In my new series of posts on Philosophy and Religion I talked in the last 2 posts about the God of the Philosophers and the Via Negativa:

The God Of The Philosophers And The Via Negativa

(2/2) The God Of The Philosophers And The Via Negativa

Today I am going to start looking at the Jesus of the Philosophers, in this case the Jesus of Nietzsche.  Let’s recall Ehrman writes:

• It is easy to see Luke’s own distinctive view by considering what he has to say in the book of Acts, where the apostles give a number of speeches in order to convert others to the faith.  What is striking is that in none of these instances (look, e.g., in chapters 3, 4, 13), do the apostles indicate that Jesus’ death brings atonement for sins.  It is not that Jesus’ death is unimportant.  It’s extremely important for Luke.  But not as an atonement.  Instead, Jesus death is what makes people realize their guilt before God (since he died even though he was innocent).  Once people recognize their guilt, they turn to God in repentance, and then he forgives their sins.  Jesus’ death for Luke, in other words, drives people to repentance, and it is this repentance that brings salvation. (Bart Ehrman)

We see the philosophical turn toward Jesus very conspicuously in the gospel of Luke and Luke’s understanding of the cross.  A key passage is when Luke says: “and all flesh shall see the salvation of God (Luke 3:6),” which does not mean as Catholic Universalists think everyone will be saved and we should pray for Hitler in purgatory, and certainly doesn’t mean the “exclusive club” salvation model of penal substitution atonement, but rather that the image of Jesus on the cross is the catalyst for everyone who is inspired by it to repent. In this way Jesus gave himself out of love for humanity. Goicoechea comments:

• Of course, all along, Nietzsche wants to show that the loving Jesus is not the blaming Christ, which is the main point of [Nietzsche’s Anti Christ]. And, Nietzsche writes: “The incapacity for resistance here becomes morality (‘resist not evil!’; the profoundest saying of the Gospel, Its key in a certain sense)  blessedness in peace, in gentleness, in the inability for enmity.” This Jesus at the center of Nietzsche’s heart does not resist any evil. He is a gentle pacifist and peacemaker who does not even have the ability for enmity.  (Goicoechea, loc 1637).

Jesus redefines agape love as “43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I say to you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you (Matthew 5:43-44).” We see this with Jesus mandates of Turn the other cheek (moral influence cross); Bless those who persecute you; Forgive them father they don’t know what they’re doing.

Philosophically, last time I distinguished between the finite mind that passively receives its object (I see the sun), and the infinite mind that creates its object (let there be light).  Jesus is an intermediary between these 2 because he does not passively receive but reinterprets, eg making the Torah more strict (you are guilty of adultery even if it’s just lust) and even an enemy is lovable, and so while Jesus does not create his object ex nihilo, he transfigures it.

Goicoechea argues Nietzsche saw what would later be proposed as the Q1 stratum of the Jesus tradition and so distinguished the loving Jesus from the judging Christ.

Like God Jesus creates his object rather than have it passively press upon him, unlike glory/honor seeking Achilles.  For instance, as I said he is not just going to passively receive everyday opinion about the Torah, but creatively interpret it and make it stricter (eg adultery as lust in one’s heart)

The joyous life of this higher type of individual is what Nietzsche calls “Caesar with a soul of Christ – the overman (KGW VII 2:289).” It is a Christ-like Caesar, conquering not with might but rather love, not a seeking desire of eros, but a will to power transfiguring desire, a glass half-full approach to life. Not the Peace through victory of the Romans but peace through love. The key is whether one lives a life of love determined by eros or “lack,” like honor and glory seeking Achilles, esteeming beings because they seem beautiful/worthy, or whether to live a life of godless will to power agape where your “surplus” of love transfigure beings into becoming worthy – agape as amor fati and dancing in your chains.  A key to this is how Jesus will overcome the tedium of Ecclesiastes.

Ad nauseam / Ad Infinitum express the boringness of something that has repeated or that has continued to the point of nausea. We also see this in an argument from “repetition.” For example, Nietzsche writes that Zarathustra fasts for seven days and when he resumes speaking he mentions again the “nausea” that the thought of the Eternal Return occasioned.    It here is referring to something that has been done or repeated so often that it has become boringly annoying or tiresome.  Regarding the potential horror of this infinite, Nietzsche says of a once free bird that has become so agitated with cabin fever in the confines of its cage that it is banging its head:

• “But times will come when you wilt feel that it is infinite, and that there is nothing more frightful/wonder-inspiring than infinity.  Oh, the poor bird that felt itself free, and now strikes against the walls of this cage!  Alas, if home sickness for the land should attack thee, as if there had been more freedom there, and there is no “land” any longer! (GS, 124)”  

Regarding this homelessness/homesickness for the land that has vanished for the bird, Heidegger says of Nietzsche’s position that Nietzsche talks about ‘this most uncanny of all guests’ (Nietzsche, The will to power, Outline. Werke, vol. XV, p. 141). It is called the ‘most uncanny’ [unheimlichste] because, as the unconditional will to will, it wills homelessness [Heimatlosigkeit] as such. This is why it is of no avail to show it the door, because it has long since been roaming invisibly inside the house (Heidegger, 1998, 292; also cf Heidegger, 1998, 257).  Heidegger says due to its instantiated nature, “[h]omelessness is coming to be the destiny of the world (Heidegger, 1998, 258).”  The ancients called this horror loci, revulsion at one’s place and state of being.   So, analogously, as an explanation of what Nietzsche’s once free, now caged bird was going through, we can consider that simply through confinement, a battery hen will go through listlessness, then anger and self directed violence, finally repetitive and self destructive motor acts and eventually death.   We see similar things from killer whales in captivity.  

Against the currently popular argument that eternal return for Nietzsche most fundamentally means infinite cosmological repetition, either in fact or as a visualization, we can point to numerous historical analogies (Ecclesiastes, Stoics, Schopenhauer) that would suggest instead that it refers to existentia, the way beings appear:

(1)  Ecclesiastes in the bible makes the point about the tedium and pointlessness of life because there is just a circular bad repetition ad nauseam ad infinitum of “the same” with the consequence that there is nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:8-9), that life becomes inherently meaningless in the face of eternal recurrence.  Ecclesiastes says:

All things are wearisome;

    more than one can express;

the eye is not satisfied with seeing,

    or the ear filled with hearing.

9 What has been is what will be,

    and what has been done is what will be done;

    there is nothing new under the sun.

Ecclesiastes’s answer for this problem is to find satiety in God, and as for the big idea of Ecclesiastes, Greidanus contends that the goal is to encourage readers to, “Fear God in order to turn a vain, empty life into a meaningful life which will enjoy God’s gifts” (22).”  But, Nietzsche posed a solution for a godless world.  Nietzsche said  “People to whom their daily life appears too empty and monotonous easily grow religious; this is comprehensible and excusable, only they have no right to demand religious sentiments from those whose daily life is not empty and monotonous ( HH: Part One, 115. To BE RELIGIOUS WITH ADVANTAGE).” For Nietzsche the higher types are distinguished from the lower types in terms of two different kinds of love/desire, because the higher types do not need to find value in the world, or in God like Ecclesiastes, “eros” of the lower types, but rather bestow a healthy meaning onto the world, godless “agape.” 

Much in Nietzsche seems to allude to Ecclesiastes, and so Nietzsche is appropriating and responding to Ecclesiastes.  In Ecclesiastes, we read “I hated life, because what is done under the sun was grievous to me, for all is vanity and a striving after wind” (Eccl 2:17) since “What happens to the fool will happen to me also. Why then have I been so very wise?” And I said in my heart that this also is vanity” (Eccl 2:15) and “I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind” (Eccl 1:14).  Similarly, Nietzsche has Zarathustra say in section 3:

• “What is the greatest thing that you can experience? It is the hour of your great contempt. The hour in which even your happiness turns to nausea and likewise your reason and your virtue.The hour in which you say: ‘What matters my happiness? It is poverty and filth, and a pitiful contentment. But my happiness ought to justify existence itself!’  The hour in which you say: ‘What matters my reason? Does it crave knowledge like the lion its food? It is poverty and filth and a pitiful contentment!’  The hour in which you say: ‘What matters my virtue? It has not yet made me rage. How weary I am of my good and my evil! That is all poverty and filth and a pitiful contentment!” (Z, 3)

It is only when we fully encounter the force of the eternal return of the same do we come to see the darkness of Nietzsche’s vision: a meaningless, Ecclesiastes’ world, but without God to fall back on for meaning, purpose and joy.  In face of such desolation, only the creative agapeic type can have a spirit of amor fati and joyfully dances in his chains. 

(2)   Are there other thinkers we can reference whose ideas seem to be historical analogies for Nietzsche’s eternal return?  Yes, we see another possible historical analogy to the idea interpreting life as this tragic repetition of the same (which is not guessing about cosmological repetition) with Seneca who says

• 26.  Some people suffer from a surfeit of doing and seeing the same things. Theirs is not contempt for life but boredom with it, a feeling we sink into when influenced by the sort of philosophy which makes us say, ‘How long the same old things? I shall wake up and go to sleep, I shall eat and be hungry, I shall be cold and hot. There’s no end to anything, but all things are in a fixed cycle, fleeing and pursuing each other. Night follows day and day night; summer passes into autumn, hard on autumn follows winter, and that in turn is checked by spring. All things pass on only to return. Nothing I do or see is new: sometimes one gets sick even of this.’ There are many who think that life is not harsh but superfluous. (Seneca ep. mor. 24. 26)

 In this Epistle 24, Seneca says boredom/agitation can be such a problem that it leads to suicide.  Life is seen not as bitter but superfluous, and one is prone to the libido moriendi or death drive (recall earlier I pointed out Nietzsche said eternal recurrence brings with it the possibility of suicide, which makes it unlikely to be referring to visualizing cosmic repetition). 

Regarding this inherent restlessness of human life, Plutarch in Pyrrhus 13 talks of a nauseous boredom (alus nautiodes), like what eros driven Achilles felt when there was ease (no quests to conquer).  Nietzsche picks up on the boredom issue in the genealogy of morals 2.24 and 3.14, and in Thus Spoke Zarathustra Kaufmann and Holingdale say the great nausea is a central concept. 

However, Nietzsche critically and successfully engages with historical arguments for temporal eternal recurrence, arguing it isn’t inherently tragic because when it wipes value away from beings, the positive vanishes, but also the negative, and so leaves things neither inherently positive nor negative, and because of this completely open to interpretation.  It is precisely because of this that creative types can lead a joyous existence of will to power. The deciding factor is whether we have an approach to life of love as eros, or love as agape. 

For Nietzsche, the higher types are distinguished from the lower types in terms of two different kinds of love/desire, because the higher types do not need to find value in the world, such as in God, “eros,” like the lower types like Ecclesiastes, but rather bestow a healthy meaning onto the world, “agape.” For Nietzsche, godless agape allows for a glass half-full amor fati and dancing in your chains.  In Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount Jesus redefines love saying “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love (agapēseis) your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love (agapāte) your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”  Nietzsche said, “‘I have never desecrated the holy name of love’ (1888, LN1 [286]),”  Eros as filling a “lack” nurses on the luster of its object, whereas agape transfigure its object to be loveable.

Nietzsche knew well the difference between living a tragic life of eternal return of the same where everything is experienced “as though” it had been experienced an infinite number of times, like a warn out recording of a favorite song, and a creative life of eternal return of the same difference where everything is joyous and new.  Nietzsche said in a particularly illustrative letter to Overbeck that his creative energies being poured into creating his Third Untimely Meditation left him invulnerable to the agitated boring eternal return as cabin fever that was affecting all the people around him at a rainy cottage.  Nietzsche’s insight was not merely to see through to the heart of the horror loci, but to see it was completely perspectival. (Nietzsche, 1975,: 11.3 382).  It is precisely in creatively transfiguring widow, orphan, stranger and enemy into being lovable and dedicating your life to serving them is the core of Jesus’ love/agape message as an answer to Ecclesiastes tragedy and tedium of Eternal Return nothing new under the sun.  It is not a life of being locked up in oneself but in loving service to an Other that is needed, be it service to the needy, or to the Muse, or whatever is born a life of creativity and affirmation, what Nietzsche called saying yes and Amen to all existence no matter how tragic it presences at first.  The successful lawyer can be a miserable alcoholic just as a prisoner can dance in her chains. Nietzsche says: “From the military school of life: that which does not kill me makes me stronger.”

In a life of active and creative transfiguring the Other: “Not ‘to know’ but to schematize, to impose upon chaos as much regularity and form as our practical needs require WTP 515 (March-June 1888).” Heidegger gives the example of not simply “recognizing” or encountering or abstracting to the category of “living thing,” but imposing it, such as is negatively  phenomenalized when we hear a “living thing” in the forest, only to look down to see we “mis-took” rustling dead leaves in the wind at our feet to be a “living thing.”  In life we are in the business of imposing structure on the chaos, “taking as,” as is phenomenalized when we “mis-take:” When will to power fails to usefully stamp becoming with Being (the rustling leaf example), we explicitly see that the default human condition is living as will to power in the schematizing or bringing order to chaos, like a sculptor with his clay.  Similarly, the sexual and romantic qualities of something reflects the way we impose form, as is clear in the case of objectophilia with romantic and sexual attraction to objects such as towers and bridges.  Heidegger quotes Nietzsche that “To stamp Becoming with the character of Being – that is the supreme will to power” (WM 617, 1888).   Heidegger says “for Nietzsche art is the essential way in which beings are made to be beings … the creative, legislative, form-grounding aspect of art (Heidegger, 1991, 131).”  Nietzsche argues the true artist doesn’t imitate Nature but gives form to the chaos: “A man in this state transforms things until they mirror his power–until they are reflections of his perfection. (TI, SKIRMISHES OF AN UNTIMELY MAN, 8-9).” 

Nihilism is a problem when we have an “eros/erotic” approach to beings like glory seeking Achilles (eg I love her because she is beautiful), Achilles who was devastated by the tedious, boring and meaninglessness in the Greek interpretation of the afterlife (Achilles needed his obstacles to be overcome in the name of glory) – but rather we need an approach akin to a godless kind of Christian transfiguring agape (eg I have a transfiguring spirit of loving, regardless of whether the other be widow, orphan, stranger, or enemy).  That higher type is what Nietzsche calls “Caesar with a soul of Christ – the overman (KGW VII 2:289).” It is a Christ-like Caesar, conquering not with might but rather love, a transfiguring, glass half-full approach to life.

(3)  Like the historical analogy with Ecclesiastes and The Stoics, Nietzsche seems to very much have Schopenhauer in mind with eternal tragic temporal repetition. Schopenhauer said in On the Sufferings of the World: 

• “Boredom is a form of suffering unknown to brutes, at any rate in their natural state; it is only the very cleverest of them who show faint traces of it when they are domesticated; whereas in the case of man it has become a downright scourge. The crowd of miserable wretches whose one aim in life is to fill their purses but never to put anything into their heads, offers a singular instance of this torment of boredom. Their wealth becomes a punishment by delivering them up to misery of having nothing to do; for, to escape it, they will rush about in all directions, traveling here, there and everywhere. No sooner do they arrive in a place than they are anxious to know what amusements it affords; just as though they were beggars asking where they could receive a dole! Of a truth, need and boredom are the two poles of human life… [And in his essays on Pessimism Schopenhauer summarizes] “He who lives to see two or three generations is like a man who sits some time in the conjurer’s booth at a fair, and witnesses the performance twice or thrice in succession. The tricks were meant to be seen only once; and when they are no longer a novelty and cease to deceive, their effect is gone.”

 To which (3 above) Nietzsche responds to Schopenhauer regarding the performance from the point of view of the creative and artistic individual:

• “56. Anyone like me, who has tried for a long time and with some enigmatic desire, to think pessimism through to its depths and to deliver it from the half-Christian, half-German narrowness and naivete with which it has finally presented itself to this century, namely in the form of the Schopenhauerian philosophy; anyone who has ever really looked with an Asiatic and supra-Asiatic eye into and down at the most world-negating of all possible ways of thinking – beyond good and evil, and no longer, like Schopenhauer and the Buddha, under the spell and delusion of morality –; anyone who has done these things (and perhaps precisely by doing these things) will have inadvertently opened his eyes to the inverse ideal: to the ideal of the most high-spirited, vital, world-affirming individual, who has learned not just to accept and go along with what was and what is, but who wants it again just as it was and is through all eternity, insatiably shouting da capo not just to himself but to the whole play and performance, and not just to a performance, but rather, fundamentally, to the one who needs precisely this performance – and makes it necessary: because again and again he needs himself – and makes himself necessary. – – What? and that wouldn’t be –circulus vitiosus deus? (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil)

Eternal return wipes away meaningfulness from beings, and so this is tragic for the eros of the sick and weakly, but an opportunity for creation for the transfiguring godless agape of the artistic and healthy.  Hence, Heidegger quotes Nietzsche twice: “To stamp becoming with Being, that is the highest form of will to power.”

For Nietzsche, the higher types are distinguished from the lower types in terms of two different kinds of love/desire, because the higher types do not need to find value in the world, such as in God, “eros,” like the lower types like Ecclesiastes, but rather bestow a healthy meaning onto the world in transfiguring godless “agape.” For Nietzsche, agape allows for a glass half-full amor fati and dancing in your chains.  As I said above, In Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount Jesus redefines love saying “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love (agapēseis) your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love (agapāte) your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”  Nietzsche said, “‘I have never desecrated the holy name of love’ (1888, LN1 [286]),”  Eros as filling a “lack” nurses on the luster of its object, whereas agape transfigure its object to be loveable.

Nihilism is a problem when we have an “eros/erotic” approach to beings like glory seeking Achilles (eg I love her because she is beautiful), Achilles who was devastated by the tedious, boring and meaninglessness in the Greek interpretation of the afterlife (Achilles needed his obstacles to be overcome in the name of glory) – but rather we need an approach akin to a godless kind of Christian transfiguring agape (eg I have a transfiguring spirit of loving, regardless of whether the other be widow, orphan, stranger, or enemy).  That higher type is what Nietzsche calls “Caesar with a soul of Christ – the overman (KGW VII 2:289).” It is a Christ-like Caesar, conquering not with might but rather love, a transfiguring, glass half-full approach to life.

Nietzsche went so far to say that even the gods struggle against boredom in vain, (TI, Chapter 48) and that the usual approach to life is to avoid boredom any way possible. (GS, First Book, 42. Work and Boredom)  A well known Science Fiction example of this is the Star Trek Voyager episode where the Q continuum Philosopher Quinn (a god-like being) wants to commit suicide because he has been devastated by the boredom of having been everything and done everything countless times.   This God not only died, but wanted to die (there is a similar theme in a play by Karel Čapek).  This TV episode may have been a response to Nietzsche’s call to depict the boredom of God after creation had been finished  (HH: The Wanderer and His Shadow, 56. INTELLECT AND BOREDOM).Heidegger comments regarding twofold eternal recurrence, “Everything is nought, indifferent, so that nothing is worthwhile – it is all alike.  And on the other side: Everything recurs, it depends on each moment, everything matters – it is all alike … The smallest gap, the rainbow bridge of the phrase it is all alike, conceals two things that are quite distinct: everything is indifferent and nothing is indifferent (Heidegger, 1991 vol 2, 182).”

On the other hand, Nietzsche comments that, far from being inherently crippling, the energy of Langeweile boredom can be understood as the greatest elixir in life against the tedious, or agitating, stretching out of time: “He who fortifies himself completely against boredom fortifies himself against himself too. He will never drink the most powerful elixir from his own innermost spring.   (HH: The Wanderer and His Shadow, 200. THE SOLITARY SPEAKS).”  Therefore, this shows the twofold tragic/joyous temporality of eternal recurrence is not an objective characteristic of Time as a thing in Nature, is not cosmological guesswork, but is completely perspectival as how we auto affect ourselves, and so interpreting it out of a place of creativity, strength and health, the surplus of energy is a blessing as auto-affecting oneself with eternal return of the same difference rather than just eternal return of the same.  Gilles Deleuze interpreted Nietzsche’s eternal return as a radical understanding of the nature of time. For him this is not a ‘flat circle’ or cyclical understanding of time, but a description of the empty form of future time. It is the ever-generated new time that allows us to continually act in new ways, that allows the creation of novelty. 

Nietzsche would argue that for those coming from a place of eros, sickness and weakness like Ecclesiastes relying on God for Joy, the stretching out of time in Langeweile boredom is experienced as a tragic curse, encountering beings “as though” they have been encountered numberless times before, and so augmenting depression, irritability and agitation:  This was Nietzsche’s Dwarf in Zarathustra: “‘Everything straight lies,’ murmured the dwarf disdainfully. ‘All truth is crooked, time itself is a circle.'”

To briefly recapitulate, nihilism is a problem when we have an “erotic” approach to beings (I love her because she is beautiful) rather than an approach akin to a godless kind of Christian agape (I have a transfiguring spirit of loving, making worthy those who others might find undesirable such as widow, orphan, stranger, or enemy).  That is, what Nietzsche calls “Caesar with a soul of Christ – the overman (KGW VII 2:289).” It is a Christ-like Caesar, conquering not with might but rather love, a transfiguring, glass half-full approach to life. As I said, in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount Jesus says “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love (agapēseis) your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love (agapāte) your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”  There is a difference between love as eros, caritas and philia with the Greeks and Self-sacrificial love of Jesus: agape.  Han-Pile points out with Nietzsche

• “In a nutshell, erotic love is motivated by the perceived value of its object: we love someone or something because we value them. By contrast, agapic love bestows value on its object, and this regardless of the value previously attributed to it: we value someone or something because we love them …  (Christ came for sinners and the righteous alike); and finally it creates value by transfiguring its object (the sinner becomes worthy by virtue of being loved by God).”  (Han Pile, online, no pages)

The creativity, strength, and joy of the thinker actively wipes beings clean as eternal recurrence, and as will to power lovingly bestows value on them with the hope of promoting strength and health.  Eternal recurrence is like when in the Republic Plato offers the image of the Philosopher who creates the Republic as wiping the canvas clean, as the artist wiping the canvas clean before beginning work. (R. vi,501A2- 4).  This is possible because beings reflect becoming, Chaos, not Being/permanence, and molding/forming this chaos as Being is will to power.

So, this is a general overview of what Nietzsche saw in Jesus in response to Ecclesiastes: not desire as a lack that is empty and can only be filled by God, but desire as a surplus that creates its own joy.

In the next 2 posts in this series I will be looking at Jesus and Nietzsche with the Q source with Burton Mack and David Goicoechea.