character, or his mother’s, or both; but he can never suppress his own nature”.177 And this is, of course, no less a Greek conviction, and what Euripides had Hecuba declare, marvelling at the terrifying nobility of Polyxena’s sacrifice, is merely a high form of the most common assumption: “Always the worthless man is nothing except bad, the noble always himself; no circumstance can corrupt him, his fitting goodness is permanent”.178 It is nature herself that has fixed the uncrossable boundaries and difference of rank between various types, various natures; and Nietzsche does not hesitate, in his “hardness” and “seriousness” when it comes to such “spiritual matters,”179 to carry this principle of fixed boundaries—which are protected by the “primordial law of things,” and which are indeed racial, defined by “bloodline”—into the most spiritual of spiritual matters, i.e., into philosophy itself, in an uncannily “Platonic” way:

In the last analysis, there is a rank order of psychic states which corresponds to the rank order of problems; and the highest problems will ruthlessly repel anyone who dares to get close without being predestined by sheer stature and power of spirituality to reach a solution. What good is it if, as happens so often these days, agile, ordinary minds or clumsy, worthy mechanists and empiricists throng with their plebeian ambition to these problems and into, as it were, the “inner courtyard”! But crude feet would never be allowed on a carpet like this: this has already been provided for in the primordial laws of things. The door will stay barred against these intruders, however much they push or pound their heads against it! You need to have been born for any higher world; to say it more clearly, you need to have been bred for it: only your descent, your ancestry can give you a right to philosophy—taking that word in its highest sense. Even here, “bloodline” is decisive. The preparatory labor of many generations is needed for a philosopher to come about; each of his virtues needs to have been individually acquired, cared for, passed down, and incorporated: and not only the bright, light, gentle gait and course of his thoughts, but above all the eagerness for great responsibilities, the sovereignty of his ruling gazes and downward gazes, the feeling of separation from the crowd with its duties and virtues, the genial protection and defense of anything misunderstood and slandered, whether it is god or devil, the pleasure and practice in great justice, the art of command, the expanse of the will, the slow eye that hardly ever admires, hardly ever looks up, hardly ever loves…180

As long as one has been “predestined” for philosophy, for the highest problems and most difficult climates, as it were, one knows, in the most profound way, that “what a philosopher is … cannot be taught”.181 One is aware—ineluctably—of a certain fate; and the question of the justice or injustice, the “moral” implications, of such a “rank order of psychic states” is eclipsed by the sheer and irresistible fact of the matter. It is only the lowest natures, i.e., slaves, who would think otherwise, and who would be capable of thinking otherwise, since such have a vested interest not only in thinking otherwise, but in deceiving higher natures into thinking otherwise. That is: in deceiving such a nature into thinking that everybody “is entitled to every problem” (the truly “terrible consequence of ‘equality’”182), i.e., that an equality of rights prevails among human beings, or otherwise said, that the sufferings, joys, thoughts, desires, instincts, and goals of every individual mean something equally. For Nietzsche, philosophy becomes sere in the light of such “enlightenment”.

The slave is especially interested in deceiving a higher nature into believing that such a nature stands—not high above the rest, and that his sufferings, joys, desires, etc., consequently mean infinitely more and are infinitely more valuable, but—shoulder to shoulder with his “fellow man,” “before God,” or otherwise put (but this says the same thing): that he is a subject. It is in this way—through the revenge and cunning of lower natures—that higher natures are everywhere brought down, while these very lower natures are lifted up. But in the end, even equality is not the true goal: rather, the lower natures must constitute the standard: it is their ways of suffering, enjoying, desiring, etc., their ideals and gods, that are called “right”: “They give rights to all those who suffer life like a disease, and they want to make every other feeling for life seem wrong and become impossible”.183 The doctrine of equal rights ultimately means: the right of the slave—the one who suffers from life, from nature—“to sit in judgement on everything and everybody”.184

But this is a “superstitious belief”.185 And to comprehend the polemic of The Anti-Christ and the real ends to which it directs itself, one must finally comprehend Christianity as superstition in precisely this sense. What Christianity ultimately means, as the most dangerous enemy and ailment of human kind, is the most outrageous superstition of all, the most superstitious doctrine of anti-nature: “equality”. What “God” means as a value is the devaluation of natural inequality, and the gradual “Chandala” concealment of the “supreme law” of nature by its perverse opposite.

This is why, in opposing the concept of the Christian God—and here we come back to the question of atheism—it is, for Nietzsche, never a matter of demonstrating or otherwise proclaiming his inexistence; rather, it is a question of showing that this God is an invention of the slavish evaluation of the world, that it belongs to a slavish taste. “What decides against Christianity now,” Nietzsche wrote in The Gay Science, “is our taste, not our reasons”.186 The case against what has been called “God” is not in the first place an intellectual or “scientific” case—nor does Nietzsche ever mount such a case—but an aesthetic, moral, and meta-political case. That is to say: a case of beauty, right, and justice. It is not, therefore, that Christianity is an “error,” is intellectually dishonest, that principally matters to Nietzsche; what “horrifies” him, rather, is its radical injustice, which is to say: its anti-nature:

What horrifies me when I look at this [Christian corruption of humanity] is not the error as an error … it is the absence of nature, it is the absolutely horrible state of affairs where anti-nature itself has been given the highest honour as morality and hangs over humanity as law, as categorical imperative! … To make this big a mistake, not as an individual, not as a people, but as humanity!187

Or, again: it is not the fact that the true philosopher has resisted the urge to discover some clever way of sneaking God back into his metaphysics that separates him from the pretend “atheism” of the age (for such pretend atheism has been rather good at working hard to eliminate the metaphysical hypothesis of God); rather, it is solely his juridical and moral sense, which is located in his heart and his nose, the former which aches at the sight of Christian blasphemers of nature, the latter which holds itself closed to the stench of “atheistic” pi(e)ty and socialism:

The fact that we have not rediscovered God, either in history or in nature or behind nature: this is not what separates us. Rather, we are separated by the fact that we view the thing worshipped as God as pathetic, absurd, and harmful, not as “divine”; the fact that we do not treat it as a simple error but as a crime against life… We deny that God is God… If someone were to prove this Christian God to us, we would believe in him even less.188

Lack of belief, here, does not mean lack of theoretical assent to the existence of a highest being, but precisely a moral defiance in the face even of proof—of good reasoning—not only for this being’s existence but for every modern, “atheistic” avatar of this moral god. Once more, intellectual honesty is necessary but not sufficient. Nietzsche’s ultimate indifference, in fact, to intellectual atheism is the reason why he can visit his deepest hatred—the hatred he has for Christians—precisely upon so-called “atheists,” i.e., socialists and anarchists; for, while they no longer “believe in God,” this is ultimately irrelevant when one considers that they are, in their very “atheism,” the very embodiment and culmination of what was truly corrupt about Christianity. Which is to say, not its lack of scientific realism or faulty reasoning, but its power as a disease and an assault against the noble indifference, cruelty, and hierarchies of a truly healthy, natural order:

Who do I hate most among the rabble today? The socialist rabble, the Chandala-apostles who undermine workers’ instincts and pleasures, their feelings of modesty about their little existences,—who make them jealous, who teach them revenge… Injustice is never a matter of unequal rights, it is a matter of claiming “equal” rights … What is bad? But I have already said it: everything that comes from weakness, from jealousy, from revenge.—The anarchist and the Christian are descended from the same lineage…189

For Nietzsche, “unconditional, honest atheism”190 finally means not that God is not, but that we—we free spirits, we disciples of the philosopher and god Dionysos—deny that God is God: that the Judeo-Christian legacy of morality, of breeding a type of being at odds with itself and resentful of natural order and difference, is good. And “we” deny this not principally thanks to our reasoning—for “we” would still deny it in the face of the most successful, rigorous, rational proof—but on account of our love for humanity, our passion for justice: our seriousness when it comes to spiritual matters.