Nietzsche's views on the misinterpretation of the life of Christ

Friedrich Nietzsche is commonly viewed as one of history's most outspoken critics of Christianity. A large portion of his writing consists of attacks on its doctrines and expounding his view that a fixation on God has limited humanity from reaching its full potential.

“Perhaps man will ever rise higher and higher from that point onward, when he no longer flows out into a God.” [GS §285]

However, there is a section from one of his last books 'The Anti-Christ' which, despite its name, reads almost like a sermon (if you include a few omissions). Nietzsche's idiosyncratic view of Jesus Christ is probably one of the most uncharacteristic admissions into his body of work and, as such is often the case with things that appear to be out of place, suggests that we can draw from it a unique and insightful interpretation. Throughout this essay, I will attempt to explore Nietzsche's views on the life of Jesus Christ, how he believes this conflicts with the core tenets of Christianity, and how we can apply these ideas to our own lives. Countless writers have analysed the actions and meaning of Jesus's life, but few have attempted to gauge his psychological type. To attempt to ascribe such a human classification to the Messiah could undoubtedly be seen as heretical, but luckily for us, heresy is something Nietzsche has no objection to. To separate Christ's authentic psychology from the aspects that have been retroactively ascribed to him by his followers, Nietzsche decides it is productive to first discern the psychological traits of these followers. He assumes that our physical attributes can give us some insight into our psychological ones, and as such, attempts to identify what he calls 'the physiological realities' upon which Christian doctrine has grown. There are two that he identifies: an 'Instinctive hatred of reality' and an 'Instinctive exclusion of all aversion, all enmity, all feeling for limitation and distancing'. He sees in the commonalities between these an 'extreme capacity for suffering' and consequently, every contact and all resistance is felt too deeply and generates unbearable displeasure. Nietzsche concludes that the individual of this type, as the only way to avoid all resistance, is naturally drawn to 'love as the sole, as the last possibility of life'. In short:

“The fear of pain…cannot end otherwise than in a religion of love”. [AC §30]

Following on from this, Nietzsche makes the radical proposition that most impressions of Jesus have been preserved in a distorted form, that the last 2000 years of Christian tradition have been misguided. The reason for this, at least partly, is symptomatic of the milieu into which Christ was born:

“That strange and sick world to which the Gospels introduce us - a world like that of a Russian novel, in which refuse of society [and] neurosis … seems to make a rendezvous”. [AC §31]

The first Christian communities, those to which the teachings of Jesus Christ appealed so strongly, were the outcasts of society: the meek, the powerless, those with that 'fear of pain' that confined them into lives of inaction and suffering. As such, Nietzsche speculates that the religious leaders of these communities were driven to infuse the image of Jesus with fanatical qualities to motivate their people to action, namely war. He views the temporal nature of concepts such as the 'second coming' and the 'Last judgement' as unevangelical.

“One knows very well how resolutely all sectarians adjust their Master into an apologia of themselves”. [AC §31]

To instead identify a more accurate picture of the psychology of the redeemer, Nietzsche looks for patterns in Jesus's speech rather than qualities assigned to him. He noticed that when Christ speaks, he regularly spoke in terms of what Nietzsche calls 'the inmost thing', such as 'life', 'truth' or 'light'. This reference to only the abstract, the timeless, and the intuitive made Nietzsche believe that in Christ's eyes 'the whole of reality…possesses for him merely the value of a sign, a metaphor'. Jesus does not offer any justifications for his worldview, his proofs are 'inner lights, inner feelings of pleasure and self-affirmations'. This view of reason and corporeal reality as merely secondary to Christ compared to his 'inner realities' also leads Nietzsche to question the notion faith in itself. He draws from Christ's conduct that faith is merely 'a screen behind which the instincts played their games'. It is unclear whether he attributes a divine element to what he calls instinct but, at least in my interpretation, he would deem a more accurate description of Christ not as someone acting out God's will, but an individual with an instinct for love. Not as someone who has denied evil and false doctrines, but one for which is denial is impossible.

“One has always spoken of faith, one has always acted from instinct”. [AC §39]

So, what can we draw from this? For the answer, we must look at how this instinct manifests itself in Christ's life. Nietzsche makes a bold hypothesis: that 'evangelic practice alone leads to God, it is God!'. He viewed the perception of God as a person as 'un-Christian' and an 'ecclesiastical crudity'. He believes that the Kingdom of Heaven was not something beyond, but a state of being that arrives to one who behaves as Christ did. That the practice of love as the only instinct is, not in metaphorically but in the literal sense, God.

“This bringer of glad tidings died as he lived, as he taught — not to redeem mankind, but to demonstrate how one ought to live”. [AC §35]

Nietzsche takes this view to its logical endpoint. He believed that a fixation on the death of Jesus and the cross as a symbol of what he represented is a gross misunderstanding of the true meaning of his life. He puts himself in agreement with Goethe's sentiment of 'the cross being on the four things he most dislikes'. Nietzsche's viewpoint on what we should take from Christ can be summed as the following: Jesus's greatest gift to mankind was not his death, but his life. It is interesting to note that the original German title of 'Der Antichrist' can also be translated as 'The Anti-Christian'. It is not Christ that Nietzsche refers to as the 'immortal blemish of mankind', but Christianity. He even goes as far as to say that 'one constructed the Church out of the antithesis of the Gospel'. To Nietzsche, Christ and Christianity are alike only in name. From his unorthodox sermon, one can almost detect a hint of sadness and regret, that the highest of all goods has been tainted by what he believes is an 'instinct for revenge'. Nowhere is this feeling shown more clearly than in perhaps one of Nietzsche's most chilling insights:

“In reality there has been only one Christian, and he died on the cross”. [AC §39]