John A.T. Robinson, Where Three Ways Meet: Last Essays and Sermons (London SCM Press, 1987), p. 190 I Kings 18:21 (RSV) Sof 59 may 2003 One morning sometime in the year 1882, carrying antern to aid his search, a man arrived in the rketplace of a small anonymous town somewhere tral Europe. His name and origin unknown, he rted as causing a minor disturbance when tioning local people on the whereabouts of God out his own ideas on the cause of what he be the apparent absence of deity. he sought, were fictional ociety in general and theology ir in an’s words, to give him his — n, could hardly have had ane he madmen’ was the German lietzsche. Probably more than to see why. In hie time European culture stood at an intellectual cross-roads. The scientific mindset was overtaking traditional religious conceptions of the world and of human nature. The barbarians of nihilism would soon bring down the Gates of Heaven and the Superman would soon take over the world. Nietzsche foresaw it all and proclaimed it in soaring poetic narratives. Yet underpinning his writing Nietzsche the town and the people, like, some es yas bp, the search was over, For Nietzsche the origin of religious thought lay in ancient societies who based their lives upon the idea that all physical or natural causality was in reality the product of actions and counter actions of the gods and demons of an invisible parallel world. Such an idea came from a fundamental misunderstanding of nature, for to such people, as he observed, ‘neither earth nor sky are constrained by any compulsion, a season, sunshine, rain can come or they can fail to come’. From such a starting principle it can be seen | that primitive consciousness develops a mode of ought that sees human actions not as being a constituent effect of any natural cause but rather a ic practice that mystically participates in the supernatural.
From an understanding such as this the primitive mind arrives at the belief that man is, or can in some sense be seen as, the rule, whilst nature is seemingly arbitrary and irregular. That being so, in order for man to progress to a state of dominance over the world the simple system of participation had to be developed into a system that gave men control over nature. It was, for example, of no real benefit to man to participate through a symbolic action in the supernatural process of making rain fall.
The only real benefit would be found in developing a ritual that controlled the process of making rain fall.
From this totally naturalistic understanding of religion Nietzsche is able to develop an evolutionary was something far simpler than prophecy, it was the recognition of the inevitability of an intellectual and social evolution every bit as compelling as the biological forces at work in nature.
Religion did not point to something objective and unchanging. The God of Abraham was an idea, and like any other idea, subject in time to indifference and rejection.
Sof 59 May 2003 hypothesis concerning the relationship of God to ‘his people’. Thus in early dynamic societies God is seen as the embodiment of the tribe, the personification of their own collective will to power, and both loved and feared in good and bad aspects alike. However, as a society changes so too does its concept of deity. When, for example, a culture becomes decadent or simply exhausts itself of its initial creative will, then so are some of the more dynamic aspects of God (anger, vengefulness, envy etc) denied. Instead, deity is invested with qualities such as modesty and timidity, and seen not as a conqueror but as a counsellor of peace and guardian of harmony. To Nietzsche this represents both a psychological regression in society and a corruption of the purity of the idea of God - for now the quality of weakness and the expungement of the will to power is perverted into the idea of goodness.
Nietzsche traced just such a development through the Judeo-Christian tradition. Here the jealous and vengeful God of the early Jewish community mirrored the dynamics of a society that was in the process of creating its own nationhood. Later, following the period of the monarchy, Jewish culture lapsed into decadence, reforming the idea of God away from the aggressive and more towards the beatitudinal. Later still, in the exilic period, the other great contributing factor to the development of the Jewish (and consequently Christian) faith was established - that which Nietzsche identified as the psychology of ressentiment.
It arose originally in the Jewish mind when ‘faced with the question of being or not being, they preferred, with a perfectly uncanny conviction, being at any price’. And for Nietzsche the price they paid was nothing less than the falsification of nature and the inversion of all natural values. Placed historically in an almost impossible situation Nietzsche believed that the Jewish mind, in search of psychological and perhaps even national survival, inverted religion, morality and history in order to triumph historically in the world. But the inversion of all values meant that to triumph in the world they actually triumphed over the world. Thus by rejecting the virtues of worldly power, beauty and self-affirmation they assured their historical continuance. Through weakness and persecution they quite literally prevailed against the world.
Against such a background it can be seen that Nietzsche understood Christianity not only as the ‘ultimate consequence of the Jews’, but also as the ultimate consequence of decadence. The inheritance of this mentality leant to Christianity both an attitude : of revulsion against anything natural and a life denying dialectical belief that weakness was strengt and humility was power. Further, the decadence of | Christian culture had brought about the total erasure of all the dynamic aspects of deity. In turn these h been invested in a devil so that now God was loves and the devil feared. For Nietzsche this was ‘God degenerated to the contradiction of life’. — Also for Nietzsche, nowy the evolution of still on the conception « corruption, for it was to result ultimately in its complete negation. He believed that in the nin century something had happened to the way fF viewed themselves in the world. The new scie worldview with which the mind of man was not invested had effectively corrected the confusion of intellect that resulted in the idea of God in the primitive mind. In short, in nineteenth-century Europe, belief in God was no longer a viable intellectual option.
So man was to be effectively liberated from the oppression of God, but, as Nietzsche also perceived, liberation brings with it a new responsibility. With the death of God also comes the collapse of the very foundation upon which meaning and morality in Western civilisation are based. Thus the death of God brings a new and challenging demand with it, for man himself is now required to construct his own meaning and moral base.
The idea of this new basis came to Nietzsche in a moment of inspiration, a natural rather than supernatural revelation, and it was a theory that he called Eternal Recurrence. Fundamentally it was simply a way by which each individual, now cast adrift in a meaningless universe, could construct meaning and value in it from the evaluation of their own experience. In short the test, outlined in ‘The Heaviest Burden’ is set by a demon of doubt who tells you must live your present life endless times over How do you respond?
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who thus spoke?
Or have you experienced a tremendous moment in which you would have answered him: