Blog 4: The Antichrist

Source:

Nietzsche, Friedrich. “The Antichrist.” Sources of European History Since 1900. Ed. Marvin Perry, Matthew Berg, and James Krukones. Boston: Wadsworth, 2011. 36-37. Print.

Summary:

Nietzsche begins by defining good, bad and happiness: good is “all that heightens the feeling of power”; bad, “all that proceeds from weakness”; and happiness, “the feeling that power increases”.  He condemns contentment, peace, and virtue, and declares that we should help the weak and ill-constituted to perish.  Then he starts on Christianity, calling it “more harmful than any vice.” He calls the Christian “the domestic animal, the herd animal, the sick animal.” He accuses Christianity of waging war on the higher type of man and against “every feeling of reverence and distance between man and man.”  He insists that the Christian conception of God had “degenerated to the contradiction of life,” calling God “nothingness deified, the will to nothingness sanctified.” Nietzsche laments, “No one any longer possesses today the courage to claim special privileges or the right to rule, the courage to feel a sense of reverence towards himself and towards his equals—the courage for a pathos of distance… Our politics is morbid from this lack of courage!”  He seems to be in favor of “the aristocratic outlook,” which he says has been “undermined most deeply by the lie of equality of souls.”  At the same time, he seems to also be in favor of revolutions, and deplores the “Christian value judgment which translates every revolution into mere blood and crime.”  Christianity, Nietzsche seems to think, is the wrong type of revolution: “Christianity is a revolt of everything that crawls along the ground directed against that which is elevated: the Gospel of the “lowly” makes low.”

My Opinion:

Obviously I don’t agree with what Nietzsche is saying.  But I find this piece fascinating.  Nietzsche clearly was passionate about what he was writing.  He can’t have had very many adherents to his worldview, and his writing is not representative of any great social movement—just an ideological one.  It is interesting to wonder how Nietzsche would have viewed Hitler and the Nazi regime and World War II.  I think he would have praised Hitler as being “good,” according to Nietzsche’s definition that the piece started with.  But how would he have viewed the end of the war?  Why, in his hypothetical opinion, did it end as it did?  Hitler’s personality represented the type of overman that Nietzsche often praised, but he ultimately lost the war, and committed suicide.  Does this mean that Hitler was not as “good” as it seemed at the height of his career?  Were the Allies stronger, and thus better?  Or had Christianity’s “lie of the equality of souls” ultimately undermined something truly great?  I wonder if Nietzsche’s point of view was only valid because it was hypothetical.  Tyrants, Nietzsche’s “more valuable type”, come along, but they also, inevitably, are toppled, and often not by a new stronger man, but by the people at large.  Nietzsche would have them continue forever, or be replaced by someone stronger, but this necessitates them being surrounded by very weak people, who will allow it, which type of person Nietzsche sneered at.  What, then, was his goal? Anarchy?  A system like the earlier Germany with hundreds of independent kingdoms, thus allowing for hundreds of overmen? 

Nietzsche’s treatment of Christianity is, I think, incomplete.  He neglects, for example, how Christianity was (and still is) often used to justify the subjugation, even domination, of others.  Certainly that aspect of Christianity supports what Nietzsche would call “good.”  He also is, I think, too generous in equating Christianity with “the doctrine ‘equal rights for all’”.  This is an ideal that rarely is supported in actuality by the actions of Christians, especially not at the time that Nietzsche was writing, when it was very common for Christians to be extremely racist.  This may sound rather odd coming from someone who is Christian.  I feel that Christianity, in itself, is a very good thing, but that people’s interpretation of Christianity has, at many times in its history, been used to support Nietzsche’s overman just as often as it has embraced the “lowly”.