Based on a video lecture.
Video lecture: YouTube
Friedrich Nietzsche. How much is contained in that name. He stood out sharply from other nineteenth-century thinkers: in the radicalism of his views and in his literary talent equally. He remains, to this day, a deeply contradictory figure.
In the twentieth century everyone wrote about him. Some demonised him, others heroised him. Some considered him a prophet, a messiah, a genius who had revalued all values and opened the path to a great future. Others considered him simply a mentally ill person. As usual, the truth is somewhere in between: in a certain period of his life Nietzsche did become genuinely ill in psychological terms.
Thomas Mann, when writing Doctor Faustus (my favourite novel), drew substantially on Nietzsche’s biography. The protagonist sells his soul to the devil for twenty-odd years of greatness, lives, creates, writes great works, then loses his mind and lives out his days in a semi-conscious state. In Nietzsche’s own life things played out in much the same way.
Nietzsche as a Literary Figure, Not a Scholar
I regard Nietzsche primarily as a literary figure rather than a philosopher, and certainly not as a scientist. Open any of his works: there are no scholarly citations. What you find is essentially a stream of consciousness. Structured, yes, and Nietzsche really is a very talented writer, but there is no scholarly apparatus, no properly introduced conceptual framework. This is not a humanistic science.
Moreover, in his critique of religion he did not draw on the work of contemporary religious scholars: not even figures as prominent as Friedrich Max Müller. He relied on his own framework. In this sense what we have is primarily literature: high-quality, very talented, very well written, but not reaching the level of science.
When discussing Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity I will focus on exactly that: how he approached the question, how he criticised it, what arguments he used. His ontological conception, his epistemology, his ethics broadly speaking, we will leave aside.
One important caveat up front: I read Nietzsche in translation, because I do not read German. It is said that in German he sounds extraordinary. I am unfortunately unable to verify this. If you want to write a scholarly article about anything, read sources only in the original. Otherwise it is a profanation. But since this is YouTube, I say what I consider worth saying.
Central Concepts: The Free Mind and the Will to Power
At the centre of Nietzsche’s conception of the human being is the idea of the free mind. The most important thing about a person, in his view, is that they should not be bound, that they should be able to rise to mountain heights and breathe that mountain air he wrote about so compellingly in Ecce Homo. He criticises everything that undermines this free mind. Christianity and socialism receive equal blame: both make the human being weak, both press them down into the earth.
The central concept of all Nietzsche’s philosophy, as is well known, is life. He is associated with the philosophy of life, continued later by Dilthey and Henri Bergson, Nobel Prize laureate in literature. But Nietzsche is perhaps the most vivid representative.
The embodiment of life for him is the will to power. In this he follows Schopenhauer, who spoke of the will to live. But Schopenhauer, like almost all his colleagues, Nietzsche mercilessly abused: first praised, then accused of decadence and all manner of horrors. Nietzsche might be called the Nabokov of philosophy: very few figures in his pantheon escaped without being covered in mud. Of those he genuinely respected, perhaps only Spinoza.
The Antichrist
Our main source for this discussion is Nietzsche’s work Der Antichrist. The German title permits both translations: “The Anti-Christ” and “The Anti-Christian.” I will use “The Anti-Christian,” which is how the edition I read was translated.
Written in 1888 and offered for publication, it was so radical that no one dared publish it immediately. The delay was organised by Nietzsche’s friends Franz Overbeck and Heinrich Köselitz, who held back both this work and Ecce Homo. It was published only in 1895, by which point Nietzsche had virtually lost his grip on where he was and what was happening to him.
The work was conceived as the first book of a large project, the Revaluation of All Values: a final blow against contemporary morality. Everything outstanding he had written before (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, On the Genealogy of Morality, and the rest) was already behind him. The word “contemporary” was one he particularly detested: for him it meant petty, pygmy-like, wretched, negligible. The concept of progress was equally deflated in his view: he did not believe progress was real, and if it was, it was a bad thing.
The Main Arguments Against Christianity
Christianity makes people weak. For Nietzsche there is nothing worse than weakness. The human being must rise above itself, above humanity, surpass it. Hence the famous formulas: “push the falling,” “man is a rope stretched between the ape and the overman.” His first commandment of humanity: let the weak and the deformed perish, help them perish. This is a kind of social Darwinism of the highest order.
Hence the well-known myth that Nietzsche was a forerunner of fascism and Nazism. This is a complicated question and context matters, but grounds for such interpretations do exist in his texts.
Christianity offers us cowardly compromises, pseudo-virtue, everything that makes human beings weak. Compassion, which Christianity places at its centre, Nietzsche considers a form of weakness. The idealised Greece, the Hyperborea of his conception, is set against this Christian decline.
Compassion is hostile to life itself. For Nietzsche, the cosmos is a continuous struggle of quanta of power. Compassion violates this law: it prolongs the lives of the weak and the wretched who have, in essence, no place in the struggle. This is why Schopenhauer is, for him, the chief enemy of life: a decadent, a pessimist, a preacher of compassion.
Suffering, by contrast, strengthens the human being. In Ecce Homo Nietzsche wrote that his greatest creative surge came during a period of maximum physical suffering: illness after illness, treatments, travels — and precisely then he surpassed himself most completely and rose higher than ever before.
The most striking example of a victim of Christianity in Nietzsche’s account is Pascal. Pascal is well known for his ardently Christian views, and in Nietzsche’s opinion he renounced reason, renounced his own genius, in the service of this vicious Christianity.
The Christian god is castrated. A people cannot see its own reflection in the Christian god. God should be both giving and taking, both kind and terrible. The Christian god, in Nietzsche’s view, is castrated, stripped of the will to power: a dull, kindly little deity, a crutch for the weak. The true gods are the pagan gods, the ancient gods. The older the better; the contemporary is by definition wretched.
This can be contested. We do not forget the passage about bringing not peace but a sword, and the fact that the Christian god is not only the god of the New Testament but also of the Old, with its rather illiberal episodes. Christianity, moreover, has held very high positions in the world for two thousand years: in terms of moral authority and in terms of real power. The Crusades, the Reconquista, the state religion of Rome — what religion of the weak is this? But Nietzsche has his own view, and that is why we value him.
Ressentiment. One of the key concepts in Nietzsche’s psychology. Ressentiment is the suppression of the will to power by those who lose in open struggle: the bitterness and retaliation of the oppressed. Nietzsche considered ressentiment characteristic of priests above all. For more detail, read On the Genealogy of Morality.
Beyond this, Nietzsche addresses the question of Christianity’s origins. In his view, Christianity is a truncated and corrupted continuation of the Jewish tradition. The Jews embody ressentiment; Christianity is a degraded continuation of this morality of ressentiment. Worse than bad.
Paul the Apostle as a calculating schemer. Nietzsche held that Paul was responsible for the doctrine of the Last Judgement, with which he herded people like a flock of sheep.
The figure of Jesus. Nietzsche criticises Renan for calling Christ a hero and a genius. For Nietzsche, if there is anything un-evangelical, it is precisely the concept of heroism. Christianity is devoid of heroism: it is a religion preaching weakness, abasement, ressentiment.
Nietzsche against Kant. Kant posited a single categorical imperative: a universal moral standard to which every person must conform. For Nietzsche morality is relative. The exact quotation: “The deepest laws of preservation and growth demand the opposite — that each person should invent their own virtue, devise their own categorical imperative.” Kant receives the same treatment as Schopenhauer: wretchedness, compromises, and so on.
The relativist conception of morality is another stone thrown at Christianity. Christianity presupposes an absolute morality flowing from the highest source. Nietzsche rejects this entirely.
It is here that the roots of contemporary disputes about religion are located. Dostoevsky’s famous line: “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.” Dawkins’s famous reply: “One can be a deeply moral person while being an atheist.” Sam Harris in The Moral Landscape argues that morality is an objective reality requiring no divine underpinning.
Was Nietzsche a Nihilist?
There is a famous myth: Nietzsche was a nihilist. He himself categorically disagreed. Nihilism, in his understanding, is precisely a decadent phenomenon: the negation of everything, pessimism, decline, everything he associated with Schopenhauer’s gloom. It is against this that he rebels.
But it is important to understand: if we take a broader conception of nihilism as a refusal to submit to established values, as a willingness to revalue everything taken for granted, then in that sense Nietzsche is, without question, a nihilist. The concept of nihilism itself is quite old, incidentally: nihilus is a Latin word, and Turgenev in Fathers and Sons did not invent it but merely popularised it in Russian culture.
So the answer to the question “was Nietzsche a nihilist” depends entirely on what you put into the term. If nihilism means pessimism and decadence, then certainly not. If nihilism means the revaluation of all values and a refusal of ready-made answers, then yes, completely.
Nietzsche and Other Religions
His critique is concentrated almost entirely on Christianity. Toward Islam he showed considerably more sympathy. Buddhism he called “the only positivistic religion.”
This is an important point, because Nietzsche is often presented as someone hostile to religion in general. That is not the case. He critiques Christianity because Christianity runs against his philosophical conception: it preaches weakness, compassion, ressentiment. Islam, in this respect, is far more acceptable to him: there is will in it, there is force, there is something his conception does not reject. Buddhism he values in part because it, unlike Christianity, does not lie about reality and does not construct fictional worlds of reward and punishment. In this sense Buddhism, for Nietzsche, is more honest.
So what we have here is not anti-religious criticism in the manner of Dawkins or Harris. It is a very specific critique of a specific religion from a specific philosophical standpoint. Nietzsche called himself an atheist and a freethinker with pride, but his atheism is not the position that all religion is evil. It is the position that Christianity is incompatible with what the human being ought to be.
Why This Is Not Science
Back to the central claim I stated at the beginning. Scientific critique of religion rests on scientific concepts. Soviet scientific atheists and the New Atheists (Harris, Dawkins, Dennett) alike build their critique on the following: religion is a product of the evolution of human society. If its emergence can be explained by natural causes, if it passed through specific evolutionary stages, then this indirectly challenges the idea of its supernatural origin. Open The God Delusion: citations, footnotes, scientific concepts on every other page. Or take Sam Harris: the same. Faith is set against reason, and this opposition is argued through scientific instruments. Religious thinkers who participate in this polemic say the opposite: faith and reason do not contradict each other, they complement each other. But that is a different conversation.
Nietzsche stands entirely apart from all of this. He even examines Christianity outside its social context. In Soviet anti-religious literature, or in contemporary critiques of religion, Christianity is inseparable from other social institutions, from class relations, from economics. For Nietzsche this is all somewhat beside the point. The doctrine of social reality, of the social environment — he considered it a decadent conception. He thought himself above it, at least that was how he saw things.
He examines Christianity exclusively from the standpoint of his own philosophy: the will to power and the free mind. His claims can neither be proven nor refuted; they do not meet the criterion of falsifiability. This is not science; it is philosophy at best, and broadly speaking: polemic and high literature.
Any of us could write an anti-Christian pamphlet and say Christianity is a religion of the weak. To the same effect as Nietzsche. The question is how well it would be done. Nietzsche did it with something close to genius. He really was an exceptional writer, and that does not change because his claims are unscientific.
This is my central argument: Nietzsche does not operate as a scholar, he operates as a literary figure. This does not diminish his significance, but it determines the right way to engage with him. Read him as one reads good literature: with admiration and with critical distance at the same time.