JENI PARSONS reviews a new book about the man who famously announced the death of God, suggesting that Nietzsche's distaste for the deceased was itself deeply religious.
Nietzsche Against the Crucified, by Alistair Kee, SCM Press, £14.95 less intellect, more passion!
Nietzsche ended Ecce Homo, his last book with "Have I been understood? Dionysos against the Crucified". In his own book Alistair Kee takes the reader through Nietzsche's religious thought to explore what this might mean and in the process illuminates Nietzsche as a deeply religious man whose integrity would not allow him the easy path of religious observance in the face of the God Who is Dead.
The God Who is Dead has had plenty of outings since the 1960s and Christian atheism is not new. Yet Kee shows that Nietzsche is not an atheist in the simple sense of someone for whom the traditional proofs of God don't work. Instead, Nietzsche will not give honour to the God he sees portrayed by religious people, since such a God is not deserving of worship. His distaste for such a God is a deeply religious stance and he sets himself the task of imagining a God who would be worthy, though he is not so simple-minded as to think that by this imagining such a God exists.
But what sort of a God should there be, if there is to be one? The answer is one of power, not morality. A God who is holy, a mysterium tremendum who is untouchable for very holiness, who brings life and yea-saying, not death and the narrowness of a tight morality code. So far so attractive.
And Nietzsche sees in the Crucified some attractive qualities of affirming life, embodying certain values and being prepared to die rather than to betray those values.
For him the religion of Jesus is attractive, while the religion about Jesus is not and is the work of Paul, about whom he has nothing good to say. This distinction is of course a familiar one, but it is all the more interesting from one who has the reputation of having done away with Christianity all together.
As a religious writer Nietzsche's parables are second to none and Kee reports several of them in full. It is in them, particularly in "the Madman" from The Gay Science, that the agony of Nietzsche the religious man can be heard proclaiming the killing of God by those round about who do not have the moral fibre to see what they have done and live the consequences. The consequences of the demise of God are that all the horizons have been wiped away and that anyone who is living now must find a new way to anchor truth, morality and art. Nietzsche's complaint about those round about is that they will not draw the obvious conclusions and live with the terror of what has happened, and what's more live joyfully since there is nowhere else to go except into despair and nihilism.
Kee makes the point that a look at Nietzsche's own life gives little clue to what excited him about the new possibility. Nietzsche glorifies the new man (sic) of strength and self-control and yet lives a life broken by constant ill-health, lacking in companionship of any meaningful sort and descending inexorably into madness.
Yet the passion of the writing and the palpable longing that his own integrity be matched by others has made him a companion of many who don't hold his views on so much, including the poor, women, class and the state of God's health. Kee asks, "Why is it that Nietzsche comes and comes again, to ever new generations, to young people who are not attracted to religion which resents life, and to philosophy which avoids it? Is it because he speaks to them of life, that he has consecrated himself to life, that to encounter Nietzsche is to be in the presence of the holy, and it is awesome?" I think it is that consecration which draws me to him even as I am unwilling at the moment to behold God dead at our hands. His passion communicates even as the passionlessness of many Christians and post-Christians stultifies. Nietzsche should be compulsory reading for all religious persons, perhaps especially those nonrealists whose joyfulness is obscured by heavy intellect, and Kee's book is a good place to start as he draws the man and his life together to our attention.
Jeni Parsons is Vicar of Tolladine, Worcester.
Nietzsche Against the Crucified, by Alistair Kee, SCM Press, £14.95.