book review:
The Pious Origins of Nietzsche’s Immoralism

Redeeming Nietzsche: On the Piety of Unbelief  written by Giles Fraser
Pious Nietzsche: Decadence and Dionysian Faith  written by Bruce Ellis Benson
reviewed by David van Dusen, University of Wales

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“Germans understand me immediately when I say that philosophy has been corrupted by theologian blood,” and “Protestantism itself is its peccatum originale” (A §10). (1) So Nietzsche writes in The Anti-Christ, while he prefaces the work: “This book belongs to the very few. Perhaps none of them are even alive yet” (A P). Thus whatever it is in The Anti-Christ that is futural or obscure in 1888, it is not the idea that nineteenth-century German philosophy is theologically conditioned. This is clear. Or at least, Nietzsche insists, this is clear to the Germans. That this self-recognition is of dubious value since it is suggested by a man who despises them, (2) or that it may derive from what Nietzsche calls their “theologian instinct” (A §10), is not our question. But it is also not irrelevant to our present concern, since the studies under consideration are alike devoted to Nietzsche’s ‘piety’ or ‘theologian instinct,’ and neither is written by a German.

It would seem that the English and North Americans are still intrigued, if not mystified, when they encounter evidence of this ‘original sin’ in German philosophers. Perhaps this is because even when philosophers such as Nietzsche or Heidegger identify theology as a decisive factor in modern philosophy their interpreters have, on the whole, been inattentive. It is perhaps this neglect that results in theologically motivated interpretations such as Redeeming Nietzsche and Pious Nietzsche—a specific ignorance of the history of philosophy seems to invite and justify this sort of work.

That Slavoj Žižek can write (3) of Pious Nietzsche, that it “clearly formulates what even the most perspicacious readers only vaguely suspected: the subterranean link between Paul and Nietzsche,” obliquely confirms this. Žižek’s praise here is excessive, (4) and the reference to Nietzsche’s ‘most perspicacious readers’ is vacuous; but it is surely correct that most of Nietzsche’s readers have ‘only vaguely suspected’ his vascular connection to Paul—or to Augustine and Dante, Luther and Pascal. (5) Given this generalized lack of theological (and thus historical) subtlety in Nietzsche-interpretation, there is a sense in which works such as Fraser’s and Benson’s should be welcomed. But this welcome should be critical.

It is imperative that theological interpreters of Nietzsche—and their critics—recognize that their undertaking is not new. Significant works from the twentieth century, such as those of Karl Löwith, should be genuinely consulted and held in view. (6) This is a failing in Benson’s study that seriously diminishes its usefulness. Despite glances at recent works by Alain Badiou and Julian Young, (7) Benson develops his interpretation with a basic disregard for his predecessors. (8) And interestingly, aspects of his reading seem to parallel failed Protestant appropriations of Nietzsche in Germany between 1900 and 1920. (9) In this regard, Fraser is more circumspect—his first chapter is devoted to a theological reception-history of Nietzsche.

Redeeming Nietzsche and Pious Nietzsche both assert a specific continuity between Nietzsche’s childhood (or “prehistory”(10)) and his philosophy. While for Fraser this is a concern with ‘salvation’ and for Benson it is a concern with ‘the heart,’ for both it is German Pietism that provides the original and abiding impulse of Nietzsche’s thought. (11) Nietzsche’s father was of course a pastor, but he died when Nietzsche was very young, and “the decisive influence exerted by Nietzsche’s mother” has long been recognized. (12) Fraser and Benson take Nietzsche’s mother and his earliest written ‘outpourings’ as their interpretive points of departure. Benson in particular relies on the latter, and whereas Löwith sees in the “poems written by Nietzsche as a young man,” that “from the very beginning his religiosity had something . . . forced about it,” (13) Benson uses them with a complete lack of critical distance—he displays none of the “ironic resistance” that Nietzsche commends to his interpreters. (14)

Neither study gives any real attention to Nietzsche’s early essays, which are different in tonality from his adolescent memoirs and verse, or to early theological influences such as Feuerbach and relevant later contacts such as Bruno Bauer and Franz Overbeck. This is highly problematic. Nietzsche is far more theologically sophisticated than his rhetoric can at times suggest, (15) and a decision to interpret his last writings through his earliest—or worse, through a putative reconstruction of his earliest religious experience (16)—calls for methodological and material justifications that neither work provides.

But from the beginning, Fraser is alert to dangers that Benson courts. Benson’s title alone, Pious Nietzsche, promises to sanctify him. And while Benson resists Nietzsche at various places, often sotto voce, he essentially delivers what he promises: “I argue that Nietzsche remains a person of faith and prayer” (PN 16). That Benson treats Nietzsche’s madness, in the last paragraph of his work, as a virtual beatification should indicate how uncritical he is capable of being (PN 216). (17)

Fraser, on the contrary, opens his work by disavowing the impulse to construct a ‘holy Nietzsche’:

from the development of the various Nietzsche cults at the turn of the twentieth century to his becoming a fetish of post-modern credibility, Nietzsche is always in danger from those who most admire him. “May your name be holy to future generations” pronounced Nietzsche's friend Peter Gast at his funeral. In challenging the ideological purity of Nietzsche's “atheism” one is not making Nietzsche holy. One may indeed be saving him from an unwanted secular saintliness. (RN 3)

A glance at Nietzschean iconography from the decade following his death—‘Nietzsche with a crown of thorns,’ ‘Nietzsche naked in the mountains ’(18)—should suffice to kill anyone’s desire to confer an aura of saintliness on him, be it Nordic-Christian or post-modern. Still, the impulse is clearly not dead, and this is particularly intriguing given Nietzsche’s negative fascination with the figure of ‘the saint.’

While Nietzsche is not ‘holy’ for Fraser, he is yet characterized as “obsessed with the question of human salvation” (RN 2)—and this is, prima facie, a saintly obsession. Yet that the negative echo in this description (‘obsessed’) is intentional, becomes clear over a hundred pages on, when Fraser calls Nietzsche “a dangerous unreconstructed religious obsessive” (RN 145). The specific sense this phrase has for Fraser is complex, but strictly polemical. The sense that ‘religious’ has here is indicated by the fact that Fraser has just approvingly cited Nietzsche when he writes that “all religions are, at their most fundamental, systems of cruelty” (RN 145).

Fraser’s text breaks down into two introductory chapters, followed by three descriptive and three polemical chapters. The polemical chapters are slovenly, and at its worst Redeeming Nietzsche is simply inane. Fraser writes, for instance, “Shit is a sacrament of ultimate seriousness” (RN 125). In the preceding chapters, however, Fraser is relatively methodical and discriminating. In this, Redeeming Nietzsche provides a contrast to Pious Nietzsche, and those who are attracted to the latter would be better served to read first five chapters of Fraser’s work.

One reason for this is that Benson is dishonest. It is important that ‘dishonesty’ here signifies a lack of transparency, rather than intent to deceive. Indeed, given the philosophy faculty that Benson chairs, his intent is presumably to tempt a new generation of fundamentalists into the open—which is to be commended. (19) But regardless of motives, he does not confess his faith. Benson’s own piety can only be inferred from allusions to the gospels and Augustine, which clarify nothing (PN 15–16, 20); or from an incongruous use of Jean-Luc Marion on “idolatry,” when Bacon’s Novum Organum is the pertinent (and radically different) reference (PN 35); or from his habit of naively appealing to “orthodox Christianity,” (20) and using only post-Nietzschean theologians to articulate it (PN 136). (21) Numerous other instances could be adduced, but since theological prejudices inflect and deflect Benson’s exposition throughout, Pious Nietzsche could only be a respectable study if he stated them.

Fraser does. He addresses himself to Nietzsche as a philosophical theologian—as a Christian—and this decision has consequences. (22) It immediately allows him to face Nietzsche without the overly subtle indirection that onto-theological discourse affords certain interpreters: “What Nietzsche hates, above all, is the cross . . . it is precisely the crucified God that is the source of all the trouble” (RN 21–22). (23) Fraser coolly insists that “for a conservative Protestant scholar . . . to claim that Nietzsche attacks a degenerate view of God” is “absurd.” Nietzsche leaves no doubt “that he believes the principle agent of theological corruption was not Plato, or Aristotle, or St. Thomas, but St. Paul” (RN 22). With this, Fraser also rejects the “possibility of Nietzsche as ancilla theologiae” (RN 20–21), negatively citing a Merold Westphal essay that Benson praises in his notes. (24) And thus, when Fraser proceeds to stress “the question of salvation” in Nietzsche and to suggest that “much of his work is driven by an attempt to expose the pathologies of Christian soteriology and re-invent a very different soteriological scheme which . . . leads to genuine joy” (RN 30), his hypothesis at least does not provoke the suspicion that Nietzsche is being cleaned up for theologians.

Fraser’s descriptive thesis can be summarized by way of the following claims, all of which rest on his assertion that “Nietzsche is obsessed with the question of salvation” (RN 30), coupled with an important question: “Nietzsche was unquestionably an atheist—my question is going to be: of what sort?” (RN 30). Chapters 2 to 5 of Redeeming Nietzsche argue that:

Nietzsche approaches “the question of God” with the instincts of his Lutheran Pietistic upbringing. . . . [And] from this perspective the “first question” of theology is not “Does God exist?” but rather something like “How are we saved?” (RN 30)

Nietzsche is unreservedly hostile to any conception of salvation that means trading in our humanity for a stake in the hereafter: “do not believe those who speak to you of super-terrestrial hopes!” he insists. (RN 74)

Salvation, for Nietzsche, is about healing . . . Humanity suffers from a disease brought about by . . . the imagined comforts of Christian redemption. (RN 87)

Nietzsche seeks salvation in an inverted version of Lutheranism; that is, by urging his readers to undergo, in reverse, that process by which humanity came to hate itself in the first place. (RN 101)

Fraser takes up the first, less contentious claims successively in chapters 2 to 4. The last is taken up in chapter 5, commencing with Fraser’s interpretation of the “Three Metamorphoses” in part 1 of Zarathustra and culminating in his discussions of eternal recurrence and “the invocation of eternity” (RN 119) in part 3 of Zarathustra.

Though he is not cited, Löwith anticipates chapter 5 in its basic outline (25) and indeed devotes Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same to the constellation of questions that Fraser surveys here. (26) But whereas Löwith’s exposition is incisive and dispassionate—though he wrote in political exile, during the Nazizeit—Fraser’s becomes increasingly erratic, and in the last paragraph of the chapter it is hysterical:

Nietzsche’s “Yes” is the “Yes” of praise—his own Dionysian Alleluia. But, though a relative of the charismatic evangelical “Yes,” Nietzsche’s post-Christian affirmation is . . . closer in spirit to something much more sinister—to the highly charged, emotionally intoxicating “Yes” of the Nazi rallies in Nuremberg. (RN 121)

Redeeming Nietzsche never recovers from this lapse in rigor, (27) and Fraser’s stress on Nietzsche’s pietistic ‘instincts’ and ‘post-theistic soteriology’ can be seen, in retrospect, to be dubious. Fraser’s last, polemical chapters are being prepared by his first chapters— that is, the descriptive thesis of Redeeming Nietzsche is itself polemical.

Though Benson, as noted, is more hagiographical than polemical, Pious Nietzsche simply modulates the descriptive thesis of Redeeming Nietzsche. Benson mentions Fraser early on to take his distance (PN 7), but his debt is deeper than this reference suggests and later objections are superficial (PN 198–200). Of course, Benson shifts Fraser’s terminology at every point of the argument that was represented above. Thus, for instance, Fraser’s initial claim that “Nietzsche is obsessed with the question of human salvation” (RN 2) becomes, in Benson, “his writings are obsessed with these questions—who or what is god and what does it mean to serve this god?” (PN 22). And similarly, where Fraser has, “Nietzsche was unquestionably an atheist—my question is going to be: of what sort?” (RN 30), Benson writes that “once God is dead, the question is: what kind of ‘piety’ does Nietzsche put in place of Christian piety?” (PN 39).

The only significant advance in Pious Nietzsche consists in its stress on the polyvalence or, strictly speaking, the duplicity of the concept of askēsis for Nietzsche. Benson suggests the distinction between a ‘no-saying’ and a ‘yes-saying’ askēsis, the former comprising Nietzsche’s rhetorical “warfare against all that is ‘sick’ in him . . . Socrates, Wagner, Paul” (PN 3–4), while the latter is interpreted by way of a putatively Greek conception of mousikē (PN 5). (28) To put it crudely, Nietzsche’s negative askēsis is philological and critical, while his affirmative askēsis is musical and fideistic. Though Benson’s basic insight—namely, the duplicity of askēsis in Nietzsche—is incontestable, his exposition is badly flawed. As a single indication of this: Pace Benson’s directional logic, in which negative askēsisprecedes the positive and should be superseded by it, (29) Nietzsche’s most destructive works follow the lyricism of Zarathustra—“after the yea-saying part of my task had been solved it was time for the no-saying”—and an ironically ‘theological’ gloss in Ecce Homo indicates that Nietzsche in some way recoiled from his affirmative, visionary work (EH “Books” BGE §1–2).

This sort of unclarity is characteristic of Pious Nietzsche. Citations from Nietzsche’s corpus and Nachlass are highly selective, and yet Benson seems incapable—from the preface on—of seriously interrogating the passages he cites. For instance, Nietzsche consistently refers to his ‘will to truth’—the epochal (and yet ‘moral’) necessity of his unbelief in “the ‘law’, the ‘will of God’, the ‘holy book’, ‘inspiration’” (A §55)—as his piety. Nietzsche is pious precisely when he refuses Christianity and its god. But what Benson insists is a ‘Dionysian Pietism’ in Nietzsche, is what Nietzsche calls—in the epigraph to Benson’s preface, no less—his immoralism. Nietzsche’s immoralism clearly has pious roots—namely, in his inherited ‘will to truth.’ But this rhetorical opposition— ‘pious’ Nietzsche, ‘immoralist’ Nietzsche—is nevertheless essential, (30) and Benson fails to address it as such.

And as he negligently collapses Nietzsche’s pious-immoralist opposition into a ‘Pietism,’ so Benson collapses Nietzsche’s faith-truth opposition into a ‘faith’—which is precisely what Nietzsche excoriates in the New Testament. (31) In later works Nietzsche of course refers, on occasion, to a Dionysian ‘faith’—but these occasions must be interrogated, and they never are in Pious Nietzsche. (32) Nietzsche far more consistently insists that the “imperative of ‘faith’ is a veto on science,—in praxi, the lie at any cost” (A §47), or that “in every age (with Luther, for instance), ‘belief’ has just been . . . a shrewd blindness about the dominance of certain instincts” (A §39), or that “‘Faith’ means not wanting to know the truth” (A §52). (33) Thus, when Benson writes that “Nietzsche ultimately comes to call his own belief system a faith that is ‘the highest of all possible faiths,’ one that he baptizes ‘with the name of Dionysus’” (PN 38), he claims precisely nothing—since the words are indeed Nietzsche’s—but the core of what he implies is demonstrably false.

Thus Benson insists that “Nietzsche may not be certain exactly ‘who’ Dionysus is, but Dionysus is clearly his god” (PN 197), whereas Dionysus is not Nietzsche’s ‘god’ but a name he espouses. Nietzsche is a theological nominalist, (34) and (pace Benson) he remains godless. Though Nietzsche values what the name ‘Dionysus’ signifies and devalues what ‘the Crucified’ signifies, he no more believes in Dionysus as a god than he does in the Crucified—which is why he can utilize these ciphers as he does, at the end of Ecce Homo. Similarly, when Benson insists that Nietzsche’s ‘faith’ is “founded upon a dogma—the eternal recurrence that should provoke an amor fati” (PN 196), he not only misinterprets Nietzsche but betrays an ignorance of the decisive historical senses of this word, ‘dogma.’ If ‘eternal recurrence’ is to be a dogma, it is certainly not a theological dogma (35) in the sense that begins to emerge in the fourth and fifth centuries and peaks in the sixteenth or seventeenth; (36) and if Nietzsche is to be “dogmatic,” (37) he is certainly not philosophically dogmatic in the sense that comes to new prominence and clarity at the end of the eighteenth century. (38)

Nietzsche is a theological and philosophical skeptic, and eternal recurrence is a formal concept or conceit—indeed, it is an ascetic (and aesthetic) formula that cannot (as such) ‘provoke’ but only detect amor fati or its absence. And since the Dionysian involves (as Nietzsche says) a ‘faith,’ then a subordinate sense of this word could perhaps be related to Jacobi’s idea of a pre-reflective faith without which “we cannot cross the threshold, sit at table, or go to bed.” (39) That is, ‘faith’ as it appears in the post-Humean Glaubensphilosophen could have some relevance. But the decisive sense should be sought in a passage of Beyond Good and Evil in which Nietzsche reactivates the Pauline “formula” that sets faith over works. (40) Here, Nietzsche identifies a real faith with something like that Johannine vice, the pride of life. But whatever it is that Nietzsche espouses as a ‘faith,’ it cannot be sought in the gospels (PN 15–16) or by way of a received ecclesiastical virtue that Nietzsche repeatedly analyzes and always eschews.

There is a phrase on the last page of Pious Nietzsche which crystallizes (and finalizes) what is fundamentally wrong with this study: Benson suggests the possibility that Nietzsche feigned madness as “the only way to overcome his own personal decadence” (PN 216, my stress). And Benson is preoccupied, throughout, with the question of Nietzsche’s capacity or incapacity to “believe and live out his own doctrines” (PN 49, my stress)—indeed, he says that this is “the central question” of Pious Nietzsche (PN 12). This typically Protestant formulation of a question that is neither philosophical nor historical certainly attests to Benson’s strain of piety, but it signally and repeatedly fails to elucidate Nietzsche’s driving concerns and most serious insights.

Toward the end of The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche writes:

dismal ideas like hell, like the sacrifice of the innocent, like the unio mystica in the drinking of blood . . . that is what gained control over Rome, the same type of religion that Epicurus had already waged war against in its pre-existent form. You should read Lucretius to see what Epicurus had fought, not paganism but “Christianity,” I mean the corruption of the soul through the ideas of guilt, punishment, and immortality.—He fought the subterranean cults, the whole of latent Christianity,—at that time, to deny immortality was nothing less than salvation. (A §58) (41)

Redeeming Nietzsche and Pious Nietzsche interpret Nietzsche’s self-confessed piety and concern with redemption (42) from out of his earliest writings and a variety of German religious life they call ‘Pietism.’ This decision has its validity, but will also predictably yield reductive, indeed provincial interpretations. Serious research into the sources and sense of Nietzschean piety will proceed, rather, by way of renewed interrogations of Lucretius and Porphyry (43)—or of “Christian agitators” such as Paul, Tertullian and Augustine (AC 59)—or of Luther and Bacon, (44) Spinoza and Hegel and Heine.

And whatever it is in Nietzsche’s anti-theology that is still futural or obscure, it did not originate in his mother’s Pietism and culminate in raptures at a piano, or in Nazi death-camps. It is the question, still, of what conquered sub hoc signo. (45) It is the question, still, of what recommenced with the Protestant revolutions (46) and commenced with European conquests of the Americas and Africa. It is also the question of pity and terror within the instant which still possesses us of eternity, and will dispossess us of time absolutely. (47) And here the only piety—and “there is no alternative”—is still this: “I will not deceive, not even myself.” (48)

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