Discourses of Philology and Theology in Nietzsche: From the “Untimelies” to The Anti-Christ 3031422724, 9783031422720

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Discourses of Philology and Theology in Nietzsche From the “Untimelies” to The Anti-Christ Paul Bishop

Discourses of Philology and Theology in Nietzsche

Paul Bishop

Discourses of Philology and Theology in Nietzsche From the “Untimelies” to The Anti-Christ

Paul Bishop School of Modern Languages and Cultures University of Glasgow Glasgow, UK

ISBN 978-3-031-42271-3    ISBN 978-3-031-42272-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42272-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

God exists even though He doesn’t. (Emile Cioran, Despre neajunsul de a te fi născut [Bucharest: Humanitas, 1995], p. 200) Why do I have to talk about God? Because He is everywhere! I am only the spoon in his kitchen. (C.G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff: A Collection of Remembrances,ed. Ferne Jensen and Sidney Mullen [San Francisco: Analytical Psychology Club, 1982], p. 109) Now it is not so easy not to believe—for we ourselves once believed it and the whole world believes or seems to believe it. We must not only relearn, but adapt our valuations—it requires practice. (Nietzsche, in KSA 9, 5[34], 188)

In memoriam Richard Sheppard 1944–2022

Acknowledgements

At Palgrave Macmillan I should like to thank Brendan George as Publisher and Subject Head for Philosophy and Raghupathy Kalyaraman as Project Coordinator for their help from book proposal through to production, as well as the reviewers of the original book proposal. I am very grateful to everyone for their feedback and support throughout the work on this project. The proofs for this book arrived at the same time as the start of the academic teaching semester; but, according to Islam, only Allah makes things that are perfect, and to weave a handmade rug or carpet without mistakes would cause offence, so the inevitable niggles or errors which remain in the following pages will, I hope, neither displease Allah nor overly distract the reader. This book arose while working on an introductory study of The Anti-­ Christ for the Edinburgh Critical Guides to Nietzsche series, and without the kind invitation of Keith Ansell-Pearson and Dan Conway in 2016 to write that book, I would not have had the opportunity to progress with work on this one. I should also like to thank the members of the Graduiertenkolleg “Europäische Traumkulturen (European Dream-­ Cultures)” at the Universität des Saarlandes in Saarbrücken for our discussions about Nietzsche during my time as Mercator Fellow during the summer of 2019. During the difficult months of lockdown in 2020 and 2021, I was thankful for the opportunity to talk about themes related to this book on two podcasts, Hermitix and Psychology and the Cross, hosted ix

x Acknowledgements

respectively by James Ellis and by Jakob Lusensky. Thanks to Lucy Huskinson at Bangor University, in 2020 I was invited to be external examiner for a compelling thesis written by Joshua D. Duff on the philosophical anthropologies of Nietzsche and St Paul. And, as happenstance would have it, I also reviewed two volumes of the Historischer und kritischer Kommentar zu Friedrich Nietzsches Werken (a project that promises to revolutionize our approach to reading Nietzsche) for the Journal of Nietzsche Studies as well as a selection of studies on Nietzsche’s Untimelies, that is, the Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, especially the second essay, for Nietzsche-Studien: I am grateful to Jessica N. Berry and to Christian J. Emden for their invitations to do so. Finally, my thanks and love as always to Helen.

Contents

1 I ntroduction  1 2 Nietzsche and the History of Atheism 31 3 Nietzsche and the Quest for the Historical Jesus103 4 Nietzsche,  David Friedrich Strauß, and the Post-Straussian Tradition167 5 Nietzsche and St Paul239 6 Methods and Nietzsche’s Portrait of Christ333 7 N  ietzsche on Philology385 8 C  onclusion465 I ndex481

xi

Abbreviations and Editions

Biblical Texts DRV H KJV NJB NT OT

Douay-Rheims Version Haydock Bible, 1811–1814; Haydock 2006 King James Version New Jerusalem Bible; Wansbrough 1985 New Testament Old Testament

Nietzsche: Editions BAW KGW KSA KSB W

Frühe Schriften, Nietzsche 1994 [1933–1940] Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Nietzsche 1967– Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, Nietzsche 1967–1977; 1988 Sämtliche Briefe: Kritische Studienausgabe, Nietzsche 1975–1984 Werke in drei Bänden, Nietzsche 1966

xiii

xiv 

Abbreviations and Editions

Nietzsche: Individual Works AC BT BGE CW D EH GM GS HA NCW TI UM Z WP

The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche 1920 The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche 1968a Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche 1968a The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche 1899 Daybreak, Nietzsche 1924a Ecce Homo, Nietzsche 1911; Nietzsche 1992 On the Genealogy of Morals; Nietzsche 1968a The Gay Science, Nietzsche 1924b Human, All-Too-Human, Nietzsche 1908; Nietzsche 1986 Nietzsche contra Wagner, Nietzsche 1899 Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche 1899; Nietzsche 1968b Untimely Meditations, Nietzsche 1983 Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche 1969 The Will to Power, Nietzsche 1968c

Bible Editions H = Haydock, George Leo. 2006. The Holy Catholic Bible with a Comprehensive Catholic Commentary. Duarte, CA: Catholic Treasures NJB = Wansbrough, Henry, ed. 1985. The New Jerusalem Bible. London: Darton, Longmann, and Todd

Nietzsche: Editions BAW = Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1994 [1933–1940]. Frühe Schriften, 1854-1869, edited by Hans Joachim Mette, Karl Schlechta, and Carl Koch, 5 vols. Munich: Beck KGW = Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1967–. Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, then Volker Gerhardt, Norbert Miller, Wolfgang Müller-Lauter, Karl Pestalozzi, and the Berlin-­Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 40 vols in 9 sections. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter

  Abbreviations and Editions 

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KSA = Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1967–1977; 1988. Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, edited by Gorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 15 vols. Berlin and New York; Munich: de Gruyter; Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag KSB = Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1975–1984. Sämtliche Briefe: Kritische Studienausgabe, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 8 vols. Berlin and New York; Munich: de Gruyter; Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag W = Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1966. Werke in drei Bänden, ed. Karl Schlechta. 3 vols plus Index. Munich: Hanser

Nietzsche: Individual Works AC = Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1920. The Anti-Christ, translated by H.L. Mencken. New York: A.A. Knopf BT, BGE, GM = Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1968a. Basic Writings, edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Modern Library CW and NCW = Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1899. The Case of Wagner; Nietzsche Contra Wagner, The Twilight of the Idols; The Antichrist [Works, vol. 3], translated by Thomas Common. London: T. Fischer Unwin D = Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1924a. The Dawn of Day, translated by J.M. Kennedy. London: Allen & Unwin EH = Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1911. Ecce Homo (Nietzsche’s Autobiography), translated by Anthony M. Ludovici. New York: Macmillan; and Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1992. Ecce Homo, translated by R.J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth; Penguin GS = Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1924b. The Joyful Wisdom, translated by Thomas Common. New York: Macmillan HA = Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1908. Human, All Too Human, translated by Alexander Harvey. Chicago: Kerr; and Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1986. Human, All Too Human, translated by R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press TI = Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1899. The Case of Wagner; Nietzsche Contra Wagner, The Twilight of the Idols; The Antichrist [Works, vol. 3], translated by Thomas Common. London: T. Fischer Unwin; and Nietzsche,

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Abbreviations and Editions

Friedrich. 1968b. Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ, translated by R.J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin UM = Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1983. Untimely Meditations, translated by R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Z = Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1969. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, translated by R.J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin WP = Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1968c. The Will to Power, edited by Walter Kaufmann, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Random House [Note on The Will to Power: although texts in the collection edited by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and Peter Gast (Heinrich Köselitz) as The Will to Power are best consulted as they are found in Nietzsche’s Nachlass, nevertheless I have, for the sake of convenience, provided references to both editions.]

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Conic sections Fig. 8.1 Dionysos “against”/“and” the Crucified Fig. 8.2 Relation between the discourses of theology (the Crucified) and philology (Dionysos)

14 469 471

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1 Introduction

In a seminar examining dream symbolism given on Bailey Island in 1936, C.G. Jung made the remarkable claim that the Catholic Church was “a way of living the unconscious,” inasmuch as it acts as a repository for what he would term the archetypes. “The dogmas of the Catholic Church contain all the history of the unconscious objectified,” he argued, for “whatever they represent as happening is what happens in the unconscious”: “There we have the Divine Mother, the Divine Father, the birth of the hero, the great dragon; we have everything we possibly could think of, all the essentials of the unconscious process established, as metaphysical realities” (Jung 2019, 125). Yet Jung also placed a question mark over the efficacy of these dogmas: “We have simply forgotten the meaning of these things,” he continued, “and we reject them as meaningless and valueless, because our unconscious has withdrawn from these expressions and has established itself as a psychological fact, and this gravely disturbs everybody because we have no expression for it”—in short, “the source of our life has been poured into another basin” (ibid., 125). Three years later, in a seminar talk given in 1939 to the Guild of Pastoral Psychology in London, Jung returned to this question when discussing what happens to a symbol when it ceases to be a living one: What I have spoken of is, alas, to a great extent the past. We cannot turn the wheel backwards; we cannot go back to the symbolism that is gone. No © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Bishop, Discourses of Philology and Theology in Nietzsche, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42272-0_1

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sooner do you know that this thing is symbolic than you say, ‘Oh, well, it presumably means something else.’ Doubt has killed it, has devoured it. So you cannot go back. I cannot go back to the Catholic Church, I cannot experience the miracle of the Mass; I know too much about it. I know it is the truth, but it is the truth in a form in which I cannot accept it any more. I cannot say ‘This is the Sacrifice of Christ,’ and see him any more. I cannot. It is no more true to me; it does not express my psychological condition. My psychological condition wants something else. I must have a situation in which that thing becomes true once more. I need a new form. (Jung 2014, §632)1

What it means when, in Jungian terms, we experience a collapse of the symbolic system or “the death of the symbol” can be easily understood if we compare it to how, in their introduction to the second edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Christian Art and Architecture, its editors, Peter and Linda Murray, describe what over thirty years’ experience of teaching the History of Art and Architecture has taught them, namely, that “simple lack of knowledge of the Bible, and of Christian doctrine, as well as something of church history and ritual, frequently prevents people from understanding—and even more, appreciating—much of the greatest art which has ever been created” (Murray and Murray 2013, viii). This is a problem which, they rightly say, is “getting worse,” and a similar situation can be recognized in the field of English Literature, where “the words and cadences of the Authorized Version of the Bible, echoed by writers from Shakespeare to Hardy, no longer have the effect intended by the author and, because they are not recognized, their meaning and relevance is lost” (ibid.). Now it is important to take Linda and Peter Murray’s complaint seriously, because it is not mere snobbery: simple lack of knowledge of the Bible, and Christian doctrine in general, prevents people from understanding and appreciating Friedrich Nietzsche, too. Nietzsche would have assumed that his readers would have automatically “got” his biblical or theological references, but this is by no means the case today, and this circumstance inflects our reading of his work. Yet this circumstance is the inevitable result of a process that has been going for many years or, indeed, centuries, and was powerfully captured in the middle of the nineteenth century in the image of the receding tide

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by the English poet and cultural critic Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) in his famous poem “Dover Beach” (1867). Full of melancholy and nostalgia, the poem opens with an evocation of the moon-lit English coast, and it reflects on how The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world. (Hayward 1964, 645–46)

As the poem unfolds, it becomes clear that it is a lament for the disappearance of a metaphysical or supernatural world, in which the “sea of faith” is, like the ebbing tide, in slow but remorseless retreat. Arnold’s poem is completely in line with the lament for the disappearance of not the Christian, but the pagan world so memorably expressed eight or so decades earlier in Friedrich Schiller’s poem “The Gods of Greece” of 1788 (revised 1800): Whither art thou gone, fair world? Ere long   Yet return, age of nature’s bloom! Only in the fairy-land of song   May your bright illusions yet find room. Winter’s gloom our silent fields enwreathing—   To our eyes no Godhead’s form display’d— Ah!—of you bright picture, rapture-breathing,   Nought is left us but a shade. (Schiller 1844, 20)2

Nietzsche certainly knew Schiller’s poem (KSA 8, 22[24], 384), and in his third Untimely Observation, “Schopenhauer as Educator” (1874), he uses an image strikingly similar to Arnold’s when he writes of how “the waters of religion are ebbing away and leaving behind swamps or stagnant pools; the nations are again drawing away from one another in the most hostile fashion and long to tear one another to pieces”: “The

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sciences, pursued without any restraint and in a spirit of the blindest laissez faire, are shattering and dissolving all firmly held belief […]. Everything, contemporary art and science included, serves the coming barbarism” (UM II §4). Over a century on, has the sea retreated to the point of no return? Has the ocean of religion entirely evaporated, a cultural counterpart to the climate crisis with which we are confronted in the natural world? True, there are statistics that suggest that the decline of religion in the West, reflected in the reduction of the number of church-goers in the UK, is only part of the picture. After all, the rise of secularism does not adequately describe the situation in in the US, and the global picture is robust: it is predicted that, by 2050, there will be 2.9 billion Christians— over 30% of the world’s population. And close on Christianity’s heels is Islam: some calculations suggest that, by 2070, the projected Muslim population will equal the Christian population, and outnumber it by the end of the millennium. (According to the Office for National Statistics, in the 2021 census of England and Wales less than half the population described themselves as “Christian,” a 13.1 percentage point decrease from the response in 2011 and the first time the figure had fallen to below half at 46.2%. “No religion” was the second most common response at 37.2% [an increase of 12 percentage points from 2011], while the numbers of people describing themselves as Muslim and as Hindu increased from 4.9% to 6.5% and from 1.5% to 1.7% respectively. Do these figures prove the validity of the remark attributed to G.K.  Chesterton—namely, that “when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in everything”?) What these statistics do not (and cannot) indicate, however, is the extent to which these believers are invested in a culturally rich or intellectually sophisticated version of religion, be it Christianity or Islam or any other religion, or in an impoverished, reduced form—what is often referred to as fundamentalism. And for Nietzsche, this would be the crucial question—and one that reflects the way that, in his critique of religion in general (and Christianity in particular), we can observe a tension between—or sometimes even a clash of—two competing discourses, the discourse of theology and the discourse of philology. Or to put it another way, to understand Nietzsche’s complicated standpoint and the aim of his

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Kulturkritik,3 we have to appreciate how it operates with two different discourses, one indexed to belief, faith, and liturgy (i.e., the discourse of theology) and another indexed to analytical reason, sceptical investigation, and logical argumentation, as well as historical context and linguistic precision (i.e., the discourse of philology). In terms of intellectual history, the distinction between the two discourses of theology and philology can be seen to be part of a struggle that goes back to the larger conflict between reason and faith as found in the late eighteenth century in the “pantheism controversy” between Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1749–1832).4 This controversy revolved around the interpretation of the controversial figure of Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), a notorious Dutch philosopher (of Portuguese Sephardi origin), whose preface to the Tractatus Theologico-­ Politicus itself made a distinction between theology and philosophy.5 The dispute over Spinoza fuelled the thought of the Romantic generation— including Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), F.W.J.  Schelling (1775–1854), Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), Novalis (1772–1801) (who regarded Spinoza as der Gott betrunkene Mensch), Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), and (last but not least) Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)—and, in the case of the last thinker, was reflected in his dialectic, that is, in the distinction between the form (or method of exposition) and content (or what is expounded) of religion, and in the distinction between representation (Vorstellung) and concept (Begriff).6 In the thought of the German Protestant theologian, philosopher, and biblical scholar Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768–1834), the distinction between faith and reason, or between theology and philosophy, became a rigid, even dogmatic separation.7 For Schleiermacher, the essence of religion is not to be found in the concepts, judgements, and syllogisms that characterize philosophy, but rather in feeling—a view expounded in The Christian Faith (Der christliche Glaube) (1821), regarded as one of the most influential works of Christian theology of the time. Or as he wrote in On Religion: Addresses to its Cultured Despisers (Über die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern), originally published in 1799 (with two further editions released in Schleiermacher’s lifetime in 1806 and 1831), religion is really “an intuition of the universe” (Anschauen des Universums) and “a sense for the

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infinite” (Sinn für das Unendliche). In the second of these Addresses, Schleiemacher defined religion as follows: [Religion] does not seek to determine and explain the nature of the universe as metaphysics does, nor by the power of freedom and the divine will of humankind to advance and perfect the universe as morality does. Its essence is neither thinking nor acting, but intuition and feeling [Anschauung und Gefühl]. It wants to intuit the universe, it wants reverently to attend to the universe’s representations and actions, it wants to be gripped by and filled by its immediate influences in childlike passivity. (Schleiermacher 2002 [1889], 49)

And again: Religion is the outcome neither of the fear of death, nor of the fear of God. It answers a deep need in man. It is neither a metaphysic, nor a morality, but above all and essentially an intuition and a feeling. […] Dogmas are not, properly speaking, part of religion: rather it is that they are derived from it. Religion is the miracle of direct relationship with the infinite; and dogmas are the reflection of this miracle. Similarly belief in God, and in personal immortality, are not necessarily a part of religion; one can conceive of a religion without God, and it would be pure contemplation of the universe; the desire for personal immortality seems rather to show a lack of religion, since religion assumes a desire to lose oneself in the infinite, rather than to preserve one’s own finite self.8

According to Jörg Sandberger, the Hegelian distinction between the form and content of religion fed directly into the early thought of the German liberal Protestant theologian David Friedrich Strauß (1808–1874),9 while Frederick Beiser sees the irresolvable conflict between reason and faith as reflected in the positions adopted respectively by Strauß (who decided to follow reason to the bitter end) and by the Lutheran theologian and defender of orthodox Protestantism Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg (1802–1869) (who, so to speak, kept the faith).10 In Die christliche Glaubenslehre in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung und im Kampfe mit der modernen Wissenschaft (2 vols, 1840–1841), Strauß adopted a method he described as “genetic exposition” (genetische

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Darstellung), presenting the development of Christian dogma in a series of stages from its origins in the early Church, through the Scholasticism of the Middle Ages, to its modern critique by the Socinians, the Arminians, and the Spinozists. In so doing, Strauß sought to reconcile the discourses of philosophy and theology, not so much by descending from speculation to faith, that is, from concept to dogma, as by ascending from faith to the concept, that is,, from dogma to concept.11 As a summary of this historical as opposed to philosophical approach, Strauß wrote in his “Introduction,” §6, that “the true critique of dogma is its history” (Die wahre Kritik des Dogma ist seine Geschichte) (Strauß 1840, vol. 1, ix and 71). In his own lectures on the life of Jesus, given in Berlin in 1832 (but not published until 1864), Schleiermacher reduced his earlier formulae for the essence of religion, “intuition of the universe” and “feeling of dependence on God” (daß wir uns unsrer selbst als schlechthin abhängig bewußt sind, das heißt, daß wir uns abhängig fühlen von Gott),12 to one—to “the personality of Christ” or the mysterious Gottmensch who is both human and divine.13 In the foreword to his critique of these lectures published as Der Christus des Glaubens und der Jesus der Geschichte (1864), Strauß declared “the delusion […] that Jesus could have been a human being in the fullest sense and yet stand alone above the whole of humanity” to be “the chain that separates the harbour of Christian theology from the open sea of rational science [Wissenschaft],” adding: “To shatter this chain has been the chief goal of the present work, as it has always been of all my theological writings.”14 Yet the “open sea” (die offene See) of which Strauß here speaks is nevertheless still a good deal more restricted than the “open sea” of The Gay Science where Nietzsche wrote that “we philosophers and ‘free spirits’ feel, when we hear the news that ‘the old god is dead,’ as if a new dawn shone on us; […] the sea, our sea, lies open gain; perhaps there has never yet been such an ‘open sea’—” (GS §343).15 Indeed, Strauß was critical above all of the way that Schleiermacher’s biblical criticism—his questioning of the credibility and historical authority of the synoptic gospels, for instance, and his view of them as no more than a collection of fragments (or, in John Kloppenborg’s and Burton L.  Mack’s terms, a kind of proto-Q)—was undermined by his insistence that the two discourses of theology and philosophy, or faith

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and reason/criticism/philology, had to be brought together into harmony. In 1819, for instance, Schleiermacher wrote to Jacobi: “My philosophy and my dogmatics have firmly decided not to contradict one another; for just that reason neither can be complete; and as long as I can think, they will have to be harmonized and approximated to one another.”16 In his lectures, Schleiermacher set about working out how the divine could exist in the human by means of such formulas as the following: “The divine is thought not under the form of an actual, determinate consciousness, but as what lies at the basis of all consciousness” (daß das Göttliche dabei gedacht werde nicht under der Form eines wirklichen bestimmten Bewußtseins, sondern nur als dem gesammten Bewußtsein zum Grunde liegend) (Schleiermacher 1864, 103). Or as expressed in more theological terms in his introduction, “we can consider the Holy Spirit to be a power that drives into the greatest interiority” of the human being,17 which enabled Schleiermacher to propose the following, highly convoluted argument, defining the Holy Spirit as “the principle and the source of individual consciousness, but under the form of the actual(ly) individual consciousness” and in this light explaining his understanding of the essence of Christ as follows: “What appears in him to be human cannot be related to this divine principle as, in Christianity and in individuals, what appears to be human is related to the divine principle, namely as something imperfect to what is perfect, or what is dark to what is pure, i.e., what appears as human in Christ is as such something individually determined and thus also limited, but in this its essentially human form is to be nevertheless purely explained from the divine in him” (Schleiermacher 1864, 105). Strauß picks apart this obscure definition as, in philosophical terms, Spinozistic in conception and, expressed in theological terms, treading a middle path between Docetism and Ebionitism (i.e., seeing Christ as divine and only apparently human as opposed to seeing him as a mere human being).18 In short, Schleiermacher’s approach was a mixture of faith and reason, being supernaturalist in its Christology and rationalist in its critical exegesis.19 At one point, Strauß opted for a classical metaphor to characterize Schleiermacher’s position, comparing the orthodox theologians before Schleiermacher to Odysseus’s companions, “who stopped their ears against the siren voices of criticism [die Sirenenstimmen

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der Kritik],” and Schleiermacher to Odysseus himself because, “while he kept his ears open, he had himself bound with rope to the mast of belief in Christ, in order to pass unscathed through the dangerous straits.”20 (In his turn, Homeric metaphors would turn out to be some of Nietzsche’s favourites too.)21 In other words, Schleiermacher’s attitude was “only a half free one, and by the same token an only half scientific [wissenschaftliches] one,” whereas “a truly scientific attitude [das wahrhaft wissenschaftliche Verhalten] is to engage, both unbound and with open ears, with criticism, as a result of which it will arise of its own accord that the entire fairy-tale of the sirens was only something whispered by the old sorceress, Circe” (Schleiermacher 1864, 44). Consequently, Beiser is right to describe Strauß’s late work Der alte und der neue Glaube: Ein Bekenntniß (The Old Faith and the New: A Confession) of 1872, the same year as the publication of The Birth of Tragedy, as “a catechism for freethinkers” (Beiser 2020, 252), but it remains a “catechism,” a “confession (of faith),” and this is but one of the many problems that led Nietzsche to write such a devastating critique in his first of the Untimely Observations in 1874, entitled “David Strauß, the Confessor and the Writer.” In Nietzsche’s eyes, Strauß had left the job of demolishing Christianity half-finished: the tension between the discourses of philosophy and theology remained unresolved, and simply reading newspapers in the morning, taking a stroll in the Tiergarten in the afternoon, and visiting the beerhall in the evening—Strauß’s model of a perfect day—was not going to resolve that tension or finish the demolition. Hence: incipit Zarathustra. Picking up on a theme mentioned in Strauß’s Die christliche Glaubenslehre of Scholasticism, we might illustrate this point about the competing discourses of philosophy and theology in another way, namely, in relation to one of the greatest theological debates of the twentieth century, the controversy over the doctrine of analogia entis.22 According to St Thomas Aquinas, we can know God through the analogy that exists between him and his creation. In his Summa Theologica, part 1, question 4, article 3, Aquinas distinguishes between different kinds of likeness or analogy, reflecting different kinds of speech: univocal speech, equivocal speech, and analogical speech:

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Now if there be an agent which does not belong to any genus, its effect will reflect its likeness all the more remotely. It will not reflect the likeness of the form of the agent by possessing the same specific nature, nor by having the same genus, but by some kind of analogy, since existence itself is common to all things. The things which God has made are like him in this way. In so far as they are beings, they are like the first and universal principle of all being. […] When we say that a creature is like God, we do not mean that it has the same form according to genus and species. We speak by analogy, since God exists through his essence, whereas other things exist through participation. (in Fairweather 1954, 74–75)

The implications of this doctrine have been summarized by Aquinas’s editor and translator, A.M. Fairweather (a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, and a minister of the Church of Scotland), as follows: As the first active principle and first efficient cause of all things, God is not only perfect in himself, but contains within himself the perfections of all things, in a more eminent way. It is this that makes possible the celebrated analogia entis, whereby the divine nature is known by analogy from existing things, and not only by analogy based on the memory, intellect, and will of man, as Augustine had maintained. It is a fundamental principle of Aquinas that every agent acts to the producing of its own likeness. Every creature must accordingly resemble God at least in the inadequate way in which an effect can resemble its cause. The analogy is especially an analogy of ‘being,’ which the mediaeval mind apparently conceived as in some way active, not merely passive. All created things resemble God in so far as they are, and are good. Goodness and beauty are really the same as ‘being,’ from which they differ only logically. (in Fairweather 1954, 28)

Aside from Aquinas, other sources for the analogia entis are said to include St Augustine of Hippo, who writes as follows in De Trinitate (book 15, chapter 20, §39) about how the divine Trinity corresponds to our own memory, understanding, and will: “Which three things, if any one intelligently regards as by nature divinely appointed in his own mind, and remembers by memory, contemplates by understanding, embraces by love, how great a thing that is in the mind, whereby even the eternal

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and unchangeable nature can be recollected, beheld, desired, doubtless that man finds an image of that highest Trinity. And he ought to refer the whole of his life to the remembering, seeing, loving that highest Trinity, in order that he may recollect, contemplate, be delighted by it. But I have warned him, so far as seemed sufficient, that he must not so compare this image thus wrought by that Trinity, and by his own fault changed for the worse, to that same Trinity as to think it in all points like to it, but rather that he should discern in that likeness, of whatever sort it be, a great unlikeness also” (Augustine 1873, 424). Subsequently, the doctrine of analogia entis and the Thomistic understanding of an analogous relationship between reason and faith, that is, the principle that “faith (grace) does not destroy but presupposes and perfects reason (nature)” (fides (gratia) non destruit, sed supponit et perfecit rationem (naturam)),23 was affirmed (albeit cautiously) by the Fourth Lateran Council (1215),24 and then again by the First Vatican Council (1870).25 As distinct from the principle of analogia entis, however, theology has also recognized another principle, known as the analogy (or rule) of faith (analogia or regula fidei). The biblical roots of this doctrine can be found in St Paul’s letter to the Romans, where he writes, “So we, being many, are one body in Christ […], having gifts different, according to the grace that is given us, whether prophecy, according to the proportion of faith” (Douay-Rheims Version, DRV) or “the gifts that we have differ according to the grace that was given to each of us: if it is a gift of prophecy, we should prophesy as much as our faith tells us” (New Jerusalem Bible, NJB, which also notes that another translation, although less likely, is “according to the rule of faith”). It is this phrase (in Greek, κατὰ τὴν ἀναλογίαν τῆς πίστεως) that constitutes the basis of the notion of “the analogy of faith” (αναλογἰα τῆς πἰστεως), which is glossed by the commentary in the NJB as meaning that the “confession of faith,” that is, the common teaching of the Church, is the criterion of authentic gifts of the Spirit—and hence of what should be believed. For the Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth (1886–1968), the doctrine of analogia entis was a fundamental problem. In the introduction to his thirteen-volume magnum opus entitled Church Dogmatics (Kirchliche Dogmatik), he polemically dismissed analogia entis as “the invention of the Antichrist” and as the fundamental reason for which one cannot

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become a Catholic, in comparison to which all other reasons are “shortsighted and trivial” (Barth 1932, viii–ix)! By contrast, Barth proposed the doctrine of analogia fidei or analogy of faith, according to which only faith in Jesus Christ leads human beings to knowledge of God.26 Over and above reason, Barth insisted on revelation; in place of the Thomistic understanding of an analogous relation between reason and faith, or between nature and grace, Barth embraced the concept-shattering intervention of the Holy Spirit and argued that revelation provides its own criteria of understanding (Betz 2019, 86). At a first glance, the dispute between analogia entis and analogia fidei looks like a purely theological dispute, even if a significant one, inasmuch as the fault line between Roman Catholicism and Lutheran Protestantism seems to emerge from it. Yet it is also a metaphysical distinction, inasmuch as the method of analogy relies on a cosmological model of hierarchy in which there is a correspondence between above and below, heaven and earth, supernatural and natural (Taubes 1954, 115–116 and 114). If, however, either the cosmological model of hierarchy (associated with Ptolemy) or the method of analogy collapses, then the Ptolemaic cosmology is replaced by a Copernican one and the method of analogy is replaced by a dialectic of antithetical terms—or, to be precise, either a dialectic of identity between the Creator and the creation (as found in pantheism) or a dialectic of their irreparable alienation (as found in Luther, Pascal, Kierkegaard, or Karl Barth) (Taubes 1954, 118 and 115). In all variants of the dialectical method in theology, the status of the divine undergoes a major transformation: no longer independent of time and change, the divine itself becomes dependent on humankind’s efforts at self-realization (Taubes 1954, 117). This processual conception of divinity is reflected in the links (found in Germany, in particular) between theology and German Idealism, a tradition perhaps most fully exemplified by G.W.F.  Hegel.27 Among the theological disciples of German Idealism in the nineteenth century one might count the German philosopher Johannes Volkelt (1848–1930), the German liberal Protestant theologian Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923), and the German Protestant religious philosopher Christian Hermann Weisse (1801–1866), the son of the theologian Christian Ernst Weisse (1766–1832) and (as we shall see in Chap. 7) the first theologian to propose the so-called two-source

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13

hypothesis to account for the origin of the New Testament gospels. Indeed, in his account of dogma or Glaubenslehre, Troeltsch went so far as to describe the life of the divine as dependent on an increase in the spiritual life of humankind (Taubes 1954: 117). From this position one does not have to go far to find the post-Christian theogonies of such German philosophers as Hermann Schwarz (1864–1951), the phenomenologist Max Scheler (1874–1928), or Leopold Ziegler (1881–1958). Subsequently, in the theologies of such figures as Henri de Lubac (1896–1991) or Erich Przywara (1889–1972), the principle of analogy completes its metamorphosis into the form of a synthetical and antithetical dialectic (Taubes 1954, 118).28 For dialectical theology combines two different kinds of dialectic: on the one hand, the dialectic of synthesis (as found in Hegel) and, on the other, the dialectic of antithesis (as found in Kierkegaard). Even if, in line with Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel, dialectical theology sought to distinguish its negative dialectic from a dialectical synthesis à la Hegel, Karl Barth—to take just one example—developed a theology which, while dialectical, distanced itself from Kierkegaard’s anti-Hegelian stance. Or as the scholar of religious history Jacob Taubes (1923–1987) has summarized what is at stake in this position: Dialectical theology laid such absolute stress on the antithesis between the human and the divine that, once the contradiction was resolved (and this is the hidden aim of all theology), the new relation between [hu]man[kind] and God could only be expressed in terms of identity. The extreme alternatives of either contradiction or identity between [hu]man[kind] and God can only be resolved in the unity of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. (Taubes 1954, 117)

Just as Platonic philosophy had recourse to geometrical shapes in order to pursue its argumentation,29 so Barth has recourse to the mathematical figure of the open parabola. (A member of the family of conic sections, a parabola is definable as a plane curve which is approximately U-shaped and mirror-symmetrical; see Fig. 1.1) Consequently, Taubes explains the relation between the antithetical (i.e., Kierkegaardian) and synthetical (i.e., Hegelian) methods of dialectic

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Fig. 1.1  Conic sections

in terms of a mathematical simile. If one takes a cone and passes a plane through it parallel to the base, one always cuts a circle, however high or low. If, however, one tilts the plane, one no longer cuts a circle but an ellipse, and the more one tilts the plane, the more the focus of the ellipse becomes more and more eccentric, until the curve changes from an ellipse into a parabola, curved at one end and open at the other: The basic dialectic between the human and the divine remains the same in the antithetical and synthetical dialectic, and it is only a question how far the plane is tilted. In the synthetic dialectic the plane is almost parallel to the base (the circle is the mathematical figure of Hegel). In the antithetical dialectic the plane is tilted until it shifts from an ellipse to a parabola […]. (Taubes 1954, 117)

In response to this mathematical image, Paul Fletcher underscores the point that Barth cannot escape this modern dialectical configuration because he is “a modern theologian […] for whom the cosmos is no longer a home and for whom analogy is ruined” (Fletcher 2009, 140). Defining modern theology as anatopistic, that is, as belonging not just to

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the wrong time, but to the wrong place, or even the wrong world, inasmuch as it is “out of place, unless it accepts the principles of the modern as the principles of theological formation per se” (ibid., vii–viii and 137), Fletcher insists that, even if, like the open parabola, Barth’s dialectical theology “exceeds the parameters and boundaries of the synthetic ‘theology’ of Hegel,” anatopistic theology “is dialectical,” because it has to “operate immanently, constrained by the flattening of the world” (ibid., 140)—the flattening, that is, of the post-Copernican world. At this point, Nietzsche would ask: Is this still theology at all? Abandoning the distinction between analogia entis and analogia fidei, Nietzsche confronts the situation when one has deconstructed reason and abandoned faith. Why? Because, in Nietzsche’s view, the search for truth ends up by undermining itself, and because faith is impossible for philological reasons. In Human, All-Too-Human, Nietzsche argues that “a certain false psychology, a certain kind of imaginativeness in the interpretation of motives and experiences is the essential preliminary to being a Christian and to experiencing the need of salvation,” and he concludes that “upon gaining an insight into this wandering of the reason and the imagination, one ceases to be a Christian” (HA I §135). Taking this sentence as one’s starting point, one might reformulate it thus to express Nietzsche’s position: “A certain false philology, a certain kind of imaginativeness in the interpretation of texts is the essential preliminary to being a Christian and to experiencing the need of salvation,” so that one may say that “upon gaining an insight into the wandering of philological reason and interpretative imagination, one ceases to be a Christian”—as well as a philologist… This book arises in part out of research done for another book intended to offer a critical introduction and guide to Nietzsche’s late—and controversial—work The Anti-Christ (written in 1888, but not published until 1895).30 In that study, while examining Nietzsche’s critique in order to understand it better, I also tried to explore the surprising gaps in what Nietzsche does not critique about Christianity. The question of what a writer does not say is an important one for Nietzsche—as, after all, he himself notes (TI Expeditions §51) (and, as the saying goes, funk is what you don’t play …)—and it may come as a surprise to some readers to realize that, despite the title of his book, Nietzsche never says anything

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negative at all about the actual figure of Christ! This absence of criticism about the biblical Jesus extends to apparently not doubting his historical existence, and in this respect Nietzsche might be seen as a rather unusual critic of Christianity. At the core of that study and a fortiori the present one lies the thesis that Nietzsche advances an argument against Christianity on essentially philological grounds. (As Werner Thiede has shrewdly observed, the philological insights gained from Nietzsche’s engagement with the Hellenic and Roman world demonstrated to him, as someone brought up in the tradition of Pietism, how a historical-critical approach to the Bible was possible.)31 This makes Nietzsche’s argument sometimes hard to grasp, and it also accounts for its remarkable subtlety in some respects (and its startling absence of subtlety in others). We might summarize and explain Nietzsche’s argument as running something like this. First, Judeo-Christianity is based on religious texts that arose in a historical context, but we no longer have access to the full meaning of those texts. For instance, the notion of the “Messiah,” a Hebrew term meaning “the anointed one,” or its Greek equivalent, Christos or Χριστός, “the Christ,” carries with it a whole range of associations no longer available to us. Yet these connotations are essential for understanding the full significance of the hymn in the Letter to the Philippians which concludes that “every tongue should confess that the Lord Jesus Christ is in the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:11), where the allusion to Isaiah 45:23 (and its homage addressed to Yahweh) clearly indicates the divine character understood by the title Kyrios (NJB, NT, 1943), or of Peter’s profession of faith in Caesarea Philippi when he says, “Thou art Christ, the Son of the living God,” that is, ὁ χριστός, ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ θεοῦ τοῦ ζῶντος, glossed by Haydock as “the Christ formerly promised by the law and the prophets, expected and desired by all the saints, the anointed and consecrated to God” (H, 1281). Second, Christianity itself arises from a series of comparative readings, whereby the New Testament acquires its full significance only in relation to the so-called Old. For instance, the liberation from Egypt, the wandering in the desert, and the building of the tabernacle in Exodus, or the instructions for offering sacrifice in Numbers, are “reverse engineered” in the Letter to the Hebrews into “shadows” or “types” of the redemptive

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sacrifice of Christ. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil finds its counterpart in the Cross or the tree of salvation, which, according to tradition (as related by St Basil, St Ambrose, St John Chrysostom, St Epiphanius, and St Jerome), was set up over the tomb of Adam, so that the redeeming blood of Christ flowed over the original sinner’s skull. This kind of parallel reading or symbolism is reinforced by the use of scripture in liturgical contexts, now as for centuries past, which presents an entire sequence of readings from Old and New Testaments so as to reinforce the idea of continuity and a shift from the literal to the “spiritual.” Third, this principle organizes the Christian approach to scripture, as reflected not simply in the way that lectio divina (as it is called in the Benedictine tradition) represents a complete departure from the philological practices espoused, not just by Nietzsche, but by contemporary text criticism, leading to his repeated expressions of outrage at the way the Church reads the Bible (including in the Protestant tradition in which, as a child, he had been brought up). In the end, Nietzsche can no longer believe, because he thinks he has uncovered a fraudulent production of meaning in the texts, in a way that is comparable to his insight into the production of morality in On the Genealogy of Morals (1887). Going beyond this author’s previous study with its focus on the actual text of The Anti-Christ, the present work seeks to investigate the intellectual-historical context in which it was possible for The Anti-Christ and other works to be written. It explores how the two discourses of theology and philology inform Nietzsche’s critique of religion in general and Christianity in particular, from his engagement in the first of the Untimelies with the work of David Friedrich Strauß to his final reckoning with Christianity in his posthumously published work The Anti-Christ. And it seeks confirmation of its thesis that the two discourses of theology and philology are intertwined (but not inextricably so) in his writings by examining the development of Nietzsche’s thinking about the relation between theology and philosophy in the period between (and including) those two works, the Untimely Observations—referred to here collectively as the “Untimelies”32—and The Anti-Christ.33 Consequently, this book begins by situating Nietzsche in the surprisingly long history of atheism (Chap. 2). In order to contextualize the view of Jesus presented in The Anti-Christ and elsewhere, we then

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examine older examples of the critique of the “historical” Jesus before turning to the quest for the historical Jesus (as Albert Schweitzer called it) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Chap. 3). The philological concerns of The Anti-Christ are shown to have been anticipated already by Nietzsche in his engagement with D.F. Strauß in the first of his Untimelies (Chap. 4). Without this intellectual-historical contextualization, the significance of Nietzsche’s later work in general and The Anti-Christ in particular, is—so we shall argue—simply impossible to grasp. The next chapter examines the importance for Nietzsche of methods (AC §13 and §59), and Nietzsche’s portrait of Christ (AC §29 and §32), while noting that more radical positions than Nietzsche’s vis-à-vis the figure of Christ exist (Chap. 5). Then we consider Nietzsche’s attitude to the controversial figure of St Paul (D §68 and AC §31-§43) and investigate its problems, noting again that far more radical critiques of Paul of Tarsus have since been articulated (Chap. 6). In the following chapter we offer an examination of the importance for Nietzsche of philology—and its importance for the construction of the New Testament as well (Chap. 7). Finally, we touch on the rich reception of Nietzsche’s work in general and The AntiChrist in particular, and draw some conclusions (Chap. 8). This approach aims to make Nietzsche’s approach to religion, especially as reflected in the first of his Untimely Observations and in The Anti-­ Christ, accessible to readers of all faiths—and none. It seeks to uncover the continuity in Nietzsche’s thinking about religion, or more precisely the significance of his early “philological turn” from theology to philology, which the increasing urgency of his polemic against Christianity can often occlude or disguise. And it hopes to offer a bridge between two different disciplines or “discourses” which are (or were) both central to the arts and humanities or, as Nietzsche would say, to the project of Bildung (the neo-humanist ideal of self-development). This project was of a significance to Nietzsche that can be described as existential in more than one way. After all, the historical context in which Nietzsche was operating was one of immense change in higher education in Germany. Between 1841 and 1881, enrolment in philology (ancient languages), philosophy, and history in arts and humanities faculties at universities declined from 86% to 63%. In the same period, enrolment

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19

in mathematics and the natural sciences—what today we would recognize as belonging to STEM subjects—increased from 14% to 37%. Within Nietzsche’s homeland of Prussia, between 1868 and 1881 enrolment in the humanities dropped from 60% to 53.5%, while in the same period numbers in maths and sciences increased from 20.6% to 32.4%.34 For Nietzsche, the crucial question was this: How does Bildung relate to scholarship (Wissenschaft) and research (Forschung)?35 Or to put it another way, what was the point of learning (ancient) languages? To some ears, this will sound all too familiar. For around a century and a half later, one can come across headlines such as these: “The war against humanities at Britain’s universities.” In this piece Alex Preston argued that “higher education is stuffed with overpaid administrators squeezing every ounce of efficiency out of lecturers and focusing on the ‘profitable’ areas of science, technology, engineering and maths,” posing the dramatic question: “Are the humanities at risk of being wiped out?” (Preston 2015). While modern languages in particular are under fire, Nietzsche might not have been so concerned about that; after all, in Human, All-­ Too-­Human, he described “the learning of many tongues” as “a necessary evil,” and he pondered what the benefits of modern languages actually were: The learning of many languages fills the memory with words instead of with facts and thoughts, and this is a vessel which, with every person, can only contain a certain limited amount of contents. Therefore the learning of many languages is injurious, inasmuch as it arouses a belief in possessing dexterity and, as a matter of fact, it lends a kind of delusive importance to social intercourse. It is also indirectly injurious in that it opposes the acquirement of solid knowledge and the intention to win the respect of men in an honest way. Finally, it is the axe which is laid to the root of a delicate sense of language in our mother-tongue, which thereby is incurably injured and destroyed. (HA I §267)

At the same time, Nietzsche recognized the need for languages as a means of global communication, and with remarkable foresight he envisaged the development of a truly international language:

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The two nations which produced the greatest stylists, the Greeks and the French, learned no foreign languages. But as human intercourse must always grow more cosmopolitan, and as, for instance, a good merchant in London must now be able to read and write eight languages, the learning of many tongues has certainly become a necessary evil; but which, when finally carried to an extreme, will compel mankind to find a remedy, and in some far-off future there will be a new language, used at first as a language of commerce, then as a language of intellectual intercourse generally, then for all, as surely as some time or other there will be aviation. Why else should philology have studied the laws of languages for a whole century, and have estimated the necessary, the valuable, and the successful portion of each separate language? (HA I §267)

Here we see Nietzsche carving out a new role for philology, and there is little doubt that he would have been concerned about the virtual disappearance of Classics—or, as he would have called it, philology. Yet he might have derived comfort that it is possible, in Germany at least, to suggest that the reintroduction of Latin into schools might be a powerful tool for integration and social inclusion (Waltz 2020). In writing this book I have drawn on an intentionally wide variety of existing scholarly sources, notably (in Chap. 3) on Albert Schweitzer’s Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung (1904); (in Chap. 4) on Frederick C. Beiser’s David Friedrich Strauß, Father of Unbelief (2020); (in Chap. 5) on various works by Michel Onfray; (in Chap. 6) on Robert Jewett’s Paul’s Anthropological Terms: A Study of their Use in Conflict Settings (1971) and Robert M.  Price’s The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul (2012); and (in Chap. 7) on Burton L. Mack’s The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q & Christian Origins (1993) and John S. Kloppenborg’s Q, the Earliest Gospel: An Introduction to the Original Stories and Sayings of Jesus (2008). Some, if not all, of these works seem to be less well known in academic circles than they ought to be, and this study seeks to constellate their conclusions in order to achieve fresh insight into Nietzsche’s thinking about religion. To be sure, reading those works has helped inform the perspective underlying this book that Nietzsche’s thought instantiates or enacts an agon between the discourse of theology and the discourse of philology, and it is to be hoped that readers of this book

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might go back to these other studies, as well as—of course—to Nietzsche’s texts themselves. In a collection of reminiscences about him, Jung is recorded as saying that “people—even theologians—are embarrassed to talk about God,” and that “it is more polite to talk about sex” (Jensen and Mullen 1982, 7). One of the curious things about Nietzsche is that, for someone reputed to be an atheist, he talks a lot of the time about God; Thiede, for instance, describes Nietzsche as being a theologian in four respects (as someone predisposed to be a theologian by background and education, as a theologian of the circulus vitiosus deus [BGE §56], as an “atheist theologian,” and as a theologian of the “divine labyrinth”)36 (Thiede 2001, 468)37; and there is even an introduction to Nietzsche published by the SPCK—that is, the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (Huskinson 2009). And it is this remarkable paradox that this study—by examining the competing discourses of theology and philology in his work—aims to examine, explore, and better understand.

Notes 1. For further discussion, see Giegerich 2004. 2. For further discussion, see Gerhard 1946; Frühwald 1969; Theiler 1970; Demmer 1984; Bernauer 1995, 105–130; Koopmann 1996; and, most recently, Lyons 2014. 3. For a discussion of Kulturkritik, see “Kulturkritik: A Discursive Typology and its History in Modern Germany” (in Martella 2012, 1–22). 4. For further discussion, see Beiser 1986, while the main documents of the dispute are collected in Scholz 2004 [1916]. 5. “I became thoroughly convinced, that the Bible leaves reason absolutely free, that it has nothing in common with philosophy, in fact, that Revelation and Philosophy stand on totally different footings. […] Having thus laid bare the bases of belief, I draw the conclusion that Revelation has obedience for its sole object, and therefore, in purpose no less than in foundation and method, stands entirely aloof from ordinary knowledge; each has its separate province, neither can be called the handmaid of the other” (Spinoza 1891, 9–10; cf. Beiser 2020, 144: fn. 34).

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6. See Beiser 2020, 33–34. 7. See Beiser 2020, 142. 8. “Address on Religion” (1799), cited in Kedourie 1961, 26. 9. Sandberger 1972, 35, 54, and 70; cited in Beiser 2020, 34: fn. 37. 10. See Beiser 2020, 102–103. 11. See Beiser 2020, 151. 12. Schleiermacher 1821–1822, vol. 1, 33 (“Einleitung,” §9). 13. Schleiermacher 1864; see Beiser 2020: 244. 14. Strauß 1864, vii-viii; see Beiser 2020, 246. 15. For further discussion of this image, see Large 1995. 16. Schleiermacher 1858, vol. 2, 343; see Beiser 2020, 247. 17. Schleiermacher 1864, 29–30; see Beiser 2020, 247. 18. The Docetists held that the humanity and the sufferings of Jesus were apparent rather than real (a view compatible to some of the beliefs of Gnosticism), while two of the Ebionites’ principal tenets were that (a) Jesus was the human son of Mary and Joseph and that at his baptism the Holy Spirit alighted on him in the form of a dove and (b) the Mosaic Law was binding in character (see Cross 1957, 409 and 433). 19. Strauß 1864, 209–223; see Beiser 2020, 249. 20. Strauß 1864, 44; see Beiser 2020, 251. 21. In Human, All-Too-Human, for example, Nietzsche writes (alluding to another episode in the Odyssey): “I too have been in the underworld, even as Odysseus, and I shall often be there again. Not sheep alone have I ­sacrificed, that I might be able to converse with a few dead souls, but not even my own blood have I spared” (HA II §408); and in Beyond Good and Evil: “To translate the human being back into nature; […] to see to it that human individual stands before human individual as even today, hardened in the discipline of science, he stands before the res of nature, with intrepid Oedipus eyes and sealed Odysseus ears, deaf to the siren songs of old metaphysical bird catchers who have been piping at him all too long, ‘you are more, you are higher, you are of a different origin!’” (BGE §230; cf. GS §372). For further discussion, see “Conclusion: Odysseus Bound?”, in Conway 1997, 246–261. 22. For further discussion of the analogia entis, see Mondin 1963; Mechels 1974; Johnson 2010; Long 2011; White 2011; Przywara 2014 [1962]; Betz 2016; Gonzales 2018; and Betz 2019.

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23. See Summa Theologiae, I, I, 8 ad 2 (i.e., First Part, Question 1, Article 8, Reply to Objection 2); see https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.I.Q1.A8.Rep2. Accessed 2 February 2022. 24. See the Canons of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), Canon 2: “Be perfect by the perfection of grace as your heavenly Father is perfect by the perfection of nature, namely, each in his own way, because between the Creator and the creature there cannot be a likeness so great that the unlikeness is not greater”; cited in Halsall n.d., accessed 2021. 25. In Dei Filius (1870), the First Vatican Council’s dogmatic constitution on the Catholic faith, Pope Pius IX affirmed that human beings are capable of having knowledge of God through the use of natural reason, on the basis that the human being, as an image of God, is capable of knowing God, “partly from the analogy of those things which it naturally knows, partly from the relations which the mysteries bear to one another and to the last end of man” (§4); cited in Manning 1871, 192–203 (199). For further discussion, see Giurlanda 1987. 26. For further discussion, see Wucherer-Huldenfeld 2014, 126–156. 27. For further discussion of German Idealism, see Solomon and Higgins 1993; Ameriks 2000; O’Connor and Mohr 2006; Dunham et al. 2011; and Altman 2014, as well as other titles in the series Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. For useful anthologies, see Bubner 1978; Behler 1987; and Bubner 1997. 28. For further discussion of Henri de Lubac, see Hillebert 2021; and of Przywara, see Zeitz 1982. 29. Tradition has it that the phrase “Let no one ignorant of geometry enter” was inscribed on the door of Plato’s Academy in Athens. The Platonic solids, that is, the five regular, convex polyhedra constructed by congruent, regular, and polygonal faces with the same number of faces meeting at each vertex, are the tetrahedron, the cube, the octahedron, the dodecahedron, and the icosahedron (consisting respectively of four, six, eight, twelve, and twenty faces). 30. See Bishop 2022. For further discussion, see Benz 1937; Jaspers [1946]; Blondel 1994; Biser 1962; Detering 2010; Franck 1998; and Conway 2019. 31. Thiede 2001, 472; drawing on Janz 1978, 92 and 99 and 117. 32. For this abbreviated form Untimelies I am indebted to Anthony K. Jensen (see Jensen 2016).

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33. Prior to the research for this book and then in the course of it, two indispensable sources of information became available; see NK 6/2 (building on Sommer 2000); and NK 1/2 and NK 1/4. 34. See Reitter and Wellmon, 2015: 8–81 35. Their failure then was a source of concern for Nietzsche (see the 1910 and 2016 translations of Nietzsche’s lecture series Ueber die Zukunft unserer Bildungsanstalten of 1872; and Daybreak, §195; and for further discussion see Hart 2009, Allen 2017 and Bishop 2017), as it should be for us now. 36. On the central image of the labyrinth in Nietzsche’s thought, see Del Caro (1988). 37. Consequently, Nietzsche himself has often been seen as an essentially religious thinker (see Andreas-Salomé 1983 [1894], 61; Rittelmeyer 1904; Schülke 1946; Nigg 1948, 217–313; Pfeil 1949; Plankensteiner 1966; Ryogi 1995; Teske 2000; Fraser 2002; and van Os 2021), and even as a Christian thinker (see Gallwitz 1896; Steiner 1983 [1895], 7–123; Willers 1988; Kühneweg  1986; and Jaspers 1946 [1938], 9: “Nietzsche’s hostility toward Christianity as a reality is inseparable from his actual commitment to Christianity as an ideal [als Anspruch]”) (cf. Braun 1986).

References Allen, Ansgar. 2017. Awaiting Education: Friedrich Nietzsche on the Future of Our Educational Institutions. Philosophical Inquiry in Education 24 (2): 197–210. Altman, Matthew C., ed. 2014. The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ameriks, Karl, ed. 2000. The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism. New York: Cambridge University Press. Andreas-Salomé, Lou. 1983. Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken [1894]. Edited by Ernst Pfeiffer. Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig: Insel. Augustine. 1873. On the Trinity. Translated by Arthur West Haddan [Works of Augustine, edited by Marcus Dods, vol. 7]. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark. Barth, Karl. 1932. Kirchliche Dogmatik, vol. I/1, Die Lehre vom Wort Gottes: Prolegomena zur christlichen Dogmatik. Zurich: Theologischer Verlag. Behler, Ernst, ed. 1987. Philosophy of German Idealism. New York: Continuum.

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Beiser, Frederick C. 1986. The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2020. David Friedrich Strauß, Father of Unbelief: An Intellectual Biography. New York: Oxford University Press. Benz, Ernst. 1937. Nietzsches Ideen zur Geschichte des Christentums. Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 56: 169–313. Bernauer, Joachim. 1995. “Schöne Welt, wo bist du?”: Über das Verhältnis von Lyrik und Poetik bei Schiller. Berlin: Erich Schmidt. Betz, John R. 2016. Erich Przywara and the Analogia Entis: A Genealogical Diagnosis and Metaphysical Critique of Modernity. In Christian Wisdom Meets Modernity, ed. Kenneth Oakes, 71–91. London and New  York: T. & T. Clark. ———. 2019. The Analogia entis as a Standard of Catholic Engagement: Erich Przywara’s Critique of Phenomenology and Dialectical Theology. Modern Theology 35 (1): 81–102. Biser, Eugen. 1962. Gott is tot: Nietzsches Destruktion des christlichen Bewußtseins. Munich: Kösel. Bishop, Paul. 2017. Nietzsche and Bildung/Paideia. In Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory, ed. M.A.  Peters. Singapore: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­981-­287-­588-­4_459. ———. 2022. Nietzsche’s “The Anti-Christ”: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Blondel, Éric. 1994. ‘Introduction,’ ‘Notes,’ and ‘Bibliographie.’ In Friedrich Nietzsche, L’Antéchrist, ed. and trans. Éric Blondel, 7–35, 135–180, and 181–191. Paris: Flammarion. Braun, Hans-Jürg. 1986. Karl Jaspers’ Beziehung zu Nietzsche im Blickfeld der Destruktion des Christentums. Nietzsche-Studien 15: 358–381. Bubner, Rüdiger, ed. 1978. Deutscher Idealismus [Geschichte der Philosophie in Text und Darstellung, vol. 6]. Stuttgart: Reclam. ———, ed. 1997. German Idealist Philosophy. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Del Caro, Adrian. 1988. Symbolizing Philosophy: Ariadne and the Labyrinth. Nietzsche-Studien 17: 125–157. Conway, Daniel W. 1997. Nietzsche’s Dangerous Game: Philosophy in the Twilight of the Idols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Conway, Dan, ed. 2019. Nietzsche and “The Antichrist”: Religion, Politics, and Culture in Late Modernity. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Cross, R.L., ed. 1957. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. London: Oxford University Press.

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Demmer, Sybille. 1984. “Von der Kunst über Religion zur Kunst-Religion: Zu Schillers Gedicht Die Götter Griechenlandes.” In Gedichte und Interpretationen, vol. 3, Klassik und Romantik, ed. Wulf Segebrecht, 37–47. Stuttgart: Reclam. Detering, Heinrich. 2010. Der Antichrist und der Gekreuzigte: Friedrich Nietzsches letzte Texte. Göttingen: Wallstein. Dunham, Jeremy, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Sean Watson. 2011. Idealism: The History of a Philosophy. Durham: Acumen. Fairweather, A.M. 1954. Introduction. In Nature and Grace: Selections from the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas, ed. and trans. A.M.  Fairweather, 21–34. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press. Fletcher, Paul. 2009. Disciplining the Divine: Toward an (Im)political Theology. Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Franck, Didier. 1998. Nietzsche et l’ombre de Dieu. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Fraser, Giles. 2002. Redeeming Nietzsche: On the Piety of Unbelief. London and New York: Routledge. Frühwald, Wolfgang. 1969. Die Auseinandersetung um Schillers Gedicht “Die Götter Griechenlandes.” Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft 15: 251–271. Gallwitz, Hans. 1896. Friedrich Nietzsche als Erzieher zum Christentum. Preußische Jahrbücher 83: 342–343. Gerhard, Melitta. 1946. Schillers “Götter Griechenlandes” in ihrer geistesgeschichtlichen Bedeutung. Monatshefte 38 (1): 32–43. Giegerich, Wolfgang. 2004. The End of Meaning and the Birth of Man. Journal of Jungian Theory and Practice 6 (1): 1–66. Giurlanda, Paul. 1987. Faith and Reason: A Critical Inquiry. Lanham, MD, and London: University of America. Gonzales, Philip John Paul. 2018. Reimagining the Analogia Entis: The Future of Erich Przywara’s Christian Vision. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Halsall, Paul, ed. n.d. Internet Medieval Sourcebook: Twelfth Ecumenical Council: Lateran IV 1215. Accessed 20 February 2021. https://sourcebooks.fordham. edu/basis/lateran4.asp. Hart, Thomas E., ed. 2009. Nietzsche, Culture and Education. Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Hayward, John, ed. 1964. The Oxford Book of Nineteenth-Century Verse. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hillebert, Jordan, ed. 2021. T&T Clark Companion to Henri de Lubac [2017]. London: Bloomsbury.

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Huskinson, Lucy. 2009. The SPCK Introduction to Nietzsche: His Religious Thought. London. Janz, Curt Paul. 1978. Friedrich Nietzsche Biographie, vol. 1, Kindheit – Jugend – Die Basler Jahre. Munich and Vienna: Hanser. Jaspers, Karl. 1946. Nietzsche und das Christentum. Hameln: Fritz Seifert. Jensen, Anthony K. 2016. An Interpretation of Nietzsche’s ‘On the Uses and Disadvantage of History for Life’. New York and London: Routledge. Jensen, Ferne, and Sidney Mullen, eds. 1982. C.G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff: A Collection of Remembrances. San Francisco: Analytical Psychology Club. Johnson, Keith L. 2010. Karl Barth and the ‘Analogia Entis’. London and New York: T. & T. Clark. Jung, C.G. 2014. The Symbolic Life: Miscellaneous Writings [Collected Works of C.G.  Jung, vol. 18]. Translated by R.F.C.  Hull. Hove and New  York: Routledge. ———. 2019. Dream Symbols of the Individuation Process: Notes of C.G. Jung’s Seminars on Wolfgang Pauli’s Dreams. Edited by Suzanne Gieser. Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Kedourie, Elie. 1961. Nationalism. London: Hutchinson. Koopmann, Helmut. 1996. Poetischer Rückruf. In Interpretationen: Gedichte von Friedrich Schiller, ed. Norbert Oellers, 70–83. Stuttgart: Reclam. Kühneweg, Uwe. 1986. Nietzsche und Jesus—Jesus bei Nietzsche. Nietzsche-­ Studien 15: 382–397. Large, Duncan. 1995. Nietzsche and the Figure of Columbus. Nietzsche-Studien 24: 162–183. Long, Steven A. 2011. Analogia Entis: On the Analogy of Being, Metaphysics, and the Act of Faith. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Lyons, Sara. 2014. The Disenchantment/Re-enchantment of the World: Aesthetics, Secularisation, and the Gods of Greece from Friedrich Schiller to Walter Pater. The Modern Language Review 109 (4): 873–895. Manning, Henry Edward. 1871. Petri Privilegium: Three Pastoral Letters to the Clergy of the Diocese. London: Longmans, Green. Martella, Vincenzo. 2012. Dialectics of Cultural Criticism: Adorno’s Confrontation with Rudolf Borchardt and Ludwig Klages in the “Odyssey” chapter of “Dialektik der Aufklärung.” PhD diss., University of Gießen. Mechels, Eberhard. 1974. Analogie bei Erich Przywara und Karl Barth: Das Verhältnis von Offenbarungstheologie und Metaphysik. Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag. Mondin, Battista. 1963. The Principle of Analogy in Protestant and Catholic Theology. The Hague: Nijhoff.

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Murray, Peter, and Linda Murray. 2013. Preface. In The Oxford Dictionary of Christian Art and Architecture, ed. Peter Murray, Linda Murray, and Tom Devonshire Jones, 2nd ed., xviii–ix. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1910. On the Future of Our Educational Institutions. Translated by J.M. Kennedy. Edinburgh and London: Foulis. ———. 2016. Anti-Education: On the Future of Our Educational Institutions. Translated by Damion Searls, ed. Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon. New York: NYRB. Nigg, Walter. 1948. Religiöse Denker: Kierkegaard, Dostojewskij, Nietzsche, Van Gogh. Zurich: Büchergilde Gutenberg. NK 1/2 =Neymeyr, Barbara. 2020. Kommentar zu Nietzsches “Unzeitgemässen Betrachtungen”: I.  David Strauss der Bekenner und der Schriftsteller, II.  Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben [Historischer und kritischer Kommentar zu Friedrich Nietzsches Werken, vol. 1/2]. Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter. NK 1/4 = Neymeyr, Barbara. 2020. Kommentar zu Nietzsches “Unzeitgemässen Betrachtungen”: III. Schopenhauer als Erzieher, IV: Richard Wagner in Bayreuth [Historischer und kritischer Kommentar zu Friedrich Nietzsches Werken, vol. 1/4]. Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter. NK 6/2 = Sommer, Andreas Urs. 2013 Kommentar zu Nietzsches “Der Antichrist”, “Ecce homo”, “Dionysos-Dithyramben”, “Nietzsche contra Wagner” [Historischer und kritischer Kommentar zu Friedrich Nietzsches Werken, vol. 6/2]. Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter. O’Connor, Brian, and Georg Mohr, eds. 2006. German Idealism: An Anthology and Guide. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pfeil, Hans. 1949. Friedrich Nietzsche und die Religion. Regensburg: Habbel. Plankensteiner, Georg. 1966. Ontologische Ansätze zum Gottesproblem in Nietzsches “Zarathustra”. Doctoral dissertation, Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck. https://diglib.uibk.ac.at/download/pdf/53116.pdf Preston, Alex. 2015. The War Against the Humanities in Britain’s Universities. The Observer, 29 March 2015. Przywara, Erich. 2014. Analogia Entis: Metaphysics—Original Structure and Universal Rhythm [1962]. Translated by John R.  Betz and David Bentley Hart. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Reitter, Paul, and Chad Wellmon. 2015. How the Philologist Became a Physician of Modernity: Nietzsche’s Lectures on German Education. Representations 131 (1): 68–104.

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Rittelmeyer, Friedrich. 1904. Friedrich Nietzsche und die Religion: Vier Vorträge. Ulm: Kerler. Ryogi, Okochi. 1995. Wie man wird, was man ist: Gedanken zu Nietzsche aus östlicher Sicht. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Sandberger, Jörg. 1972. David Friedrich Strauß als theologischer Hegelianer. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Schiller, Friedrich. 1844. ‘The Gods of Greece’ [1788]. In The Minor Poems of Schiller of the Second and Third Periods, trans. John Herman Merivale, 16–21. London: Pickering. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1821–1822. Der christliche Glaube nach den Grundsätzen der evangelischen Kirche im Zusammenhange dargestellt. 2 vols. Berlin: Reimer. ———. 1858. Aus Schleiermacher’s Leben, in Briefen. 2 vols. Berlin: Reimer. ———. 1864. Das Leben Jesu: Vorlesungen an der Universität zu Berlin im Jahr 1832. Edited by H.A. Rütenik. Berlin: Reimer. ———. 2002. Über die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern. Edited by Rudolf Otto [1899]. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Scholz, Heinrich, ed. 2004. Die Hauptschriften zum Pantheismusstreit zwischen Jacobi und Mendelssohn [1916]. Waltrop: Spenner. Schülke, Horst. 1946. Nietzsches gottlose Frömmigkeit. Hamburg: Reich & Heidrich. Solomon, Robert C. and Kathleen M. Higgins, eds. 1993. The Age of German Idealism [Routledge History of Philosophy, vol. 6]. Abingdon: Routledge. Sommer, Andreas Urs. 2000. Friedrich Nietzsches “Der Antichrist”: Ein philosophisch-­historischer Kommentar. Basel: Schwabe. Spinoza. 1891. Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza. Translated by R.H.M. Elwes, vol. 1, Introduction, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Tractatus Politicus. Revised edn. London: George Bell. Steiner, Rudolf. 1983. Friedrich Nietzsche, ein Kämpfer gegen seine Zeit [1895]. Dornach: Rudolf Steiner Verlag. Strauß, David Friedrich. 1840. Die christliche Glaubenslehre in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung und im Kampfe mit der modernen Wissenschaft. 2 vols. Tübingen: Osiander. ———. 1864. Der Christus des Glaubens und der Jesus der Geschichte: Eine Kritik des Schleiermacher’schen Lebens Jesu. Berlin: Duncker. Taubes, Jacob. 1954. Dialectic and Analogy. The Journal of Religion 34 (2): 111–119.

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Teske, Martin. 2000. Das grausame Tier: Friedrich Nietzsche—Der fromme Atheist als Antichrist. Lutherische Monatshefte 38 (8): 6–9. Theiler, Willy. 1970. Der Mythos und die Götter Griechenlands. In Untersuchungen zur antiken Literatur, 130–147. Berlin: de Gruyter. Thiede, Werner. 2001. “Wer aber kennt meinen Gott?” Friedrich Nietzsches “Theologie” als Geheimnis seiner Philosophie. Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 98 (4): 464–500. Van Os, Aron. 2021. The Pious Antichrist: Nietzsche as a Religious Thinker. M.Phil. dissertation, Utrecht University. Available online Microsoft Word -­ Van_Os_—_Nietzsche_as_a_Religious_Thinker_—_UU_RMaPhil_ Thesis_20.docx. Waltz, Manuel. 2020. SWR2 Wissen: “Integration durch Latein?” Broadcast on SWR2, 8 February 2020, 8.30–9.00. White, Thomas Joseph, ed. 2011. The Analogy of Being: Invention of the Antichrist or the Wisdom of God? Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge: Eerdmans. Willers, Ulrich. 1988. Nietzsches antichristliche Christologie: Eine theologische Rekonstruktion. Innsbruck: Tyrolia-Verlag. Wucherer-Huldenfeld, Augustinus Karl. 2014. Philosophische Theologie im Umbruch, vol. 2, Wider den ungöttlichen Gott, part 1, Die Infragestellung Philosophischer Theologie durch Fideismus und Atheismus. Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: Böhlau. Zeitz, James V. 1982. Spiritualty and Analogia entis according to Erich Przywara, S.J. Washington, DC: University Press of America.

2 Nietzsche and the History of Atheism

Nietzsche’s position as an atheist is, it seems, clear. After all, in The Gay Science we find the famous parable of the madman that announces the death of God (GS §125).1 Yet this passage is arguably as misunderstood as it is notorious, and one of its major interpreters was Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). In his Rectoral Address on assuming the Rectorate of Freiburg University in 1933, Heidegger asked: “And if, indeed, our ownmost being (Dasein) itself stands before a great transformation, if what that passionate seeker of God and the last German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, said is true: ‘God is dead’—and if we have to face up to the forsakenness of modern man in the midst of what is, what then is the situation of science?” (Heidegger 1985, 474). In “The Will to Power as Art” (drawing on lectures given between 1936 and 1940), Heidegger shrewdly observed that “the phrase ‘God is dead’ is not an atheistic proclamation,” but rather “a formula for the fundamental experience of an event in Occidental history” (Heidegger 1991a, vol. 1, 156). And in 1952 (drawing on those same lectures as well as on addresses to small groups in 1943) Heidegger published a lengthy essay entitled “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God is Dead,’” where he described Nietzsche’s madman as “de-ranged” (ver-rückt) and “dis-lodged from the level of humankind hitherto” and as “the one who seeks God, since he cries out after God,” asking “Has a thinking man perhaps here really cried out de profundis?”2 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Bishop, Discourses of Philology and Theology in Nietzsche, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42272-0_2

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(As Bernhard H.F. Taureck observed, the “madman” himself represents not so much—as many philosophical and theological interpretations often assume—Nietzsche himself or the Übermensch as the type of passive nihilist for whom the death of God means “unending nothingness.”3 As Edith Düsing has suggested, the motif of the “death of God” contains several discrete aspects: the negative reply to the question of theodicy (i.e., the vindication of God or the resolution of the problem of evil); the overtones in God’s “dying” of the doctrine of Patripassianism (or Sabellianism) (i.e., the anti-Trinitarian belief that in the sufferings of Christ on the Cross the Father also suffered); a denial of the resurrection; and—last but not least—the impact of historical-critical biblical exegesis.4 And as Bertrand Vergely has recently pointed out, the news of God’s demise is addressed primarily to atheists, not to believers.)5 Moreover, the declaration of Nietzsche’s madman is not without its own genealogy, including Pascal, F.W.J. Schelling, and the early Hegel.6 In his Pensées, Pascal specifically noted Plutarch’s account in De Defectu Oraculorum (The Obsolescence of Oracles) of how the world learned that “le grand Pan est mort,” and he observed elsewhere that not only God had disappeared, but that nature too was corrupt.7 In The Ages of the World (Die Weltalter) (1811), Schelling discussed the nature of God and the proposition, “Thus God does not exist” (“Also ist Gott nicht”), while making an important distinction between the being and the existence of God (“Seyn Gottes” and “Existenz Gottes”) (Schelling 1958–1959, vol. 4, 573–720 and 692). As for Hegel, at the end of Glauben und Wissen (1802)—and with reference to Pascal—he discussed the religious sentiment of his age, that is, the early nineteenth century, as “the feeling on which the religious of the modern age is founded,” in terms of “the feeling that God himself is dead,” characterizing this as “absolute suffering or the speculative Good Friday” (Hegel 1986, vol. 2, 432). And in the section on religion at the end of the Phenomenology of Spirit (Phänomenologie des Geistes) (1807), he made further references to “the pain which articulates itself as the hard saying: God is dead” and “the painful feeling of the unhappy consciousness that God himself is dead” (Hegel 1986, vol. 3, 547 and 572). Thus the actual expression “death of God” can be said to have three meanings: a pagan one (see the reference to Plutarch above); a

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Trinitarian-­theological one, with Patripassionist overtones; and an antiChristian or anti-theistic one, in the sense that God does not exist or, if He does, He is indifferent about the state of the world (as Deists argue) or is an evil, cynical tyrant (as the Gnostics conceive the Demiurge) (Düsing 2006a, 312). What dies is the biblical God who exhibits covenant loyalty towards His people (and to those who seek Him), because the biblical scripture itself can no longer be believed (as we shall argue in this study). Such commentators as Thomas J.J.  Altizer (1927–2018) and Jacob Taubes (1923–1987) relate the “death of God” to the change on cosmological outlook described by Nietzsche in his Nachlass fragments published as The Will to Power as follows: “Since Copernicus man has been rolling from the center toward X” (WP §1, ss. 5 = KSA 12, 2[127], 127). Or as Nietzsche puts it elsewhere, “since Copernicus, man seems to have got himself on an inclined plane—now he is slipping faster and faster away from the center—into what? into nothingness? into a ‘penetrating sense of his nothingness’?” (GM III §25). Taubes explains this significance of the Copernican Revolution as not just the overthrow of an old astronomical theory but also the destruction of humankind’s place in the cosmos (Taubes 1954, 114).8 He describes it as the shift from a hierarchical view of the universe, discoverable thanks to the principle of analogy, which can express the basic correspondence between above and below, heaven and earth, or supernatural and natural, to a dialectic of identity between Creator and creation (as in pantheism) or a dialectic of irreparable alienation (as found in Luther, Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Karl Barth) (ibid., 114–115). Prior to the Second Vatican Council, Catholic doctrine had embraced the principle of analogy in the form of the doctrine of analogia entis, that is, the doctrine (as reaffirmed, e.g., in Dei Filius, the First Vatican Council’s dogmatic constitution on the Catholic faith, issued by Pope Pius IX in 1870), that human beings are capable of having knowledge of God through the use of natural reason. On this view, the human being— as an image of God—is capable of knowing God, “partly from the a­ nalogy of those things which it naturally knows, partly from the relations which the mysteries bear to one another and to the last end of man” (§4).9

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Now for the Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth (1886–1968), the doctrine of analogia entis was a fundamental problem.10 In the introduction to his Church Dogmatics (Kirchliche Dogmatik), a fiercesome work of scholarship in some thirteen volumes (which Barth himself sometimes playfully referred to, because of its heavy, white-jacketed volumes, as “Moby Dick” or “the white whale”),11 Barth described analogia entis as “the invention of the Antichrist” and as the fundamental reason for which one cannot become a Catholic, in comparison to which all other reasons are “shortsighted and trivial” (Barth 1932, viii–ix). (By contrast, Barth proposed the doctrine of analogia fidei or analogy of faith, according to which only faith in Jesus Christ leads human beings to knowledge of God.12 As John R. Betz has noted, Barth’s use of the term analogia fidei is peculiar to him: whereas in St Paul (cf. Romans 12: 6) it means that the charism of prophecy should be tested by the rule of faith and, in Catholic theology, it refers to the analogy of the two covenants (Old and New), in Barth it expresses the conformity in the act of faith of God and creatures.)13 For his part, the German-Polish Jesuit theologian Erich Przywara (1889–1972) sought to defend the notion of the analogia entis, especially in his study of 1962 and in some of the essays collected in Ringen der Gegenwart (1929).14 In Przywara’s own words, the doctrine of analogia entis means that “in their ultimate essence mutable and finite things are grounded in something immutable and infinite that is essentially distinct from them,” and in such a way that “every perfection of the creature is a similitude of the infinite perfection of the Creator, and […] the Creator declares Himself in creatures on the basis of [His being] this essential ground of being.”15 In tackling what he described as the “Barth-Gogarten-Thurneysen school,” that is, the school of Karl Barth, Friedrich Gogarten (1887–1967), and Eduard Thurneysen (1888–1974) that embraced “dialectical theology,” with its emphasis on revelation rather than Scholastic natural theology with its emphasis on the accessibility of God to human reason, Przywara argued in defence of the analogia entis as follows: Whatever belongs to the divine is diametrically opposed to whatever is human. […] The only relation between God and creature is […] that of the

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absolute ‘No.’ We thus see here the actual antithesis to the Catholic conception of God in that the ‘analogy’ between God and creature is replaced with a pure ‘negation.’ Whereas the analogia entis proper to the Catholic concept of God entails the mysterious tension of ‘similar-dissimilar’ […], in the Protestant conception of God the ‘similar’ is completely abolished. God is the absolutely and completely ‘Other’, as Rudolf Otto conceives it, or the ‘No’ to the creature, the ‘No’ of a ‘Yes’ that alone is real [alleinwirklich] and effective [alleinwirksam].16

Inasmuch as the “Barth-Gogarten-Thurneysen school” sought to reverse the “falling away” of such nineteenth-century liberal Protestant theologians as Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930) and later Rudolf Otto (1869–1937), Przywara regarded it as a “genuine rebirth” of the spirit of the Reformation (Przywara 1929, vol. 2, 553–554); inasmuch as, however, it was committed to the Lutheran doctrine of God’s exclusive agency or sole-causality (Alleinwirksamkeit), it was not just at odds with Catholicism but in denial of what Thomas Aquinas called secondary causes (causae secundae) within Alleinwirksamkeit, that is, of the ability to cooperate with grace (Przywara 1929, vol. 2, 553; cf. vol. 1, 57). In Przywara’s view, this led to the twin errors of, on the one hand, pantheism (or the view that “everything is God”) and, on the other, theopanism (or the view that “God is everything”), over and against which Przywara affirmed the Catholic doctrine of analogia entis, arguing that “though the creature of entirely from God and similar to God, God nevertheless transcends the creature and is unconditionally separate from the creature; hence the creature is endowed with its own being [Eigen-Sein] and efficacy [Eigen-Wirksamkeit].”17 On this account, Luther’s existentialist-­ nominalist theology turns into a radical, individualistic voluntarism that leads to historicism, relativism, and a Nietzschean will to power (Betz 2014, 50–51). For Przywara, Lutheran-Reformed theology with its denial of any cooperation with grace leads to Western secular materialism and its rejection of God as either a product of self-alienation (as in Feuerbach or Marx) or mythopoesis (as in Nietzsche) or mere wish-fulfilment (as in Freud) (Betz 2014, 52). In his essay entitled “Gott in uns oder Gott über uns?” (1923), Przywara traced a path from Luther and his doctrine of

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God’s Alleinwirksamkeit—via the pantheistic systems of Spinoza and Hegel (which are, in Przywara’s eyes, really a theopanistic reduction of the creature to a mere manifestation of the divine)—to the thought of Nietzsche (and its tragic dialectical shift from one-sided transcendence to one-sided imminence): This more linear [positiv] development [i.e., from Luther to Spinoza to Hegel] gives way to a second that amounts to its actual reversal. […] Instead of the Catholic unity-in-tension between transcendence and immanence, we have, beginning with Luther, a transcendence that converts into immanence, only to convert once again into transcendence. At one point man is disenfranchised and everything is about God and God alone; at another, God is disenfranchised and everything is about man and man alone. In this sense Nietzsche is the most obvious consequence of Luther: for his Übermensch is nothing other than man as God.18

As Przywara himself put it in the form of a question: “As for this identity [Identitäts-Eins] of God and world, which replaced polarity’s unity-­ in-­tension [Polaritäts-Spannung-Eins] of God and world, what does it fundamentally matter whether one call it God or world, whether one call it Spinoza’s world-denying theopanism or Schopenhauer-Nietzsche’s God-denying pantheism?”. And he went on to answer this question with another: “Either way, its inevitable consequence was the frightful reeling of modernity between a sensual, pleasure-seeking intoxication with the world and a fanatical, eschatological hatred of the world: is not this the deadly fever that is shaking Europe even now?”.19 Now usually Spinoza is described as a pantheist, but Przywara places Spinoza (and, indeed, Hegel) in the same theopanist category as he does Luther-Reformed theology, as opposed to the secular-redemptive tradition of salvation through psychology (as in Freud), politics (as in Marx), science (as in Comte), or art (as in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche)—a path which risks culminating in the nihilism of those whom Nietzsche described as the “last men” (letzte Menschen) who are entirely uninterested in Zarathustra’s announcement of the death of God. Or as Przywara put it in 1925 in his essay “Die religiöse Krisis in der Gegenwart und der Katholizismus”:

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The inner dialectic of the religiosity of the Reformation turns out to be precisely the Urgrund of the dialectic of modernity: between the negation and apotheosis of culture. This dialectic is inherent in the almost indiscernible coincidence of God and creature that follows from the doctrine of God’s Alleinwirksamkeit. If God and creature are so nearly blurred into one, it is ultimately a matter of indifference whether I call this one thing God or the universe.20

In order to craft his response to the Nietzschean death of God, and to combat the twin ills of theopanism (which would deny human freedom) and pantheism (which would deny God’s transcendence) from which it arose, Przywara had recourse to a quasi-Augustinian formulation: Instead of the congenital illness of the modern ‘God alone [is] everything,’ the native wholeness of the Thomistic ‘God [is] all in all’: instead of ‘God above us or in us’ (either a world that is absorbed into God or a God that is dissolved into the world) the great, vital and liberating ‘God above us and in us.’21

But while Przywara was able to discover in the obscure, but ancient doctrine of the analogia entis nothing less than what he described as “the origin, ground of truth, content and extent of our natural knowledge of God” (Przywara 1962, 10), for Nietzsche this route simply no longer existed. For the parable-like text of section 125 of The Gay Science could be described as offering the first of the reasons that Nietzsche gives for atheism: the simple fact that, in terms of belief and practice, human beings in the West have “killed” God—that is, as a matter of fact they have ceased to believe. (While this may be statistically true, one could point to a number of eminent believers in, say, the field of twentieth-century French literature, including Paul Claudel (1868–1955), Francis Jammes (1868–1938), Charles Péguy (1873–1914), Marie Noël (1883–1967), Jean Grosjean (1912–2006), and Patrice de la Tour du Pin (1911–1975), the last of whom played an important role in the liturgical revision in the wake of Vatican II.)22 Behind the dramatic presentation in The Gay Science

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of the “death of God” lie other, more nuanced arguments about the impossibility―as Nietzsche saw it―of belief. A second kind of argument in favour of atheism is proposed in Human, All-Too-Human, volume 1, and this could be described as a genealogical argument, that describes how belief in God came into being. Elsewhere, and particularly in Human, All-Too-Human, volume 1, Nietzsche proposes a related argument in favour of atheism—a psychological one. Because Nietzsche uses “psychological” arguments in The Anti-Christ, it is worth pausing to consider these in more detail. In the section entitled “The Religious Life,” we find a number of statements about Nietzsche’s psychological approach to religion. Here a sequence of aphorisms aims to uncover the mechanism behind “the Christian need of salvation” (HA I §132–§135). Here Nietzsche undertakes to propound “some explanation of that process in the soul of a Christian which is termed need of salvation, and […] an explanation, too, free from mythology: hence one purely psychological” (HA I §132). In these sections Nietzsche offers one of his earliest accounts of the origin of the conscience (an account that he was to revise in Beyond Good and Evil and again in On the Genealogy of Morals). Once we understand how “the idea of a god,” which “perturbs and discourages as long as it is accepted,” actually originated—something which, in Nietzsche’s view, can “in the present state of comparative ethnological science” no longer be a matter of doubt—then “with the insight into the origin of this belief all faith collapses” (HA I §133). In short, Nietzsche argues that “a certain false psychology, a certain kind of imaginativeness in the interpretation of motives and experiences is the essential preliminary to being a Christian and to experiencing the need of salvation,” and he concludes that “upon gaining an insight into this wandering of the reason and the imagination, one ceases to be a Christian” (HA I §135). This psychological account is extended later by Nietzsche into a genealogical account of morality (see On the Genealogy of Morals). Long before Nietzsche proclaimed the “death of God,” there was a long tradition of atheism.23 But not as long as one might perhaps expect. Although the word atheism derives from the ancient Greek ἄθεος or atheos, meaning “without god(s),” before the fifth century BCE, the term usually had a different meaning from the one it does today. When Socrates was accused in Athens in 399  BCE of being atheos, it was because he

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allegedly refused to acknowledge the gods recognized by the state, not because he did not believe in the existence of gods.24 As is clear from Plato’s dialogues, Socrates certainly believed in the existence of various deities, and the Platonic notion of the One (as found in the dialogue called the Parmenides) maps easily onto the monotheistic conceptions of other traditions.

History of Atheism On the face of it, the definition of atheism is simple—it applies to someone who does not believe in God. Yet, as Kerry S. Walters points out in his useful guide to atheism “for the perplexed,” this commonsense definition is too broad: it does not distinguish between different levels of non-­ belief in God; it does not indicate whether there is more than variety of atheism; and it does not say anything about the sort of God in which the atheist does not believe (Walters 2010, 9). (For instance, can an atheist reject monotheism and accept polytheism?) Even in rhetorical terms, Nietzsche is a strange kind of atheist; rather than simply stating that he does not believe in God, Nietzsche claims that we have killed him, which implies a good deal more than simply denying the existence of God. Just as there are varieties of god(s) that are rejected, so there are varieties of unbelief—or, to borrow from the title of the famous work by William James (1842–1910), different varieties of not having religious experience. There is (1) overt disbelief or atheism; (2) unbelief or agnosticism; (3) different forms of atheism and agnosticism that may be (a) pragmatic or practical; (b) philosophical, reflective, and intellectually justifiable (Walters 2010: 11–12). One can be born agnostic or atheist; for instance, John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) was raised in an entirely secular family and once described himself as “one of the very few examples of [someone] who has not thrown off religious belief, but [instead] never had it.”25 Or one can become agnostic or atheist, either gently through a process of incremental indifference or through searing personal experience: many of the survivors of the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755, for instance, which killed upwards of 100,000 people, found their faith in a wise, benevolent deity had been shattered; while the writer and Holocaust

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survivor Eli Wiesel (1928–2016) told the story in his autobiographical novel, Night (1960), an account of experiences with his father in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944–1945, contains a harrowing account of how the book’s narrator, an Orthodox Jewish teenager called Eliezer, is forced to watch, along with the rest of the camp, the hanging of a child. After his slow death, Eliezer files past the slight body, its tongue still pink and its eyes clear. Eliezer hears someone asking, “Where is God? Where is he?”, and from within himself he hears a voice answer, “Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows.”26 This is a “death of God” of a very un-Nietzschean kind. And then there are the different historical inflections that have characterized the expression of atheism over the centuries. One could write, and many have written, a history of atheism. For instance, in the years 1920 to 1923, the Austrian philosopher Fritz Mauthner (1849–1923), perhaps best-known today (if at all) for his philosophy of language (see his Beiträge zur Kritik der Sprache of 1901–1902), published an extensive history of atheism in four volumes under the title, Der Atheismus und seine Geschichte im Abendlande.27 In volume 1, entitled Einleitung: Teufelsfurcht und Aufklärung im sogenannten Mittelalter (1920), Mauthner traced the link between the fear of the devil and the development of enlightened thought in the Middle Ages; in volume 2, entitled Entdeckung der Natur und des Menschen, lachende Zweifler, Niederlande, England (1921), he explored how the growth of the natural sciences fed into an empirical sort of atheism; in volume 3, entitled Aufklärung in Frankreich und in Deutschland, die grosse Revolution (1922), he examined the relationship between Enlightenment, revolutionary thought, and atheism; while in volume 4, entitled Die grosse Revolution (12. bis 14. Abschnitt): Die letzten hundert Jahre, Reaktion, Materialismus, gottlose Mystik (1923), he explored the explosition of atheism in the nineteenth century—a century of reaction, materialism, and a curious category he perceptively described as “godless mysticism.” In coining this term, Mauthner explained, he was using it similarly to the way in which modern science spoke about a psychology without the psyche or a Seelenlehre without the Seele. By setting up a contrast between “godless” mystics and those “blessed” mystics of earlier ages, Mauthner saw an analogy with the contrast between chemistry and alchemy, that is, between a discipline bereft of

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miracles and a discipline that positively seeks out miracles—the former arising out of the latter.28 And Mauthner was frank about the role of the philosophy of language in relation to faith and sceptical disbelief: “In order to be completely free, free of the words of faith, but also free of the words of an arrogant philosophy, human thought had to move via sensualism, materialism, to the linguistic-critical insight that thought is nothing other than language, and that language is an unsuitable tool for understanding reality or especially for answering in a satisfactory, consoling way the so-called last questions, although or because these are only human questions expressed in human language. Linguistic criticism  is something at which we could only arrive through materialism and, in accepting it, destroying it, not through by-passing materialism.”29 (In the penultimate chapter of this volume, Mauthner also offers an insightful discussion of Nietzsche.)30 Arguably the earliest recorded philosophical atheist is Diagoras of Melos, a Greek poet and philosopher of the fifth century BCE. Little is known about his teachings, other than he was a critic of Greek religion in general and the ancient Mystery cults in particular (see Diogenes Laërtius, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, book 6, §59). According to Athenagoras of Athens, a second-century Christian writer, “With reason did the Athenians adjudge Diagoras guilty of atheism, in that he not only divulged the Orphic doctrine, and published the mysteries of Eleusis and of the Cabiri, and chopped up the wooden statue of Hercules to boil his turnips, but openly declared that there was no God at all” (Athenagoras, A Plea for Christians, §4; in Roberts, Donaldson, and Coxe [eds] 1885: 131). Yet there is no evidence that Diagoras held this view, rather than rejecting the misconceptions, as he saw them, of popular or superstitious religious belief. It is a similar case with Theodorus of Cyrene (c. 340–c. 250 BCE), known as Theodorus ὁ ἄθεος (Atheus), that is, “the Atheist.” A member of the Cyrenaic school founded by Aristippus of Cyrene (c. 435–c. 356 BCE), who taught the hedonist doctrine that the only intrinsic good is pleasure,31 Theodorus is said by Diogenes Laërtius to have “utterly discarded all previous opinions about the gods” (Lives and Opinions, book 2, §97).32 Yet even this is not unambiguous, and because Theodorus’s book, On the Gods, has not survived, we cannot know exactly what he taught.

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Although some writers, including Diogenes Laërtius, Cicero, Pseudo-­ Plutarch, and Sextus Empiricus, claimed that he rejected the existence of any gods, it is more likely that, as the Church Father Clement of Alexandria suggested, he simply rejected popular conceptions of the deities. Other ancient philosophers sometimes regarded as atheists also turn out, on closer inspection, not to be. For instance, Euhemerus (c. 330– c.260 BCE) proposed a “historical theory” of mythology, arguing that the gods were no more than the deified figures of conquerors, founders, and rulers of the past. (Such earlier thinkers as Xenophanes, Herodotus, Hecataeus of Abdera, and Ephorus also shared this view.) Although Plutarch accused him (in Moralia, “On Isis and Osiris,” §23) of having “spread atheism over the whole inhabited earth by obliterating the gods of our belief and converting them all alike into names of generals, admirals, and kings, who, forsooth, lived in very ancient times,”33 Euhemerus admitted the existence of primordial gods that were “eternal and imperishable, as the Sun and Moon and the other heavenly bodies, and besides these the winds, and the rest who partake of the like nature with them; for each of these has an eternal origin and eternal continuance” (Eusebius of Caesarea, Preparation for the Gospel, book 2, chapter 2).34 Then again, Epicurus (c. 300 BCE)—a figure of especial interest for Nietzsche35—is often regarded by ancient thinkers as well as by later ones as an atheist and even reviled (especially by Christian thinkers) for his alleged godlessness and contempt for religion (see Obbink 1989). Yet the famous tetrapharmakos or “four-fold remedy,” a summary of his most important teachings that were recorded by Philodemos of Gadara and preserved in a papyrus at Herculaneum (1005, 4.9–14), runs as follows: “The gods are not to be feared. Death is not a thing that one must fear. Good is easy to obtain. Evil is easy to tolerate.”36 Drawing on the materialism of Leucippus, Democritus, and other atomists, Epicurus offered a materialist account of the world as one in which the gods did not intervene; not because they do not exist, but because they are not interested in us. What Epicureanism did deny was the existence of an afterlife; in so arguing, Epicurus sought to relieve his followers of the fear of death. (This aroused the ire of a number of Christian thinkers in particular.)37

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When reformulating Epicurean thought for a Roman audience, Lucretius (in On the Nature of Things) elaborated the argument that one of the greatest causes of human unhappiness was religious fear; while denying that the gods intervened in the affairs of the world, he did not deny that they exist. “The nature of the gods is so tenuous, and so far removed from our senses, that it is scarcely perceptible even to the mind; and since it eludes the touch and impact of our hands, it cannot touch anything that is tangible to us; for what is itself intangible cannot touch,” Lucretius argued.38

Pantheism and Atheism Controversies Yet it is not until early modern times that we can talk of atheism being proposed and held as the position as which we know it today. For a long time, the term “atheist” was largely used as a term of insult, and a dangerous one, bearing in mind the consequences of excommunication or even execution. For instance, in 1656 the Jewish synagogue excommunicated the twenty-three-year-old Baruch Spinoza, and his pantheism—formulated in the phrase deus sive natura, that is, “God or Nature”—was widely (if often wrongly) regarded as an expression of atheism. In the eighteenth century, to describe someone as a Spinozist was tantamount to describing them as an atheist! The reception of Spinoza’s writings took the form of the so-called pantheism controversy or Pantheismusstreit, initiated by the alleged confession made to Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1819) by the German dramatist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) that there was no true philosophy—apart from Spinozism.39 In Über die Lehre des Spinoza (1785; 2nd edn, 1789) Jacobi argued that if God or Nature are extended substance (cf. Ethics, definitions), then Spinoza’s pantheism was indistinguishable from materialism, and his rationalism would inevitably lead to atheism. His work drew a response from Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), who argued that pantheism was perfectly compatible with theism, that is, belief in God (but, unlike deism, with a belief in revelation). Because of the negative response to the use of the notion of (unreasoning) belief or Glaube, Jacobi turned in his next work, David Hume über den Glauben, oder Idealismus und

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Realismus (1787), to a defence of this term—and to a consideration of the critical philosophy of Kant. In the preface to the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) wrote that he had found it necessary “to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith,” suggesting that his critical philosophy “puts an end for all future time to objections against morality and religion in a Socratic way, namely by the clearest proof of the ignorance of the opponent” (B xxx; Kant 1997, 117). On one reading of Kant, the critical philosophy was a defence of traditional religious belief; this is how Nietzsche read Kant, whom he accused of being a “cunning Christian” (TI “Reason” in Philosophy §6). Yet on other readings of Kant, the critical philosophy opened to the door to atheism and nihilism. A decade or so after the Pantheism controversy, German-speaking Europe was plunged into the atheism controversy or Atheismusstreit, sparked by accusations of atheism made against the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), who saw himself as a disciple of Kant. The grounds for this accusation were found in his essay, “On the Basis of Our Belief in a Divine Governance of the World” (1798), written as a response to an essay entitled “Development of the Concept of Religion,” which had appeared earlier that year in the Philosophisches Journal einer Gesellschaft Teutscher Gelehrten, by Friedrich Karl Forberg (1770–1848), a somewhat forgotten figure nowadays in the history of German thought (Bowman 2016). Fichte put forward a case for the view that, by recognizing the moral law, one is also affirming a “moral world order,” an order which he identified with God. To their critics, both Forberg and Fichte were, for all their talk about morality, essentially atheists, a charge energetically rejected by Fichte. His position was a complex one; as Yolanda Estes summarizes it, Fichte “had a concept of God, which he took to be fundamental to religion, so his position was not agnostic or atheistic; but his concept of God presupposed a divine relation to man, so his position was not deistic; and it precluded a divine personality, so his position was not theistic” (Estes 2016, 5). Fichte’s spirited public defence, in the form of his “Appeal to the Public” (1799), provoked a response from Jacobi who, in an open letter, accused Fichte of nihilism—the first use of this term, which is so important for Nietzsche, in German philosophical discourse. The controversy

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led to Fichte’s forced resignation from the chair of philosophy at the University of Jena—and his subsequent move to Berlin.

Meslier and Holbach Both these controversies (about pantheism and atheism) were conducted in German and took place in public. Yet the real roots of atheism in early modern times are arguably to be found in France, in a work that was not published during its author’s lifetime and was written, not by a philosopher, but by a Catholic priest! For “the history of true atheism” begins, according to Michel Onfray, with the work of Jean Meslier (1664–1729), a Catholic priest based at Étrépigny, in Champagne.40 On his death, it was discovered that Meslier had left three copies of a large manuscript, his Testament, in which he denounced religion in general and Christianity in particular outright. Meslier could not have announced his atheism straight more clearly: “Il n’y a point de Dieu” (§59; Meslier 2007, 345). A shortened version of Meslier’s Testament was published in 1762 by Voltaire who had obtained a copy of the complete work. Under the title Extraits des sentiments de Jean Meslier, Voltaire presented an expurgated version of the original, presenting Meslier less as an atheist and more as a deist, that is, as someone who accepts that God exists but believes that he does not intervene in or reveal himself to the world (which was, in fact, Voltaire’s position). Although Nietzsche dedicated the first volume of Human, All-Too-Human in 1878 “to the memory of Voltaire on the celebration of the anniversary of his death, May 30, 1778” (a dedication removed when the two-volume edition of the work was published in 1886), and although this work is often regarded as a celebration of Voltaire in particular and the free-thinking spirit of the Enlightenment in general, in some respects Voltaire is far less radical a figure than he is often thought to be, despite his cry, écrasez l’infâme, quoted by Nietzsche in Ecce Homo (EH Destiny §8).41 In 1760 Voltaire arranged for the reconstruction of an old church on a new site on his estate at Ferney; he requested (and obtained) from Pope Benedict XIV a sacred relic for this church; and he recruited a chaplain for his chapel at Cirey so he could hear Mass being said (Onfray 2017, 391). As A.  Owen Aldridge has

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noted, Voltaire was “partly sincere” in his dedication to “the superficial accoutrements of Catholicism” inasmuch as, “despite his intellectual opposition to Christian doctrines and to the bigotry and superstition of certain clergymen, he retained from childhood his fascination with elements of ritual and liturgy” (Aldridge 1975, 270; Pearson 2005, 275). In his edition of Meslier’s Testament, Voltaire toned down Meslier’s atheism, his revolutionary outlook, his communist politics, and his materialist approach; instead, he closed his extracts from the Testament by describing it as “the testimony of a dying priest who asks God’s forgiveness.” Now although Nietzsche never mentions Meslier, the arguments of the Testament and those of The Anti-Christ have much in common. For instance, in regard to Christian morality, to which Meslier objects in principle on the grounds that it is unnatural and without justification, governed by the death-drive in its search for suffering and its imitation of “the passion of Christ.” As far as sexuality is concerned, Meslier speaks of the vital force as le doux penchant de la nature, advocating a contractual approach to sexual relations between individuals simply in search of pleasure. And Meslier was suspicious of Christianity’s so-called love of one’s neighbour, arguing that to love one’s enemies by turning the other cheek was to permit injustice to flourish (Onfray 2007b, 69–71). Even more significant in terms of common ground between Nietzsche and Meslier is their attitude to philology. In this respect, Meslier was able to draw on an important tradition in French scholarship. Six years before Meslier was born, Richard Simon (1638–1712) was ordained a priest and became a member of the French Oratory (i.e., the Congregation of the Oratory of Jesus and Mary Immaculate), where he established the tradition of Catholic biblical exegesis. Among Simon’s numerous works are a three-volume Critical History of the Old Testament (1678) and Critical Enquiries into the Various Editions of the Bible (1684), which followed such earlier biblical critics as the medieval Jewish commentator Abraham ibn Ezra (1089–1167), the French Protestant scholar Louis Cappel (1585–1658), and the French theologian and fellow Oratorian Jean Morin (1591–1659), in denying that the Pentateuch (i.e., the first five books of the Hebrew bible or “Old” Testament) had been written by Moses or that the text of the Hebrew bible had undergone a process of historical change and development. Simon’s Histoire critique du Vieux

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Testament was greeted with disapproval by Catholics and Protestants alike: by Catholics by criticizing the Church Fathers and by Protestants for questioning the integrity of the biblical text and the inerrancy of divine scripture. In particular, Bousset (1627–1704) and other Jesuits campaigned for the suppression of this work, all copies of which were confiscated and destroyed. Meslier would have known about the controversy surrounding the work of Richard Simon and, for his part, Meslier radicalized this historical approach to the biblical texts. He proposed to read sacred texts as if they were pagan or secular texts, questioning their divine inspiration by pointing to their contradictions and errors as evidence of all-too-human imperfections; Meslier regarded such texts as little better than fairy-tales (cf. Onfray 2007b, 63). He considered the New Testament to be full of contradictions in relation to the genealogy of Jesus; the account of his life and teachings; the details of the Last Supper; as well as the number, locations, and circumstances of the post-Resurrection appearances. Far from being inspired, he argued, the biblical texts were unhighly unreliable as historical sources, compromised by the political circumstances of their composition, by the arbitrary creation of a canon that excluded texts now deemed apocryphal, and by the role played in this selection by Church councils and state authorities. Meslier was suspicious of all allegorical approaches to biblical texts that ignored their literal sense in favour of a “hidden meaning”—rejecting all “allegorical, spiritual, and mystical” as well as “anagogical or tropological” readings (§28; Meslier 2007, 184–185). And he rejected (as so many later thinkers did) all accounts of miracles as incompatible with the laws of nature and the laws of reason, pointing out that Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius of Tyana contained similarly astonishing accounts of miracles. Although Nietzsche is not interested in even debating the authenticity or otherwise of miracles, his critique is placed fairly and squarely on a philological base, as we shall see. Although he does not mention Meslier, Nietzsche does refer in passing to the famous French Enlightenment philosopher, Baron d’Holbach (1723–1789), and to his System of Nature or, the Laws of the Moral and Physical World (Système de la Nature ou Des Loix du Monde Physique et du Monde Moral) (1770) (KSA 1, 200; KSA 7, 27[2], 588). In his abridgement of this work, a treatise entitled Common Sense; or, Natural Ideas

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Opposed to Supernatural (Le Bon Sens, ou Idées naturelles opposées aux idées surnaturelles) published in 1772, d’Holbach described all religion as “but a castle in the air” and theology as “ignorance of natural causes reduced to a system” and “a long tissue of chimeras and contradictions” that “presents to all the different nations of the earth only romances devoid of probability, of which the hero himself is made up of qualities impossible to reconcile” (Hyland, Gomez and Greensides [eds] 2003, 88). In a series of works, beginning with Christianity Unveiled: Being an Examination of the Principles and Effects of the Christian religion (1761, but dated as 1758; Le Christianisme dévoilé, ou Examen des principles et des effets de la religion chrétienne), then Théologie portative, ou Dictionnaire abrégé de la religion chrétienne (1768) and La Contagion sacrée, ou Histoire naturelle de la superstition (1768), and finally, Histoire critique de Jésus-Christ, ou Analyse raisonnée des Évangiles, translated as Ecce Homo! Or, A Critical Inquiry into the History of Jesus Christ: Being a Rational Analysis of the Gospels (1770) and Tableau des Saints, ou Examen de l’esprit, de la conduite, des maximes & du mérite des personnages que le christianisme révère & propose pour modèles (1770), Holbach undertook nothing less than a “deconstruction” of Christianity (Onfray 2007b, 227). Arguing against the theologians (or, as he called them, déicoles), Holbach highlighted the ignorance of many Christians and the shortcomings of their interpretation of scripture. If the bible had been divinely inspired, Holbach wondered, why were there so many different versions of the same fact, so many exaggerations, and so many errors? In his Histoire critique de Jésus-Christ, Holbach dismissed the New Testament as a series of “blunders” (bévues), “fables” (fables), “unworthy tales” (contes indignes), “sophisms” (sophismes), “allegories” (allégories), “ridiculous laws” (lois ridicules), and “contradictions” (contradictions), and the Gospels as an “oriental romance” (roman oriental) or a “Platonic romance” (roman platonique) (ibid., 233). Holbach undertook further to deconstruct the biblical image of God as fundamentally contradictory, as both gracious and willing to pardon yet seeking revenge, as a God of anger as much as a God of love; as considered to be uncreated, immortal, and eternal, yet arising from the human sense of impotence; as a denial of the human lack of knowledge, by ignoring the world of sense and matter and answering every question with reference to God; and as a denial of death (Onfray 2007b, 235–236).

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He sought to deconstruct the figure of Jesus, whom he dismissed as a “charlatan of Judea” (charlatan de Judée), as a liar and a deceiver, modelling his actions on the Old Testament in order to trick his audience into believing he was the Messiah, and as failing to fulfil his prophecy that the Crucifixion would save a world which evidently is just as wicked as it has ever been (ibid., 234). Holbach remained unconvinced by the miracles, since the world of antiquity was full of accounts of miracles, and he questioned how anything in nature could escape the laws of nature (ibid., 234). He dismissed the doctrine of transsubstantiation as an “idolatrous worship of bread” (idolâtrie du pain) and the sacraments in general as “puerile, ridiculous ceremonies” (cérémonies puériles et ridicules). Perhaps most damningly of all, Holbach argued that Christianity was a recycled form of paganism: holy water as a Christian form of lustral water, baptism as a Christian form of the Mithraic tauroctony, resurrection as the Christian form of an ancient Babylonian idea, purgatory or a place of punishment in the afterlife as an idea originally found in Plato, the Eucharist as based on oriental theurgic practices, and the Incarnation as a revival of ancient Oriental mythologies (ibid., 237). As if this was not enough, Holbach turned his deconstructive gaze to the history of the institution left behind by Christ, that is, the Church. The religion of Jesus became the official religion of the Roman Empire, thanks to Paul of Tarsus (dismissed as a “fanatic” or forcené) and Constantine; Holbach dissected the life and writings of Paul in his Examen critique de la vie et des ouvrages de saint Paul (1770), to which he appended a “Dissertation sur saint Pierre.” He contrasted the official account of the rise of Christianity with the violent reality: the brutal suppression of paganism, the ideological totalitarianism of the Church Councils, and the construction of a “pious fraud” (pieuse fraude) to select, out of the dozens of existing gospels, just four to serve as a justification for the Church in the form in which it had become constituted (Onfray 2007b, 238). Under the guise of “faith,” Holbach argued, blind obedience and a hatred of reason had flourished; Christian morality, with its insistence on loving one’s enemies and pardoning them, was simply inhuman; whilst turning suicide into a sin, Christianity nevertheless practised and praised the “slow suicide” of a life lived in accordance with the ascetic ideal; the ritual of confession gave priests access to the minds of the

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faithful in order to gain control over them; the sacrament of extreme unction, the belief in purgatory, and the practice of indulgences all served financial, rather than spiritual interests; while the inculcation of a profound sense of guilt had driven a wedge between the ideal and reality, replacing a natural hedonism with a culture of renunciation (ibid., 239–240). And Holbach offered a polemical reinterpretation of certain passages in the Bible (in much the same way that, in The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche offers in §45 and §48 a parodistic reading of passages from the New Testament and the story of the Fall in Genesis). The story of the virginal conception of Christ, for example, is said to have been a story invented to cover Mary becoming pregnant by someone other than Joseph, possibly a Roman soldier; the episode of the expulsion of the dealers from the Temple was not to purify the Temple from commerce but in order to profit from the chaos and to pick up some coins in order to fund the community of the disciples; and the miracles of Christ were, in reality, conjuring tricks and mere magic (Onfray 2007b, 240–241). Finally, Holbach drew attention to what he saw as the anti-social aspects of Christianity that are implicit in its call to renounce worldly enjoyment. Its hatred of the body, he argued, especially its call for celibacy, its insistence on sexual continence, and its praise of virginity, represents a danger for humankind as a species, while the practice of fasting weakens its population. Similarly, Holbach was critical of Christianity’s hatred of the world: what it calls charity, he calls a justification of the existing social order; what it calls hope, a ban on demanding one’s rights. Its call for non-violence, if applied to the military and the police, would reinstate the law of the jungle; the injunction to love one’s enemies would make resistance to enemy forces impossible; while its rejection of wealth inhibits the growth of prosperity and the well-being of the nation, at the same time leading to the pauperisation of the masses and acquiescence in the rich and comfortable lifestyles of the aristocratic élite, the kind, the court, and the bishops, archbishops, and cardinals (Onfray 2007b, 242–244). Holbach’s “deconstruction” of Christianity intersects with two other aspects of his project, in a way that helps clarify Nietzsche’s position too. These are Holbach’s atheist materialism and his eudaimonistic, utilitarian

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politics, reflected in his magnum opus, the two-volume The System of Nature (Système de la nature) and its abridgement as Good Sense (Le Bon Sens), and in the three-volume Système Social, ou Principes naturels de la morale et de la Politique, avec un examen de l’influence du gouvernement sur les mœurs (1773), the two-volume Politique naturelle, ou Discours sur les vrais principes du Gouvernement (1773), and the two-volume La Morale Universelle, ou Les devoirs de l’homme fondés sur la Nature (1776). Even if, by the 1770s, it had become possible openly to embrace atheism and to deny the existence of God, Holbach was nevertheless careful to published many of his works, including the System of Nature, under a pseudonym, and this work and Good Sense were banned and publicly burned. Yet the Church was not alone in finding Holbach problematic, and for a rejection of Holbach’s thinking on different grounds, one might recall Goethe’s brief discussion of the System of Nature in his autobiography: We had neither impulse nor tendency to be illumined and advanced in a philosophical manner; on religious subjects we thought we had sufficiently enlightened ourselves, and there fore the violent contest of the French philosophers with the priesthood was tolerably indifferent to us. Prohibited books condemned to the flames, which then made a great noise, produced no effect upon us. I mention as an instance, to serve for all, the Système de la Nature, which we took in hand out of curiosity. We did not understand how such a book could be dangerous. It appeared to us so dark, so Cimmerian, so deathlike, that we found it a trouble to endure its presence, and shuddered at it as at a spectre. (Goethe 1848, 424)

The writings of Holbach and Meslier—particularly the wish of the latter that “that all the great men in the world and all the nobility could be hanged, and strangled with the guts of the priests,” reformulated by Diderot as the cry, “And [with] the guts of the last priest let’s strangle the neck of the last king”—help explain how, in post-Revolutionary France, the so-called Cult of Reason could be established in France as the first state-sponsored, atheistic “religion.” In Paris, many of its churches, including the Cathedral of Notre Dame, were transformed into “temples of reason”; on 10 November 1793, a “Feast of Reason” was held in Notre Dame, in which the nave was decorated with a Greek temple dedicated

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to Philosophy, an altar was dedicated to Reason, and a torch of Truth was lit; and on 24 November 1793, the Catholic Mass itself was forbidden.

Hegel and Feuerbach In the nineteenth century, several decades before Nietzsche, the West saw an explosion of atheism, as the state claimed for itself the rights and privileges of the Church, symbolized by Napoleon’s gesture at his coronation as Emperor in 1804 when he seized the imperial crown from the hands of the Pope Pius VII and crowned himself before the assembled dignitaries. In 1811, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) was expelled from Oxford University for writing a tract entitled The Necessity of Atheism. In his poem, Queen Mab (1813), Shelley reasserted his atheist convictions, while giving them a pantheist twist. In a note appended to Canto 7, where the Fairy declares, “There is no God!”, Shelley explains that “this negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity,” while maintaining that “the hypothesis of a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the universe remains unshaken” (Shelley 1977, 51). As we saw above, it was possible to read Kant both as attacking religious belief and as defending it, and the same applies to a later thinker in the tradition of German Idealism, George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831).42 On the one hand, Hegel places philosophy above religion in the hierarchy of his system. In the Hegelian system, art, religion, and philosophy can all express the truth, but the truth of philosophy is more complete than the truth of art or religion, because it is purer and more conceptual (see Hegel 2006). On the other hand, in his early writings Hegel—reflecting his seminary training at the Tübinger Stift—demonstrated great interest in matters of religion. In his so-called Tübingen Fragment of 1793, he drew a distinction between “subjective” religion (or what Hegel calls “the religion of the heart”) and “objective” religion (i.e., theology and its institutional embodiment in the Church) and proposed a third kind of religion he termed a “religion of the people” (or Volksreligion). For an example of this third kind of religion, Hegel looked back to ancient Greece:

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The folk festivals of the Greeks were all religious festivals, and were held either in honour of a god or of a man deified because of his exemplary service to his country. […] A religion of the people [Volksreligion]—engendering and nurturing, as it does, great and noble sentiments—goes hand in hand with freedom. But our religion [i.e., orthodox Christianity] would train people to be citizens of heaven, gazing ever upward, making our most human feelings seem alien. (Hegel 1984, 55–56)

As well as writing about the history of religion, Hegel also sometimes stands accused of having created a religion of history (Onfray 2013, 265–266). On this reading, Hegel’s Lutheran background is reflected in his model of the philosophy of history, which is essentially Christian in character, in which God performs the role of Providence. On the Christian account of history, everything that happens is an expression of divine will, a realization of God’s plan, and a manifestation of his providential foresight. In effect, Hegel translates these Christian religious terms into those of German Idealism, arguing that history is the site of the realization of the Concept. On this account, irrespective of whether Hegel is talking about the Concept, or the Idea, or Reason, or Truth, or the Spirit, he is really only ever talking about God, and on occasion he is perfectly prepared to use this term, not least in his political theory. For instance, in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right (§258, Addition), Hegel declares, “the state in and by itself is the ethical whole, the actualization of freedom; and it is an absolute end of reason that freedom should be actual. The state is mind on earth and consciously realizing itself there. […] The march of God in the world, that is what the state is” (Hegel 1976, 279). And Hegel has no qualms about declaring that there is something godlike about the state, inasmuch as what is divine about the state is that it is the idea as it made manifest on earth: “For Truth is the Unity of the universal and subjective Will; and the Universal is to be found in the State, in its laws, its universal and rational arrangements. The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on Earth” (Hegel 1956, 38–39). In such passages it becomes clear how Hegel’s view of world history is rooted in a fundamentally theological conception. According to Christianity, the world was created by God through his logos (or “reason”), the same logos which became incarnated in the figure

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of Christ. Just as Christianity (and indeed Greek thought before it, on which Christianity explicitly drew) sees the world—and history, too—as saturated with logos, so Hegel sees world history as the unfolding manifestation of Vernunft. (At the same time, it should be noted that there is an important difference between the Christian outlook and the Hegelian outlook: in the tradition of St Augustine, at least, world history is moving in one direction, in which it is the City of God (the New Jerusalem) that matters, not any city established on earth. By contrast, for Hegel the state is the goal of the history, and so the theological notion of the City of God is turned into something historical, concrete, and immanent.) For some, Hegel’s quasi-religious (or entirely religious) approach to history represents an expression of nihilism, a central issue for Nietzsche (who approaches it without specific reference to Hegel). On this account, Hegelian philosophy feeds a nihilistic outlook because of the fatalism of its ontology, its belief in an absolute determination and its concomitant negation of free will, the way it legitimizes negativity through its dialectical approach, and its interpretation of intersubjectivity in the master-­ slave dialectic in terms of the law of the jungle (Onfray 2013b, 267–268). Yet precisely this belief in fatalism, determinism, and the justification of negativity, this negation of free will and of the possibility of choosing how to act because we do not act on the world, the world acts on us and turns us into objects of the all-controlling Spirit, provoked two responses to Hegel, one of which is well known, the other is which is less so: one from Marx and another from Feuerbach. Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) was the son of an eminent lawyer, Paul Johann Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach, and a member of Left Hegelian circles, that is, those intellectuals who regarded Hegelian thought as a resource for offering a radical critique of politics and society (such as Max Stirner, Karl Marx, and Bruno Bauer). In his early writings, Feuerbach began to elaborate a detailed critique of Christianity. In Gedanken über Tod und Unsterblichkeit (1830), Feuerbach attacked the notion of personal immortality, advocating instead a Spinozistic conception of immortality as a return to the natural world from which one originated. In his study of the French Protestant thinker and author of the Dictionnaire Historique et Critique (1697), Pierre Bayle (1838), and Philosophie und Christentum (1839), Feuerbach continued his critical engagement with

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Christian theology. His critique reached its fullest elaboration in The Essence of Christianity (Das Wesen des Christentums, 1841), translated into English by the novelist George Eliot in 1854. In this work, Feuerbach argued that theology was, in fact, a secret form of anthropology: far from God having created Man in his image, Man had created God—and in the image of Man. In the preface to the second edition of 1848, Feuerbach responded to his critics in the following words: “If therefore my work is negative, irreligious, atheistic, let it be remembered that atheism—at least in the sense of this work—is the secret of religion itself; that religion itself, not indeed on the surface, but fundamentally, not in intention or according to its own supposition, but in its heart, in its essence, believes in nothing else than the truth and divinity of human nature” (Feuerbach 1881, x). Feuerbach summarized the argument of his work as follows. First, he uncovered the anthropological roots of theology, showing that “the true sense of Theology is Anthropology, that there is no distinction between the predicates of the divine and human nature, and, consequently, no distinction between the divine and human subject” (Feuerbach 1881, xi). Then, Feuerbach sought to prove this thesis that human beings have made God in their own image by arguing that the absence of religion in the animal kingdom demonstrated that it was a human creation. And he tried to advance atheism as an intellectual project by not insulting God and his believers, and not simply denying his existence, but proceeding to “deconstruct” the mechanisms that led to his creation (Onfray 2009, 28–35). In order to do this, Feuerbach uncovered what he saw as the inconsistency between what theology and anthropology reveals, arguing it can only lead to absurdity and to the negation of religion, by showing that “the distinction which is made, or rather supposed to be made, between the theological and anthropological predicates resolves itself into an absurdity” (Feuerbach 1881, xi). In the “Introduction” in the first edition of The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach had described the method he intends to use in this work as an “entirely objective” one—that is, as “the method of analytical chemistry,” by which Feuerbach understood that “whenever necessary and wherever possible documentation […] is offered to justify the conclusions achieved by the analyses, i.e., to show they are objectively based” (Feuerbach 1973,

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6). Similarly, in the opening section of the first volume of Human, All-­ Too-­Human, Nietzsche would propose a “chemistry of concepts and sensations” (HA I §1). Elsewhere, Feuerbach talked about proposing a “pneumatic hydrotherapy,” that is, using “the cold water of natural reason”—achieved by “reinstalling old, simple Ionian hydrology on the terrain of speculative philosophy, and first of all on that of the speculative philosophy of religion” (Feuerbach 1973, 8). In other words, Feuerbach was attempting to fuse the approach of the Ionian school of ancient Greece (including Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, and Anaxagoras) with Hegelian philosophy! In practical terms, Feuerbach’s method involved paying attention to the picture (or Bild), a category which in his view distinguished religion from philosophy (Feuerbach 1973, 6). And this implied respecting the pictorial qualities of the picture: “In this work,” he wrote, “the images of religion are reduced neither to thoughts—at least, not in the sense of the speculative philosophy of religion—nor to things, but are considered as images—i.e., theology is treated neither as a mystical pragmatology, as Christian mythology does, nor as ontology, as the speculative philosophy of religion does, but as psychic pathology” (Feuerbach 1973, 6). For Feuerbach, respecting these images also involved understanding what they are—just images, which reflect those who made them. In part 1 of The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach asserted that “religion is the reflection, the mirroring of the human essence in itself,” as a result of which “God is the mirror of humankind” (Feuerbach 1973, 127). In key respects, this position restates the one held by Xenophanes of Colophon, one of those ancient Ionian philosophers who went on to found the Eleatic school. In the fragments that have survived of this thought, he maintained that “mortals think that the gods are born, and have clothes and speech and shape like their own” (DK 21 B 14) and that “if cows and horses or lions had hands or could draw with their hands and make the things men can make, then horses would draw the forms of gods like horses, cows like cows, and they would make their bodies similar in shape to those which each had themselves” (DK 21 B 15) (Barnes 1987, 95). However, Feuerbach went further—by diagnosing, in an almost proto-­ psychoanalytic way, an important dimension of lack in the human conception of God. Or as he put it: “The emptying of the real world and the

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filling of the divinity is one act. God arises from the feeling of a lack; what a human being misses—whether this missing is determinate, conscious or indeterminate—that is God” (Feuerbach 1973, 148). As a consequence, Feuerbach understands religion in general and Christianity in particular to involve the operation of an act of inversion. Whereas human beings are limited in time, God is uncreated, eternal, and unchanging; whereas human beings are limited in space, God is omnipresent, “an infinite circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere” (Nicholas of Cusa)43; whereas human beings are limited in their knowledge, God is omniscient (“Immortal, invisible, God only wise / In light inaccessible hid from our eyes,” in the words of the hymn written in 1867 by the Scottish Free Church minister Walter Chalmers Smith [1824–1908]); and whereas human beings are limited in their power, God is omnipotent (“My purpose will stand, and I will do all that I please”; Isaiah 46:9–10). Seen from this perspective, the function of prayer is to enable human beings to invoke and to imagine everything they are lacking. While Feuerbach’s analysis of Christianity was obviously rejected by the Church, it was also the subject of critique from another quarter: from the individualist anarchist thinker Max Stirner (1806–1856), who argued in his idiosyncratic treatise entitled The Ego and Its Own (1845; Der Einzige und sein Eigentum) that Feuerbach’s critique had not gone far enough and that, by separating individuals from their human essence, it had somehow left that essence intact and posited as something set above those individuals and for which they should strive (Stepelevich 1978). Nor was Stirner alone in offering a critique of Feuerbach. Another critic, albeit for different reasons, was Karl Marx (1818–1883). For Marx (as indeed for his collaborator, Friedrich Engels [1820–1895]), Feuerbach was insufficiently rigorous in the materialism of his approach; their critique was summarized in their famous “Theses on Feuerbach” (1845), which concluded with the celebrated eleventh thesis, “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it” (Marx 1983, 158). In equally famous lines from the introduction to his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right” (1844), Marx wrote: “Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the

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sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people” (Marx 1983, 115). While this critique was similar to Feuerbach’s, Marx placed greater emphasis on the political and social mechanisms involved with religion. “The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man,” he wrote, adding “Religion is, indeed, the self-­ consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man—state, society” (ibid., 115).

Freud and Jung Together with Marx and Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) belongs to that group of thinkers described André Glucksmann (1937–2015) as the “master thinkers” or maîtres penseurs (Glucksmann 1980), while for Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) they belong to the “masters of suspicion.”44 Between the members of this group, to the extent that they did know or could have known, did not know or could not have known, of each other, there is a good deal of suspicion as well. To the extent that he knew of Marx at all, Nietzsche would have rejected him as a thinker of the Left, even if Nietzsche was highly critical of capitalism. In a fragment from the time of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche laments that “the division of labour is the principle of barbarism” (KSA 7, 3[44], 73); in “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” he observed how “the words ‘factory,’ ‘labour market,’ ‘supply,’ ‘making profitable,’ and whatever auxiliary verbs egotism now employs, come unbidden to the lips when one wishes to describe the most recent generation of men of learning” (UM II §7); in the first volume of Human, All-Too-Human, Nietzsche argues that “anyone who does not have two-­ thirds of the day to oneself is a slave, whatever one may be: statesman, businessman, official, scholar” (HA I §283), and he sings the praises of “the idle” (§284); in “The Wanderer and his Shadow” in the second volume of Human, All-Too-Human, Nietzsche wonders “whether property can be squared with justice” (§285), and he questions “the value of

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labour” (§286); and in Daybreak he invites the workers to “make it clear that their position as a class has become a human impossibility,” to emigrate en masse, and in so doing to protest “against machines and capital and the alternatives that now threaten them either of becoming slaves of the State or slaves of some revolutionary party” (D §206). And while Freud knew at least something about Nietzsche, and probably a good deal more than he was prepared to acknowledge, he was openly dismissive about the aspirations of Marx (or at least Socialists and Communists) to realize social justice. In other respects, Freud can be seen as developing and extending the critique of religion offered by Nietzsche— by giving it, of course, a psychoanalytic twist. In Totem and Taboo (1913), Freud argued that a foundational act of violence, an act of patricide in which “the violent primal father” was killed and devoured, formed the basis of a ceremony of remembering and re-enactment that constituted the “totem meal” or “humankind’s earliest festival.” This act of violence was, he concluded on the basis of clinical experience and academic anthropological research, “the beginning of so many things—of social organization, of moral restrictions, and of religion” (Freud 1990, 201). Looking back on this work in An Autobiographical Study (1925), Freud noted that this central thesis of Totem and Taboo “throws a particularly clear light upon the psychological basis of Christianity, in which, is we know, the ceremony of the totem meal still survives, with but little distortion, in the form of Communion” (1993, 253). And it also constituted a clear psychoanalytic response to C.G. Jung (1875–1961) who, in his correspondence with Freud in the years 1909 and 1910 and in Transformations and Symbols of the Libido (1911–1912), had been developing a very different, and highly symbolic, interpretation of ancient religious cults. Perhaps in response to both Alfred Adler (1870–1937) and Jung who, as Freud put it in “On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement” (1914), both “court a favourable opinion by putting forward certain lofty ideas, which view things, as it were, sub specie aeternitatis,” and in particular to those members of the Jungian school who had, in Freud’s words, “picked out a few cultural overtones from the symphony of life” and “once more failed to hear the mighty and primordial melody of the instincts” (Freud 1993, 119 and 124), Freud returned to the theme of

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religion in The Future of an Illusion (1927) and in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). In the first of these works, Freud sought to show that “religious ideas have arisen from the same need as have all the other achievements of civilization”: first, from “the necessity of defending oneself against the crushingly superior force of nature” and second as a result of “the urge to rectify the shortcomings of civilization which made themselves painfully felt” (Freud 1991, 201). On the basis of his investigations into why we believe, Freud concluded that all religious doctrines are “illusions and insusceptible of proof,” adding “No one can be compelled to think them true, to believe in them. Some of them are so improbable, so incompatible with everything we have laboriously discovered about the reality of the world, that we may compare them—if we pay proper regard to the psychological differences—to delusions” (ibid., 213). In 1923, Freud had begun a long-standing correspondence with the French novelist Romain Rolland (1866–1944). In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud began by criticizing Rolland’s defence of religion on the basis that its source lay in what Rolland called an “oceanic feeling.” Freud glossed this term as referring to “a feeling which [Rolland] would like to call a sensation of ‘eternity,’ a feeling of something limitless, unbounded—as it were, ‘oceanic’” (Freud 1991, 251). Freud claimed that, for his part, he had never had such a feeling, which he compared to a line from Hannibal (1835) by the German dramatist Christian Dietrich Grabbe (1801–1836): “I cannot discover this ‘oceanic’ feeling in myself. […] If I have understood [Rolland] rightly, he means the same thing by it as the consolation offered by an original and somewhat eccentric dramatist to his hero who is facing a self-inflicted death. ‘We cannot fall out of this world’” (ibid., 252). In a letter to Rolland of 20 July 1929, in which he mentioned his forthcoming discussion of the “oceanic feeling” in Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud told his correspondent: “To me mysticism is just as closed a book as music” (Freud 1961, 389). Freud offered the following psychological explanation for the “oceanic feeling” in terms of the feeling of helplessness experienced by the individual when a child: “The derivation of religious needs from the infant’s helplessness and the longing for the father aroused by it seems to me incontrovertible, especially since the feeling is not simply prolonged from childhood days,

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but is permanently sustained by fear of the superior power of Fate” (Freud 1991, 260). Yet while insisting that “the origin of the religious attitude can be traced back in clear outlines as far as the feeling of infantile helplessness,” it is interesting that Freud could not help but leave the speculative door, if not open, then at least ajar, by adding “There may be something further behind that, but for the present it is wrapped in obscurity” (Freud 1991, 260). (It is worth noting that Freud, while eschewing occultism per se, was nevertheless interested in telepathy, numerology, and other “supernatural” phenomena.45 And whether Freud himself was quite such an entire stranger to the “oceanic feeling” is a question raised by an experience made by Freud during a visit to the Acropolis in Athens in 1904 and described in 1936 in “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis: An Open Letter to Romain Rolland.”) As Freud noted in his “Postscript” (1935) to his Autobiographical Study, both The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and Its Discontents carried the critique of religion in Totem and Taboo a stage further, inasmuch as he ever more clearly perceived how “the events of human history, the interactions between human nature, cultural developments and the precipitates of primeval experiences (the most prominent example of which is religion) are no more than a reflection of the dynamic conflicts between the ego, the id and the super-ego, which psychoanalysis studies in the individual—are the very same processes repeated upon a wider stage” (Freud 1993: 257). As Freud himself acknowledged, however, there was yet another stage to go: while in The Future of an Illusion he expressed “an essentially negative valuation of religion,” he later found “a formula which did better justice to it,” namely, that, while “granting that its power lies in the truth which it contains,” he nevertheless had shown (at least, to his own satisfaction) that “the truth was not a material but a historical truth” (Freud 1993, 257–258). This third and final move was one that Freud made in Moses and Monotheism (1939). In this work, Freud puts forward the hypothesis— drawing on the work of the American archaeologist James Henry Breasted (1865–1835) and the German historian Eduard Meyer (1855–1930)— that Moses was not, in fact, a Hebrew, but had been born from ancient Egyptian nobility and become a follower of Akhenaten, a pharaoh of the

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18th Dynasty who abandoned traditional polytheism in favour of monolatry (a term associated with Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918) and used to describe belief in many gods but the worship of just one), henotheism (a term coined by F.W.J. Schelling [1775–1854] and applied by Friedrich Welcker [1784–1868] to the ancient Greeks, used to describe the worship of one god while accepting the possible existence of others), or even a form of monotheism (a belief in one single god). Following the death of Akhenaten and the collapse of the cult of the sun-disk (Aten), Moses fled Egypt but sought to perpetuate these quasi-monotheistic beliefs in the form of a different religion, so that the cult of Aten re-emerged in the cult of the Hebrew god, Yahweh. As Freud made plain, this argument had consequences for Christianity: The restoration to the primaeval father of his historical rights marked a great progress, but this could not be the end. The other parts of the prehistoric tragedy also clamoured for recognition. How this process was set into motion it is not easy to say. It seems that a growing feeling of guiltiness had seized the Jewish people and perhaps the whole of civilization of that time—as a precursor of the return of the repressed material. This went on until a member of the Jewish people, in the guise of a political-religious agitator, founded a doctrine which together with another one, the Christian religion separated from the Jewish one. Paul, a Roman Jew from Tarsus, seized upon this feeling of guilt and correctly traced it back to its primaeval source. This he called original sin […]. (Freud 1939, 138–139)

Although it has been suggested that in this work Freud used “the same method of interpretation that he used in the privacy of his office to ‘reconstruct’ his patients’ forgotten and repressed memories,” only this time in an historical context (Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani 2012, 179–180), it is hard not to hear in Freud’s (psycho)analysis of St Paul an echo of the accounts of the logic behind his miraculous conversion offered by Nietzsche in Daybreak and in The Anti-Christ. And indeed Freud’s entire method, if one sets aside the specific doctrines of psychoanalysis, would seem to bear out Nietzsche’s claim, made in Beyond Good and Evil, that “psychology is now again the path to the fundamental problems” (BGE §23).

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As one of Freud’s major contrahents, Jung was someone for whom— ironically—the writings of Nietzsche came to hold almost the same importance as scripture itself! Rather like Habbakuk, who was picked up by his hair and carried by an angel of the Lord to deliver food to Daniel in the lion pit (Daniel 14:31–42) or like John in the Book of Revelation who was “taken away in the spirit into the desert” (Revelation 17:3), or perhaps like those experiences which Jung himself worked through in the form of his Red Book, Jung found that his engagement with Nietzsche in November 1914 led him, so to speak, into the desert of the Real46: “I read Zarathustra for the first time with consciousness in the first year of the war, in November 1914, twenty years ago”—so he told his audience in a seminar held on 21 November 1934—“then suddenly the spirit seized me and carried me to a desert country in which I read Zarathustra. I did not understand really, but I made marks with my pencil at every place where I slightly stumbled … There are still those marks in my German edition, and invariably I have found that these places are things that grate, that don’t go down really” (Jung 1989, vol. 1, 259). And a few months later, on 20 February 1935, Jung had the following to say about his policy of annotating his copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra and the impact that reading Nietzsche had had on him: “I read Zarathustra for the first time when I was only twenty-three, and then later, in the winter of 1914–1915, I studied it very carefully and made a lot of annotations. I was already interested in the concept of the self, but I was not clear how I should understand it. I made my marks, however, when I came across these passages, and they seemed very important to me” (ibid., vol. 1, 391). It is safe to say that, throughout his intellectual career, Jung was preoccupied with the problem of religion. In Psychological Types (1921), he elaborated his notion of psychological typology with references to psychology in the classical age (the Gnostics, Tertullian, and Origen); to the theological disputes of the early Church; to the problem of transsubstantiation; to the problem of universals (nominalism and realism) in antiquity and in Scholasticism; and to the controversy over Holy Communion between Luther and Zwingli (Jung 1971). In lectures given at Yale University in 1934 and at the Eranos Conferences in the 1940s and 1950s, Jung turned his attention to the relationship between psychology and religion, to a psychological approach to the dogma of the Trinity, and

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to transformation symbolism in the Mass (Jung 1969). And in the 1950s he also provided psychological commentaries on The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation and on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, as well as displaying an interest in Yoga, Zen Buddhism, and the I Ching (ibid.). Was Jung an atheist? Or was he a secret—or not so secret—believer? When interviewed by John Freeman for BBC television in 1959, Jung was asked, “Do you believe in God?”, to which he answered: “Now? [Pause.] Difficult to answer. I know. I don’t need to believe. I know” (McGuire and Hull 1977, 428); but he did not actually say what it was he claimed to know! Now the question posed by Freeman in this interview was precisely the so-called Gretchenfrage, the question posed by Gretchen to Faust in Part One of Goethe’s dramatic poem, Faust, that is, about one’s belief in God; and Jung’s post-Nietzschean engagement with religion reached its most sophisticated expression in a work that had an equally Faustian dimension, his 1952 study of the biblical Book of Job, entitled Answer to Job (Jung 1969, §560–§758). Although no mention is made of Nietzsche, Jung’s strategy in this work of, in effect, putting the biblical figure of Yahweh on the psychoanalytic couch embraces and exemplifies Nietzsche’s principle that “psychology is now again the path to the fundamental problems” (BGE §23) just as much as it does Freud’s work on religion. In fact, in the introduction to an essay on “Psychology and Literature” (1930) Jung explicitly noted that “psychology, which once eked out a modest existence in a small and highly academic backroom, has, in fulfilment of Nietzsche’s prophecy, developed in the last few decades into an object of public interest” and thus “burst the framework assigned to it by the universities” (Jung 1966, 84). Jung regarded psychology as taking forward a number of disciplinary areas, including philosophy, mythology, and comparative religion, “and not a few theologians want to apply it even to the cure of souls,” which prompted him to ask (with a pun on the Scholastic expression, scientia ancilla theologiae or “science becomes the handmaiden of theology”), “Will Nietzsche be proved right in the end with his ‘scientia ancilla psychologiae’?” (ibid., 84).

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New Atheists Given the rise of state atheism in various totalitarian regimes, in some respects it would be no exaggeration to call the twentieth century the century of atheism. In Soviet Russia, the Russian Orthodox Church was suppressed; in Fascist Italy, the Fascist Manifesto of 1919 called for Church property to be handed over to the state (although, in the Lateran Treaty of 1929, the Catholic Church came to an accommodation with the Italian state); in Nazi Germany, an unusual combination of secularism and Germanic paganism was promoted (although many Germans apparently found membership of the NSDAP entirely compatible with Church membership); and in China under Mao Zedong, the state became officially atheist. After the Second World War, most Eastern European states, such as Yugoslavia, Poland, Hungary, and Lithuania, strongly discouraged religious practice; under Enver Hoxha, Albania formally declared itself atheist in 1967 (Bociurkiw, Strong with Laux 1975). In the town and city of Nietzsche’s youth—Naumburg and Leipzig— the East German government, controlled by the SED, discouraged Church membership and promoted such rituals as the Jugendweihe as an atheistic alternative to confirmation. Yet this official embrace of atheism had little to do with Nietzsche; while such right-wing dictatorships as Fascism and National Socialism may have claimed to be putting into practice Nietzsche’s ideas, they were grotesquely ill-informed as to Nietzsche’s philosophical intentions. And in the Soviet Union and in the Eastern bloc states, their atheist ideology took its stand on Marx, not on Nietzsche. After the collapse of Communism and the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the churches were able to reassert themselves, albeit with varying degrees of success. While the papacy of John Paul II is regarded by many historians as having been instrumental in bringing about the collapse of Communism in Poland (and more widely in Europe and Russia) through his support for Solidarity and anti-Communist movements, the Catholic Church has not always been happy with the secular, consumerist culture that has replaced it. (In some ways, nor would Nietzsche be, given Zarathustra’s

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caustic remarks about the trivial hedonism espoused by the “Last Human Being” in the Preface to Thus Spoke Zarathustra.) On a visit to Poland in 1991, John Paul II delivered an impassioned homily during an open-air Mass at Masłów Aero Club in Kielce and attacked recent legislation that enabled abortion (Glaser 1991). In other homilies during that visit in Kielce, Bialystok, and Koszalin, John Paul II warned against the “temptations” of freedom and consumerism, drew attention to Poland’s “ethical crisis” and questioned the capitalist economic order, and defended the proposition that humanism was not only entirely compatible with, but only achievable under the condition of, religious faith. From his perspective, John Paul II was right to be worried; the collapse of Communism had allowed Christianity to be practised openly again, only for it to be met by different challenges—by the rise of consumerism, the growth of Islam, and a development referred to as the “New Atheism.” (This term was coined by the internet journalist Gary Wolf in 2006 in an article for the online journal Wired.)47 This movement, if it can be described as such, centres around the work of four prominent atheists— Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett— who describe themselves (in a video available on the YouTube site of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science) as the “Four Horsemen”; an allusion, of course, to the four biblical horsemen of the apocalypse.48 (Lest one think that such popular atheism is an exclusively Anglo-American phenomenon, one might also consider in France the work of André Comte-Sponville, for whom God is an illusion; Michel Onfray, for whom God is a curse; and Luc Ferry, for whom God is a thing of the past.)49 In 2004, the neuroscientist Sam Harris published The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. Against the backdrop of the 9/11 attacks in 2001, Harris begins his critique of belief with the evocation of the last day of a suicide bomber in a chapter entitled “Reason in Exile.” He continues in “The Nature of Belief ” to examine the lack of empirical evidence for religious belief, arguing that “the danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy” (Harris 2005, 73). “In the Shadow of God” offers a historical survey of Christianity, focusing on the Inquisition and the torture of heretics, the witch craze and anti-Semitic

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persecution, and the Holocaust as a kind of culmination of these tendencies: “Knowingly or not,” he claims, “the Nazis were agents of religion” (ibid., 79). For Harris, “the problem with Islam” is that it, “more than any other religion human beings have devised, has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death” (ibid., 123). In “West of Eden,” Harris is equally forceful about the role of the religious Right, particularly in the US. Harris puts forward the idea of what he calls a “science of good and evil,” proposing a “rational approach to ethics.” In his final chapter, however, Harris’s argument takes a curious turn, when he defends Meister Eckhart, St John of the Cross, St Teresa of Avila, and St Seraphim of Sarov, claiming that “mysticism is a rational enterprise,” while “religion is not,” because “the mystic has recognized something about the nature of consciousness prior to thought, and this recognition is susceptible to rational discussion” (Harris 2005, 221). Hence Harris concludes that “a kernel of truth lurks at the heart of religion, because spiritual experience, ethical behavior, and strong communities are essential for human happiness,” and “yet our religious traditions are intellectually defunct and politically ruinous” (ibid., 221). Nietzsche is only referred to once—in a footnote, where Harris observes that Nietzsche “had it right” when he observed (in AC §5) that “the most pitiful example” of Christianity’s corruption of reason is “the corruption of Pascal, who believed in the corruption of his reason through original sin when it had in fact been corrupted only by his Christianity” (ibid., 247: fn. 35). In 2006, the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins published The God Delusion. The essence of his case can be found in his enthusiasm— feigned, of course, or at any rate tongue-in-cheek—for the cult of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (Dawkins 2016, 76). It is unclear to what extent Dawkins has read any canonical gospels, however, and his sense of interpretative hermeneutics is clumsy at best. For instance, at the opening of chapter 2, Dawkins writes that “the God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sado-masochistic, capriciously malevolent bully” (ibid., 51), thus ignoring any historical contexts in

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which the biblical texts arose. Defending the sentence just quoted against charges of anti-Semitism and inaccuracy, Dawkins asserts in his new introduction to the 10th anniversary edition that this sentence “can be amply justified, word for word—every single one of them—from the Bible itself ” (ibid., 18), as if the Bible were a monolithic kind of text that could simply be mapped onto twentieth-century descriptors ignoring cultural context. Indeed, philology is really not Dawkin’s strong point—a marked point of contrast with Nietzsche, whom interestingly he at no point mentions. Like Nietzsche, however, Dawkins has firmly in his sights the figure of Paul, whom he credits (as does Nietzsche) with the “founding” of Christianity, writing that “during the Roman occupation of Palestine, Christianity was founded by Paul of Tarsus as a less ruthlessly monotheistic sect of Judaism and a less exclusive one, which looked outwards from the Jews to the rest of the world” (Dawkins 2016, 58). And, again like Nietzsche, Dawkins objects above to the Pauline theology of redemption: “God incarnated himself as a man, Jesus, in order that he should be tortured and executed in atonement for the hereditary sin of Adam. Ever since Paul expounded this repellent doctrine, Jesus has been worshipped as the redeemer of all our sins. Not just the past sin of Adam: future sins as well, whether future people decided to commit them or not!” (ibid., 286). For Dawkins, “the central ‘atonement’ dogma of Christianity (due to Paul rather than Jesus) is obnoxious even by the elevated standard set in the Old Testament” (ibid., 118). Dawkins regards the three Abrahamic religions—that is, Christianity, Judaism (“originally a tribal cult of a single fiercely unpleasant God, morbidly obsessed with sexual restrictions, with the smell of charred flesh, with his own superiority over rival gods, and with the exclusiveness of his chosen desert tribe”), and Islam (“several centuries later, Muhammed and his followers reverted to the uncompromising monotheism of the Jewish original, but not its exclusiveness, and founded Islam upon a new holy book, the Koran or Qu’ran, adding a powerful ideology of military conquest to spread the faith”)—as being capable, for “most of [his] purposes,” of being “treated as indistinguishable” (Dawkins 2016, 58). Although Dawkins recommends that other authors follow his example and have someone read their entire books aloud to them, in order to apprehend

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“very directly how [they] might seem to a reader other than [themselves],” while warning that “for best results the reader must be a professional actor, with voice and ear sensitively tuned to the music of language” (ibid., 30), it is hard to see how Dawkin’s writing could in any way be said to compare with, say, Nietzsche’s. In the “Miscellaneous Maxims and Opinions” in volume 2 of Human, All-Too-Human, Nietzsche contrasts the “worst readers” (who “act like plundering soldiers”) with the signs of “good writers” (who “prefer being understood to being admired” and who “do not write for the critical and over-shrewd reader”) (HA II AOM §137–§138). Then again, in his preface to Daybreak, Nietzsche observes that he had not been a philologist in vain and that perhaps he was one still—“a teacher of slow reading” who had learned to “write slowly.” Describing the art of “reading well” as reading “slowly, profoundly, attentively, prudently, with inner thoughts, with the mental doors ajar, with delicate fingers and eyes,” Nietzsche cries: “My patient friends, this book appeals only to perfect readers and philologists: learn to read me well!” (D Preface). Indeed, the entire question of “intelligibility” is considered by Nietzsche at some length in The Gay Science, where he compares the spirit of a philosopher to a good dancer (GS §381). In the preface to On the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche discusses (with regard to his Zarathustra) the need for “an art of exegesis,” defined in terms of “reading as an art,” something that requires “precisely the thing which has nowadays been most thoroughly unlearned […]—a thing for which one must be almost a cow and in any event not a ‘modern human being’: rumination” (GM Preface §8). And in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche pictures to himself his “perfect reader,” describing this reader as “a monster of courage and curiosity, also something supple, cunning, cautious, a born adventurer and discoverer” (EH Books §3). Indeed, in Ecce Homo Nietzsche writes of Human, All-Too-Human that “almost every sentence in it is the expression of a victory” (EH HA §1); of Daybreak that “almost every sentence in the book was thought, tracked down among that confusion of rocks near to Genoa where I was alone and still shared secrets with the sea” (EH D §1); and of The Gay Science that “in practically every sentence of this book profundity and exuberance go hand in hand” (EH GS), praising “at the end of the fourth book the diamond beauty of the opening words of Zarathustra” and at the end

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of the third book “the granite sentences with which a destiny for all ages formulates itself for the first time” (EH GS). And in this work, Nietzsche also describes the “inspiration”—his term, not mine!—behind the composition of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (EH Z §3). Significantly, Nietzsche uses tradition topoi from the descriptive rhetoric of religious experience: talking about ecstasy, about an intense luminosity, and even about a sensation of freedom, of absoluteness, of power, of divinity (EH Z §3). Could anyone of us say to Nietzsche of this experience, “it is mine also”? Certainly Richard Dawkins could not. In 2007, the English columnist and essayist Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) published God Is Not Great, subtitled “How Religion Poisons Everything” for the US market and (slightly less combatively) “The Case Against Religion” for the UK one. Its main title is obviously a riposte to the Islamic phrase Allahu Akbar, a phrase used at least five times a day by Muslims in their obligatory daily prayers (the Salah), but also associated with those Muslims engaged in Jihad (meaning “struggle” or “striving,” sometimes with military connotations). But his book does not just focus on Islam, as an anecdote he tells in the second chapter demonstrates. Hitchens recalls how, a week before the events of 9/11, he was on a panel and was challenged by Dennis Prager, an American religious broadcaster, to answer the following question with a straight yes or no: “I was to imagine myself in a strange city as the evening was coming on. Toward me I was to imagine that I saw a large group of men approaching. Now—would I feel safer, or less safe, if I was to learn that they were just coming from a prayer meeting?” Hitchens replied as follows: “I was able to answer it as if it were not hypothetical. Just to stay within the letter ‘B,’ I have actually had that experience in Belfast, Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade, Bethlehem, and Baghdad. In each case I can say absolutely, and can give my reasons, why I would feel immediately threatened if I thought that the group of men approaching me in the dusk were coming from a religious observance” (Hitchens 2007, 18). The image of poison in the US subtitle recalls Nietzsche’s remark about how Christianity gave Eros poison to drink (BGE §168). But Hitchens is not a fan of Nietzsche, whom he specifically singles out for caustic rejection in this passage:

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The decay and collapse and discredit of god worship does not begin at any dramatic moment, such as Nietzsche’s histrionic and self-contradictory pronouncement that god was dead. Nietzsche could no more have known this, or made the assumption that god had ever been alive, than a priest or witch doctor could ever declare that he knew god’s will. Rather, the end of god-worship discloses itself at the moment, which is somewhat more gradually revealed, when it becomes optional, or only one among many possible beliefs. (Hitchens 2007, 67)

Nietzsche is, then, hardly a resource for these three New Atheist thinkers, nor is he, perhaps more surprisingly, for the fourth, except in a highly qualified way. As a philosopher and cognitive scientist, Daniel Dennett has published widely on such issues as free will, the philosophy of mind, and evolution. Although Dennett’s favourite philosopher is not Nietzsche, but David Hume, Nietzsche is mentioned on several occasions in Dennett’s book, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995). Dennett refers to Marx’s “exultant” remark in a letter to Lasalle about Darwin’s Origin of Species that “not only is a death blow dealt here for the first time to ‘Teleology’ in the natural sciences but their rational meaning is empirically explained” (cited in Himmelfarb 1959, 347), and he also suggests that Nietzsche “saw— through the mists of his contempt for all things English—an even more cosmic message in Darwin: God is dead.” Hence, Dennett observes, “if Nietzsche is the father of existentialism, then perhaps Darwin deserves the title of grandfather” (Dennett 1995, 62). Dennett makes an important point about the “curious historical coincidence” that, while Darwin was developing the theory of evolution, fellow scholars had been perfecting “the same bold, ingenious strategy of historical inference” in a very different field—philology. Dennett illustrates this point with the example of the transmission of Plato, noting that, “by Darwin’s day, the philologists who devoted their entire professional lives to re-creating the genealogy of their witnesses had not only developed elaborate and—for their day—rigorous method of comparison, but had succeeded in extrapolating whole lineages of copies of copies, and deduced many curious facts about the historical circumstances of their birth, reproduction, and eventual death” (Dennett 1995, 137).

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Setting aside the question of whether any of these philologists recognized how Darwin had “re-invented one of their wheels,” Dennett points out how Darwin himself, in The Descent of Man (1871), had noticed the parallels: “We find in distinct languages striking homologies due to community of descent, and analogies due to a similar process of formation.”50 And Dennett notes that Nietzsche, too, had been “one of these stupendously erudite students of the ancient texts” as well as “one of many German thinkers who were swept up in the Darwin boom”—even if Nietzsche never noticed “a kinship between Darwin’s method and that of his colleagues” (ibid., 138). As Dennett remarks later (in the context of a discussion of the eternal recurrence), Nietzsche makes numerous references to Darwin, although they are often hostile. In a fragment from his Nachlass for 1887–1888 (and included in The Will to Power), Nietzsche complained about the confusion of philosophers with scholars and scientists, claiming that “confusion goes so far that one regards Darwinism as philosophy: and now the scholars and scientists dominate [und jetzt ist die Herrschaft bei den wissenschaftlichen Menschen]” (WP §422 = KSA 11, 35[44], 531). Elsewhere, Nietzsche inveighed against “the highest equity and mildness as a state of weakening,” reflected in “the New Testament and the original Christian community”—a major theme in The Anti-Christ—and more recently “as complete bêtise in the Englishmen, Darwin and Wallace” (WP §130 = KSA 10, 24[25], 659), that is, Alfred Russell Wallace (1823–1913), the British naturalist and biologist who, entirely independent of Darwin, conceived a theory of evolution through natural selection, but also dabbled in spiritualism. Yet, as Nietzsche recognized, he himself was sometimes regarded by others as being a Darwinist; in Ecce Homo he noted, with reference to the notion of the Übermensch or superman, how “other scholarly oxen have suspected me of Darwinism on this account” (EH Books §1). Nevertheless, in On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche wrote (in Dennett’s view) “one of the first and subtlest of the Darwinian investigations of the evolution of ethics” (Dennett 1995, 182). Indeed, on Dennett’s account it is not The Anti-Christ, but On the Genealogy of Morals that marks Nietzsche’s signal contribution to post-­ Darwinian, and hence post-Christian, thinking on ethics. In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Dennett traces the demise of the deity from being “an

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anthropomorphic, Handicrafter God,” via “God as Lawgiver” and then the Newtonian role of Lawfinder, to the disappearance of any kind of “Intelligent Agency,” until all that is left is “what the process, shuffling through eternity, mindlessly finds (when it finds anything): a timeless Platonic possibility of order” (Dennett 1995, 184).) In a section entitled “Friedrich Nietzsche’s Just So Stories” in chapter 16 (entitled “On the Origin of Morality”), Dennett hails Nietzsche as “the second great sociobiologist”—the first being Thomas Hobbes (ibid., 461 and 453–460). Once again, Dennett highlights the essentially philological nature of Nietzsche’s argumentation in On the Genealogy of Morals and its account of the transition from a premoral world to a moral world in two stages. (These two stages are, first, the formation of a capacity to make promises, i.e., memory; and second, the shift from “good” and “bad” to “good” and “evil.”) Inasmuch as this second transition “occurred in historical times” and “can be traced via etymological reconstruction and a proper reading of the texts of the last two millennia,” this argument is “an adaptation by Nietzsche of the philological method that he had been trained to use” (ibid., 463). Yet Dennett goes on to argue that Nietzsche’s real contribution is not a philological one, but a sociobiological one—namely, “his steadfast application of one of Darwin’s most fundamental insights to the realm of cultural evolution” (Dennett 1995, 465). This insight is the insight into the “genetic fallacy,” that is, the fallacy of judging something to be good or bad depending on where or from whom it comes. As Darwin expressed it, “throughout nature almost every part of each living thing has probably served […] for diverse purposes” (Darwin 1988, 199), or as Nietzsche had put it, “the cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual employment and place in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart” (GM II §12). In the case of Nietzsche, he proposes as an explanatory principle the will to power—emphasizing the historical method because it is “in fundamental opposition to the now prevalent instinct and taste which would rather be reconciled even to the absolute fortuitousness, even the mechanistic senselessness of all events than to the theory that a will to power is operating” (GM II §12)—yet Dennett dismisses this principle as “one of the stranger incarnations” of what he calls “skyhook hunger,” that is, an imaginary explanatory contrivance (Dennett 1995, 466).

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Defending a view he describes as “secular humanism,” Dennett admits the task facing this position is the same as the task that faced Hobbes and Nietzsche: to explain why “somehow we have to have evolved into beings that can have a conscience”—a conscience which, in Nietzsche’s words (BGE §98), “kisses us while it hurts us” (Dennett 1995, 477). For there is, as Nietzsche realized, no recourse (as the Stoics believed there was) to living simply “according to nature” (BGE §9). The task, in Dennett’s view, that still faces sociobiology or evolutionary ethics is to test and explain the hunches of Hobbes and Nietzsche that “there are natural, evolutionarily enforceable paths to where we are today” and that “mutual recognition and the capacity to communicate a promise […] are necessary conditions for the evolution of morality” (Dennett 1995, 480–481). Again, we are much closer to the concerns of On the Genealogy of Morals than we are those of The Anti-Christ. All in all, what is surprising about the New Atheists is that they orient themselves around Nietzsche so little. (This is in notable contrast to their Francophone counterparts.) In fact, the entire philosophical discourse about atheism seems not to register on their intellectual-historical radar— that is, to the extent that they have one. The exception here is Daniel Dannett, but his entire approach rests on assumptions about the validity of empirical science; assumptions which, for his part, Nietzsche seems to have been reluctant to accept. So one is left with the strange conclusion: despite clearly occupying an important position in the history of atheism, and despite having written a book entitled The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche does not play an important role in the current debate about religion and Christianity in particular. Is this because Nietzsche has nothing to say, or is this a missed opportunity for the New Atheists?

Benedict XVI and Nietzsche Curiously enough, Nietzsche is taken more seriously than he is by the New Atheists by the recently deceased Pope Emeritus, the former pontiff Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger). In his encyclical of 2005, Deus Caritas Est, Benedict/Ratzinger (1927–2022) pauses explicitly to engage with Nietzsche’s argument in Beyond Good and Evil, §168: “According to

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Friedrich Nietzsche, Christianity had poisoned eros, which for its part, while not completely succumbing, gradually degenerated into vice” (Benedict XVI 2005, §3). Benedict/Ratzinger takes Nietzsche’s argument seriously: “But is this the case?”, he asks, “Did Christianity really destroy eros?”, and he urges his readers to “take a look at the pre-Christian world”—a world with which, of course, Nietzsche had been well acquainted. Benedict/Ratzinger continues: “The Greeks—not unlike other cultures—considered eros principally as a kind of intoxication, the overpowering of reason by a ‘divine madness’ which tears man away from his finite existence and enables him, in the very process of being overwhelmed by divine power, to experience supreme happiness” (ibid., §4). By contrast, the Old Testament, on this account, “firmly opposed this form of religion, which represents a powerful temptation against monotheistic faith, combating it as a perversion of religiosity”; but, Benedict/ Ratzinger argues, “it in no way rejected eros as such”: “Rather, it declared war on a warped and destructive form of it, because this counterfeit divinization of eros actually strips it of its dignity and dehumanizes it. […] Evidently, eros needs to be disciplined and purified if it is to provide not just fleeting pleasure, but a certain foretaste of the pinnacle of our existence, of that beatitude for which our whole being yearns” (ibid., §4). Leaving aside the heavily Platonic or Neoplatonic overtones of Benedict/ Ratzinger’s discourse on eros, it is clear that the former pontiff is able to find in Nietzsche a conversation partner, if a rather unlikely one. Then again, he was equally happy to engage with Marx (in Deus Caritas Est, §26–§27 and §31) and even with Theodor W. Adorno (Spe Salvi, §22 and §42–§43). What does it tell us about the success of Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity that he finds a hearing, not with the prominent (and noisy) atheist voices of the current age, but with a former Pope? Indeed, in an article published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 20 October 1994, Benedict was described by the German author Botho Strauß as the “anti-Nietzsche,” inasmuch as Nietzsche’s attempt at a “revaluation of all values” (Umwertung aller Werte) was now being reversed. In the words of Emery de Gaál, Benedict was “challenging modernity to a revision of the suppositions and assumptions Nietzsche had instilled in such a sustained and lasting manner” (de Gáal 2010, ix). Benedict was not the first to make this analysis; Nietzsche, as a key

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exemplar of the “German connection,” had already been identified by Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind (1987) as the source of many of our ills in general and the radical deterioration of American higher education in particular (Bloom 1987, 148–152 and 225–226). And so it is significant that Jürgen Habermas, the last living representative of the Frankfurt School which was, in so many respects, rooted in the thought of Nietzsche as well as Marx, found himself in dialogue with Joseph Ratzinger when he was a cardinal. On 14 January 2004, the Catholic Academy of Bavaria in Munich invited Habermas and Ratzinger to a debate before a limited audience, and the discussion was later published under the title The Dialectics of Secularization. At the heart of their discussion lies the status of reason, and what it might be that provides the ultimate grounding of reason. As Ratzinger argues, there is something circular about grounding reason on reason itself; already, he suggests, in submitting to reason, we are making an act of faith.51 Significantly, Habermas conceded that Ratzinger has a point, and he since has gone on to argue for a role for Judeo-Christian ethics in informing our society’s culture and to accept that the exclusion of religious voices from the public sphere is essentially “illiberal.” For as greatly as such New Atheists as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens might deplore it, a “religious turn” is discernible in numerous contemporary thinkers, be it in Derrida and deconstruction (Bradley 2006), in phenomenology (Henry 1996), or in Habermas, who has argued for a role for religion in the public sphere (Habermas 2006; Habermas 2008). For Habermas, religious traditions have “a special power to articulate moral intuitions, especially with regard to vulnerable forms of communal life.” As a consequence, this potential “makes religious speech a serious candidate to transporting possible truth contents, which can then be translated from the vocabulary of a particular religious community into generally accessible language.” Indeed, Habermas argues that “the ostensibly critical overcoming of […] a narrow secularist consciousness is itself an essentially contested issue—at least to the same extent as the demythologizing response to the cognitive challenges of Modernity” (Habermas 2006, 10 and 16).

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Nietzsche and Nihilism Another way to talk about the “death of God” is to talk about nihilism. This term was coined by F.H. Jacobi to describe the tendency, as he saw it, of rationalism in general and the critical philosophy of Kant in particular to cancel out faith and revelation and reduce everything to nothing; as he put it in a (published) letter to Fichte of 1799, “Truly, my dear Fichte, it should not grieve me, if you, or whoever it might be, wanted to call chimerism what I oppose to idealism, which I reproach as nihilism.”52 (The first use of the term in print is credited to Friedrich Leberecht Goetz [1704–1748] in his De nonismo et nihilismo in theologia of 1733, and it was later used by the doctor and non-academic philosopher Jacob Hermann Obereit [1725–1798] as well as by the Lutheran theologian Daniel Jenisch [1762–1804] who equated transcendental idealism with nihilism in his On the Ground and Value of the Discoveries of Herr Professor Kant in Metaphysics, Morals, and Aesthetics of 1796 [Gillespie 1995, 65].)53 In his letter to Fichte, Jacobi spelled out his argument as follows: The human being has this choice and this alone: nothing or God. Choosing nothing he makes himself God; that means he makes God an apparition, for it is impossible, if there is no God, for man and all that is around him to be more than an apparition, I repeat: God is and is outside of me, a living essence that subsists for itself, or I am God. There is no third possibility. (Jacobi 1968: vol. 3, 49)

Yet while Jacobi is, these days, for the most part forgotten, the term nihilism is by no means forgotten and is moreover one that is often associated with Nietzsche.54 In a famous fragment from his Nachlass (published as an aphorism in The Will to Power), Nietzsche declared: “Nihilism stands at the door: whence comes this uncanniest of all guests?” (WP §1 = KSA 12, 2[127], 125). In so doing, Nietzsche replaces the passage from the Book of Revelation, “Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me” (Revelation 3:20), made famous in the Victorian English artist William Holman Hunt’s painting, The Light of the World (1853), with an

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horrific alternative. And this replacement is an ironic one, since on Nietzsche’s account the advent of nihilism is bound up with the historical trajectory of Christianity: The end of Christianity [Der Untergang des Christenthums]—at the hands of its own morality (which cannot be replaced), which turns against the Christian God (the sense of truthfulness, developed highly by Christianity, is nauseated by the falseness and mendaciousness of all Christian interpretations of the world and of history […]). (WP §1 = KSA 12, 2[12], 125–126)

For Nietzsche, nihilism is something that can be easily summed up, as when he answers the question, “What does nihilism mean?”, as follows: “That the highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking: ‘why?’ finds no answer” (WP §2 = KSA 7, 9[35], 350). This sense underpins the precise sense of the term as Nietzsche uses it in The Anti-Christ: in section 6, he asserts that “my contention is that all the highest values of humanity have been emptied of this will [to power]—that the values of decadence, of nihilism, now prevail under the holiest name” (AC §6). In section 7 of that work, he links nihilism not just to the Christian ethic of pity but to Schopenhauer’s ethic of pity as well: Humankind has ventured to call pity a virtue (—in every superior moral system it appears as a weakness—); going still further, it has been called the virtue, the source and foundation of all other virtues—but let us always bear in mind that this was from the standpoint of a philosophy that was nihilistic, and upon whose shield the denial of life was inscribed. Schopenhauer was right in this: that by means of pity life is denied, and made worthy of denial—pity is the technic of nihilism [die Praxis des Nihilismus]. (AC §7)

In The Anti-Christ, nihilism is linked with what Nietzsche calls the “theologian instinct,” something he is determined in this work to combat: “When theologians, working through the ‘consciences’ of princes (or of peoples —), stretch out their hands for power, there is never any doubt as to the fundamental issue: the will to make an end, the nihilistic will exerts that power” (AC §9).

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And not content with associating nihilism with Christianity and with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche even associated it—just as Jacobi had done, albeit for different reasons—with the philosophy of Kant: A word now against Kant as a moralist. A virtue must be our invention; it must spring out of our personal need and defence. In every other case it is a source of danger. That which does not belong to our life menaces it […]— To think that no one has thought of Kant’s categorical imperative as dangerous to life!… The theological instinct alone took it under protection!—An action prompted by the life-instinct proves that it is a right action by the amount of pleasure that goes with it: and yet that Nihilist, with his bowels of Christian dogmatism, regarded pleasure as an objection. (AC §11)

At the same time, Nietzsche also detected the presence of nihilism not just in Christianity, but also in Buddhism: “In my condemnation of Christianity I surely hope I do no injustice to a related religion with an even larger number of believers: I allude to Buddhism. Both are to be reckoned among the nihilistic religions—they are both décadence religions—but they are separated from each other in a very remarkable way” (AC §20). Aside from Jacobi, nihilism evidently has roots long before Nietzsche; according to Michael Allen Gillespie, the concept can be traced back to Descartes and his notion of the deceiver God, the malin génie in the first of his Méditations métaphysiques (Gillespie 1995, 1–32). And one can find various analogues in the field of literature and visual art. For instance, Jean Paul’s Romantic novel Siebenkäs (1796–1797) features a famous passage known as the speech of the dead Christ from the celestial sphere that there is no God: And Christ spake on, saying, ‘I have traversed the worlds, I have risen to the suns, with the milky ways I have passed athwart the great waste spaces of the sky; there is no God. And I descended to where the very shadow cast by Being dies out and ends, and I gazed out into the gulf beyond, and cried, “Father, where art Thou?” But answer came there none, save the eternal storm which rages on, controlled by none; and towards the west, above the chasm, a gleaming rainbow hung, but there was no sun to give it birth, and so it sank and fell by drops into the gulf. And when I looked up

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to the boundless universe for the Divine eye, behold, it glared at me from out a socket, empty and bottomless. Over the face of chaos brooded Eternity, chewing it for ever, again and yet again. Shriek on, then, discords, shatter the shadows with your shrieking din, for HE IS NOT!’ (Richter 1897, 263)

Then again, we find this mood of spiritual desolation and metaphysical anguish powerfully evoked in the famous painting by Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), The Monk by the Sea (Der Mönch am Meer), first exhibited in 1810. This painting excited the admiration of Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811), who wrote that with this work Friedrich had “opened a new path in the field of his art” (cited in Miller 1974, 208). But Kleist also wrote of this painting that “since in its uniformity and boundlessness it has no foreground but the frame, the viewer feels as though his eyelids had been cut off” and that “were such a painting made with its own chalk and water, the foxes and wolves, I believe, would be set howling by it” (ibid., 208).55 Jean Paul’s speech of the dead Christ and Friedrich’s painting are fully the equals of the well-known passage in The Gay Science where Nietzsche (in the guise of the madman) proclaims the death of God. Nietzsche’s understanding of nihilism is far from simplistic, however. In his later Nachlass, for instance, he distinguishes between three aspects of nihilism as a psychological state. First, it arises “when we have sought a ‘meaning’ in all events that is not there: so the seeker eventually becomes discouraged” (WP §12 = KSA 13, 11[99], 46). Second, we find it “when one has posited a totality, a systematization, indeed any organization in all events, and underneath all events, and a soul that longs to admire and revere has wallowed in the idea of some supreme form of domination and administration […]” (WP §12 = KSA 13, 11[99], 47). And third: “Given these two insights, that becoming [or change] has no goal and that underneath all becoming there is no grand unity in which the individual could immerse himself completely as in an element of supreme value, an escape remains: to pass sentence on this whole world of becoming as a deception and to invent a world beyond it, a true world,” he argues, adding “But as soon as human beings find out how the world is fabricated solely from psychological needs, and how they have absolutely no right to it, the last form of nihilism comes into being: it includes disbelief in any

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metaphysical world and forbids itself any belief in a true world. Having reached this standpoint, one grants the reality of becoming as the only reality, forbids oneself every kind of clandestine access to afterworlds and false divinities—but cannot endure this world though one does not want to deny it” (WP §12 = KSA 13, 11[99], 47–48). Yet Nietzsche’s thought in this respect is eminently dialectical. As he suggests in another Nachlass fragment, the ultimate form of nihilism is belief; yet there might even be something divine about such nihilism: What is a belief? How does it originate? Every belief is a considering-something-true. The most extreme form of nihilism would be the view that every belief, every considering-something-true, is necessarily false cause there simply is no true world. Thus: a perspectival appearance whose origin lies in us (in so far as we continually need a narrower, abbreviated, simplified world). —That it is the measure of strength to what extent we can admit to ourselves, without perishing, the merely apparent character, the necessity of lies. To this extent, nihilism, as the denial of a truthful world, of being, might be a divine way of thinking. (WP §15 = KSA 12, 9[41], 354)

Indeed, when R.J. Hollingdale presented a selection of passages in his famous introduction to Nietzsche’s thought, Hollingdale structured this account around the twin ideas of nihilism and anti-nihilism, and he was right to do so. On this account, the delineation of the nihilist world is “a necessary preliminary to transcending it,” but in the form of a “non-metaphysical transcendence,” which Hollingdale identifies with Nietzsche’s theory of the will-to-power, embodied in the Übermensch and expressed in the Dionysian acceptance of life, which is itself then put to the hardest test through the postulate of the eternal recurrence of all things (Hollingdale 1977, 11). Consequently, as Hollingdale correctly assessed, the continuing tension between the nihilist and the anti-nihilist (or non-­ metaphysically transcendent) aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy serve to prevent it from “hardening into a dogmatic doctrine” and so it “remains to the end an experiment in reorientating oneself within a world of total

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uncertainty” (ibid., 11). So how do these nihilist and anti-nihilist aspects of Nietzsche’s thought relate to each other? The nihilist note is sounded in the transitional work in the development of Nietzsche’s thought, Human, All-Too-Human (1878), in a philosophically technical way with reference to the Kantian concepts of the “phenomenon” and the “thing-in-itself ” (HA I §16). (Here, once again, we find this curious proximity between Kant and F.H.  Jacobi.) The essence of Nietzsche’s argument, however, is that “what we now call the world is the result of a crowd of errors and fancies which gradually developed in the general evolution of organic nature” (HA I §16). For all their limitations science or scholarship can, he goes on to argue, “light up by degrees the stages of the development of that world of conception, and lift us, at least for a time, above the whole spectacle” (HA I §16). This project is immediately placed in a classical Greek context by Nietzsche’s reference to the “unquenchable laughter”—ἄσβεστος (ásbestos, “unceasing”), γέλως (gélōs, “laughter”)—of the gods (cf. Iliad, book 1, l. 599; Odyssey, book 20, l. 346) when he adds: “Perhaps we may then perceive that the thing-in-itself is a meet subject for Homeric laughter: that it seemed so much, everything, indeed, and is really a void—void, that is to say, of meaning” (HA I §16). By the time of Daybreak (1881), this sense that humankind is inescapably caught up in “fundamental errors” (HA II WS §12) is accompanied by the “new fundamental feeling” of “our ultimate transitoriness,” a by-­ product of the post-Darwinian world: In former times people sought to show the feeling of man’s greatness by pointing to his divine descent. This, however, has now become a forbidden path, for the ape stands at its entrance, and likewise other fearsome animals, showing their teeth in a knowing fashion, as if to say, No further this way! Hence people now try the opposite direction: the road along which humanity is proceeding shall stand as an indication of their greatness and their relationship to God. But alas! this, too, is useless! At the far end of this path stands the funeral urn of the last man and gravedigger (with the inscription, Nihil humani a me alienum puto).[56] (D §49)

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In section 109 of The Gay Science, occupying as it does a position which concludes the transition from the early period to the mature phase that finds expression in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche radicalizes his position even further, arguing that “the general character of the world […] is to all eternity chaos; not by the absence of necessity, but in the sense of the absence of order, structure, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever else our aesthetic humanities are called” (GS §109). The conclusion in another aphorism that “life is no argument,” for “error might be among the conditions of life” (GS §121), leads to the climatic passage entitled “The Madman” in which the death of God is announced (GS §125). All this nihilism, this negativity, this lack, nevertheless allows Nietzsche to perform a pivot that defines his philosophical position; so in Zarathustra, in the chapter entitled “Of the Thousand and One Goals,” we read: A thousand goals have there been hitherto, for a thousand peoples have there been. Only the fetter for the thousand necks is still lacking; there is lacking the one goal. As yet humanity hath not a goal. But pray tell me, my brethren, if the goal of humanity be still lacking, is there not also still lacking—humanity itself? (Z I §15)

This pivot is already signalled within The Gay Science itself in a number of ways: by the recognition that “we have left the land and have gone aboard ship!” and that “we have burned our bridges—more, we have burned the land behind us!” (GS §124); by the insight that “the secret of realizing the largest productivity and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously!”, and the associated imperatives: “Build your cities on the slope of Vesuvius! Send your ships into unexplored seas!” (GS §283); by the recognition that “what our cheerfulness signifies” is intimately bound up with the death of God, that is, that “the belief in the Christian God has become unworthy of belief ”: “We philosophers and ‘free spirits’ feel ourselves irradiated as by a new dawn by the report that the ‘old God is dead’; our hearts overflow with gratitude, astonishment, presentiment and expectation. At last the horizon seems open once more, granting even that it is not bright; our ships can at last put out to sea in face of every danger; every hazard is again permitted to the discerner; the sea, our sea, again lies open before us; perhaps never before did such an

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‘open sea’ exist” (GS §343); and by the invocation of the “great healthiness” (GS §382). In Thus Spoke Zarathustra itself, the prophetic figure of Zarathustra sets out Nietzsche’s chief doctrines of the Übermensch, the will-to-power, self-­ overcoming, and the eternal recurrence. And later, in Twilight of the Idols (1888), Nietzsche summarizes his “teaching” in such a way that the relation between its nihilistic and anti-nihilistic aspects becomes unmistakeable: What alone can be our doctrine? […] That nobody is held responsible any longer, that the mode of being may not be traced back to a primary cause, that the world does not form a unity either as a sensorium or as ‘spirit’— that alone is the great liberation. With that idea alone we absolve our becoming of any guilt. The concept of ‘God’ was until now the greatest objection to existence. We deny God, we deny the responsibility that originates from God: and thereby we redeem the world. (TI Four Great Errors §8)

During this period Nietzsche composed a text published in the twelfth volume of the Kritische Studienausgabe as fragment (5[71]) and known among Nietzsche scholars as the Lenzerheide fragment. Nietzsche gave the text the title “European Nihilism” (Der europäische Nihilismus), and it is a text so radically questioning and disturbing that it would probably require a trigger-warning if one tried to teach it on a literature course. It is known as the Lenzerheide fragment because in the spring of 1887 Nietzsche was unsure (or so he wrote to his friend, Heinrich Köselitz, on 20 May 1887) as to where he should spend the summer. In Sils-Maria, the village in the Upper Engadine where he had worked in his Zarathustra? Or in Celerina (Schlarigna), in the Maloja region of Graubünden? Or perhaps the mountain resort of Lenzerheide (“with its dense forest,” as Nietzsche noted) (KSB 8, 79)? In the end, Nietzsche chose Lenzerheide but only stayed for four days, before moving on (and up) to Sils-Maria. In the Lenzerheide text itself, Nietzsche distinguishes between different kinds and phases of nihilism, and there is an important diachronic dimension to Nietzsche’s theory of nihilism, reflected in the three stages of his history of its development: first, the pessimism of the ancient

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Greeks; second, the hypothesis of Christian morality; and third, the phase of the “death of God,” which itself subdivides into four stages: a period of unclarity, followed by a period of clarity, followed by “the period of the three great affects” (i.e., contempt, pity, and destruction), and finally the period of catastrophe. Thus Nietzsche inscribes the whole history of European culture, from the Presocratic Greeks to his own century, the nineteenth, and onwards to our own, within the history of nihilism (van Tongeren 2018, 99). (Was there ever, one wonders, a period that was not nihilistic…?) The question of nihilism in relation to Nietzsche subsequently emerges as a major theme in the four lecture courses given by Heidegger at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau from 1936 to 1940 (and first published in 1961).57 According to the translator of these lectures, David Farrell Krell, for Heidegger nihilism arises from “our persistent failure to think the nothing, to confront in our thought the power of nihil in human existence, which is mortal existence, and in history, which is the history of the oblivion of being and the abandonment by being” (in Heidegger 1991a, vol. 1, xviii). Heidegger touches on the question of nihilism on a number of occasions. In volume 1, Heidegger proposes “the will-to-­ power as art” as a countermovement to nihilism, a force that Nietzsche detects already at work in Platonism—hence his attempt to overturn Platonism on the basis of the fundamental experience of nihilism (ibid., vol. 1, 151). According to Heidegger, Nietzsche’s “fundamental experience” in his “growing insight into the basic development of our history”—which in his view is nihilism (ibid., vol. 1, 156). The following remark by Heidegger about Nietzsche’s style is, in the context of our investigation of the relation between the discourses of philology and theology in his thought, particularly apposite: Nietzsche expresses incessantly and passionately the fundamental experience of his existence as a thinker. To the blind, to those who cannot see and above all do not want to see, his words easily sound overwrought, as though he were raving. And yet when we plumb the depths of his insight and consider how closely the basic historical development of nihilism crowds and oppresses him, then we may be inclined to call his manner of speech almost placid. (Heidegger 1991a, vol. 1, 156)

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One of the “essential formulations” designating “the event of nihilism” is the formulation we considered at the outset of this chapter, “God is dead”—a phrase on which Heidegger commented at greater length in his essay, “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God is dead’” (Heidegger 1977, 53–112). In his Nietzsche lectures, Heidegger explicitly notes that “the phrase ‘God is dead’ is not an atheistic proclamation: it is a formula for the fundamental experience of an event in Occidental history” (Heidegger 1991a, vol. 1, 156). On Heidegger’s account of Nietzsche’s account of Plato, “a new interpretation of Platonism emerges” here, one which “flows from a fundamental experience of the development of nihilism” and sees in Platonism “the primordial and determining grounds of the possibility of nihilism’s upsurgence and of the rise of life-negation” (ibid., vol. 1, 159). Inasmuch as Christianity is nothing other than “Platonism for the people” (BGE Preface), it is also nihilism; hence Nietzsche’s designation of his own philosophy as “inverted Platonism” (KSA 7, 7[156], 199)—and as anti-Christianity. In volume 2, Heidegger defines “the domain” of the thought of eternal recurrence as the historical area where “the overcoming of nihilism” takes place (Heidegger 1991a, vol. 2, 170; cf. 174–175). In volume 3, nihilism is said to belong to the five “fundamental expressions” (Grundworte) of Nietzsche’s metaphysics (the other four being the will-to-power, the eternal recurrence, the Übermensch, and justice [die Gerechtigkeit]) (Heidegger 1991b, vol. 3, 189; cf. 201–208). Here Heidegger’s definition is even more radical, for “nihilism is not merely one history, nor even the fundamental feature of Western history; it is the lawfulness of this historic occurrence, its ‘logic’” (ibid., vol. 3, 205). Finally, in volume 4, our entire history is placed under the rubric of European nihilism (vol. 4, 1–196), and nihilism itself is described as being “determined by the history of being” (vol. 4, 197–250). (As Edith Düsing has shrewdly observed, an emphatic invocation of those values that have been handed down to us and on the meaning of existence to which tribute is to be paid, as ways of warding off the nihilism that was steadily gaining ground, forms part of our unconsciously internalized inheritance from Nietzsche (Düsing 2006a, 299). After all, in “Nietzsche’s Word ‘God is dead’” Heidegger interpreted Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the age as meaning that “value [der Wert] and the valuable

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[das Werthafte] become the positivistic substitute for the metaphysical” (Heidegger 1977, 71), in response to which Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) argued that value philosophy is a reaction to the crisis of nihilism unleashed by Nietzsche in the nineteenth century.58 Then again, in Eclipse of God [1952] Martin Buber [1878–1965] declared that “eclipse of the light of heaven, eclipse of God—such indeed is the character of the historic hour through which the world is passing,” noting that “Nietzsche’s saying that God is dead, that we have slain Him, dramatically sums up the end situation of the era,” and adding that “even more eloquent than this proclamation […] are the attempts to fill the horizon that has been declared empty” (namely, those of Henri Bergson and Heidegger.)59 In 1941 (and thus one year after Heidegger’s final lecture course on Nietzsche) the German-American political philosopher Leo Strauss (1899–1973) gave a lecture to the General Seminar of the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science of the New School for Social Research entitled “German Nihilism.”60 Strauss began by considering the extent to which nihilism could be considered “a specifically German phenomenon” and identifying German nihilism with National Socialism, albeit as “its lowest, most provincial, most unenlightened and most dishonourable form” (Strauss 1999, 357). Underlying German nihilism as a desire for “the destruction of modern civilisation” was, Strauss argued, a fundamentally moral impulse: inasmuch as it involved “a love of morality, a sense of responsibility for endangered morality,” Strauss pointed to the following examples of this “conviction” or “passion”: Glaucon’s “passionate protest against the city of pigs” in his brother’s (i.e., Plato’s) Republic (see 372d); Rousseau’s “passionate protest against the easy-going and somewhat rotten civilisation of the century of taste”; and Nietzsche’s “passionate protest against the easy-going and somewhat rotten civilisation of the century of industry” (ibid., 359). Above all, Strauss identified first Schopenhauer and then—more prominently—Nietzsche as thinkers exemplifying the overlap between nihilism and atheism. According to Strauss, “there is no other philosopher whose influence on postwar German thought is comparable to that of Nietzsche, of the atheist Nietzsche,” because of his assertion that “the atheist assumption is not only reconcilable with, but indispensable for, a radical anti-democratic, anti-socialist, and anti-pacifist policy” (Strauss 1999, 362 and 361). For

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further discussion, Strauss referred his audience to the work of his colleague at the New School for Social Research, Carl Mayer (1902–1974) (Mayer 1942). In defending “menaced morality, i.e., non-mercenary morality,” the German philosophers were, Strauss contended, “tempted to overstress the dignity of military virtue” and, in the cases of Fichte, Hegel, and Nietzsche, they “succumbed to that temptation” (Strauss 1999, 371). Nevertheless, Strauss insisted that the blame should above all be placed fairly and squarely at Nietzsche’s door: “Of all German philosophers, and indeed of all philosophers, none exercised a greater influence on post-war [i.e., post First World War] Germany, none was more responsible for the emergence of German nihilism, than was Nietzsche” (ibid., 372). Avoiding any simplistic equation of Nietzschean philosophy and National Socialism, Strauss nevertheless held that Nietzsche could not be entirely exculpated, and he declared the relation of Nietzsche to the German Nazi revolution was “comparable” to the relation of Rousseau to the French Revolution, that is to say: “by interpreting Nietzsche in the light of the German revolution, one is very unjust to Nietzsche, but one is not absolutely unjust” (ibid., 372).61 In support of this position, Strauss cited two sections from Beyond Good and Evil (BGE §252 and §253), but he might equally have cited passages from, say, The Anti-Christ, whose vitriolic discourse might itself be held not directly, but indirectly, responsible for National Socialism’s record in thinking the unthinkable, saying the unsayable, and enacting acts of devastating destruction. In The Courage To Be (1952), the German-American theologian Paul Tillich (1886–1965) identified what he called the God of “theological theism” as being at the root of the contemporary crisis of faith. On Tillich’s account, this God is “supposed to be beyond the ontological elements and categories which constitute reality,” and in this sense He is “a being, not being-itself ”—worse, this God as a subject makes us all into objects which are “nothing more than object,” thus “depriv[ing] us of [our] subjectivity because he is all-powerful and all-knowing” (Tillich 2000, 184–185). Consequently, this God appears as the “invincible tyrant, the being in contrast with whom all other beings are without freedom and subjectivity” (ibid., 185). It is this God, Tillich argued, who becomes “the model against which Existentialism revolted” and whom

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Nietzsche said “had to be killed because nobody can tolerate being made into a mere object of absolute knowledge and absolute control”—and this is “the deepest root of atheism”: “It is an atheism which is justified as the reaction against theological theism and its disturbing implications. It is also the deepest root of the Existentialist despair and the widespread anxiety of meaninglessness in our period” (ibid., 185). The answer to theological theism lay, Tillich believed, in the “courage to be”—both the courage to be “as a part” and the courage to be “as oneself ”—and, using a strikingly quasi-Gnostic note, to “be the ‘God above God’” (ibid., 186). “The God above God is the object of all mystical longing,” he observed, “but mysticism also must be transcended in order to reach him,” adding: “The God above the God of theism is not the devaluation of the meanings which doubt has thrown into the abyss of meaninglessness; he is their potential restitution” (ibid., 185): The courage to be which is rooted in the experience of the God above the God of theism unites and transcends the courage to be as a part and the courage to be as oneself. It avoids both the loss of oneself by participation and the loss of one’s world by individualization. The acceptance of the God above God of theism makes us a part of that which is not also a part but is the ground of the whole. (Tillich 2000, 187)

For Tillich, then, atheism is reflected in the attendant meaninglessness of the historical moment of the epoch in which we live. Is its transcendence equally an historical moment? While the discussion in this chapter has tried to show how Nietzsche’s approach to religion exists itself in an historical context, Nietzsche for his own part was well aware of attempts to locate Jesus himself as an historical figure, as we shall see in the following chapter.

Notes 1. On the vexed question of the “Death of God,” see Wilson 1999; Young 2003; Osborn 2017; and Düsing 2021a. 2. Heidegger 1977, 111–112; and for further discussion, see Luft 1984.

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3. See Taureck 1991, 482; cited in Thiede 2001, 486–487. 4. See Düsing 2006b, 495; and Braun 2010, 24. 5. See Vergely 2019, 196. On this reading, Nietzsche’s message is about the failure of atheism to accomplish a deed equivalent to “drinking up the sea.” 6. See Altizer 1967; von der Luft 1984; Roberts 1989; Anderson 1996; and Figl 2000. For further discussion of the differences between Pascal’s, Hegel’s, and Nietzsche’s view of the death of God, see Löwith 1978, 42–44. 7. Pascal, Pensées, §695 and §441, in Pascal 1959, 647 and 536. For further discussion in relation to Hegel, see Düsing 2006b, 495–505. 8. For discussion of what is at stake in Nicolas of Cusa’s embrace of geocentrism and simultaneous defence of theocentrism (Düsing 2006a, 301), see Gerhardt 1988. Among the standard works on the Copernican turn, see Kuhn 1957; Blumenberg 1965; and Blumenberg 1975. 9. Cited in Manning 1871, 192–203 (here: 199). For further discussion, see Giurlanda 1987. For the history of the doctrine of the analogia entis, see Terán-Dutari 1970; and Betz 2014: 30–43. 10. For further discussion of the analogia entis, see Johnson 2010; White 2011; Przywara 2014; and Gonzales 2018. 11. See Burnett 2013, xiii. 12. For further discussion, see Wucherer-Huldenfeld 2014: 126–156. 13. See Betz 2014, 93: n. 258. As Barth writes, “in the Bible […] it is not a being common to God and man which finally and properly establishes and upholds the fellowship between them, but God’s grace” (Barth 1957, 243). For further discussion, see Johnson 2010. 14. See Przywara 2014 and Przywara 1929. 15. Przywara, “Gotteserfahrung und Gottesbeweis,” in Przywara 1962, 7. 16. Przywara 1929, vol. 2, 553; cited in Betz 2014, 18. 17. Przywara 1929, vol. 1, 57; cited in Betz 2014, 19: note 59. 18. Przywara 1929, vol. 2, 555–556; cited in Betz 2019, 95. 19. Przywara 1929, vol. 2, 960–961; translated in Betz 2014, 52: note 140. 20. Przywara 1967, 51; cited in Betz 2014, 53: note 140. 21. Przywara 1929, vol. 2, 961; cited in Betz 2014, 53. Cf. “This is the great thought of Augustine. […] Deus interior et exterior, ‘God in all and above all,’ God more inward to us than we are to ourselves, and yet surpassing and surmounting us as the one who is infinite and incomprehensible” (Przywara 1929, vol. 2, 543); cf. Augustine, Confessions, III, 6 (11). For further discussion, see Przywara’s essay of 1923, “Gott in uns oder über

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uns? (Immanenz und Transcendenz im heutigen Geistesleben),” in Przywara 1929, vol. 2, 543–578. 22. For an anthology exploring this body of work in twentieth-century French Catholicism, see Lemaire 2021. 23. For further discussion, see Martin 2007; Walters 2010; and Bullivant and Ruse 2013. 24. See Whitmarsh 2016, 127–137. 25. Mill 1924, 36 (cited in Walters 2010, 12). 26. Wiesel 1982, 61–62 (cited in Walters 2010, 13). 27. See Mauthner 2011. For more historical surveys of atheism, see Bury 1913; Thrower 1979; Gaskin 1988; Joshi 2000; Thrower 2000; Hecht 2003; and Düsing 2021b, 103–135. 28. Mauthner, Der Atheismus und seine Geschichte im Abendlande, vol. 4, Die grosse Revolution (12. bis 14. Abschnitt): Die letzten hundert Jahre, Reaktion, Materialismus, gottlose Mystik, in Mauthner 2011, vol. 4, 425. 29. Ibid., in Mauthner 2011, vol. 4, 426. 30. Ibid., in Mauthner 2011, vol. 4, 345–367. 31. See Onfray 2002. 32. See Diogenes Laërtius 1915, 93. 33. See Plutarch 1936, 57. 34. See Eusebius 1903, 65. 35. See Knight 1933; Roos 2000; Ansell-Pearson 2014; and, most recently, Acharya and Johnson 2020. 36. See Epicurus 1994, vi. 37. See, for instance, the identification of Epicurus with hedonism by Justin Martyr in his First Apology (7.3, 12.5, and 15.3). 38. De rerum natura, book 5, ll. 146–155 (Lucretius 2001, 141; cf. Long and Sedley 1985, 144–149). 39. See the documents collected in 1916 and reprinted as Scholz 2004. 40. See Onfray 2007a, 29; cf. Onfray 2007b, 43–98. 41. See Voltaire’s letters of 1 July 1759 to Mme d’Épinay, of 19 December 1766 to Damilaville, and of 7 May 1761 to d’Alembert (cited in Vergely 2018, 103). 42. As Jon Stewart has recently shown, in the development of philosophy in the period of the nineteenth-century religion played an “absolutely central and constitutive role,” particularly with reference to the twin Hegelian notions of “alienation” (Entäußerung or Entfremdung) and “recognition” (Anerkennung) (see Stewart 2021, 10).

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43. For further discussion, see Mahnke 1937; Honecker 1939; Harries 1975; and Small 1983. 44. “Three masters, seemingly mutually exclusive, dominate the school of suspicion: Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud” (Ricœur 1970, 32). 45. For further discussion, see “Excursus: Freud’s Interest in the Occult,” in Bishop 2000, 102–129; and Onfray 2010, 349–386. 46. Cf. Baudrillard’s remark in Simulacra and Simulation: “Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory—the precession of simulacra—that engenders the territory […]. It is the real, not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself” (Baudrillard 1994, 1). 47. See Wolf 2006. For further discussion, see Cotter et al. 2017. 48. For the intellectual background to the “New Atheism” of unbelief on the American scene, see Jacoby 2004. 49. Vergely 2019, 182; see Comte-Sponville 2006; Onfray 2007a; and Ferry 2006. 50. See Darwin 1871, vol. 1, 60. 51. See Habermas and Ratzinger 2005 and 2006. 52. Jacobi 1968: vol. 3, 44; cited in Gillespie 1995: 65. 53. Now whether Jacobi adopted the term from Jenisch or another source is open to discussion (see Müller-Lauter 1975, 14). But the term was fully worked out in the sense used above by Jacobi. 54. For further discussion of Nietzsche’s nihilism in intellectual-historical context, see Gillespie 1995; Düsing 2006b; Düsing 2007; Brock 2015; van Tongeren 2018; and Düsing 2021a, 389–417. 55. For further discussion, see Meyertholen 2013. 56. Cf. “I am human, I consider nothing alien to me,” in Terence, Heauton Timorumenos (The Self-Tormentor), Act 1, scene 1, line 25. 57. For further discussion, see Conway 1992; Hemming et  al. 2011; and Pippin 2013. 58. See Düsing 2006a, 299; citing Schmitt 2011, 31 and 37–39. For further discussion, see Zeitlin 2021 59. See Buber 2016, 18 and 15. 60. Strauss 1999; for further discussion, see Altman 2007. 61. For further discussion, see Altman 2011.

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References Acharya, Vinod, and Ryan J. Johnson, eds. 2020. Nietzsche and Epicurus: Nature, Health and Ethics. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Aldridge, A.  Owen. 1975. Voltaire and the Century of Light. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Altizer, Thomas J.J., ed. 1967. Towards a New Christianity: Readings in the Death of God Theology. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Altman, William H.F. 2007. Leo Strauss on ‘German Nihilism’: Learning the Art of Writing. Journal of the History of Ideas 68 (4): 587–612. ———. 2011. The German Stranger: Leo Strauss and National Socialism. Lanham, ML: Lexington Books. Anderson, Deland S. 1996. Hegel’s Speculative Good Friday: The Death of God in Philosophical Perspective. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press. Ansell-Pearson, Keith. 2014. Heroic-idyllic Philosophizing: Nietzsche and the Epicurean tradition. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 74: 237–263. Barnes, Jonathan, ed. 1987. Early Greek Philosophy. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Barth, Karl. 1932. Kirchliche Dogmatik, vol. I/1, Die Lehre vom Wort Gottes: Prolegomena zur christlichen Dogmatik. Zurich: Theologischer Verlag. ———. 1957 Church Dogmatics, vol. 2, The Doctrine of God, pt. 1 [1940], edited by G.W.  Bromiley and T.F.  Torrance, translated by T.H.L.  Parker, W.B. Johnston, Harold Knight, and J.L.M. Haire. London and New York: T. &. T Clark. Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Benedict XVI. 2005. “Encyclical Letter Deus Caritas Est of the Supreme Pontiff Benedict XVI to the Bishops, Priests and Deacons, Men and Women Religious, and all the Lay Faithful on Christian Love.” Accessed 2 February 2022. https://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-­xvi/en/encyclicals/documents/ hf_ben-­xvi_enc_20051225_deus-­caritas-­est.html. Betz, John R. 2019. The Analogia entis as a Standard of Catholic Engagement: Erich Przywara’s Critique of Phenomenology and Dialectical Theology. Modern Theology 3 (1) (January): 81–102. Betz, John R. 2014. Translator’s Introduction. In Erich Przywara, Analogia Entis: Metaphysics—Original Structure and Universal Rhythm, translated by John R. Betz and David Bentley Hart. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. 1–115. Bishop, Paul. 2000. Synchronicity and Intellectual Intuition: Kant, Swedenborg, and Jung. Lewiston, NY: Mellen.

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Bloom, Allan. 1987. The Closing of the American Mind. New  York: Simon & Schuster. Blumenberg, Hans. 1965. Die kopernikanische Wende. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 1975. Die Genesis der kopernikanischen Welt. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Bociurkiw, Bohdan R., and John W.  Strong with Jean K.  Laux, eds. 1975. Religion and Atheism in the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press. Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel, and Sonu Shamdasani. 2012. The Freud Files: An Inquiry into the History of Psychoanalysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bowman, Curtis, trans. 2016. J.G. Fichte and the Atheism Dispute (1798–1800). London and New York: Routledge. Bradley, Arthur. 2006. Derrida’s God: A Genealogy of the Theological Turn. Paragraph 29 (3): 21–42. Braun, Hermann. 2010. Nietzsche im theologischen Diskurs. Theologische Rundschau 75, no. 1 (March): 1–44. Brock, Eike. 2015. Nietzsche und der Nihilismus. Berlin, Munich, and Boston: de Gruyter. Buber, Martin. 2016. Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation Between Religion and Philosophy [1952]. Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Bullivant, Stephen, and Michael Ruse, eds. 2013. The Oxford Handbook of Atheism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Burnett, Richard E. 2013. Introduction. In The Westminster Handbook to Karl Barth, ed. Richard E.  Burnett, ix–xv. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Bury, J.B. 1913. A History of a Freedom of Thought. New York: Henry Holt. Comte-Sponville, André. 2006. L’Esprit de l’athéisme: Introduction à une spiritualité sans Dieu. Paris: Albin Michel. Conway, Daniel W. 1992. Heidegger, Nietzsche, and the Origins of Nihilism. Journal of Nietzsche Studies 3: 11–43. Cotter, Christopher R., Philip Andrew Quadrio, and Jonathan Tuckett, eds. 2017. New Atheism: Critical Perspectives and Contemporary Debates. [Sophia Studies in Cross-Cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol. 21]. Cham: Springer. Darwin, Charles. 1871. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. Vol. 2 vols. London: John Murray.

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———. 1973. Das Wesen des Christentums [Gesammelte Werke, vol. 5], edited by Werner Schuffenhauer. Berlin [DDR]: Akademie-Verlag. Figl, Johann. 2000. “‘Tod Gottes’ und die Möglichkeit »neuer Götter«: Biographische und werkgeschichtliche Kontexte bei Nietzsche,” Nietzsche-­ Studien 29: 82–101. Freud, Sigmund. 1939. Moses and Monotheism. Translated Katherine Jones. London: Hogarth Press; Institute of Psycho-Analysis. ———. 1961. The Letters of Sigmund Freud, 1873–1939, edited by Ernest L. Freud, translated by Tania and James Stern. London: Hogarth Press. ———. 1990. The Origins of Religion [Penguin Freud Library, vol. 13], edited by Albert Dickson, translated by James Strachey. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. 1991. Civilization, Society and Religion [Penguin Freud Library, vol. 12], edited by Albert Dickson, translated by James Strachey. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. 1993. Historical and Expository Works on Psychoanalysis [Penguin Freud Library, vol. 15], edited by Albert Dickson, translated by James Strachey. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gaál, Emery de. 2010. The Theology of Pope Benedict XVI: The Christocentric Shift. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gaskin, J.C.A. 1988. Varieties of Unbelief from Epicurus to Sartre. New  York: Prentice-Hall. Gerhardt, Volker. 1988. Die Kopernikanische Wende bei Kant und Nietzsche. In Kant und Nietzsche—Vorspiel einer künftigen Weltauslegung? ed. Jörg Albertz, 157–182. Wiesbaden: Akademie Verlag. Gillespie, Michael Allen. 1995. Nihilism Before Nietzsche. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Giurlanda, Paul. 1987. Faith and Reason: A Critical Inquiry. Lanham, MD, and London: University of America. Glaser, Gabrielle. 1991. Pope Delivers Angry Sermon on Abortion to Poles. The New York Times, 4 June 1991. Glucksmann, André. 1980. The Master Thinkers [1977]. Translated by Brian Pierce. New York: Harper & Row. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. 1848. The Autobiography of Goethe: Truth and Poetry, from my own Life. Translated by John Oxenford. London: Bohn. Gonzales, Philip John, and Paul. 2018. Reimagining the Analogia Entis: The Future of Erich Przywara’s Christian Vision. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Habermas, Jürgen, and Joseph Ratzinger. 2005. Dialektik der Säkularisierung: Über Vernunft und Religion. Freiburg im Breisgau, Basel, Vienna: Herder.

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———. 2006. The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion [2005]. Translated by Brian McNeil. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 2006. Religion in the Public Sphere. European Journal of Philosophy 14, no. 1 (April): 1–25. ———. 2008. Between Naturalism and Religion. Translated by C.  Cronin. Cambridge: Polity Press. Harries, Karsten. 1975. The Infinite Sphere: Comments on the History of a Metaphor. Journal of the History of Philosophy 13, no. 1 (January): 5–15. Harris, Sam. 2005. The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. London: The Free Press. Hecht, Jennifer Michael. 2003. Doubt: A History. San Francisco: Harper. Hegel, G.W.F. 1956. The Philosophy of History, translated by John Sibree [1861; as Lectures on the Philosophy of World History]. Mineola, NY: Dover. ———. 1976. Philosophy of Right., translated by T.M. Knox [1952]. London, Oxford, and New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 1984. Three Essays, 1793–1795, edited and translated by Peter Fuss and John Dobbins. Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press. ———. 1986. Werke, 20 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 2006. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: One-Volume Edition: The Lectures of 1827, edited by Peter C.  Hodgson, translated by R.F.  Brown, P.C. Hodgson, and J.M. Stewart with R.S. Harris. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1977. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Translated by William Lovitt. New York and London: Garland. ———. 1985. The Self-Assertion of the German University: Address, Delivered on the Solemn Assumption of the Rectorate of the University Freiburg; The Rectorate 1933/34: Facts and Thoughts,” trans. Karsten Harries, Review of Metaphysics 38, vol. 3 (March): 467–502. ———. 1991a. Nietzsche: Volume I: The Will to Power as Art; Volume II: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, translated by David Farrell Krell. San Francisco: HarperCollins. ———. 1991b. Nietzsche: Volume III: The Will to Power as Knowledge of Metaphysics. Volume IV: Nihilism, translated by David Farrell Krell. San Francisco: HarperCollins. Hemming, Laurence Paul, Kostas Amiridis, and Bogdan Costea, eds. 2011. The Movement of Nihilism: Heidegger’s Thinking After Nietzsche. London and New York: Continuum. Henry, Michel. 1996. C’est moi la Vérité: Pour une philosophie du christianisme. Paris: Seuil.

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Himmelfarb, Gertrude. 1959. Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution. London: Chatto & Windus. Hitchens, Christopher. 2007. God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. London: Atlantic Books. Hollingdale, R.J., and ed. and trans. 1977. A Nietzsche Reader. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Honecker, Martin. 1939. Kugel und Kreis als philosophische Symbole: Zur Geschichte einer Sentenz, zugleich eine Buchbesprechung. Philosophisches Jahrbuch 52: 49–58. Hyland, Paul, Olga Gomez, and Francesca Greensides, eds. 2003. The Enlightenment: A Sourcebook and Reader. London and New York: Routledge. Jacobi, F.H. 1968. Werke, 3 vols [1812–1815]. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Jacoby, Susan. 2004. Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism. New York: Henry Holt. Johnson, Keith L. 2010. Karl Barth and the “Analogia Entis.” London and New York: T. & T. Clark. Joshi, S.T. 2000. Atheism: A Reader. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. Jung, C.G. 1966. The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature [Collected Works of C.G.  Jung, vol. 15], translated by R.F.C.  Hull. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ———. 1969. Psychology and Religion: West and East [Collected Works of C.G.  Jung, vol. 11], translated by R.F.C.  Hull. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ———. 1971. Psychological Types [Collected Works of C.G. Jung, vol. 6], translated by H.G.  Baynes, revised by R.F.C.  Hull. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1989. In Nietzsche’s “Zarathustra”: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934–1939, ed. James L. Jarret, 2 vols. London: Routledge. Kant, Immanuel. 1997. Critique of Pure Reason, edited and translated by Paul Guyer and Allan W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Knight, A.H.J. 1933. “Nietzsche and Epicurean Philosophy.” Philosophy 8, no. 32 (October): 431–445. Kuhn, T.S. 1957. The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lemaire, Jean-Pierre, ed. 2021. Le Sommet de la route et l’ombre de la croix: Six poètes chrétiens du XXe siècle. Paris: Gallimard.

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Long, A.A., and D.N.  Sedley. 1985. The Hellenistic Philosophers. Vol. 1, Translations of the Principal Sources. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Löwith, Karl. 1978. Nietzsches Philosophie der ewigen Wiederkehr des Gleichen. Hamburg: Meiner. Lucretius. 2001. On the Nature of Things. Translated by Martin Ferguson Smith. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Luft, Eric von der. 1984. Sources of Nietzsche’s ‘God is dead!’ and its Meaning for Heidegger. Journal of the History of Ideas 45, no. 2 (April–June): 263–276. Mahnke, Dietrich. 1937. Unendliche Sphäre und Allmittelpunkt: Beiträge zur Genealogie der mathematischen Mystik. Halle/Saale: Niemeyer. Manning, Henry Edward. 1871. Petri Privilegium: Three Pastoral Letters to the Clergy of the Diocese. London: Longmans, Green. Martin, Michael, ed. 2007. The Cambridge Companion to Atheism. New York: Cambridge University Press. Marx, Karl. 1983. The Portable Karl Marx, edited by Eugene Kamenka. New York: Viking Penguin. Mauthner, Fritz. 2011. In Der Atheismus und seine Geschichte im Abendlande, ed. Ludger Lütkehaus, vol. 4 vols. Aschaffenburg: Alibri. Mayer, Carl. 1942. On the Intellectual Origin of National Socialism. Social Research 9, vol. 2 (May): 225–247. McGuire, William, and R.F.C. Hull, eds. 1977. C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Meslier, Jean. 2007. Mémoire contre la religion,  ed. by Jean-Pierre Jackson. Paris: Coda. Meyertholen, Andrea. 2013. Apocalypse Now: On Heinrich von Kleist, Caspar David Friedrich, and the Emergence of Abstract Art. The German Quarterly 86, no. 4 (Fall): 404–420. Mill, John Stuart. 1924. Autobiography. London: Oxford University Press. Miller, Philip B. 1974. Anxiety and Abstraction: Kleist and Brentano on Caspar David Friedrich. Art Journal 33, no. 3 (Spring): 205–210. Müller-Lauter, Wolfgang. 1975. Nihilismus als Konsequenz des Idealismus: F.H.  Jacobis Kritik der Transzendentalphilosophie und ihre philosophiegeschichtlichen Folgen. In Denken im Schatten des Nihilismus, ed. Alexander Schwann, 113–163. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Obbink, Dirk. 1989. The Atheism of Epicurus. Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 30: 187–223. Onfray, Michel. 2002. L’Invention du plaisir: Fragment cyrénaïques. Paris: Livre de poche.

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———. 2007a. Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Translated by Jeremy Leggatt. New York: Arcade. ———. 2007b. Les Ultras des Lumières [Contre-histoire de la philosophie, vol. 4]. Paris: Grasset. ———. 2009. Les radicalités existentielles [Contre-histoire de la philosophie, vol. 6]. Paris: Grasset. ———. 2010. Le Crépuscule d’une idole: L’affabulation freudienne. Paris: Grasset. ———. 2013. Les consciences réfractaires [Contre-histoire de la philosophie, vol. 9]. Paris: Grasset. ———. 2017. Décadence: Vie et mort du judéo-christianisme. [Brève encyclopédie du monde, vol. 2]. Paris: Flammarion. Osborn, Ronald E. 2017. Humanism and the Death of God: Searching for the Good After Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche. New York: Oxford University Press. Pascal, Blaise. 1959. Pensées et Opuscules, edited by Léon Brunschvicg. Paris: Hachette. Pearson, Roger. 2005. Voltaire Almighty: A Life in Pursuit of Freedom. London: Bloomsbury. Pippin, Robert B. 2013. Heidegger on Nietzsche on Nihilism. In Political Philosophy Cross-Examined: Recovering Political Philosophy, ed. Thomas L. Pangle and J. Harvey Lomax, 173–187. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Plutarch. 1936. Moralia, vol. 5, Isis and Osiris; The E at Delphi; The Oracles at Delphi No Longer Given in Verse; The Obsolescence of Oracles, translated by Frank Cole Babbitt. Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press. Przywara, Erich. 1929. Ringen der Gegenwart: Gesammelte Aufsätze, 2 vols. Augsburg: Filser. ———. 1962. Gotteserfahrung und Gottesbeweis. In Schriften, vol. 2, Religions-­ philosophische Schriften: Weg zu Gott, 3–13. Einsiedeln: Johannes. ———. 1967. Katholische Krise, ed. Bernhard Gerzt. Düsseldorf: Patmos. ———. 2014. Analogia Entis: Metaphysics—Origina Structure and Universal Rhythm [1962]. Translated by John R. Betz and David Bentley Hart. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Richter, Jean Paul, and Friedrich. 1897. Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces: or, the Wedded Life, Death, and Marriage of Firmian Stanislaus Siebenkaes. Translated by Alexander Ewing. London: Bell. Ricœur, Paul. 1970. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Translated by Denis Savage. New Haven and. London: Yale University Press. Roberts, Alexander, James Donaldson, and Arthur Cleveland Coxe, eds. 1885. The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 2, Fathers of the Second Century: Hermas, Tatian,

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Theophilus, Athenagoras, and Clement of Alexandria. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Company. Roberts, R.H. 1989. “Nietzsche and the Cultural Resonance of the ‘Death of God.’” History of European Ideas 11: 1025–1035. Roos, Richard. 2000. Nietzsche et Épicure: l’idylle héroique. In Lectures de Nietzsche, ed. Jean-François Balaudé and Patrick Wotling, 283–350. Paris: Librairie Générale Française. Schelling, F.W.J. 1958–1959. Werke. Vol. 6 vols. Munich: Beck. Schmitt, Carl. 2011. Die Tyrannei der Werte. 3rd ed. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Scholz, Heinrich, ed. 2004. Die Hauptschriften zum Pantheismusstreit zwischen Jacobi und Mendelssohn [1916]. Waltrop: Spenner. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. 1977. In Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H.  Reiman and Sharon B. Powers. New York and London: Norton. Small, Robin. 1983. Nietzsche and a Platonist Tradition of the Cosmos: Center Everywhere and Circumference Nowhere. Journal of the History of Ideas 44 (1): 89–104. Stepelevich, Lawrence S. 1978. Max Stirner and Ludwig Feuerbach. Journal of the History of Ideas 39 (3): 451–463. Stewart, Jon. 2021. Hegel’s Century: Alienation and Recognition in a Time of Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strauss, Leo. 1999. German Nihilism. Interpretation 26 (3): 353–378. Taureck, Bernhard H.F. 1991. Nietzsches Alternativen zum Nihilismus. Hamburg: Junius. Terán-Dutari, Julio. 1970. Die Geschichte des Terminus “analogia entis” und das Werk Erich Przywaras. Philosophisches Jahrbuch im Auftrag der Görres-­ Gesellschaft 77: 163–179. Thiede, Werner. 2001. “Wer aber kennt meinen Gott?” Friedrich Nietzsches “Theologie” als Geheimnis seiner Philosophie. Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 98 (4): 464–500. Thrower, James. 1979. The Alternative Tradition: A Study of Unbelief in the Ancient World. The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter. ———. 2000. Western Atheism: A Short History. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. Tillich, Paul. 2000. The Courage To Be: Second Edition. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Tongeren, Paul van. 2018. Friedrich Nietzsche and European Nihilism. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Vergely, Bertrand. 2018. Obscures lumières: La révolution interdite. Paris: Le Cerf. ———. 2019. Notre vie a un sens! Paris: Albin Michel.

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Walters, Kerry. 2010. Atheism: A Guide for the Perplexed. New York and London: Continuum. White, Thomas Joseph, ed. 2011. The Analogy of Being: Invention of the Antichrist or the Wisdom of God? Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge: Eerdmans. Whitmarsh, Tim. 2016. Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World. London: Faber and Faber. Wiesel, Elie. 1982. Night. Translated by Stella Rodway. New York: Bantam. Wilson, A.N. 1999. God’s Funeral. London: John Murray. Wolf, Gary. 2006. The Church of the Nonbelievers. Wired Magazine. Accessed 4 February 2022. https://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/atheism.html. Wucherer-Huldenfeld, Augustinus Karl. 2014. Philosophische Theologie im Umbruch, vol. 2, Wider den ungöttlichen Gott, part 1, Die Infragestellung Philosophischer Theologie durch Fideismus und Atheismus. Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: Böhlau. Young, Julian. 2003. The Death of God and the Meaning of Life. London and New York: Routledge. Zeitlin, Samuel Garrett. 2021. Indirection and the Rhetoric of Tyranny: Carl Schmitt’s The Tyranny of Values 1960–1967. Modern Intellectual History 18: 427–450.

3 Nietzsche and the Quest for the Historical Jesus

One question which is rarely posed by the opponents of Christianity is this: did Jesus actually exist? In other words, is Jesus an actual, historical figure (Theißen and Merz 1998)? In 1906, the Alsatian theologian and philosopher, Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965), published his major work of Biblical historical criticism, The Quest for the Historical Jesus (1906), which offered a survey of the question of the “historical Jesus” that began in the late eighteenth century and, in its second edition of 1913, included an attempt to refute the so-called mythicist position, held by those who maintain that no historical Jesus ever existed.1 According to some critics, the quest for the historical Jesus falls into three periods: the old quest (1778–1909), the interim period (1909–1953), and the new quest (1953 onwards); according to Gerd Theißen and Annette Merz, it can be divided into five phases.2 The first phase initiates the critical impulse towards research into the question of the historicity of Jesus, reflected in the work of H.S. Reimarus and D.F. Strauß, the latter a particularly significant figure for Nietzsche (see Chap. 4). A second phase reflects the optimism of the liberal quest of the historical Jesus undertaken by H.J. Holtzmann (who developed the “two-source” theory proposed by G. Wilke and C.H. Weisse) and F.C. Baur (who demonstrated the priority of the so-called Synoptic Gospels over the Gospel of John), to which the work of Karl August von Hase (1800–1890) and Willibald Beyschlag (1823–1900) also belongs. In a third phase that © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Bishop, Discourses of Philology and Theology in Nietzsche, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42272-0_3

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extends from Schweitzer’s Quest book—via W. Wrede (who questioned the “messianic secret” theory as a way of explaining the non-messianic Jesus figure of the Gospel of Mark) and K.L. Schmidt (1891–1956) (who demonstrated the fragmentary character of the gospels)—to Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) as the leading exponent of “dialectical theology” (an approach that led the theological field between 1919 and 1968), the quest effectively collapsed. Then a fourth phase, dubbed the “new quest” and inaugurated by a lecture given in Marburg in 1953 by Ernst Käsemann (1906–1998) entitled “The Problem of the Historical Jesus” begins, in which Bultmann’s notion of the kerygma (or the central proclamation of Christ) serves as the starting point for a quest to identify the “authentic” Jesus tradition undertaken by, among others, Günther Bornkamm (1905–1990), Ernst Fuchs (1903–1983), Gerhard Ebeling (1912–2001), and Herbert Braun (1903–1991). And in a fifth and final phase dubbed the “third quest,” sociological interests replace theological ones, accompanied by an openness to questions about the place of Jesus in Judaism, an interest in non-canonical (including so-called Gnostic) sources, and a variety of trends, some of which offer a “non-­eschatological” picture of Jesus as a “Jewish Cynic,” that is, a proponent of a paradoxical existential wisdom shaped by Hellenistic influences, notably ancient Greek Cynicism (Burton L.  Mack, John Dominic Crossan),3 others of which return Jesus to the framework of his eschatology and hence to the heart of first-century Judaism (E.P. Sanders). From this brief overview, it is easy to appreciate the extraordinarily diverse range of Christ figures that emerge (i.e., are discovered—or invented) during this quest. Indeed, the sheer multiplicity of pictures of Jesus is, as Theißen and Merz point out, “reason to suspect that they are in reality self-portraits of their authors,” so that whereas Schweitzer’s study of the Quest ends up pondering a figure who “comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lake-side, He came to those men who knew Him not” (Schweitzer 1910, 401), the “non-eschatological” Jesus of Mack and Crossan seems to have, as Theißen and Merz astutely observe, “more Californian than Galilean local colouring” (Theißen and Merz 1998, 13 and 11)! However, they also invite us to make the following experiment. Take all the biographical accounts that have ever been written and anonymize them by deleting all proper names (of persons and places); after

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having done so, surely all the accounts of Jesus would clearly stand out. (The instruction to “love your enemies,” the figures of the “twelve disciples,” and merely a mention of the crucifixion would suffice for a clear identification.) Yet this in itself does not, of course, offer evidence for his historicity; it could be that Jesus is an “archetypal” figure (in a Jungian sense) or what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari called a personnage conceptuel. Schweitzer’s own study of this search for an historical understanding of the figure of Jesus (published in 1906 but surveying many of the philological and theological debates of the late nineteenth century) provides an invaluable historical context in which to place Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity from his Untimely Observations to The Anti-Christ, and it will largely structure our discussion in this chapter and the next. To begin with, however, we might start by noting that, from the earliest days of Christianity, there had been a vigorous, if quickly suppressed, tradition of criticizing the core doctrines of Christianity—including the belief in the historical Jesus. A (necessarily) short survey of this (in fact, massive) tradition of critique can help contextualize Nietzsche’s own rejection of Christian theology in his Untimely Observations as well as in The Anti-Christ.

 ncient Examples of Critique A of the “Historical” Jesus Celsus In the second century, the Greek philosopher Celsus wrote a critique of Christianity entitled The True Doctrine, a work that is usually classed as the earliest known comprehensive critique of Christianity. The actual text of this work, however, has not survived; all that we know is gleaned from the extensive refutation written by Origen of Alexandria in Contra Celsum, penned around half a century later and clearly directed, as its title suggests, “against Celsus.”

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In this work, Celsus assumes the identity of a Jew, speaking to Jesus and criticizing him. Celsus denies the virginal conception of Christ, claiming that “the mother of Jesus became pregnant with him through a [Roman] soldier, whose name was Panthera” (Taylor 2006, 64)4; he denies the baptism of Christ, asking him, “When you were washed by John, you say that the spectre of a bird flew to you from the air, but what witness worthy of belief saw this spectre?”; and he denies the miracles or rather he describes them as “common with the work of enchanters” (ibid., 64–65). And he denies the resurrection, asking: “Is it to be believed that Christ, when he was alive, openly announced to all men what he was; but when it became requisite that he should procure a strong belief in his resurrection from the dead, he should only show himself secretly to one woman and to his associates?” (ibid., 69). Moreover, Celsus is decidedly dismissive of the quarrels, arguments, and debates between the Jews and the Christians. They “most stupidly contend with each other,” he writes, “and this controversy of theirs about Christ differs in nothing from the proverb about the contention for the shadow of an ass” (Taylor 2006, 69–70).5 Indeed, Celsus appears to anticipate by many centuries Freud’s contention in Moses and Monotheism (1939) about the Egyptian origin of the Jews when he says that “the Jews, originating from the Egyptians, deserted Egypt through sedition, at the same time despising the religion of the Egyptians” (ibid., 70). In effect, Celsus advances a sociological explanation of the origin of Christianity, suggesting that the split between the Egyptians and the Jews repeated itself in the separation between the Jews and those who began to call themselves Christians. And Celsus notes what he regards as a fundamentally sectarian attitude as a major characteristic of Christianity (ibid., 70–71). Moreover, as a well-educated, highly cultured, intellectually sophisticated Neoplatonist, Celsus is scathing about the way that “what is said by a few who are considered as Christians, concerning the doctrine of Jesus and the precepts of Christianity, is not designed for the wiser, but for the more unlearned and ignorant part of mankind” (ibid., 71). The conclusion of the text (as it has survived) of Against the Christians might remind one of the invective language of the “Law Against Christianity” that Nietzsche appended to The Anti-Christ. For in his conclusion Celsus derides both Jews and Christians, comparing them “to a

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multitude of bats, or to ants coming out of their holes, or to frogs seated about a marsh, or to earthworms that assemble in a corner of some muddy place, and contend with each other which of them are most noxious” (Taylor 2006, 73). As noted, the response to this text, which has been its only means of survival, is Origen’s lengthy work, Against Celsus, and the Christian eradication of pagan culture was, in Nietzsche’s eyes, a crime that should never be forgotten.

Porphyry Another Neoplatonic critic of Christianity was Porphyry of Tyre (c. 234– c. 305), whom St Augustine described in the City of God as “the most renowned of the pagan philosophers” and as “the most learned of philosophers,” although at the same time “the fiercest enemy of the Christians.”6 In the City of God, Augustine engages with an argument put forward by Porphyry in a treatise (of which extensive fragments remain) entitled Philosophy from Oracles, in which Apollo, asked by someone how he could convert his wife away from Christianity and back to paganism, gave the following advice: “You might find it easier to write on water in printed characters, or fly like a bird through the air spreading light wings to the breeze, than recall to her senses an impious, polluted wife. Let her go as she pleases, persisting in her vain delusions, singing in lamentation for a god who died in delusions, who was condemned by right-thinking judges, and killed in hideous fashion by the worst of deaths, a death bound in iron” (Augustine 1972, 884–885). And Augustine goes on to quote Porphyry as adding that “in these verses Apollo made plain the incurability of the belief of Christians, saying that the Jews uphold God more than the Christians” (ibid., 885). Two common early arguments against Christianity can be found here: first, the argument from gender, suggesting that Christianity was a religion for women, not men; and second, the argument that tries to set apart Christians and Jews, thus discrediting Christianity (Magny 2014, 143). Born in Tyre, an ancient Phoenician city, Porphyry acquired this name (which means “clad in purple”) from his Athenian teacher, Cassius Longinus, possibly as a joke on the name given by his parents, “Malchus”

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(meaning “king”), through an allusion to the colour of royal robes. In fact, Tyre was known as the site of an important purple dye factory, whose director was a Christian—and at the time when Porphyry was writing, Christianity was, despite (or because) of its persecution, in the ascendency (Hoffmann 1994, 8–9). While in retirement in Sicily, Porphyry composed a comprehensive critique of Christianity in no fewer than fifteen volumes, also entitled Against the Christians. This text only survives in a highly fragmentary form through its refutation by various Christian apologists, including Methodius, Eusebius, Apollinaris, Augustine, and Jerome, and only in this way has the work survived the commands of Constantine the Great and other emperors that every copy be burned. According to St Jerome’s commentary on Paul’s letter to the Galatians, in the first book Porphyry argued that the New Testament scriptures were inherently contradictory and that such proofs as they offered derived from human beings, rather than from God. Porphyry identifies the passage in Paul’s letter to the Galatians when he writes (in relation to the famous meeting in Antioch between Peter and Paul on the question of eating with Gentile converts), “when Cephas [= Peter] was come to Antioch, I withstood him to the face, because he was blameable” (Galatians 2:11), as significant. For it showed, Porphyry is said to have asserted, that “the Apostles, and indeed the chief of them, did not publicly study the salvation of all men, but that each of them was privately attentive to his own renown” (Taylor 2006, 82). According to Eusebius of Caesarea’s History of the Church (book 6, chapter 19), in the third book Porphyry was critical of the way Christian commentators interpreted scriptures (Eusebius 1965, 258). Porphyry singled out Origen, the Christian polemicist whose lengthy citations had preserved Celsus’s treatise for posterity, for particularly stinging criticism (ibid., 258–259). Eusebius is keen to defend Origen against these charges, even though he, unlike many Church Fathers, was never canonized as a saint; indeed, some of his teachings, such as the apokatastasis (or final reconciliation of all things, including the Devil), were rejected by Christian orthodoxy as heretical. Yet this aspect of Porphyry’s critique also anticipates Nietzsche’s own rejection of Christianity on philological grounds.

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And according to St Jerome’s preface to his commentary on the Book of Daniel, in the twelfth and most celebrated of the books Porphyry criticized the prophecies of Daniel, because of the way in which Jews and Christians claimed that these prophecies had being fulfilled by historical events (Taylor 2006, 82). The interpretation devised by Porphyry that the “third kingdom” was that of Alexander, that the fourth kingdom involved the struggles of the Seleucids and the Ptolemies, and that the eleventh king, described as “one despised” to whom “the kingly honour shall not be given” (Daniel 11:21), was Antiochus IV Epiphanes (who ruled 175–164 BCE) had been for a long time quite uncontentious. Yet because Christ, in his great eschatological discourse on the end and the Second Coming and on the great tribulation of Jerusalem, had himself had alluded to “the abomination of desolation, which was spoken of by Daniel, the prophet” (Matthew 24:15), there was much at stake in Porphyry’s claim that the Book of Daniel was the work of an imposter. And there was much at stake for other reasons: in one of his sermons, the influential theologian Theodoret of Cyrrhus (c. 393–458/466) recalled an extract from Porphyry that blamed a pestilence that had been raging in Rome (and the inefficacy of sacrifices to mitigate its effects) on Christianity: “The Christians now wonder that the city has been for so many years attacked by disease, the advent [or manifest appearance] of Esculapius and the other gods no longer existing,” he wrote, adding: “For Jesus being now reverenced and worshiped, no one any longer derives any public benefit from the gods” (Taylor 2006, 84). As Nietzsche would be at pains to point out in The Anti-Christ, the shift from paganism to Christianity had been fraught—and ultimately achieved only by violence.

Julian the Apostate The man who ruled the Roman Empire from 361 to 363 was called Julian, but he is usually known as Julian “the Apostate.” This epithet reflects, of course, a Christian perspective; it would be more neutral to describe him as the last pagan—and, in this sense, the last non-Christian—ruler of the Roman Empire.7 In fact, Julian wanted to convert the Empire over which he ruled from Christianity back to paganism, and he

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sought to revive such traditional Roman religious practices as offering sacrifices and observing the rituals of the Mystery cults. A cultural and a religious pluralist, he proposed rebuilding the temple at Jerusalem, the centre of Jewish worship, and he was a philosopher, a thinker in the tradition of Neoplatonism who admired in particular the work of Iamblichus. As is so often the case with these figures, his critique of Christianity, Against the Galileans, has only survived in fragmentary form, thanks to the extracts cited by Cyril of Alexandria (c. 376–444), in his refutation called Contra Julianum. (Cyril has a sulphurous reputation, thanks to his conflict with Nestorius, the Archbishop of Constantinople, who objected to the term “Mother of God” (or theotokos) being applied to Mary, and the allegation that he was—at least, in part—responsible for the lynching of Hypatia of Alexandria by a mob of bloodthirsty monks.) By “Galileans,” Julian means the Christians, and his work—originally in multiple parts— undertook nothing less than a wholescale refutation of Christianity, seeking to demonstrate that “the fraudulent machination of the Galileans (σκευωρια) is the fiction of men, composed with an evil intention; and that it possesses indeed nothing divine, but employing that part of the soul which delights in the fabulous, which is puerile and stupid, adduces monstrous narrations in order to a belief of the truth” (Taylor 2006, 3). It offers an account of why human beings believe in gods and in the divine; it examines what the Greeks and the Hebrews (i.e., Homer and Moses) have claimed about the divine; and it seeks to explain why the Christians have abandoned Jewish beliefs and set up a new system. The Neoplatonic background to Julian’s argument is evident, and no more so than when he undertakes to compare Plato with Moses in their accounts of the creation (in the Timaeus and the Book of Genesis, respectively). In this comparison, Plato emerges as decidedly superior, for he “denominates gods those apparent natures, the sun and moon, the stars, and the heaven”: “These, however, are the images of unapparent gods; the sun which is visible to the eyes, of the intelligible and unapparent sun; and again, the moon which is apparent to our eyes, and each of the stars are images of intelligibles. Plato, therefore, knew those unapparent gods which are inherent in, co-existent with, and generated and proceeding from the Demiurgus himself ” (Taylor 2006, 6).

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When, in 1809, the English translator and Neoplatonist Thomas Taylor (1758–1835) presented his translation of the fragments of Julian’s Against the Galileans (see Taylor 1809), he did so in a straightforward and entirely unapologetic way, arguing that the Neoplatonic background to Julian’s thinking was an entirely legitimate and completely coherent system.8 Moreover, Taylor claimed, any counter-refutation of this system made by Christianity was, in his view, bound to be lacking, and he did not pull any punches in making this point: No objections of any weight, no arguments but such as are sophistical, can be urged against this most sublime theory, which is so congenial to the unperverted conceptions of the human mind […]; and the theology of the Greeks has been attacked with all the insane fury of ecclesiastical zeal, and all the imbecile flashes of mistaken wit, by men whose conceptions on the subject, like those of a man between sleeping and waking, have been turbid and wild, phantastic and confused, preposterous and vain. (Taylor 2006, 2)

In fact, Taylor was not the only one who was persuaded, several centuries after its composition, of the validity of Julian’s arguments. For Julian has remained a compelling figure of many, not least in the late nineteenth century at precisely the time when Nietzsche was writing. In 1847, David Friedrich Strauß (1808–1874) published a tract called The Romantic on the Throne of the Caesars (Der Romantiker auf dem Throne der Cäsaren), a text in which he portrayed Julian as an otherworldly fantasist, trying to turn back the clock of reality; under this guise, Strauß was offering a satirical portrait of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia and his supposed Romantic nostalgia for medieval feudalism (Strauß 1847). Aside from highlighting the perceived affinities between Julian and Friedrich Wilhelm IV—the desire to unite throne and altar under a mystical conception of the ruler; a respect for priesthood, ritual, and customs; a concern for restoring old shrines or cathedrals; an attention to philosophical voices (the Neoplatonists or the Romantics); and a predilection for displays of personal piety—Strauß’s tract was a liberal broadside against the Romantic movement, declaring that Romanticism “is essentially mysticism, and only mystic souls are Romantics” (Strauß 1847, 188; cf. Beiser 2020, 183–186).

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In 1896, the play Emperor and Galilean (Kejser og Galilæer) by the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) had its première in Leipzig; exploring the motivations behind Julian’s attempt to bring about a restoration of paganism, the play proposes (through the figure of Maximus, a philosopher) the notion of a “third Reich” as a synthesis of paganism and Christianity, of the flesh and the spirit, of the body and the soul. And Julian was the subject of a historical novel by the Russian Symbolist writer, Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky (1866–1941), entitled The Death of the Gods: Julian the Apostate (Смерть богов. Юлиан Отступник), the first instalment of a trilogy of novels called Christ and Antichrist, published between 1895 and 1904—that is, precisely at the time when Nietzsche was producing his own Anti-Christ.9 And in our own times, the French historian and philosopher, Lucien Jerphagnon (1921–2011), has published a major study of Julian that attempts to rehabilitate his reputation as a historical thinker (Jerphagnon 1986). As important as are all these thinkers—Celsus, Porphyry, and Julian himself—in the tradition of anti-Christian writing, and despite the overlap at certain points between their critique and the one he offers in Human, All-Too-Human, Daybreak, The Anti-Christ and elsewhere, at no point does Nietzsche mention them. Why? Perhaps because, as a classical philologist, Nietzsche could assume that his audience would be familiar at least with the existence of these works, if not with their specific arguments. Yet in some ways Celsus, Porphyry, and Julian are even more radical than Nietzsche in their criticism of the figure of Christ himself. After all, one of the most fascinating aspects of The Anti-Christ is not just what, as a polemical work directed against Christianity, it does  say, but also what it does not.

Reimarus On Schweitzer’s account, the quest for the historical Jesus begins with the Hamburg-based scholar of Hebrew, Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768). “Before Reimarus,” Schweitzer suggests, “no one had attempted to form a historical conception of the life of Jesus” (Schweitzer 1910, 13). As a result of a visit to the Netherlands and to England in

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1720–1721, Reimarus had become acquainted with the position of theism or deism, which posits that human reason can attain a knowledge of God and consequently rejects the need for revelation. Reimarus established himself as a serious scholar with an edition (1750–1752) of Cassius Dio, the Roman statesman and historian who published numerous volumes on the history of Ancient Rome, taking as his starting point the arrival of the Trojan hero, Aeneas, in Italy. On his death, however, Reimarus left in manuscript form a work entitled An Apology for or a Defence of Reasoning Worshippers of God (Apologie oder Schützschrift für die vernünftigen Verehrer Gottes). Fragments from this work were published by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781), the ducal librarian at Wolfenbüttel who had got to know Reimarus while in Hamburg, under the title “Fragments by an Anonymous Writer” in his Zur Geschichte und Literatur in 1774 and 1777: the first fragment, “On the Toleration of the Deists,” appeared in 1774, and a further six fragments (“On the Decrying of Reason from the Pulpit,” “On the Impossibility of a Revelation which All Men should have Good Ground for Believing,” “On The Passing of the Israelites through the Red Sea,” “Showing that the Books of the Old Testament were not Written to Reveal a Religion,” “On the Story of the Resurrection,” and “On the Aims of Jesus and His Disciples”), under the collective title Ein Mehreres aus den Papieren eines Ungenannten, die Offenbarung betreffend, in 1777. This publication gave rise to the so-called Fragmentenstreit, a theological exchange with the Lutheran pastor, Johann Melchior Goeze (1717–1786). In Germanistik circles, Lessing is usually presented as a playwright (albeit one who produced virtually unwatchable plays) and as a literary critic (and the author of the Hamburgische Dramaturgie), but arguably this is to miss entirely Lessing’s key contribution to intellectual history in the form of this debate. Goeze had been appointed chief pastor to St Katharine’s church in Hamburg in 1755 and soon acquired a reputation for his vigorous— indeed, polemical—defence of religious orthodoxy (as he saw it) against the challenges from the Enlightenment. According to the historian Klaus Epstein (1927–1967), Goeze had “all the characteristics of a fanatical bigot,” namely, “he was pharisaical and patronizing—when he was not downright hostile—to men who did not share his religious certainties;

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his magisterial self-assurance easily degenerated into parochial intolerance; his lack of self-criticism made for a want of humor and graciousness” (Epstein 1966, 140). In 1764, he had counter-challenged Johann Barnhard Basedow (1724–1790), the educational reformer and founder of the Philanthropinum in Dessau; in 1769, Johann Georg Schlosser (1739–1799), the lawyer and writer; in 1771, Johann Salomo Semler (1725–1791), the ecclesiastical historian and biblical commentator, often regarded as the founder of the “historical-critical method” and also known as the father of German rationalism; in 1773, Karl Friedrich Bahrdt (1741–1792), the controversial biblical scholar and theologian; and in 1769, Julius Gustav Alberti (1723–1772), the first rationalist Lutheran pastor in Hamburg. So it comes as no surprise to learn that Goeze’s best-known work bears the title, The True Nature of Religious Zeal (Die gute Sache des wahren Religionseifers) (1770), and even Epstein pays tribute to Goeze’s “honest zeal in pursuit of what he believed to be the truth—truth which appeared to him absolutely essential to salvation” (ibid., 140). In 1771, Goeze began his debate with Lessing, urging him to repent but earning in return a slew of pamphlets, eleven in total, published in 1778 as Anti-Goeze. In Lessing, Goeze had met his polemical match; in the estimation of Henry and Mary Garland, the Anti-Goeze is “one of the most virulent polemical works of modern times, and its violence frustrates its defence of independent thought and tolerant judgement” (Garland 1986, 30). In its way, one might see the Anti-Goeze as a kind of forerunner in its polemical rhetoric to Nietzsche’s own The Anti-Christ. In the end, Lessing’s employer, the duke of Brunswick, intervened in July 1778 to put an end to the unedifying controversy. Yet this controversy seems, from today’s perspective, really quite mild; after all, a few months later, Lessing wrote Nathan the Wise, a plea for religious tolerance but also a tacit acceptance of the equal validity (as opposed to equal invalidity) of the three great monotheisms of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It cannot be sufficiently emphasized how much the Enlightenment sought an accommodation with revealed religion in the form of rationalism. The works, for example, of Johann Jakob Hess, author of History of the Last Three Years of the Life of Jesus (3 vols, 1768–1772); Franz Volkmar Reinhard, author of Essay on the Plan Which the Founder of the Christian

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Religion Adopted for the Benefit of Mankind (1781; 41798; 51830); Ernst August Opitz, author of History of Jesus, with a Delineation of His Character (1812); Johann Adolph Jakobi, author of The History of Jesus for Thoughtful and Sympathetic Readers (1816; vol. 2, 1818); and Johann Gottfried Herder, author of On the Redeemer of Mankind, As Portrayed in Our First Three Gospels (1796) and On the Son of God, the Saviour of the World: As Portrayed by John’s Gospel (1797), all bear out Schweitzer’s claim that “rationalism surrounds religion without touching it, and, like a lake surrounding some ancient castle, mirrors its image with curious refractions” (Schweitzer 1910, 27). At the same time, writers began to write fictitious “lives” of Christ, seeking to apply a non-supernatural interpretation to the stories of the miracles found in the Gospels, such as Popular Letters About the Bible: A Weekly Paper by a Country Clergyman (1782), An Explanation of the Plans and Aims of Jesus: In Letters Addressed to Readers Who Seek the Truth (11 vols, 1784–1792), and The Whole of the Discourses of Jesus, Extracted from the Gospels (1786) by Karl Friedrich Bahrdt, or A Non-Supernatural History of the Great Prophet of Nazareth (4 vols, 1 1800–1802; 21806) by Karl Heinrich Venturini. In the case of this last work, Schweitzer observes that it “may almost be said to be reissued annually down to the present day, for all the fictitious ‘Lives’ go back directly or indirectly to the type which he created,” and that it is “plagiarised more freely than any other Life of Jesus, although practically unknown by name” (ibid., 47). On this account, rationalism reached its fully developed form in the figure of the theologian and biblical critic Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob Paulus (1761–1851), author of The Life of Jesus as the Basis of a Purely Historical Account of Early Christianity (Das Leben Jesu als Grundlage einer reinen Geschichte des Urchristenthums) (2 vols, 1828). While in Jena, Paulus had prepared an edition of Spinoza’s writings together with a biography (in 1803), and he engaged in vigorous combat with the Idealist philosopher F.W.J.  Schelling (1775–1854), or that “charlatan, juggler, swindler, and obscurantist,” as Paulus called him (Schweitzer 1910, 50). When, in 1841, Schelling was appointed to the chair of philosophy in Berlin and, in the winter semester of 1841–1842, gave his lectures on The Philosophy of Revelation (Philosophie der Offenbarung), Paulus was enraged. He arranged for Schelling’s lectures to be transcribed and then published

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them together with critical remarks of his own under the title The Philosophy of Revelation at Length Revealed, and Set Forth for General Examination (Die endlich offenbar gewordene positive Philosophie der Offenbarung […] der allgemeinen Prüfung vorgelegt) (1842). As a result, Schelling took Paulus to court and, although the book was withdrawn, the legal judgement was in favour of Paulus; disappointed, Schelling decided to resign his post (ibid., 50). In his Life of Jesus, Paulus sought to explain the biblical miracles in natural terms (e.g., walking on water was simply an illusion; the feeding of the 5000 took place by Jesus sharing his own food, and everyone following his example; raisings from the dead were cases of recovery from coma) (Schweitzer 1910, 52–53). But Paulus was interested in the idea of Messiahship and the motives behind Christ’s betrayal by Judas. In his discussion of the conception of the Messiah, Paulus proposes that the Messianic idea can be traced back to the Davidic kingdom, that is, the kingdom established when David was anointed king at Hebron—by the men of Judah (2 Samuel 2:1–4) and by the elders of Israel (5:1–5); that the prophets then raised the idea of the Messiah to a higher, less political and more religious, plane; and that, in the times of the Maccabees, the ideal of a kingly Messiah disappeared to be replaced by the notion of divine deliverer (ibid., 56). For Schweitzer, the last phrase of rationalism is represented by the works of Karl August Hase, author of The Life of Jesus, Primarily for the Use of Students (1829; 51865); Friedrich Ernst Daniel Schleiermacher (1768–1834), author of The Life of Jesus (edited by Karl August Rütenik on the basis of a student’s notes of a lecture course delivered in 1832 and published in 1864); and David Friedrich Strauß, as author of The Christ of Faith and the Jesus of History: A Critique of Schleiermacher’s Life of Jesus (1865) as well as a much earlier work of his own entitled The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (2 vols, 1835–1836). The case of Strauß, which has recently moved back into critical focus,10 will be considered more fully in Chap. 4 and in relation to Nietzsche’s first Untimely Observation. Although Hase and Schleiermacher were still committed to rationalism and offered rationalistic explanations of the miracles, they were less confident in doing so and, in some cases, were content to raise questions rather than provide solutions. In the case of Hase, for instance, only the

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Johannine miracles—that is, changing water into wine at the wedding at Cana (John 2:1–12); the cure of a royal official’s son at Capernaum (4:46–54); the cure of a sick man at the Pool of Bethesda (5:1–15); the feeding of the 5000 by the miracle of the loaves (6:1–15); Jesus coming to his disciples by walking on the waters (6:16–21); the cure of the man born blind (9:1–7); and the resurrection of Lazarus (11:1–44)—are regarded as being authentic, whereas those of the Synoptics—including the story of the birth of Christ and the “legends of the childhood”—are regarded as not, since they are reported not from at first hand but only from tradition (Schweitzer 1910, 60). For his part, Schleiermacher ranks, in the estimation of Henry and Mary Garland, as “the most important Protestant theologian of the Romantic movement” (Garland 1986, 799), and Romanticism—notably in the form of his early contact with Friedrich Schlegel (with whom he undertook a translation of Plato) among others11—was a formative influence on his intellectual development. Turning away from the strict Pietism of his education at a Moravian school at Niesky in Upper Lusaria and then at Barby near Magdeburg, Schleiermacher devoted himself as a theology student at Halle to the study of Plato, Aristotle, and Spinoza, and he developed a particular interest in the writings of Immanuel Kant and F.H. Jacobi. From the lectures of Johann Semler he acquired a knowledge of the techniques of historical criticism as applied to the New Testament. In 1799 he published On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (Über die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern), a work of apologetics in five sections devoted to a defence, the nature of religion, the cultivation of religion, association in religion, and different religions. While a pastor in the Pomeranian town of Słupsk or Stolp (1802–1804), Schleiermacher published Outlines of a Critique of the Doctrines of Morality to Date (1803), comparing various moral systems, including those of Plato and Spinoza and those of Kant and Fichte, and deciding in favour of the former. Moving to Halle in 1804 to become a professor of theology and a university preacher, Schleiermacher lectured on hermeneutics (1805–1833) and in 1806 published Christmas Eve: Dialogue on the Incarnation, a work that links his Speeches on Religion to his great dogmatic late work, The Christian Faith According to the Principles of the Protestant Church

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(1821–1822; 21830–1831; 61884). This work, which links Christianity as it is manifested in history to the idea that Christ represents the focal point of a religious consciousness interior to the individual, elaborates the core thesis of his earlier Speeches: namely, that the basis of religion is Gefühl, that is, emotional experience.12 In those speeches, he had argued that the aim of religious experience is a union with the infinite; that the formulation of faith in the form of creeds represented an expression of rather than a foundation for that religious experience; that the primacy of feeling, together with contemplative intuition of Anschauung, also functioned in the aesthetic contexts of poetry and visual art; and that the Christian church played an important historical role, both in relation to natural religion and in relation to other, non-Christian religions. As Schweitzer argues, in his Life of Jesus (Das Leben Jesu) Schleiermacher is not so much “in search of the historical Jesus” as in search of “the Jesus Christ of his own system of theology,” that is, “the historic figure which seems to him appropriate to the self-consciousness of the Redeemer as he represents it” (Schweitzer 1910, 62).13 In line with this representation, there is simply nothing empirical nor is there any natural psychology; rather, Schleiermacher understands the figure of Jesus in terms of his own peculiar dialectic—not, like Hegel’s dialectic, a dialectic which “generates reality,” but rather a “literary” dialectic of “exposition,” and in this respect Schleiermacher is judged to be “the greatest master that ever lived” (ibid., 62).14

Christian Hermann Weisse With, on the one hand, The Earliest Evangelist, Or a Critical and Exegetical Inquiry into the Relationship of the First Three Gospels (1838) and, on the other, A Critical and Philosophical Study of the Gospel History (2 vols, 1838) and The Present Position of the Problem of the Gospels (1856), two commentators—the Lutheran theologian (and later Catholic convert), Christian Gottlob Wilke (1788–1854), and the Protestant religious philosopher, Christian Hermann Weisse (1801–1866)—succeeded, entirely independent of each other, in focusing the debate about the historical Jesus on a particular problem. They proposed the Marcan hypothesis or

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two-source hypothesis, arguing that the first gospel to have been written was not—as traditionally believed—the Gospel of Matthew, but the Gospel of Mark. Mark was, they suggested, one of two sources—this other is what was later known as Q (for Quelle, i.e., source)—for the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. (For further discussion, see Chap. 7.) Weisse, the son of the theologian Christian Ernst Weisse (1766–1832), was a great admirer of David Friedrich Strauß, seeing in his Life of Jesus a move towards a space in which philosophy and religion could be reconciled (Schweitzer 1910, 121). But C.H.  Weisse parted company with Strauß on the question of interpreting the eschatological aspects of Mark’s gospel, that is, those aspects concerned with the death and judgement of the individual and the final destiny of humankind. Like Strauß, Weisse saw that the key to explaining the Messianic consciousness of Jesus lies in the biblical expression “Son of Man” (in the Koine Greek of the New Testament, ὁ υἱὸς τοὺ ἀνθρώπου, i.e., ho huios tou anthropou). While, for some, the expression is simply a synonym for “man,” for others it carries an echo of the figure of the Son of Man in the Book of Daniel and hence the Jewish Messianic tradition. (In addition, it is worth noting that the equivalent expression in Hebrew, ‫בן–אדם‬, i.e., ben-‘adam, also appears over a hundred times in the Torah.) For Weisse, however, the expression has nothing to do with ideas in the Jewish apocalyptic system, but rather represents “higher conceptions” of Jesus’s “nature and origin,” and hence has to be understood in a spiritualized sense of Messiahship (Schweitzer 1910, 135). Here lay, as far as Schweitzer is concerned, a problem: Under the obsession of the fixed idea that it was their mission to defend the “originality” of Jesus by ascribing to Him a modernising transformation and spiritualisation of the eschatological system of ideas, the defenders of the Marcan hypothesis have impeded the historical study of the Life of Jesus to an almost unbelievable extent. (Schweitzer 1910, 134)

In fact, Schweitzer maintains, it was not until the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, in the works of the German Protestant theologian and biblical scholar Johannes Weiss (1863–1914), that theology “escaped from the influence” of Christian

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Hermann Weisse (Schweitzer 1910, 136). In the works of Weiss, the eschatological perspective was advanced to the main perspective from which to interpret the gospels, and it was Weiss who gave the sobriquet “Q” to the putative second New Testament source, alongside Mark.

Bruno Bauer With the figure of Bruno Bauer (1809–1882), the quest for the historical Jesus undergoes a major turn with the production of the first sceptical life of Jesus. Bauer was a philosopher and historian, born as the son of a painter in a porcelain factory in Eisenberg, in the duchy of Saxe-­ Altenburg.15 Bauer studied philosophy in Berlin, where he became associated with the so-called Right Hegelians, that is, those interpretators and commentators who read Hegel in a politically and religiously conservative way (as opposed, i.e., to the Young Hegelians, who read him in a revolutionary way). Bauer was chosen by a leading Right Hegelian figure, Philip Marheineke (1780–1846), to edit the second edition of Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 1818–1832, and Bauer produced a critical edition in three volumes. Now Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of religion, first delivered in Berlin in the summer semester of 1821 and repeated on three occasions in 1824, 1827, and 1831, had quickly became a major reference point and source of influence for many nineteenth-century German biblical critics.16 In tandem with Schleiermacher, with whom he had major intellectual disagreements, Hegel had reset the terms of the debate over religion and, by implication, the search for the historical Jesus.17 Over the course of the ten years when he gave these lectures, the emphasis of Hegel’s own argument shifted (Hodgson 1985b): indeed, Hegel has been described by Jacques Derrida as “the last philosopher of the book and the first thinker of writing” (Derrida 1976, 26), and Duncan Forbes has argued that Hegel’s philosophy in general is “best approached in the spirit of Plato’s, as something that is in danger of being destroyed or distorted if it is written down” (Forbes 1975, xiii–xiv). This primacy of the spoken permitted the process of Hegel’s thinking to remain “open, fluid, and continuous,”18 in a way that has striking parallels with what J.P. Stern has

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called the “functionalizing of static concepts” and described as “one of Nietzsche’s characteristic philosophical moves” (Stern 1983, xiii). In 1834, Bauer became a Privatdozent in Berlin, and in 1839 he transferred to Bonn. This move coincided with an intellectual crisis, out of which such works as Critical Exhibition of the Religion of the Old Testament (2 vols, 1838) with its interpretation of the miracles in strictly naturalistic terms, Critique of the Evangelical History of John (1840), and Critique of the Evangelical History of the Synoptics (1841) emerged. Going on to write further critiques of the Gospels as a whole (in 1850–1851, 2 vols), of the Acts of the Apostles (in 1850), and of the Pauline Letters (in 1850–1852, in three parts), Bauer became increasingly interested in the sources of the New Testament and, influenced by Hegel’s Hellenophilia, argued that early Christianity owed more to the philosophy of the ancient Greeks in general and to Stoicism in particular than it did to Judaism. This thesis informed his two late works, his brief study Philo, Strauss, Renan, and Primitive Christianity (1874) and its fully worked-out argument in Christ and the Caesars: The Origin of Christianity from Greco-Roman Civilization (1877). Bauer clearly enunciates the thesis that Jesus was not just a product of a second-century fusion of Jewish, Greek, and Roman theology, but had no historical existence; in his understanding of Christ as an allegorical figure or a personnage conceptuel, Bauer can be described as the first propounder of the “mythicist” interpretation of Christ (Onfray 2009, 298). As noted, Bauer was originally associated with Right Hegelianism, characterized by its teleology of history (and the equation that the Idea = Reason = the Concept = God); its philosophy of religion (according to which Christianity is the “true” religion); the principles of the Philosophy of Right, according to which the state is “the divine being on earth”; its view that the goal of religion is “to integrate the state as deeply as possible into individual souls”; and its belief that the Prussian monarchy represented the model state. By contrast, the Young Hegelians or the Hegelian Left placed a stronger emphasis on the radical implications of Hegel’s thought: the atheistic potential of Hegel’s hyper-rational reading of Christianity in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion; the role of the “labour of the negative” in the Hegelian dialectic, useful for justifying destruction as a necessary moment in bringing forward a revolutionary

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future; and a different sort of teleology, in which the Idea or Reason is dissociated from God and associated instead with History (ibid., 298–299). The shift in Bauer’s reputation from being seen as a Right Hegelian to being seen as a Left Hegelian pivots on his reaction and response to Strauß’s Life of Jesus, a work which scandalized and fascinated Bauer by turns (and later, mutatis mutandis, Nietzsche too). Strauß’s claim to be an Hegelian added an extra dimension to the controversy surrounding his Life, and Bauer was assigned the task of reviewing Strauß’s work in the Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik.19 Bauer argued that Strauß had misrepresented Hegel and that the dialectic used by Strauß derived, not from Hegel, but from Schleiermacher. (At times, it seems that Bauer was more worried by what Strauß had said about Hegel than by what Strauß had said about Jesus). Defending himself against Bauer’s attack while nevertheless recognizing that he should have distanced himself more from Hegel, Strauß in his In Defence of My “Life of Jesus” Against the Hegelians (1838) accused Bauer of being a Right Hegelian. Yet Bauer’s friendship in Bonn with Karl Marx and other Young Hegelians soon earned Bauer the reputation of being a Left Hegelian. Although Bauer had originally been sent to Bonn by Karl vom Stein zum Altenstein (1770–1840), the Prussian Minister for Education, in order to protect Bauer’s rationalist theology against criticism from orthodox religious quarters and to spread the Hegelian word to the Rhineland, a change in the Prussian ministry and Altenstein’s replacement by Johann Albrecht Friedrich Eichhorn (1779–1856) led to the removal of his licence to lecture. Bauer’s rationalist views had not been welcome in the strongly Pietist-influenced University of Bonn, and in 1841 he wrote The Trumpet of the Last Judgement Against Hegel the Atheist and Antichrist: An Ultimatum (Die Posaune des jüngsten Gerichts über Hegel, den Atheisten und Antichristen), publishing it anonymously and presenting it as the work of a Right Hegelian, but with the parodic intention of criticizing Right Hegelianism (Bauer 1989). In 1842 Bauer was told to cease lecturing, and he expressed his indignation in a work entitled Christianity Exposed: A Recollection of the 18th Century and a Contribution to the Crisis of the 19th, which was scheduled for publication in Zurich in 1843, but withdrawn prior to publication (Bauer 2002).

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Following the failure of the revolutions of 1848, Bauer left Bonn and withdrew to what was the village of Rixdorf outside Berlin (nowadays, part of the cosmopolitan Berlin district of Neukölln). There he leads an ascetic life dedicated to scholarship, writing numerous studies on theology, modern history, and politics; his move to Rixdorf is not unlike Feuerbach’s retreat in 1837 to Bruckberg (just outside Nuremberg), where his wife had a share in a small porcelain factory. And just as Marx rejected Feuerbach in his Theses on Feuerbach (Thesen über Feuerbach) (1845), so Marx broke with Bauer in 1841 and turned his back on him in two works co-authored with Friedrich Engels, The Holy Family (Die heilige Familie) (1844) and The German Ideology (Die deutsche Ideologie) (1846). Bauer is a significant figure for numerous reasons, not least because, in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche reminisced about Bauer as “the old Hegelian” who had, in the wake of the first Untimely Observation directed against Strauß, supposedly become one of Nietzsche’s “most attentive readers” (EH UM §2).20 Then again, there are important parallels between Bauer’s critique of Christianity and that proposed by Nietzsche (Benz 1956), and the chief aspects of Bauer’s critique can be summarized as follows. First, he aligned himself with the thesis of C.H. Weisse and C.G. Wilke that Mark had been the “original evangelist” and the source for the gospels of Matthew and Luke, dismissing Strauß’s suggestion that such a connected narrative could have arisen in the early Christian community. Second, Bauer dated the Gospel of Mark back to the time of the Roman Emperor Hadrian (i.e., 117 to 138) and its original textual prototype or the Ur-Marcus to the time of Josephus and the Roman-Jewish Wars (i.e., 66–73 CE; The Jewish War was written c. 75 and Antiquities of the Jews c. 94). And third, Bauer drew attention to the thematic motif in the Gospel of Mark of the “Messianic secret,” that is, those passages where Jesus urges his disciples to remain silent and his insistence on talking about the Kingdom of God only in parables (cf. Mark 1:43–45; 4:11; and 8:29–30). Sensing something fictional about this device, Bauer concluded that the editor of the Gospel who added it was probably responsible for the final version of the Gospel as we now know it. (That version includes an account of the post-Resurrection appearances of the risen Christ [16:9–20]—a “longer ending” accepted as canonical, yet absent from the

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earliest manuscripts.) Some years later, the German Lutheran theologian William Wrede (1859–1906) would develop this idea of this subsequently added device in his study, The Messianic Secret (Das Messiasgeheimnis in den Evangelien, 1901). The Tübingen School, founded by Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860), had argued that second-century Christianity had arisen out of a combination of, on the one hand, Jewish (or Petrine) Christianity and, on the other, Gentile (or Pauline) Christianity. Bauer noted the dominance of Greco-Roman, as opposed to Jewish, elements in many Christian writings, and to this extent he agreed with the Tübingen School. (For Bauer, the writer of Mark’s gospel was “an Italian, at home both in Rome and Alexandria”; that of Matthew’s gospel “a Roman, nourished by the spirit of Seneca”; Christianity is essentially “Stoicism triumphant in a Jewish garb.”) And where the Tübingen School had suggested that several of the letters attributed to Paul were, in fact, forgeries, Bauer went further—much further. He proposed that all the Pauline letters were forgeries, written as a reaction and a response to the figure of Paul as he was presented in the Acts of the Apostles. In his final book, Christ and the Caesars (1877), Bauer tries to demonstrate by means of a linguistic analysis of keywords that there was a good deal of common ground between such first-century writers as Seneca (a major Stoic philosopher) and the texts of the New Testament. In this respect, Bauer returned to some of the ideas he had begun to develop in Philo, Strauss, and Renan, and Primitive Christianity (Schweitzer 1910, 158). Consequently, Bauer concluded, the ancients were right to have suspected that Seneca must have been a “secret” Christian. He also sought to show that Judaism entered Roman culture at the time of the Maccabees, the leaders of the Jewish rebel army that took Judea back from the control of the Seleucid dynasty, and had been far more influential in Roman life than had hitherto been realized. And he suggested that Julius Caesar had understood his life in terms of an Oriental miracle story, that August Caesar commissioned Virgil to write the Aeneid and thus turn Caesar into a son of Venus, and that Josephus had linked Vespasian’s reign with an Oriental miracle. Even though Nietzsche’s friend and correspondent, the Protestant theologian Franz Overbeck (1837–1905), reviewed Christ and the

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Caesars,21 there is no evidence that Nietzsche himself had ever read that work or Das entdeckte Christentum (Christianity Exposed). Yet there are, as the Protestant theologian and Church historian Ernst Benz (1907–1978) has noted (drawing in part on the work of Dmitrij Tschižewskij [1894–1977]),22 significant parallels between Nietzsche’s approach in The Anti-Christ and the approach taken by Bauer in his later works. First, Nietzsche separated the figure of Christ from its ecclesiastical appropriation or even falsification, just as Bauer—in this respect, following the German Pietist and early Enlightenment thinker, Johann Christian Edelmann (1698–1767)—had done (Benz 1956, 106–107). Second, both Nietzsche and Bauer regard the institutionalization of Christianity in the form of the Church as nothing less than a world-historical disaster (ibid., 113). Third, both Nietzsche and Bauer diagnose the origins of the Church as lying in a revolt of the disadvantaged and the dispossessed— or, in Nietzsche’s terms, “the physiologically retrograde, the weak, […] the poor, the sinners, the sickly” (AC §17) (ibid., 118). Fourth, Bauer places the Christian tendency to flee the present in the context of the Platonic tradition and the teachings of Stoicism; just as Nietzsche would do (ibid., 116). Finally, Bauer strongly condemns the theology of sacrifice as it is developed by Paul of Tarsus, anticipating another key point of Nietzsche’s critique in The Anti-Christ and elsewhere (ibid., 114). True, the significance of these parallels is open to interpretation: recently, Andrea Orsucci has suggested that it was not Bruno Bauer who was the source of Nietzsche’s thesis of a “pre-existent” Christianity (cf. AC §58), that is, that the Christian Church developed out of the intellectual and social context of late antiquity, but rather the Irish historian and political theorist William Edward Hartpole Lecky (1838–1903) and his History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne (2 vols, 1869) (Orsucci 1996, 314). And the question of a “pre-existent” Christianity in a form against which Epicurus had fought has been discussed in relation to The Anti-Christ by Andreas Urs Sommer (NK 6/2, 287–289). Whether Bauer was or was not the source for some or any of Nietzsche’s ideas in his writings (including The Anti-Christ) is, however, not the point at issue. Rather, it illustrates how there was an argumentational and intellectual-historical context to Nietzsche’s theses about religion, and how even if, when seen in this context, his work may appear to

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be less radical than it might otherwise seem at first sight, it nevertheless gains in historical resonance and significance. In his Quest of the Historical Jesus, Schweitzer assesses the significance of Bruno Bauer as follows. He saw Bauer as someone who, approaching the history of the Gospels, was faced with two choices: a historical method, which takes as its starting point the Jewish conception of the Messiah and investigates how this essentially intuitive prophetic idea became a fixed and more reflective concept, or a literary method, which starts from the fusion in John’s Gospel of the Jewish Messiah and the concept of the Logos and work its way to the sources from which the gospel tradition arose. Bauer chose the latter and made it his life’s task to pursue “the literary solution to the problem of the life of Jesus” (Schweitzer 1910, 138). On Schweitzer’s account, Bauer understood how strongly a “dominant idea” could influence the shaping of its history with a definite artistic purpose, citing the case of the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria as an example of how a “speculative principle” can “take possession of men’s minds, influenc[ing] them in the first glow of enthusiasm which it evokes with such overmastering power that the just claims of that which is actual and historical cannot always secure the attention which is their due” (ibid., 138–139). In other words, what matters in understanding theology is not history, but art. If religion has any meaning at all, then it has it, not in relation to the past, but to the present, where (so Bauer argues in his Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte des Johannes) we “save the honour of Jesus when we restore His Person to life from the state of inanition to which the apologists have reduced it, and give it once more a living relation to history, which it certainly possessed—that can no longer be denied” (cited in Schweitzer 1910, 143). Bauer’s Hegelian roots are evident in this passage from its emphasis on consciousness and its manifestation in the world, and in this way Bauer goes on to propose a philosophical understanding of the figure of Christ: Jesus accomplished this mighty work, but not by prematurely pointing to His own Person. Instead He gradually made known to the people the thoughts which filled and entered into the very essence of His mind. It was only in this indirect way that his Person—which He freely offered up in the

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cause of His historical vocation and of the idea for which He lived—continued to live on in so far as this idea was accepted. When, in the belief of His followers, He rose again and lived on in the Christian community, it was as the Son of God who had overcome and reconciled the great antithesis. (cited in Schweitzer 1910, 143–144)

Over time, however, the focus of Bauer’s project changed, as Schweitzer realized. At the outset of Bauer’s intellectual career, Schweitzer wrote, he “thought to save the honour of Jesus and to restore His Person from the state of inanition to which the apologists had reduced it, and hoped by furnishing a proof that the historical Jesus could not have been the Jesus Christ of the Gospels, to bring him into a living relation with history” (Schweitzer 1910, 157). In his later works, however, Bauer exchanged this task for the larger one of “freeing the world from the domination of the Judaeo-Roman idol, Jesus the Messiah,” and “in carrying out this endeavour the thesis that Jesus Christ is a product of the imagination of the early Church is formulated in such a way that the existence of a historic Jesus becomes problematical, or, at any rate, quite indifferent” (ibid., 157). And so, in the end, Bauer came to the conclusion that there had never been any historical Jesus. Now, in Schweitzer’s estimation the only critic to whom Bauer can be compared is Reimarus, that is, the first significant figure in modern times to examine the historical Jesus, to deny the supernatural origins of Christianity, and to propose that Jesus had been a Jewish prophet whose ministry had nothing to do with the Church subsequently founded by the apostles (an idea reprised by Nietzsche in The Anti-Christ and elsewhere). Reimarus and Bauer had, each in his own way, exercised “a terrifying and disabling influence upon his time,” and no one else had been as keenly conscious as they had been of “the extreme complexity of the problem offered by the life of Jesus” (Schweitzer 1910, 159). Both Reimarus and Bauer had responded to this complexity by seeking a solution outside the confines of history itself: in the case of Reimarus, by locating the basis of the Jesus’s story in a deliberate act of fraud committed by the apostles; in the case of Bauer, by postulating an original evangelist (the Ur-Markus) who had invented this story. In dismissing the solutions that Reimarus and Bauer had offered, their respective

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contemporaries also dismissed “the problems which had necessitated such solutions” and, in so doing, they demonstrated that “they were as little able to grasp as to remove these difficulties” (ibid., 159). After two solid centuries of biblical criticism and the quest for the historical Jesus, these problems remained just as little resolved when Nietzsche was writing. In this respect, Nietzsche was an inheritor, not just of these problems, but of the failure to solve them—and, from the theological point of view, the devastating consequences of that failure. In conclusion, Schweitzer judges that Bruno Bauer’s Criticism of the Gospel History is “worth a good dozen Lives of Jesus because his work, as we are only now coming to recognise, after half a century, is the ablest and most complete collection of the difficulties of the Life of Jesus which is anywhere to be found” (Schweitzer 1910, 159)—and, one might add, Nietzsche’s The Anti-Christ does little to alter this judgement. Yet— “unfortunately”—the independent, indeed “too loftily independent,” way in which Bauer developed his ideas “destroyed the possibility of their influencing contemporary theology” (ibid., 160). (Curiously, one would think that this would apply a fortiori in the case of Nietzsche, but as it turns out, the reverse is the case.) Or in the striking image chosen by Schweitzer to elaborate this point: The shaft which he had driven into the mountain broke down behind him, so that it needed the work of a whole generation to lay bare once more the veins of ore which he had struck. His contemporaries could not suspect that the abnormality of his solutions was due to the intensity with which he grasped the problems as problems, and that he had become blind to history by examining it too microscopically. Thus for his contemporaries he was a mere eccentric. (Schweitzer 1910, 160)

This reputation for eccentricity is reflected in Marx’s mocking references in The Holy Family and in The German Ideology to Bauer as “Saint Bruno,” just as he dismissed Max Stirner, the author of Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, as “Saint Max,” “Jacques le Bonhomme,” and “Saint Sancho.” (These jibes contextualize some of those passages in Nietzsche’s

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writing where he often seems, to a modern reader, to be hitting beneath the belt.) Yet this eccentricity, Schweitzer notes, concealed “a penetrating insight”: No one else had as yet grasped with the same completeness the idea that primitive Christianity and early Christianity were not merely the direct outcome of the preaching of Jesus, not merely a teaching put into practice, but more, much more, since to the experience of which Jesus was the subject there allied itself the experience of the world-soul at a time when its body—humanity under the Roman Empire—lay in the throes of death. Since Paul, no one had apprehended so powerfully the mystic idea of the supersensible σώμα Χριστού [soma Christon]. Bauer transferred it to the historical plane and found the “body of Christ” in the Roman Empire. (Schweitzer 1910, 160)

By contrast, Nietzsche would drive the opposition between the “body of Christ” and the Roman Empire to the point of the greatest intensification possible: “What stood as aere perennis, the imperium Romanum,” is “the most magnificent form of organization ever to be achieved under difficult conditions, compared to which everything before or after has just been patched together, botched and dilettantisch […],” as he writes in The Anti-Christ, “this most remarkable artwork in the great style was a beginning, its design was calculated to prove itself over the millennia” (AC §58). In contrast to which Christianity was “the vampire of the imperium Romanum,” it was “this secretive worm that crept up to every individual under the cover of night, fog, and ambiguity and sucked the seriousness for true things, the instinct for reality in general right out of every individual” (AC §58). Bauer’s rhetoric might have caused offence to his colleagues in the Faculty of Theology in Bonn, but even so, it is far removed from the invective used by Nietzsche when he denounces “the priggish creeping around, the conventicle secrecy, dismal ideas like hell, like the sacrifice of the innocent, like the unio mystica in the drinking of blood, above all the slowly fanned flames of revenge, of Chandala revenge” (AC §58).

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Gfrörer and Daumer Before we come to the giant figures (in terms of extent of influence, if arguably not in terms of intellectual significance) of Ernest Renan (1823–1892) and (in the following chapter) David Friedrich Strauß, a series of further works offering “imaginative” lives of Jesus is surveyed by Schweitzer in his account of the quest for the historical Jesus. These included An Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity (1838) by the English merchant turned Christian apologist Charles Christian Hennell (1809–1850), to the German edition (1840) of which D.F. Strauß provided a foreword; a two-volume Critical History of Primitive Christianity (vol. 1, 1831; 21835, and vol. 2, 1838) by the German historian August Friedrich Gfrörer (1803–1861), a scholar who also translated Flavius Josephus’s History of the Jewish War (1836) and wrote a two-volume study on Philo und die judisch-alexandrinische Theosophie (1831); three volumes of Theological Letters to the Cultured Classes of the German People (3 vols, 1863) by Richard von der Alm, a literary pseudonym of Friedrich Wilhelm Ghillany (1807–1876), a German Lutheran theologian and historian who, influenced by the poet and philosopher Georg Friedrich Daumer (1800–1875), had been forced to resign from the post of pastor in the St Aegidius parish in Nuremberg and had instead become its city librarian; and the four-volume History of Jesus on the Basis of a Free Historical Inquiry Regarding the Gospel and the Gospels (4 vols, 1870–1871; 2 1876) by the philosopher and theologian Ludwig Noack (1819–1885). Let us pause for a moment to consider two of these figures, Gfrörer and Daumer. Gfrörer proposed an approach he described as “historical mathematics,” presenting this approach—in reality, the development of an entire argument from a single postulate—in the following, almost prophetic terms: “The miserable era of negation is now at an end; affirmation begins. We are ascending the eastern mountains from which the pure airs of heaven breathed upon the spirit. Our guide shall be historical mathematics, a science which is as yet known to the few, and has not been applied by any one to the New Testament” (cited in Schweitzer 1910, 165). In the case of Gfrörer, as well as in such contemporary, anonymous

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publications as Important Historical Disclosures Concerning the Manner of Jesus’ Death: From an Ancient MS Found at Alexendria, Written by a Contemporary of Jesus Belonging to the Sacred Order of the Essenes (1849) and Historical Disclosures Concerning the Real Circumstances of the Birth and Youth of Jesus: A Continuation of the Ancient Essene MS Discovered in Alexandria (1849), the “truth” of Jesus was said to lie in his supposed membership of the Essenes, a Jewish sect of the time of the Second Temple that adopted an ascetic lifestyle and cultivated mystical experiences. (The Essenes are thought to be the authors of the documents known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient Jewish religious manuscripts found in caves in Qumran in the Judean Desert on the northern shore of the Dead Sea; see Lim and Collins 2010.) On the account of Gfrörer and others, the Christian Church emerged from the Essene order, one of whose members had been Joseph of Arimathea, who had bribed the Romans to make the crucifixion of Jesus a pretence, recovered his unconscious from the cross, and resuscitated him in the tomb he had prepared for this purpose (ibid., 165). Such commentators as Gfrörer, Ghillany, and Noack all illustrate the increasingly historical and above all philological approach being adopted in the quest for the historical Jesus—in this case, focusing on the role of the Essenes (ibid., 168–169). Recently, however, the Israeli scholar Rachel Elior has, among others, questioned whether the Essenes themselves actually ever existed at all (Elior 2009). Just how intense the engagement in the nineteenth century with the question of the historical origins of Christianity could become is illustrated by the fascinating figure of Georg Friedrich Daumer. Born in Nuremberg in 1800, Daumer was educated at the city’s Gymnasium, during the time when it was under the direction of Hegel. (He had been appointed its headmaster in 1808 and remained in this post until 1816.) After studying theology, and then instead philosophy at Erlangen, in turn Daumer himself taught at the Gymnasium in Nuremberg for a number of years, until he retired early on grounds of ill-health in 1832 and devoted himself to scholarly and literary work. Over the years, Daumer moved away from the Pietist beliefs he had acquired while at Erlangen and became increasingly sceptical, pantheistic, and anti-theological in his views. In Der Feuer- und Molochdienst der Hebräer (Brunswick, 1842) and Die Geheimnisse des christlichen Altertums (Hamburg, 1847), Daumer

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propounded the thesis that the basis of the ancient Hebrew religion had originally been the cult of Moloch, an ancient Canaanite god whose worship was associated with child sacrifice.23 Traditionally Moloch was represented as a bronze statue, into which children were thrown who then died horribly when the statue was heated with fire. Although the practice of child sacrifice gradually came to be abandoned, Daumer insisted on the permanence of the identity of Moloch and Yahweh—according to him, originally they had been the one and the same god. Yet Daumer then went on to propose that, in the form of Christianity, child sacrifice had been revived or had at least persisted. Seen in this light, the line in the gospels, “Suffer the little children to come unto me” (Matthew 19:14; Mark 10:14; Luke 18:16), acquires a new and startling significance! And Daumer discovered numerous examples of how the ritual of anthropophagy (or cannibalism) was tied up with Christianity as it developed over the centuries. In fact, he came to regard Christianity (much as Nietzsche would do) as an enemy that had to be combatted, and to it he opposed (in a rather less Nietzschean way) a religion of love and peace, proposed in a work entitled The Religion of the New Age (1850). (In a sense, one could regard Daumer as the first thinker of the so-called New Age, even he saw this neues Weltalter in somewhat different terms from the New Ages of the 1970s and 1980s.) Yet Daumer’s intellectual development was to take one further remarkable turn. His work, The Religion of the New Age, was reviewed in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who took a negative view of the work and of Daumer’s rejection of history as representing a struggle between classes and his suggestion that it represented a struggle between “coarseness” (Roheit) and “culture” (Bildung).24 Marx’s and Engel’s review concludes with the following devastating judgement: The ‘culture’ whose decay Herr Daumer laments is that of the time in which Nuremberg flourished as a free Reichsstadt, in which Nuremberg’s industry—that cross between art and craftsmanship—played a role of importance, the German petty-bourgeois [Kleinburgertum] culture which is perishing with the petty bourgeoisie. If the decline of former classes such as the knighthood could offer material for great tragic works of art, philistinism can achieve nothing but impotent expressions of fanatic malignity

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and a collection of Sancho Panza maxims and rules of wisdom. Herr Daumer is the dry, absolutely humourless continuation of Hans Sachs. German philosophy, wringing its hands and lamenting at the deathbed of its foster father, German philistinism—such is the touching picture opened up to us by the religion of the new age. (Marx and Engels 2010, 246)

As this and other passages in this review show, the nineteenth century cultivated a combative and provocative style of critique, and in this respect Nietzsche was very much a child of his time—even if, as an exponent of the technique of invective, Nietzsche would (then as now) find very few, if any, rivals. In the 1850s, Daumer left Nuremberg and moved to Frankfurt, and his intellectual journey continued too. Despite his critique of Christianity and his argument that its roots lay in the cult of Moloch, Daumer had never gone as far as Nietzsche would do and publicly embraced atheism, not even in private. In one way or another, he remained a believer, whether in the Virgin Mary—to whom in 1841 he dedicated a volume entitled The Glory of the Holy Virgin Mary, an anthology of Spanish, Italian, Latin, and German legends and poems, published under the pseudonym Eusebius Emmeran—or in the position he described as theistic naturalism or theistic materialism. Then, in 1859 he converted to Roman Catholicism. In the same year he published an account of his conversion entitled, not surprisingly, My Conversion (1859), and a work with the lengthy title, The Triple Crown of Rome: Attempt at a New Illumination and Characterization of the Roman-Catholic Priesthood and Church (1859), in which his exasperation with modernity emerges as one of the chief motives for his conversion. In other works, such as Christianity and Its Founder (1864) and The Miracles, Its Meaning, Truth and Necessity (1874), Daumer returns to the tradition of Christian apologetics and seeks to rebut the approach to miracles taken by David Friedrich Strauß. It comes as no surprise to learn that Daumer was involved with the curious episode of Kaspar Hauser, a young teenage German boy who suddenly turned up in Nuremberg in 1828 and who claimed to have grown up alone in a dark cell; according to some theories, Hauser was the hereditary prince of Baden, who had been switched at birth, and it was to protect this identity that he was

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suddenly stabbed by a stranger in 1833. Hauser was entrusted to the care of Daumer, who taught the boy to read and write, and discovered his artistic talent for drawing; he also conducted magnetic experiments on the boy. (As chance would have it, the case was investigated by Paul Johann Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach, the great legal scholar who was the father of Ludwig Feuerbach.) The strange story of Kaspar Hauser attracted the interest of, among others, the theosophist-turned-anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925),25 and perhaps it also comes as no surprise to discover that in his later years Daumer became increasingly interested in parapsychology and the occult. The remarkable intellectual career of Georg Friedrich Daumer shows what is usual and what is unusual in the case of Friedrich Nietzsche. Like many of his nineteenth-century contemporaries, Nietzsche took the question of religion extremely seriously, reflected in his decision to devote the first of his “Untimelies” to David Friedrich Strauß. And, in terms of methodology, The Anti-Christ reflects the historicizing, culturally contextualizing, and philologically problematizing approaches of many of those who had embarked on the quest for the historical Jesus. That said, in some respects Daumer is even more radical than Nietzsche, inasmuch as Daumer directly attacks the figure of Jesus in a way that, even in The Anti-Christ or elsewhere, Nietzsche does not. On the other hand, Nietzsche pursues the implications of atheism more radically than many of his contemporaries, including Daumer, who collapsed back like a recidivist into the old ways of belief or eventually found his way back to the ecclesiastical fold (depending on one’s point of view). In the end, Daumer converted from Protestantism to disbelief and finally to Roman Catholicism, and Nietzsche, obviously, did not.

Renan Ernest Renan was born into a family of fishermen in the port town of Tréguier in Brittany—otherwise best known for being the birthplace of St Yves, the patron saint of lawyers—in 1823. After going to school at the ecclesiastical seminary in Tréguier and then the ecclesiastical college of St Nicholas du Chardonnet in Paris, Renan moved in 1840 to the seminary

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of Issy-les-Moulineaux to study philosophy. Over time his enthusiasm for Catholic Scholasticism became replaced by an interest in such Enlightenment philosophers as Thomas Reid (1710–1796), the founder of the Scottish School of Common Sense, and the French Oratorian and rationalist philosopher Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715). Subsequently, Renan developed a taste for German Idealism, immersing himself in Kant, Herder, and Hegel. As so often (and as had, in fact, been predicted by Jacobi), German Idealism turned out to be a veritable machine de guerre against the Christian faith, eroding the very religious belief which Kant, in separating it from knowledge, had ostensibly sought to protect. Renan began to become aware of a contradiction between philosophy and faith, between metaphysics and religion, but he was unsure how to resolve this conflict. Was the answer philosophy or mathematics? In a letter to his sister, Henriette, of 23 March 1842, Renan declared that “la philosophie est maintenant mon étude, je dirai même mon étude de goût,” yet he also observed that philosophy might not be the answer, since “il ne faut pas s’attendre à trouver en philosophie cette certitude absolue qui distingue par exemples les mathématiques.” Equally, however, he rejected scepticism: for while its hypotheses “semblent souvent s’approcher de la vérité autant qu’il est donné à notre faible raison,” the demand for truth was yet stronger, and he could not free himself from “ce besoin de vérité, que la philosophie excite, et pourtant ne satisfait qu’à demi.”26 The decisive subject would turn out to be for Renan the same one as it would turn out to be for Nietzsche—philology. After his studies at Issy, Renan went to the college of St Sulpice with a view to preparing for the priesthood. Here he began to learn Hebrew, and he developed a sense of the variety of styles in the Old Testament. The difference in style between the first part of the Book of Isaiah and the second part pointed to a difference in date; the grammar of the Pentateuch indicates it was composed after the times of Moses; and the Book of Daniel was evidently written many centuries after the time in which the work is set. These philological insights raised further doubts in Renan’s mind; he left the college at St Sulpice for a lay college of the Oratorians and eventually returned wholly to secular life as a teacher in a boys’ school and then as a master in a lycée in Vendôme, before devoting himself entirely to scholarship.

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Renan was a profilic writer, and he published numerous works, including his Origins of Christianity (Histoire des origines du christianisme) in seven volumes (1863–1883) and his Histoire du peuple d’Israël in five volumes (1887–1893). Of the former work, its first volume, Vie de Jésus (1863), enjoyed enormous popularity when it was published. Renan had begun the book when he was travelling in Ottoman Syria and Palestine, using only a copy of the New Testament and of Josephus (his Jewish War and Antiquities of the Jews) as his reference sources; according to his critics, this shows. Renan followed up this work a further six volumes in relatively rapid succession: The Apostles (Les Apôtres, 1866), St Paul (Saint Paul, 1869), Antichrist (L’Antéchrist, 1873), The Gospels (Les Évangiles et la Seconde Génération Chrétienne, 1877), The Christian Church (L’Église Chrétienne, 1879), and Marcus Aurelius (Marc-Aurèle et la Fin du Monde Antique, 1882). According to Martin Pernet, Nietzsche may first have come across Renan’s Vie de Jésus when reading Das Charakterbild Jesu (1864; 41873; Engl. trans. from 3rd edn, 1869) by the Swiss Protestant theologian Daniel Schenkel (Pernet 1989: 95; cited in Ottmann [ed.] 2000: 417). In the unpublished fragments of the Nachlass from 1873, Nietzsche compares Renan favourably to David Friedrich Strauß (KSA 7, 27[1], 587), praising his “elegance” (KSA 7, 34[37], 804). Almost a decade and a half later, Nietzsche read the remaining volumes of the Origines du christianisme, albeit (as he told Overbeck in a letter of 23 February 1887) “with much malice—and little profit” (KSB 8, 28),27 as well as Renan’s Dialogues philosophiques (1876). The parallels in their respective approaches to scholarship and to philosophy have been illuminatingly discussed by Sandro Barbera and Giuliano Campioni (Barbera and Campioni 1984). In his mature writings of the later 1880s, Renan became a significant point of reference for Nietzsche, albeit one that he now tended uniformly to eye with suspicion.28 Certainly, Renan supplied Nietzsche with plenty of material for his critique of the religious and moral history of Judeo-­ Christianity, but Nietzsche’s evaluation of this material was often the opposite of Renan’s. At the time that Nietzsche was working on Beyond Good and Evil, he described Renan in a note in his Nachlass from June to July 1885 as “a kind of Catholic Schleiermacher, sickly-sweet, bonbon, sentimentally appreciating landscapes and religions” (KSA 11, 38[5],

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599–600), and this summarizes well his attitude to the figure of Renan as discussed in his published writings, including The Anti-Christ. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche suggested that Catholicism was somehow more suited to southern peoples than to northern peoples, seeking to demonstrate this thesis by using Renan as an example: “How inaccessible the language of such a Renan sounds to us northerners: at one instant after another some nothing of religious tension unbalances his soul, which is, in the more refined sense, voluptuous and inclined to stretch out comfortably” (BGE §48). To illustrate this point, Nietzsche cited a passage from an essay by Renan, “L’avenir religieux des sociétés modernes,” first published in the Revue des mondes modernes in 1860 and later included in his collection, Questions contemporaines.29 Here Renan proposed the views that “religion is the product of a normal man” and that “man is closest to the truth when he is most religious and most certain of an infinite destiny,” concluding: “It is when he is good that he wants virtue to correspond to an eternal order; it is when he contemplates things in a disinterested manner that he finds death revolting and absurd. How can we but suppose that it is in moments like this that man sees best?” (cf. BGE §48). Nietzsche can barely disguise—in fact, he cannot disguise—his indignation at these lines, which he regards as “so utterly antipodal to my ears and habits that on finding them my first wrath wrote in the margin, ‘la niaiserie religieuse par excellence!’” (BGE §48). Yet his “subsequent wrath” changed into a different response and he “actually took a fancy to them,” inasmuch as these sentences stood truth “on its head”: in Renan, Nietzsche now saw someone he regarded as his “own antipodes” (BGE §48). In the third essay of On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche launched a blistering attack on contemporary styles of historiography, excoriating in particular a group he dismissively called the “contemplatives”: “I know of nothing that excites such disgust,” Nietzsche wrote, “as this kind of ‘objective’ arm-chair scholar, this kind of scented voluptuary of history, half person, half satyr, perfume by Renan, who betrays immediately with the high falsetto of his applause what he lacks, where he lacks it, where in this case the Fates have applied their cruel shears with, alas, such surgical skill!” (GM III §26). Such historians, Nietzsche added, offended his taste and his patience alike.

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In the section “Expeditions of an Untimely Man” in Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche devoted a passage to dismantling the reputation of Renan, under the slogan of “theology, or the perversion of reason by ‘original sin’”30: He desires, with no little ambition, to represent an intellectual aristocratism; but at the same time he lies on his knees (and not on his knees only) before the antithetical doctrine, the évangile des humbles … What is the good of all freethinking, modernism, gibing, and wry-necked dexterity, if you continue to be a Christian, a Roman Catholic, and even a priest, in your intestines! (TI Expeditions §2)

As usual, however, Nietzsche’s ire was directed not (just) at Renan as an individual but as a type31—as a way of approaching the question of religion in a way that Nietzsche considered to be as disingenuous as it was deleterious: Renan’s ingenuity lies in his seductiveness, just as in the case of the Jesuit and the confessor; the broad priestly smirk is not lacking in his intellectuality, like all priests he only becomes dangerous when he loves. Nobody equals him in his faculty for idolising in a fatally dangerous manner … This spirit of Renan, a spirit which enervates, is an additional calamity for poor, sick, feeble-willed France. (TI Expeditions §2)

Thus in Nietzsche’s writings as a whole there is a context to the remarks he makes about Renan in The Anti-Christ. In his discussion of Christianity from the perspective of the will-to-­ power in section 17 of that work, Nietzsche questions an assumption he attributes to (among others) Renan that “the evolution of the concept of God from ‘the God of Israel,’ the god of a people, to the Christian God, the essence of all goodness,” represents progress; rather, Nietzsche argues, it represents a decline (AC §17).32 And in section 29, Nietzsche accuses Renan—whom he colourfully describes as “this buffoon in psychologicis”—as having “contributed the two most unseemly notions to this business of explaining the type of Jesus: the notion of the genius and that of the hero” (AC §29).33 Nietzsche rejects both of these terms in relation to

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Jesus and provocatively suggests replacing it with the word “idiot” (AC §29).34 In using this designation of Jesus as a “type” and as this particular type, Nietzsche is clearly distancing himself from Renan.35 To the extent that Nietzsche presents Jesus in psychological or physiological terms, he is decisively moving away from any attempt to place Jesus in an eschatological framework.36 In fact, he is placing a question-­ mark over the entire project of writing a biography of Jesus, much as he had done in his letter to Overbeck of 23 February 1887 when he wrote about Renan’s Origines: “This entire history of conditions and sentiments in Asia Minor seems to me to float in the air in a funny way. In the end my mistrust even goes so far as to ask if history is even possible at all? What does one hope to establish?—something which in the moment it was happening was itself not ‘established’?” (KSB 8, 28). As Andreas Urs Sommer points out, Nietzsche’s genealogical method stands in radical opposition to Renan’s biographical project, with its narrative realism and its omniscient narrator (NK 6/2, 417), and much the same point was made by Overbeck in his review of the sixth edition of Renan’s Vie de Jésus in 1863: “To write a biography of Jesus is itself an aberration for the simple reason that one cannot write a biography of a life about which all that has come down to us, aside from a very few notes, covers in all probability no more than a year” (Overbeck 2010, 387). Indeed, Gary Shapiro has gone even further and argued that Nietzsche’s “non-narrative ‘life of Jesus’ is really an attack on the narrative principle itself ” (Shapiro 1982, 219). Nevertheless, elsewhere in The Anti-Christ Nietzsche draws on material derived from Renan’s Origines, particularly the Vie de Jésus. Sometimes there are precise references, but often the link is more allusive. For instance, when in section 17 Nietzsche talks about the Christian God’s empire as being “a kingdom of the underworld, a souterrain kingdom, a ghetto kingdom” (AC §17), is this a deliberate echo of the opening sentence to Renan’s Vie—“A history of the ‘Origins of Christianity’ should include the entire obscure and, if I may make so bold to say, subterranean period that extends from the beginnings of this religion to the moment when its existence became a public fact, recognized and obvious to all eyes”?37 Or is it rather a covert reference to the title of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, translated into the French edition read by Nietzsche

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as L’esprit souterrain (NK 6/2, 104–105)? As Sommer observes, although Nietzsche commented negatively on Renan in his letter to Overbeck, an analysis of The Anti-Christ shows the extent to which Nietzsche is in fact himself indebted to Renan’s Vie (NK 6/2, 105). For instance, Nietzsche’s emphasis on Christianity’s addictions to “priggish creeping around,” to “conventicle secrecy,” and to “dismal ideas like hell, like the sacrifice of the innocent, like the unio mystica in the drinking of blood” (AC §58), as well as on Paul’s enthusiastic adoption of “the need for mysteries of the great religiously-aroused masses” (cf. KSA 13, 11[282], 108–109), derives in part from Renan, who drew attention to the parallels between Christianity and Mithraism (as well as other oriental cults).38 In section 53 of The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche embarks on a critique of martyrdom with these words, “It is so little true that martyrs offer any support to the truth of a cause that I am inclined to deny that any martyr has ever had anything to do with the truth at all” (AC §53). In adopting this position, Nietzsche is aligning himself entirely with Renan’s view in his Origines du christianisme, summed up in this statement in L’église chrétienne: “Martyrdom in no way proves the truth of a doctrine; but it proves the impression that it makes on souls, and that is all that matters for its success.”39 Nietzsche’s remark that “in the very tone in which a martyr flings what he fancies to be true at the head of the world there appears so low a grade of intellectual honesty and such insensibility to the problem of ‘truth,’ that it is never necessary to refute him” (AC §53) finds a parallel in Renan’s assertion in Les apôtres that “the martyr is in matters of religion what the party supporter is in politics” and “there have not been many very intelligent martyrs.”40 Nietzsche’s critique of martyrdom and his description of early Christianity as “a cause that produces a longing for death of epidemic proportions” (AC §53) echoes Renan’s description of the desire for martyrdom as “a fever that becomes impossible to control.”41 And similarly, his assertion that “the martyrs have damaged the truth” (AC §53) aligns itself with the Gnostics’ critique of martyrdom as recorded by Renan.42 There is also a close proximity between Nietzsche’s view of Christ and Renan’s. After all, in Nietzsche’s characterization of Jesus as someone who was, on the one hand, Buddha-like and, on the other, “[an] aggressive

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fanatic, [a] mortal enemy of theologians and ecclesiastics, who stands glorified by Renan’s malice as ‘le grand maître en ironie’” (AC §31), there is an explicit reference to Renan’s Vie de Jésus and to an aspect of Jesus’s character as an opponent of the Pharisees that had, in Renan’s view, cost Jesus his life.43 In section 32 Nietzsche goes on to say that he is also opposed to “all efforts to introduce the fanatic into the type of the redeemer” (AC §32), adding that “the very word impérieux, used by Renan, is alone enough to annul the type” (AC §32). In so writing, Nietzsche is alluding to the passage in Les Évangiles where Renan refers to Jesus as “this young Jew, at once gentle and terrible, tender and imperious, naïve and profound, full of the disinterested zeal of a sublime morality and the eagerness of an exalted personality, [who] did really exist [a bel et bien existé].”44 And when Nietzsche writes that “the whole ecclesiastical dogma of the Jews was denied by the ‘glad tidings’” (AC §33), he is echoing Renan’s opposition in Vie de Jésus between “tradition, such a holy matter for the Jews” and “pure feeling.”45 Moreover, when Nietzsche writes that Jesus was “a great symbolist” who “regarded only subjective realities as realities, as ‘truths’” (AC §34), he is echoing Renan’s description of Jesus as someone who was “not a spiritualist […] and yet a complete idealist, for whom matter was nothing but a sign of the idea, and the real a living expression of what cannot be seen.”46 By contrast, when Nietzsche asserts that the concept “Son of Man” does not “connote a concrete person in history, an isolated and definite individual,” but rather “an ‘eternal’ fact, a psychological symbol set free from the concept of time” (AC §34), he seems to be opposing Renan’s interpretation of the figure, originally found in the Book of Daniel (7:13–14), of the Son of Man as an expression of Messianic hopes.47 In relation to what Nietzsche calls “the ‘sonship of God’” (AC §34), Renan describes the notion of filial relation as possessing an apocalyptic connotation, something absent from Nietzsche’s interpretation.48 True, when Nietzsche interprets the signs “father” and “son” along the lines that “the word ‘son’ expresses entrance into the feeling that there is a general transformation of all things (beatitude), and the word ‘father’ expresses that feeling itself—the sensation of eternity and of perfection” (AC §34), he comes extremely close to Renan’s description of the relation between the Son and the Father.49 Yet in his presentation of the

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“kingdom of God” as “not something that one waits for: it has no yesterday and no day after tomorrow, it is not going to come at a ‘millennium’—it is an experience of the heart, it is everywhere and it is nowhere” (AC §34), it is as if Nietzsche is explicitly opposing the view of le royaume de Dieu as set out in its eschatological dimension by Renan in his Vie de Jésus.50 As Sommer notes, in this section of The Anti-Christ Nietzsche erases all aspects of Jesus that link him to eschatology or to political theology. For Sommer, what Nietzsche undertakes is nothing less than a systematic “de-eschatologization” (eine konsequente Enteschatologisierung) of Jesus and thus he develops a position diametrically opposed to Renan’s; an argumentational manoeuvre that contrasts markedly with the way that in The Anti-Christ Nietzsche stages the end of Christianity itself (NK 6/2, 177). Nietzsche’s description of Jesus as “this saintly anarchist” (AC §27) (cf. KSA 13, 11[280], 107) seems to expand Renan’s understanding of Jesus as an anarchist in a purely spiritual sense, extolling “a pure worship, a religion without priests and without exterior practices, based entirely on the feelings of the heart, on the imitation of God, on the immediate relation between the conscience and the heavenly Father.”51 Yet  when Nietzsche wonders aloud how it was possible for the nineteenth century, so proud of its “historical sense,” to believe that Christianity began with the fable of a miracle-working redeemer and that “everything spiritual and symbolic developed only later on,” rather than seeing that “the history of Christianity” is “the story of a progressively clumsier misunderstanding of an original symbolism” (AC §37), he is articulating a position that directly contradicts the position taken by Renan. For at the beginning of his Vie de Jésus, Renan suggests that symbolism, particularly as it developed in Egypt, was a relatively late cultural phenomenon,52 and in an appendix about the Gospel of John, Renan presents symbolism as an Egyptian-cum-Alexandrinian product of only secondary importance. He insists that the gospel is dogmatic, rather than allegorical, and he sets it in contrast to such genuinely allegorical writings as the Book of Revelation, the Shepherd of Hermas, and the Pistis Sophia.53 When Nietzsche notes how “the physiologically retrograde” and “the weak” do not call themselves weak but instead “the good” (AC §17), he is echoing a line in the Vie de Jésus in which Renan writes of how the

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prophets had established a “close relation” between the words “poor, gentle, humble, pious” and between the words “rich, impious, violent, bad.”54 Further in this section, Nietzsche wonders aloud, “how can we be so tolerant of the naïveté of Christian theologians as to join in their doctrine that the evolution of the concept of God from ‘the god of Israel,’ the god of a people, to the Christian God, the essence of all goodness, is to be described as progress?”—a position explicitly associated with Renan when he exclaims, “as if Renan had a right to be naïve!” (AC §17). As Sommer notes, Nietzsche was probably thinking here of passages in Vie de Jésus where Renan writes that “the God of Jesus is not the biased despot who has chosen Israel for his people and protects them from and against everyone else,” but “the God of humanity.”55 And as Sommer further notes, Nietzsche always sought to distance himself from those liberal theologians who saw in Christianity the development of a humanist conception of the deity that could be distinguished from the notion of a Jewish tribal god.56 By contrast, Renan distinguishes this humanitarian and universalist notion of God from earlier Jewish conceptions and attributes its invention or discovery to Jesus.57 It is not so much that Nietzsche denies to Jesus such creative originality, but rather he views the shift in the conception of God from the tribal deity of Israel via the Exile and post-Exile God of the chosen to the universalist God of Christianity as the reverse of what Renan and liberal theologians suggest—for Nietzsche sees it as a series of steps in the history of decadence (NK 6/2, 103). As Schweitzer points out in his account of the quest for the historical Jesus, Renan’s Life went through eight editions in three months; it provoked a host of responses, some of them as equally popular (e.g., Charles-­ Émile Freppel’s Examen critique de la vie de Jesus de M. Renan [1863] was, by 1864, already in its twelfth edition) (Schweitzer 1910, 188). There was an outpouring of articles about Renan’s Life in such popular learned journals as the Siècle, the Débats, the Temps, and the Revue des deux mondes, and there was an extremely mixed response from the theological establishment. The view of the Protestant theologian, Timothée Colani (1824–1888), one of the founding editors of the Revue de théologie et de philosophie chrétienne and a member of the group of liberal theologians called “l’École de Strasbourg,” was typical of the one held by many of his theological colleagues:

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This is not the Christ of history, the Christ of the Synoptics, but the Christ of the Fourth Gospel, though without His metaphysical halo, and painted over with a brush which has been dipped in the melancholy blue of modern poetry, in the rose of the eighteenth-century idyll, and in the grey of a moral philosophy which seems to be derived from La Rochefoucauld. […] We opened M. Renan’s book with sympathetic interest; we closed it with deep disappointment.58

Schweitzer notes that the excitement on the other side of the Rhine, that is, in Germany, was no less than it was in Paris. Within a year of its publication, five different German translations of Renan’s Life appeared; many of the French critiques were also translated into German; while the Protestant press was “more restrained,” the German Catholic press responded with “wild excitement” (Schweitzer 1910, 190). Some readers, such as Willibald Beyschlag (1823–1900), saw Renan as an advance on Strauß, inasmuch as Renan’s Jesus as narrated in the Gospels is, while not supernatural, nevertheless historical; others, such as Karl Heinrich Weizsäcker (1822–1899), saw Renan as a deliverer from Strauß, inasmuch as Renan had defended the Fourth Gospel as an historical source of sorts; while Strauß himself hailed Renan in his preface to his Life of Jesus for the German People as a kindred spirit and an ally (ibid., 190–191). For his part, Schweitzer aligns himself with the view expressed by the Lutheran theologian Christoph Ernst Luthardt (1823–1902) in a lecture given in Leipzig in 1864 on the writings of Strauss, Renan, Daniel Schenkel [cf. Schweitzer 1910, 193], as well as Athanase Coquerel the younger [cf. ibid., 189], Timothée Colani, and Karl Theodor Keim (1825–1878) [cf. ibid., 93]. In this lecture, Luthardt replied to his own question, “what is there lacking in Renan’s work?”, with the lapidary answer, “it lacks conscience.”59 Schweitzer agrees with this assessment, and he identified another deficit (and, in some ways, an equally devastating one): that Renan’s Vie de Jésus is “written by [some]one to whom the New Testament was up to the last something foreign, who had not read it from his youth up in the mother-tongue, who was not accustomed to breathe freely in its simple and pure world, but must perfume it with sentimentality in order to feel himself at home in it” (ibid., 192).

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Now significantly, in the conclusion to the preface of his own Life of Jesus for the German People (Das Leben Jesu für das deutsche Volk bearbeitet) (1864), D.F. Strauß expressed the hope that he had written a book “as thoroughly well adapted for Germans as Renan’s is for Frenchmen” (cited in Schweitzer 1910, 193). (Now whether Strauß had succeeded in doing this is a moot point; Schweitzer did not believe Strauß had.) And this highlights the all-important cultural context to these different aspects of the quest for the historical Jesus; an issue to which Schweitzer is alert when he writes of Renan’s Vie de Jésus that “this work will always retain a certain interest” for French and German readers alike, albeit in different (and nationally characteristic) ways: “The German is often so completely fascinated by it as to lose his power of criticism, because he finds in it German thought in a novel and piquant form,” he writes, “whereas the Frenchman discovers in it, behind the familiar form, which is here handled in such a masterly fashion, ideas belonging to a world which is foreign to him, ideas which he can never completely assimilate, but which yet continually attract him” (ibid., 191). Herein resides, for Schweitzer, the “imperishable charm” of this work’s “double character,” albeit with the major reservations noted above. Perhaps Nietzsche’s dual response—his sneering response to Renan, and nevertheless his use of Renan’s work as a source for material for The Anti-­ Christ—is more typical of the general response to Renan than is usually appreciated or than one might otherwise assume.

Renan’s Influence Beyond Nietzsche Nowadays it can be hard to appreciate the extent to which Renan was what some people might call a “public intellectual.” In 1883 he was invited, for example, to preside over the prize-giving ceremonies of the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris and to make the principal address. One of the school’s pupils, Léon Daudet (1867–1942), later to become one of the right-wing ideologues who formed the Action française, recalled how Renan addressed the students “with eyes half-closed in his large elephant’s face without a trunk” (Daudet 1931, 9). Renan’s address became celebrated because he told the assembled students in front of him that the

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day would come when one of them would denounce him, Renan, as a corruptor of youth.60

Claudel Renan was proved right. Another of the pupils assembled to hear Renan that day was Paul Claudel (1868–1955), and this future poet and playwright would go on to denounce Renan in the most trenchant terms. But why? The answer lies with the impact made on Claudel by his reading of Renan’s Vie de Jésus. Although he was descended on both sides from families that had produced several Catholic priests, and although he made a good first communion, Claudel had as a teenager lost his faith. This loss was confirmed when he began attending the Lycée Louis-le-Grand—“As soon as I entered this establishment I lost the faith which seemed to me to irreconcilable with the plurality of worlds” —and when he read Renan’s Vie de Jésus, a work which “furnished a pretext for this change of ideas, and everything about me seemed to facilitate and encourage it.”61 For Claudel, Renan was emblematic of the epoch—an epoch contemporaneous with Nietzsche’s work on The Anti-Christ: […] This was during the 1880s, the period when the literature of naturalism was at its height. Never had the yoke of matter seemed firmer or better established. Everyone who enjoyed any sort of reputation in art or science or literature was irreligious, and all the so-called great men of the end of the century were noted for their hostility to the Church. Renan was king. (Claudel 1999, 453)

As Claudel makes clear, this situation was emblematic for the age, and it could be summarized as the triumph of reason and science over religion; a triumph of which Nietzsche saw himself as being a part as well: At eighteen, then, I believed much the same as most of my contemporaries who were supposed to be cultured. The deep idea of the individual and of the concrete had become dimmed. I accepted the monist and mechanist hypothesis in the strictest sense and believed that everything was bound by ‘laws’, and I assumed that this world was an unchanging series of causes

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and effects for which science was about to provide a perfect explanation. It all seemed rather boring and depressing. (Claudel 1999, 453)

No figure was more boring and depressing for the young Claudel than Kant, whose theory of duty was expounded to his class by their philosophy teacher, Auguste Burdeau (1851–1894). (Born as the son of a manual worker in Lyons, Burdeau had educated himself thanks to scholarly bursaries at the Lycée in Lyons and then the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris. He translated several works by Schopenhauer and by Herbert Spencer into French and went on to become minister of education, then minister of finance, and president of the chamber of deputies.) In fact, in a letter written in January 1904 to the celebrated art dealer Gabriel Frizeau (1870–1938), Claudel associated Kant with Renan and charged both with being responsible for this depressing worldview: I had a youth which was very similar to yours: a pious childhood, [then] the odious [infâme] lycée with the odious doctrines of the day, the philosophy of Kant and Renan. The latter scoundrel [misérable] uttered the most horrible blasphemy which has ever left human lips: ‘Perhaps the truth is sad.’ In those days I believed there was no mystery in the world, that everything was explained by ‘scientific laws’ and that the machinery of the universe could be dismantled like a sewing-machine.62

To judge by Claudel’s experience, the only exit route out of the mechanistic worldview of modernity was by (a return to) faith through the experience of conversion, a process which in Claudel’s case had two pivotal moments: one during the office of Vespers celebrated in the cathedral of Notre Dame on Christmas Day in 1886, and the other when he returned to full participation in the sacraments of the Church on Christmas Day in 1890. The first of these experiences, which occurred during the singing of the liturgical canticle known as the Magnificat, was described by Claudel himself in 1913 in “Ma conversion” as follows: I myself was standing in the crowd near the second pillar at the entrance to the choir on the right of the sacristy. It was then that the event took place which revolutionized my whole life. Suddenly my heart was touched and I

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BELIEVED. [En un instant mon cœur fut touché et je crus.] I believed with such power, with such force of my whole being, with a conviction that was so overwhelming and a certainty that shut out so completely any tiniest doubt—that nothing since, neither books nor reasoning nor the vicissitudes of an extremely varied life, has been able to shake or even to touch my faith. I was overcome with a sudden and overwhelming sense of the innocence and the eternal infancy of God—an inexpressible revelation. (Claudel 1999, 454)

(Nor was Claudel alone in undergoing such an experience; in 1879 Léon Bloy, in 1889 Paul Bourget, in 1892 Joris-Karl Huysmans, in 1898 François Coppée, and in 1905 Ferdinand Brunetière were likewise converted [Sageret 1906].) Precisely this experience was missing from Nietzsche’s life. Or was it? After all, in Ecce Homo we find Nietzsche’s account of his experience in Sils Maria of the doctrine of eternal recurrence: “[…] I happened to be wandering through the woods alongside the Lake of Silvaplana, and I halted not far from Surlei, beside a huge rock that towered aloft like a pyramid. It was then that the thought struck me” (EH Z §1). In its turn, this experience informed the composition of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, prompting Nietzsche to ask: “Has any one at the end of the nineteenth century any distinct notion of what poets of a stronger age understood by the word inspiration?”, and to go on to describe it: “The idea of revelation, in the sense that something which profoundly convulses and upsets one becomes suddenly visible and audible with indescribable certainty and accuracy—describes the simple fact. One hears—one does not seek; one takes—one does not ask who gives: a thought suddenly flashes up like lightning, it comes with necessity, without faltering—I have never had any choice in the matter” (EH Z §3).

Alfred Loisy In his recent study of the work of Renan, Robert D. Priest notes that the period after 1870 was a time of religious revival outside the Church, citing Hervé Serry’s remark that it was the time of “the birth of the Catholic intellectual,” and pointing to the public declarations of faith made not

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just by Claudel but also by the novelist, journalist, and politician Maurice Barrès (1862–1923) and by the novelist and critic Paul Bourget (1852–1935). (Bourget, it will be remembered, is widely considered to be a likely source of Nietzsche’s concept of décadence.)63 Like Claudel, Bourget was worried about the ethical and metaphysical consequences of Renan’s Vie de Jésus, but unlike Claudel, he was more generous in his attitude towards Renan and keen to defend him from his critics. In the preface to one of his collections of essays, Bourget imagined an adolescent boy, sitting at his desk one summer’s evening and absorbed in a book (perhaps Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, Flaubert’s Salammbô, Taine’s Thomas Graindorge, Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir … or perhaps Renan’s Vie de Jésus) and experiencing something far more intense than any engagement with the physical world could bring. Bourget hailed Renan as belonging to the “celebrated writers” of the age, claiming that “the good fortunes of destiny have led him to represent to a high degree one or two states of mind [trois états de l’âme] characteristic of our nineteenth century as its draws to its close” and asking: “[…] To how many of us has he revealed strange horizons of their own heart [and] how many of his readers have just read a poem by Baudelaire and demand the same kind of stimulation?” (Bourget 1885, vi–vii and 38). Praising Renan for his sensibility, his dilettantism (in the positive sense), his religious sentiment, and his aristocratic dream, Bourget identifies “democracy” and “science” as the “two great forces of modern societies,” albeit ones that pull in contrary directions, democracy tending to level out differences, while science tends to create differences. Of the possible solutions to this antinomy, Bourget endorsed the one proposed in Renan’s Dialogues philosophiques by Théoctiste, namely, an “aristocratic ideal” consisting of “the victory of an oligarchy of the future” (which has a highly Nietzschean resonance).64 Within the Catholic hierarchy there was a response to Renan as well, exemplified by such figures as the Dominican Catholic priest and founder of the École Biblique in Jerusalem, Marie-Joseph Lagrange (1855–1938), and the Catholic priest, professor, and founder of biblical modernism in the Roman Catholic Church, Alfred Loisy (1857–1940). According to one commentator, “the profit to be drawn from a study of the Catholic career of Alfred Loisy” is so great because in this career the issue of

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progressivism and conservatism, that is, “this principle of the complete relativity of ecclesiastical doctrine through all the past, and its further progress through all the future” and “the repeated and at length definitive refusal by the Pope and his advisers to abandon one jot or tittle of the rigid absolutism of the mediaeval structure of dogma,” is “joined with a clarity and a completeness not elsewhere surpassed if anywhere equaled” (Boynton 1918, 44–45). In 1883, the same year as Renan attended the school prize-giving at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and spoke in front of Claudel, Loisy was reading the Vie de Jésus during the summer recess in Renan’s lecture course on the Semitic languages at the Collège de France in Paris that he, Loisy, had begun attending in December 1882. In his autobiographical work entitled Choses passées (1913)—a work that has been described as “a classic,” worthy of being placed alongside the Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864; 1865) of John Henry Newman (1801–1890) and the Souvenirs d’Enfance and de Jeunesse (1883) of Renan, and as “a document of outstanding significance for the intellectual and religious evolution of the last quarter-century”65—Loisy set out his radical views—radical, that is, for their time—on the inspiration of biblical scripture, namely: […] that the inspiration of the Scriptures, having to do with existing writings, subject to analysis, was a belief to be controlled by the study of the books in question; that the psychology of the inspired authors was visibly the same as that of all men who write; that whatever inspiration might add of the divine, changed not at all the nature of the writings to which it pertained, and did not transform a pseudonymous book, like The Wisdom of Solomon, into an authentic work of Solomon; that, if the revelation was contained in the Bible, and without error, as declared by the Vatican Council, it was under a relative form, proportioned to the time and to the environment in which the books had appeared, as well as to the general outlook of that time and environment; that the insufficiency of the Scriptures as a rule of faith resulted from their very nature, and that the magistracy of the Church had for its object the adaptation of ancient doctrine to ever-new needs, in disengaging the essential truth from its superannuated expression; that authors like Iranaeus and Tertullian had anticipated this when they had opposed to the extravagent exegesis of the Gnostics not

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the letter of the Bible, interpreted by common sense, but the ecclesiastical rule of faith, imposed on the Bible as the rule for its interpretation.66

Although Loisy was excommunicated in 1908,67 the modernist crisis that had erupted in 1902 with the publication of L’Évangile et l’Église and led in 1907 to the condemnation by Pope Pius X in the papal encyclical letter Pascendi Domini gregis (or, in English, “Feeding the Lord’s Flock”), subtitled “On the Doctrines of the Modernists,” of modernism as “the synthesis of all heresies” (§39), did not quickly abate.68 Many of the issues first raised by Loisy, including the application of historical-critical methods to biblical exegesis as practised by, for example, François Laplanche (1928–2009), remained controversial in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. That said, a major shift has nevertheless taken place. As Philippe Rolland has pointed out, the Bible de Jérusalem (the basis for the English language Jerusalem Bible) of 2001 that was given the imprimatur by the Bishops’ Conference of France in 1999, cheerfully states that, for example, the Second Letter of Peter dates from the middle of the second century after Jesus Christ, that is, around the year 150 CE, which would be more than eighty years after the death of the apostle Peter who is said to have written it. In other words, the real author (assuming, of course, that there is just one single author) of this letter had probably not even been born when Peter died as a martyr, and the ideas contained in the letter are those, not of Peter, but of someone else. The attribution to Peter is, in this sense, entirely fictive. Yet the ecclesiastical authorities have no objection to this view being taught, however widely.69 In other words, the once heretical views of Loisy have become the new orthodoxy. The establishment of this new orthodoxy took a long time, however, and had its roots in initiatives undertaken by Catholicism in the same epoch when Nietzsche was writing The Anti-Christ. Taking its cue from the thinking that would lead in 1893 to Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Providentissimus Deus, which envisaged equipping young biblical scholars with “all the weapons of the best science” (§22),70 in 1890 a group of French Dominican priests, led by Lagrange, founded in Jerusalem the École pratique d’études bibliques, an institute for archaeology and Biblical exegesis now known as the École biblique et archéologique française de Jérusalem, or simply as the École Biblique. In the form of its journal, the

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Revue biblique, founded in 1892 by Pierre Batiffol and Lagrange, and its landmark project published as the Bible de Jérusalem (in its first edition in 1956, followed by second and third editions in 1973 and 1998, and now undergoing further revision in the form of a project known as La Bible en ses Traditions), the École has played a leading role in establishing critical scholarly approaches to the exegesis of biblical text. In his speech delivered at the opening ceremony of the École, Lagrange declared: “We no longer wish […] to fight a false science with obsolete weapons, going to war with a crossbow against a primed canon. Let us thus try […] to explore the quarry alongside [secular scholars]; and if we find enemies along the way, let us try to have the cannons on our side.”71 In short, Lagrange saw the work of the École as a response to Renan’s legacy in the field of biblical studies. If one can read Lagrange’s memorable declaration at the opening ceremony of the École Biblique as an expression of the 1890s “culture wars” (as Robert B.  Priest does), it also points to the wider confrontation between the two discourses of philology and theology that was taking place in the late nineteenth century in general and the work of Nietzsche in particular. In a sense, as Nietzsche himself would have realized, a battle between these two discourses had been taking place since the foundational moment in Western culture that had been the translation of the Bible from Greek into Latin. As the specialist in early Christian Greek and Latin language and liturgy, Christine Mohrmann (1903–1988), argued in Liturgical Latin: Its Origin and Character (1957), “a language is not merely a sort of code to facilitate intercourse between human beings in daily life” and “the phenomenon of language is infinitely more complicated and has many more functions than that of communication among people” (Mohrmann 1957, 2). Mohrmann built on the work of the Geneva School as represented by Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) or Charles Bally (1865–1947), who saw language essentially as a medium of expression (i.e., language serves not only to communicate actual facts, but is also interpreter of all the motions and workings of the human mind—and human sensibility). In his Linguistique générale et linguistique française (21944), Bally argued that whereas language as communication strives towards certain degree of efficiency and hence linguistic simplification and standardization, language

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as expression demonstrates a tendency to become richer and more subtle, more expressive and picturesque, reflected in the coining of new words as well as the preservation of antiquated elements (Bally 1944, 363–370). This conflict between language as communication and language as expression drove the cause of linguistic art, so that Hugo Schuchardt could conclude, Aus der Not geboren gipfelt die Sprache in der Kunst (i.e., language born of necessity finds its highest point in art).72 According to Mohrmann, during the first centuries of the Christian era educated Latins found the form of the earliest Bible translations “a source of embarrassment and an obstacle to the propagation of Christianity among the higher classes” (Mohrmann 1957, 39). That said, she rejected “as fable” the idea (for which St Augustine was “to a certain extent responsible”) of “‘barbaric’ Bible translations […] executed by barely literate translators,” arguing that, “although the earliest Bible translations did indeed incorporate elements of popular speech [and] their style did depart from that of the Classical tradition,” they “reproduced the original texts with a good deal of finesse” and “were in no way ‘barbarous’” (ibid., 39). For even though, in his youth, St Augustine was contemptuous of the biblical language and style of preceding generations, both he and St Ambrose were among those who acknowledged the beauty of the biblical style, even “in the untraditional garb of the early translations” (ibid., 40). Nevertheless, Mohrmann recognized that, due to “the enormous influence exercised by the traditional Classical literature” which formed the basis of the education of every cultivated person, it was “a long time before the literary prejudice against the Bible texts was overcome” (ibid., 39). Now of course we have to remember that Nietzsche for his part greatly lamented the loss of the “literary normativism” which had dominated the whole of late Classical education and sought instead to reactivate the literary methods of pagan classicism as a response to what he regarded as the “dishonesty” of Christian philology. While Mohrmann believed that it had taken a long time “before the literary prejudice against the Bible texts was overcome” and that it was only by the end of the fourth century that Christians “attained the peak of early Christian culture and of literary and artistic formation,” became “conscious of distinctive character of the Christian tradition,” and recognized “its own rights in the domain of

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literary style,” Nietzsche would have fiercely rejected this conclusion not just on the grounds of aesthetics but on the grounds of philological accuracy. Yet there are problems with Nietzsche’s instrumentalization or even “weaponization” of the discourse of philology against the discourse of theology, as Anthony K.  Jensen has pointed out in his account of Nietzsche’s role in the “quest for the historical Jesus.”73 For Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity sits uncomfortably between, on the one hand, such earlier “questers” as D.F. Strauß in his Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet) of 1835–1836 (which was the object of Nietzsche’s attack in the first of his “Untimelies”) and Renan in his Histoire des origines du christianisme of 1863–1883 and his Vie de Jésus of 1863, and, on the other, such later “questers” as Albert Schweitzer and the German historian and Monist philosopher, Arthur Drews (1865–1935), and his The Christ Myth (Die Christusmythe) of 1909. While Schweitzer’s Quest attempted (as we saw above) to amalgamate Strauß’s “mythicist” hypothesis with C.G.  Wilke’s promotion of the “Marcan priority” hypothesis and the “two-source” or “Q” hypothesis propounded by C.H. Weisse and restated by Heinrich Julius Holtzmann (1832–1910) in his early work on the Synoptics, The Synoptic Gospels: Their Origin and Historical Character (Die synoptischen Evangelien, ihr Ursprung und geschichtlicher Charakter) (1863), Drews proposed the far more radical view, pioneered by such writers as Bruno Bauer and  by Albert Kalthoff (1850–1906) in The Christ-Problem: The Basic Principles of a Social Theology (Das Christus-Problem: Grundlinien zu einer Sozialtheologie) (Leipzig 1902) and in How Christianity Arose: New Contributions to the Christ-Problem (Die Entstehung des Christentums: Neue Beiträge zum Christusproblem) (Leipzig 1904), that declared outright that the historical Jesus did not exist and that the story of Jesus is pure mythology, unfounded in any historical fact whatsoever. (For further discussion, see Chap. 4.) Yet for all that Nietzsche’s conclusions were consistent with the dominant scholarly interpretations of his day (even if less radical than some of them), they are highly problematic, as Jensen has with critical acumen shrewdly observed. For one thing, they are “poorly defended from an historical standpoint” compared with those other thinkers; for another, they deploy a

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circular logic. It is argued, for instance, that (a) Jesus could not have held metaphysical views because his metaphysical claims were purely symbolic and that (b) he must have been a “symbolist of internal truths” because he did not intend to erect a metaphysics, and likewise, that (a) because Jesus was, as an “idiot” (in the specific sense that Nietzsche uses the term to mean “the consequence of an extreme susceptibility to pain and irritation—so great that merely to be ‘touched’ becomes unendurable, for every sensation is too profound” [AC §30]), he could never have been a Jewish revolutionary, and (b) because he was no revolutionary and never resisted authority, therefore he was pathologically averse to pain and irritation (Jensen 2019, 125 and 119–123). Post hoc ergo propter hoc; or if a, then b, and if b, then a. In Jensen’s words, too often in The Anti-Christ “intuition and rhetoric subvert evidence and argument” (ibid., 125). What’s worse: such anti-theological arguments put forward by Nietzsche as that Christ was really “a great symbolist’ and “an idiot” are, while original, entirely speculative. And they can only remain speculation because of Nietzsche’s own philological arguments elsewhere. For if, as Nietzsche contends, the original texts about Jesus have been maliciously corrupted by those early Christians, then “no amount of reinterpretation of those same texts will bring us to a ‘truer’ picture of what kind of person Jesus was” (Jensen 2019, 125–126). Hence Jensen’s devastating conclusion that, if judged in terms of conventional historiography (i.e., measured in terms of accuracy, exhaustiveness, and evidence), then Nietzsche’s project in The Anti-Christ is a “a total failure” (ibid., 126). Yet Jensen is also fully aware that while Nietzsche “seems to claim some historical standing for his attributive portrait of the historical Jesus,” he “nowhere claims to be doing […] the kinds of ‘scientific’ historiography that all other ‘historical questers’”—that is, Strauß, Renan, Schweitzer, Drews, and so on—“presume to be history as such” (Jensen 2019, 132). For Jensen, Nietzsche is trying to do something different, using an historiographical method that draws a distinction between “true demonstration” and “conviction-force”—and contends that the latter rarely depends on the former.74 Or to put it another way: there are two kinds of lie, one being a deliberate misrepresentation of reality, the other being the delusion of not wanting to know or see what one does know or see (ibid., 133). While his view of Christ (in Jensen’s words) may fail to correspond

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to some “absolute reality,” Nietzsche’s purpose in lying is said to be “nobler” than that of the early Christians in general and of St Paul in particular—and indeed of the “historical questers” themselves—in its (vitalist) affirmation of natural life (ibid., 134). In other words, Nietzsche’s argument is situated at the meeting point of the two discourses of philology and theology, not so much questioning a single or absolute account of Jesus and the historiographical tradition as questioning whether we can ever have access to it through the texts that are available to us.

Notes 1. For critical responses to Schweitzer’s work, see Reumann 1981 and Gathercole 2000. For discussion of Nietzsche in relation to this tradition, see Jensen 2019 (see below). 2. See Bond 2012, 7–36; Jensen 2019, 135; and Theißen and Merz 1998, 2-12.  1988. Out of the extensive literature on this subject, see Kähler 1969 [1892]; Reiser 2015, 43–63; and Holmén and Porter 2019. 3. For further discussion of this approach, see Chap. 7 below. 4. Of course, the difficulty arises of knowing “whether the tradition of the virginal concepton is a Christian reworking of the Panthera story, or whether the Panthera story is an anti-Christian distortion of the Christian claim that Jesus was born of a virgin” (since the name Panthera has linguistic similarities with parthenos, the Greek word for virgin) (Bond 2012, 70). It is perhaps worth noting that two rabbinic traditions (b. Shabbat, 104b and b. Sanhedrin, 64a) refer to Jesus as “Ben Pantera; or Pandera” or “Ben Pandera” and that Pantera is mentioned as Mary’s extramarital lover (Voorst 2000, 117). 5. Taylor relates this remark to the proverb mentioned by Apuleius at the end of his Metamorphosis (or The Golden Ass), book 9, as well as to a Greek proverb mentioned by Menander, Plato, and others, which was applied to those anxious to know “things futile, frivolous, and entirely useless” (Taylor 2006, 70: footnote). 6. Augustine, The City of God, book 22, chapter 3 and book 18, chapter 22 (Augustine 1972: 1025 and 885). 7. For further discussion of Julian, see Jerphagnon 1986; and of the cultural background, see Cameron 2012; and Watts 2015.

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8. On Taylor’s account, “the religion of the heathens, as promulgated by Orpheus, Pythagoras, Plato, and their followers, is founded on the following principles”: “That the cause of all things is perfectly simple, unindigent, and beneficent, and that in consequence of this he cannot be more fitly denominated than by the epithets of The One and The Good; the former of these appellations denoting that all things proceed from him, and the latter that all things tend to him, as to the ultimate object of desire. […] It is, therefore, necessary from the preceding axioms, since there is one unity the principle of the universe, that this unity should produce from itself, prior to every thing else, a multitude of natures characterized by unity, and a number the most of all things allied to its cause; and these natures are no other than the gods” (Taylor 2006, 1–2). 9. For further discussion, see Christensen 1990. 10. See Graf 1982; Fabisiak 2015; and Beiser 2020. 11. For discussion of Schleiermacher’s work as a translator and translation theorist, see Hermans 2019. 12. For further discussion, see Luft 1987. 13. For further discussion, see Schrofner 1975. 14. For further discussion, see the introduction and notes in Schleiermacher 1996. 15. For further discussion, see Stewart 2021, 118–140. 16. See Hegel (2006) and, for the full three-volume set, see Hegel (2007). For further discussion of the significance of Hegel’s view of religion for the development of nineteenth-century German philosophy, see Stewart 2021, 39–64. 17. For further discussion, see Crouter 1980 and Hodgson 1985a. 18. See Hodgson, “Editorial Introduction,” in Hegel 2006, 1–71 (here: 15). 19. December 1835, no. 110, 881–888; no. 111, 889–894; no. 112, 897–904; no. 113, 905–912; May 1836, 689–694; no. 88, 697–904. 20. Cf. Nietzsche’s letters to Taine of 4 July 1887; to Brandes of 2 December 1887; to Spitteler of 10 February 1888 and again of 25 July 1888, where he went so far as to claim that after reading his first Untimely Reflection Bauer had become a Nietzschean! For further discussion, see Benz 1956, 104–121, and Ottmann 2000, 413. 21. Overbeck’s review of Christus und die Cäsaren, see Theologische Literaturzeitung, Nr. 13 (1878), Sp. 314–319. For discussion of Overbeck’s reception of Bruno Bauer, see Overbeck 2010, 403–406. 22. See Tchijéwsky 1929.

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23. For a recent restatement (by a self-described “enthusiastic amateur religious historian”…!) of this argument (while indexing it to the god Baal rather than Moloch, and identifying the Phoenicians rather than the Canaanites as key figures) and its extension to one about human sacrifice and Western religion as a whole, see Young 2016. 24. See Marx and Engels 2010, 241–246. 25. For further discussion, see Tradowsky 2012. 26. Cited in Gouhier 1972, 13. 27. Cf. Overbeck’s review of Renan’s Vie de Jésus (6th edn) in Literarisches Centralblatt für Deutschland, Nr. 45 (1863), Sp. 1057–1059. For a discussion of Overbeck’s reception of Renan, see Overbeck 2010, 377–381. 28. For further discussion, see Shapiro 1982; and on Renan in general, see Priest 2015. 29. See the discussion of Nietzsche’s source for this passage, most likely in Paul Bourget’s Essais de psychologie contemporaine (1883), see NK 5/1, 337–338. 30. See the commentary in NK 6/1, 402–406. 31. For a discussion of the accuracy of these remarks in respect of Renan as a person, see the contradictory accounts of Karl Hillebrand (1829–1884) and Georg Brandes (cited in NK 6/1, 406). 32. See Renan 1863: 74 and 78 (cited in NK 6/2, 103). 33. See Renan 1867: 392 (on Jesus as hero) and 362 (on Jesus as genius) (cited in NK 6/2, 152–153). On genius, see also TI Expeditions §44; and on the hero, see EH Clever §9. 34. For discussion of Nietzsche’s use of the term “idiot,” see David Marc Hoffmann’s entry on “Idiot” (in Ottmann 2000, 256). In a Nachlass note from Spring 1888 on “the type ‘Jesus,’” Nietzsche writes: “Jesus is the opposite of a genius: he is an idiot. […] One has to remember this: he is an idiot in the midst of a very clever people … Only his disciples weren’t ones — Paul was not an idiot at all! — and thereby hangs the history of Christianity” (KSA 13, 14[38], 237). 35. See Sommer’s entry on “Ernest Renan” (in Ottmann 2000, 417); cf. NK 6/2, 150. 36. Sommer (in Ottmann 2000, 417). Sommer writes that Nietzsche’s approach “de-eschatologizes” Jesus as “the psychological type of the redeemer” (ibid., 417). 37. Renan 1863, iii (cited in NK 6/2, 105).

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38. On parallels between Christianity and Mithraism as well as other mystery cults, see Renan 1882, 562–563 and 569–570; and Renan 1869, 142; and on Mithraism itself, see Renan 1882, 574–579 (cited in NK 6/2, 285). 39. Renan 1899, 317 (cited in NK 6/2, 248). Cf. Renan’s comments on the martyrdom of Stephen in Renan 1866, 146 (cited in NK 6/2, 248). 40. Renan 1866, 182 (cited in NK 6/2, 249). 41. Renan 1882, 251 (cited in NK 6/2, 251). 42. Renan 1889, 153 (cited in NK 6/2, 251). According to The Testimony of Truth, catholic Christians of the ecclesiastical establishment are “[empty] martyrs, since they bear witness only to themselves” (Giversen and Pearson Giversen et al. 1988, 451), and in his Miscellanies (or Stromata), volume 2, book 4, chapter 9, Clement of Alexandia attributes to Heracleon, a leading Valentinian Gnostic, the view that “there is a confession by faith and conduct, and one with the voice”: “The confession that is made with the voice, and before the authorities, is what the most reckon the only confession. Not soundly: and hypocrites also can confess with this confession” (Roberts et al. 1885, 442). 43. Renan 1863, 166 (cited in NK 6/2, 166). 44. Renan 1877, 76 (cited in NK 6/2, 167). 45. Renan 1863, 173 (cited in NK 6/2, 173). 46. Renan 1863, 251 (cited in NK 6/2, 173). 47. Renan 1863, 131–133 (cited in NK 6/2, 174). For further discussion of the biblical figure of the Son of Man, see Sommer 2000, 329: note 241; and Burkett 2000. 48. See NK 6/2, 174–175. 49. Renan 1863, 75 (cited in NK 6/2, 175–176). 50. Renan 1863, 113–129 and 270–289 (cf. NK 6/2, 177). 51. Renan 1863, 85–86, cf. 127 (cited in NK 6/2, 145). 52. Renan 1867, 3 (cited in NK 6/2, 183). 53. Renan 1867, 508 (cited in NK 6/2, 183). At this point Renan continues: “At its heart all this symbolism is the counterpart to the mythicism of Mr. Strauss: the recourse of theologians in desperate straits, saving themselves by means of allegory, myth, symbol. We, who are looking only for pure historical truth without the shadow of theological or political agenda, can be much freer. For us none of this is mythical or symbolic; it is all sectarian, popular history. One must be sceptical, but not rush to conclusions from comfortable explanations. One can provid various examples. The Alexandrinian School, as it is known from the writings of

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Philo, exercised without doubt a strong influence on the theology of the century of the apostles. But can one not see how this School pushes the preference for symbolism to the point of madness?” (Renan 1867, 508; cited in NK 6/2, 183). 54. Renan 1867, 180–181 (cited in NK 6/2, 101). Cf. BGE §195 on “the beginning of the slave rebellion in morals” and further echoes of Renan documented in NK 5/1, 526–528. 55. Renan 1863, 78 (cited in NK 6/2, 102). 56. See NK 6/2, 102; cf. Santaniello 1994, 122–134. 57. Renan 1863, 74 (cited in NK 6/2, 103). 58. See Colani 1864 (cited in Schweitzer 1910, 189). 59. See Luthardt 1864 (cited in Schweitzer 1910, 191). 60. See Fowlie 1957, 10. 61. Claudel, “My Conversion,” in Claudel 1999, 453. 62. Paul Claudel to Gabriel Frizeau on 24 January 1904; in Claudel, Jammes, and Frizeau 1952, 33 (cited in Priest 2015, 208). 63. See Paul Bourget, “Théorie de la décadence,” in Essais de psychologie contemporaine, vol. 1, which first appeared in 1883 (see Bourget 1926, 3–33). For further references by Nietzsche to Bourget, see his letters to Resa von Schirnhofer of 11 March 1885 (KSB 7, 18) and of June 1885 (KSB 7, 59). Recently, however, Greg Moore has pointed out that, before his reading of Bourget, Nietzsche had observed in a note from 1876 to 1877 that Cervantes’s Don Quixote “belongs to the decadence of Spanish culture” (KSA 8, 23[140], 454) and had remarked of Wagner’s Parsifal in a letter to Heinrich Köselitz of 25 July 1882: “What sudden décadence! And what Cagliostroism!” (KSB 6, 231) (see Moore 2002, 121). 64. Bourget 1885, 106–107. For further discussion, see Conway 2019. 65. See Boynton 1918, 37. 66. Loisy 1913, 72–73 (cited in Boynton 1918, 43–44). 67. See Pope 1904. 68. See Pius X 1907. 69. See Rolland 2002. 70. See Leo XIII 1893. 71. Lagrange 1890, 15 (cited in Priest, 2015, 203). 72. See Schuchard 1922, 211. 73. See Jensen 2019. For further perspectives, see Beilby and Eddy 2009. 74. Jensen 2019, 132; cf. Jensen 2013, 119–154.

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References Augustine. 1972. Concerning the City of God: Against the Pagans. Edited by David Knowles, translated by Henry Bettenson. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Bally, Charles. 1944. Linguistique générale et linguistique française. 2nd ed. Berne: Francke. Barbera, Sandro, and Giuliano Campioni. 1984. Wissenschaft und Philosophie der Macht bei Nietzsche und Renan. Nietzsche-Studien 13: 279-315. Bauer, Bruno. 1989. The Trumpet of the Last Judgement against Hegel the Atheist and Antichrist: An Ultimatum. Translated by Lawrence Stepelevich. Lewiston, NY: Mellen. ———. 2002. An English Edition of Bruno Bauer’s 1843 Christianity Exposed: A Recollection of the Eighteenth Century and a Contribution to the Crisis of the Nineteenth Century. Edited by Paul Trejo, translated by Jutta Hamm Esther Ziegler. Lewiston, NY: Mellen. Beilby, James K., and Paul Rohdes Eddy, eds. 2009. The Historical Jesus: Five Views. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press. Beiser, Frederick C. 2020. David Friedrich Strauß, Father of Unbelief: An Intellectual Biography. New York: Oxford University Press. Benz, Ernst. 1956. Nietzsches Ideen zur Geschichte des Christentums und der Kirche [Beihefte der Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte, vol. 3]. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Bond, Helen K. 2012. The Historical Jesus: A Guide for the Perplexed. London and New York: T. & T. Clark. Bourget, Paul. 1885. Essais de psychologie contemporaine: Baudelaire—M. Renan— Flaubert—M. Taine—Stendhal. 3rd ed. Paris: A. Lemerre. ———. 1926. Essais de psychologie contemporaine. Vol. 1. Paris: Plon. Boynton, Richard Wilson. 1918. The Catholic Career of Alfred Loisy. Harvard Theological Review 11 (1): 36–74. Burkett, Delbert. 2000. The Son of Man Debate: A History and Evaluation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cameron, Alan. 2012. The Last Pagans of Rome. New  York: Oxford University Press. Christensen, Peter G. 1990. ‘Christ and Antichrist’ as Historical Novel. Modern Language Studies 20 (3): 67–77. Claudel, Paul. 1999. My Conversion. In Pilgrim Souls: An Anthology of Spiritual Biographies, ed. Amy Mandelker and Elizabeth Powers, 452–457. New York: Simon & Schuster.

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Claudel, Paul, Francis Jammes, and Gabriel Frizeau. 1952. In Correspondance 1897–1938 avec des lettres de Jacques Rivière, ed. André Blanchet. Paris: Gallimard. Colani, Timothée. 1864. “Examen de la vie de Jésus de M. Renan.” Revue de théologie et de philosophie chrétienne; republished Strasbourg; Paris: Treutel et Wurtz; Cherbuliez. Conway, Daniel. 2019. Resurgent Nobility and the Problem of Self-­ Consciousness. In Nietzsche and “The Antichrist”: Religion, Politics and Culture in Late Modernity, ed. Daniel Conway, 181–203. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Crouter, Richard. 1980. Hegel and Schleiermacher at Berlin: A Many-Sided Debate. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 48: 19–43. Daudet, Léon. 1931. Fantômes et vivants. Paris: Grasset. Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology, translated by G.C. Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Elior, Rachel. 2009. Memory and Oblivion: The Secret of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Jerusalem: The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and Hakibbutz Hameuchad. Epstein, Klaus. 1966. The Genesis of German Conservatism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Eusebius. 1965. The History of the Church, translated by G.A.  Williamson. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Fabisiak, Thomas. 2015. The “Nocturnal Side of Science” in David Friedrich Strauss’s “Life of Jesus Critically Examined”. Atlanta: SBL Press. Forbes, Duncan. 1975. “Introduction.” In Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction: Reason in History, translated by H.B. Nisbet, vii– xxxvi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fowlie, Wallace. 1957. Paul Claudel. London: Bowes & Bowes. Garland, Henry and Mary. 1986. The Oxford Companion to German Literature. 2nd ed. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Gathercole, S[imon] J. 2000. The Critical and Dogmatic Agenda of Albert Schweitzer’s The Quest of the Historical Jesus. Tyndale Bulletin 51: 261–283. Giversen, Søren, Birger A. Pearson, and trans. 1988. The Testimony of Truth. In The Nag Hammadi Library in English, ed. James M.  Robinson, 3rd ed., 448–459. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Gouhier, Henri. 1972. Renan, auteur dramatique. Paris: Vrin. Graf, Friedrich Wilhelm. 1982. Kritik und Pseudo-Spekulation: David Friedrich Strauß als Dogmatiker im Kontext der positionellen Theologie seiner Zeit. Munich: Kaiser.

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Hegel, G.W.F. 2006. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: One-Volume Edition: The Lectures of 1827. Edited by Peter C. Hodgson, translated by R.F. Brown, P.C. Hodgson, and J.M. Stewart with R.S. Harris. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 2007. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. Edited by Peter C. Hodgson, translated by R.F. Brown, P.C. Hodgson, and J.M. Stewart with R.S. Harris, 3 vols (vol. 1, Introduction and the Concept of Religion; vol. 2, Determinate Religion; vol. 3, The Consummate Religion). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hermans, Theo. 2019. Schleiermacher. In The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Philosophy, ed. Piers Rawling and Philip Wilson, 17–33. London and New York: Routledge. Hodgson, Peter C. 1985a. Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel. In Nineteenth Century Religious Thought in the West, ed. Ninian Smart, John Clayton, Steven Katz, and Patrick Sherry, vol. 1, 81–21. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1985b. Hegel’s Christology: Shifting Nuances in the Berlin Lectures. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 53: 23–40. Hoffmann, R. Joseph, ed. and trans. 1994. Porphyry’s “Against the Christians”: The Literary Remains. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. Holmén, Tom, and Stanley E. Porter, eds. 2019. Handbook for the Study of the Historical Jesus, 4 vols. Leiden: Brill. Jensen, Anthony K. 2013. Nietzsche’s Philosophy of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2019. Nietzsche’s Quest for the Historical Jesus. In Nietzsche and “The Antichrist”, ed. Daniel Conway, 117–140. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Jerphagnon, Lucien. 1986. Julien dit l’Apostat. Paris: Seuil. Kähler, Martin. 1969. In Der sogenannte historische Jesus und der geschichtliche, biblische Christus, ed. Ernst Wolf, 4th ed. Munich: Kaiser. Lagrange, Marie-Joseph. 1890. Discours. In Couvent des pères dominicains de St Étienne, Jérusalem—Ouverture de l’École pratique d’Études bibliques, sous la présidence de Monsieur Ledoulz, Consul général de France, 15 novembre 1890, 10–16. Jerusalem: Imprimerie des PP. Franciscains. Leo XIII. 1893. Providentissimus Deus: Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII on the Study of Holy Scripture. Accessed 4 February 2022. https://w2.vatican.va/content/leo-­ xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-­xiii_enc_18111893_providentissimus-­ deus.html. Lim, Timothy H., and John J. Collins, eds. 2010. The Oxford Handbook of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Loisy, Alfred. 1913. Choses passées. Paris: Nourry.

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Luft, Eric von der, ed. and trans. 1987. Hegel, Hinrichs, and Schleiermacher on Feeling and Reason in Religion: The Texts of Their 1821–22 Debate. Lewiston, NY: Mellen. Luthardt, Christoph Ernst. 1864. Die modernen Darstellungen des Lebens Jesu: Eine Besprechung der Schriften von Strauss, Renan und Schenkel, sowie der Abhandlungen von Coquerel d[er] J[üngere], Scherer, Colani und Keim. Leipzig: Dörffling und Franke. Magny, Ariane. 2014. Porphyry in Fragments: Reception of an Anti-Christian Text in Late Antiquity. Farnham; Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. 2010. Collected Works, vol. 10, Works 1849–1851. Chadwell Heath: Lawrence & Wishart. Mohrmann, Christine. 1957. Liturgical Latin, Its Origins and Character. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Moore, Greg. 2002. Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Onfray, Michel. 2009. Les radicalités existentielles [Contre-histoire de la philosophie, vol. 6]. Paris: Grasset. Orsucci, Andrea. 1996. Orient—Okzident: Nietzsches Versuch einer Loslösung vom europäischen Weltbild. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter. Ottmann, Henning, ed. 2000. Nietzsche Handbuch: Leben—Werk—Wirkung. Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler. Overbeck, Franz. 2010. Werke und Nachlaß, vol. 3, Schriften bis 1898 und Rezensionen, edited by Hubert Cancik and Hildegard Cancik-Lindemaier. Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler. Pius X. 1907. Pascendi Dominici Gregis: Encyclical of Pope Pius X on the Doctrines of the Modernists. Accessed 4 February 2022. https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-­x/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-­x_enc_19070908_pascendi-­ dominici-­gregis.html. Pope, Hugh. 1904. The Condemnation of Four Works by the Abbé Loisy. The American Catholic Quarterly Review 29: 550–574. Priest, Robert D. 2015. The Gospel According to Renan: Reading, Writing, and Religion in Nineteenth-Century France. New York: Oxford University Press. Reiser, Marius. 2015. Kritische Geschichte der Jesusforschung: Von Kelsos und Origenes bis heute. Stuttgart: Verlag Katholisches Bibelwerk. Renan, Ernest. 1863. Vie de Jésus. Paris: Lévy. ———. 1866. Les Apôtres. Paris: Lévy. ———. 1867. Vie de Jésus, 3rd ed., revised and expanded. Paris: Lévy. ———. 1869. St Paul. Paris: Lévy. ———. 1877. Les Évangiles et la seconde génération chrétienne. Paris: Lévy.

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———. 1882. Marc-Aurèle et la fin du monde antique. Paris: Lévy. ———. 1889. L’Église chrétienne. 5th ed. Paris: Lévy. Reumann, John. 1981. ‘The Problem of the Lord’s Supper’ as Matrix for Albert Schweitzer’s ‘Quest of the Historical Jesus.’  New Testament Studies 27 (4): 475–487. Roberts, Alexander, James Donaldson, and Arthur Cleveland Coxe, eds. 1885. The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 2, Fathers of the Second Century: Hermas, Tatian, Theophilus, Athenagoras, and Clement of Alexandria. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Company. Rolland, Philippe. 2002. La mode “pseudo” en exégèse: le triomphe posthume d’Alfred Loisy. Paris: Éditions de Paris. Sageret, Jules. 1906. Les Grands convertis. Paris: Société du Mercure de France. Santaniello, Weaver. 1994. Nietzsche, God and the Jews: His Critique of Judao-­ Christianity in Relation to the Nazi Myth. Albany, NY: State Universityof New York Press. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1996. Dialectic, or, The Art of Doing Philosophy: A Study Edition of the 1811 Notes, edited and translated by Terrence N. Tice. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press. Schrofner, Erich. 1975. Erlösung in Geschichte: Zum Leben Jesu Schleiermachers. Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie 97 (1/2): 87–103. Schuchard, Hugo. 1922. In Hugo Schuchardt-Brevier: Ein Vademecum der allgemeinen Sprachwissenschaft, ed. Leo Spitzer. Halle an der Saale: Niemeyer. Schweitzer, Albert. 1910. The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede, trans. W. Montgomery. London: Black. Shapiro, Gary. 1982. Nietzsche Contra Renan. History and Theory 21 (2): 193–222. Sommer, Andreas Urs. 2000. Friedrich Nietzsches “Der Antichrist”: Ein philosophisch-historischer Kommentar. Basel: Schwabe. Stern, J.P. 1983. “Introduction.” In Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations., translated by R.J.  Hollingdale, vii–xxxii. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stewart, Jon. 2021. Hegel’s Century: Alienation and Recognition in a Time of Revolution. New York: Cambridge University Press. Strauß, David Friedrich. 1847. Der Romantiker auf dem Throne der Cäsaren, oder Julian der Abtrünnige. Ein Vortrag. Mannheim: Fr. Bassermann. Taylor, Thomas, ed. 1809. The Arguments of the Emperor Julian against the Christians translated from the Greek fragments preserved by Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria, to which are added, Extracts from the other works of Julian relative to the Christians. London: Printed for the Translator.

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Taylor, Thomas, trans. 2006. “Against the Christians” and Other Writings [Thomas Taylor Series, vol. 33]. Sturminster Newton: Prometheus Trust. Tchijéwsky, D. 1929. Hegel et Nietzsche. Revue d’histoire de la philosophie 3 (3): 321–347. Theißen, Gerd, and Annette Merz. 1998. The Historical Jesus: A Comprehensive Guide, translated by John Bowden. Minneapolis: Fortress. Tradowsky, Peter. 2012. Kaspar Hauser: The Struggle for the Spirit. Translated by John M. Wood. Forest Row: Temple Lodge Publishing. Voorst, Robert E. Van. 2000. Jesus Outside the New Testament: An Introduction to the Ancient Evidence. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Watts, Edward J. 2015. The Final Pagan Generation. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Young, Glenn. 2016. The Ba’al Theory of Christianity: Exploring the Impact of Human Sacrifice on Western Religion. North Charleston, SC: Limited Means Productions.

4 Nietzsche, David Friedrich Strauß, and the Post-Straussian Tradition

Although he is widely (if incorrectly) regarded by many Germanisten as some sort of Swabian Dichterzwerg, Eduard Mörike (1804–1875) is, in fact, a complex figure, whom Ludwig Wittgenstein once described as “really a great poet” (freilich ein großer Dichter), whose “poems are among the best things we have” (seine Gedichte gehören zum besten was wir haben); in fact, for Wittgenstein, “the beauty of Mörike’s work is very closely related to that of Goethe’s” (Mörikes Schönheit ist ganz nah verwandt mit Goethes).1 While such texts as, for instance, those in his “Peregrina-cycle” are among some of the most erotic poems written in German, and the settings by Hugo Wolf of Mörike’s poems to music belong to the greatest exemplars of the tradition of the German Lied,2 in his day-job Mörike was a Lutheran pastor. Born in Ludwigsburg in Baden-Württemberg, Mörike studied from 1822 to 1826 at the Tübinger Stift, the famous Protestant seminary whose students include the poet Friedrich Hölderlin and the philosophers G.W.F. Hegel and F.W.J. Schelling, as well as the theologian David Friedrich Strauß. Despite his poor academic grades, Mörike was accepted into the Evangelical Seminary at Urach, where he studied the classics, and he completed his theological training at the Seminary in Tübingen, where he met Ludwig Bauer, Friedrich Theodor Vischer, and the former Stiftler D. F. Strauß himself. After serving an eight-year Vikariatsknechtschaft in various locations from 1826 to 1833, in 1834 Mörike was appointed pastor in © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Bishop, Discourses of Philology and Theology in Nietzsche, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42272-0_4

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Cleversulzbach, a quiet, provincial town whose connection with wine-­ making is reflected in its coat of arms, a bunch of blue grapes between two blue pruning knives against a gold background. The removal of the weather-vane from the church-tower in 1840 was the occasion for his famous poem, Der alte Turmhahn (“The Old Weathercock”). In Cleversulzbach Mörike lived in the local vicarage with his mother and his youngest sister, Clara. For reasons of health, he retired early from his position in 1843, moving with his sister to Schwäbisch Hall, then Bad Mergentheim, and finally Stuttgart. Here he taught German literature for ten years from 1856 as professor at the Königin-Katharina-Stift. Mörike’s interests were many and varied—among them classical literature, German literature (he was a member of the so-called Schwäbische Dichterschule, associated with such figures at the university in Tübingen as Justinus Kerner und Ludwig Uhland), and paleontology (he was an enthusiastic fossil-collector, as reflected in his 1847 poem, Der Petrefaktensammler [“The Fossil Collector”]); he was also interested in the occult, believing the vicarage in Cleversulzbach to be haunted. All these interests served as so many distractions from what Mörike regarded as the crisis in theology. While he maintained an irregular correspondence with Strauß himself over several decades, it is in a letter to F.T. Vischer (1807–1887) from 1837 that Mörike presented the following devastating analysis3: You write too of the movement surrounding Strauß. I view them with the greatest interest. What he takes away from common Christian belief through his criticism of the Gospels was of course already taken away from him and from you and from me and from thousands of others in a different, more primitive way, and we can only ask what this theological bankruptcy [theologischen Bankerott], spreading further and further afield, will finally mean for the uneducated masses, and what means of reassurance they will have in the face of it. In my public office as pastor, I have always felt permitted, indeed obliged, to assume certain things as agreed and given, in accordance with tradition [hergebrachtermaßen]: partly because of people’s lack of intellectual dependence, partly because even the educated and knowledgeable person likes to have his devotion tied to the ideas and forms of thought and expression that he has been used to since childhood; though I grant you that I have never felt entirely comfortable doing so.4

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As Ian Cooper has commented, here Mörike champions the necessity of tradition as opposed to the deconstruction of scriptural revelation, identifying himself with the public role of Kantian Schriftgelehrter,5 rather than the Straussian, and certainly not the Nietzschean, apostate cleric—a figure who isn’t, in any sense of the word, in communion with his flock but rather soars intellectually above them.6 This opposition between, on the one hand, “tradition” and, on the other, “theological bankruptcy,” together with the consequent, pragmatic acknowledgement that faith requires (in a phrase used variously by St Ignatius Loyola, Blaise Pascal, and Søren Kierkegaard) a sacrifice of the intellect,7 goes to the heart of the impact that the work of David Friedrich Strauß had had, not just on Mörike, but—“spreading further and further afield”—across the entirety of German-speaking Europe and beyond. Indeed, in his recent intellectual biography of Strauß, Frederick Beiser describes him as “one of the most controversial thinkers of nineteenth-­ century Germany,” hailing Strauß as “a seminal figure of his age” and as “nothing less than the father of modern unbelief in Germany” (Beiser 2020, 1). Moreover, Beiser argues that Strauß’s legacy “remains very troubling for Christianity,” and that “his objections against the historical credibility of the New Testament remain as challenging today as they were nearly two centuries ago”; accordingly, Strauß “has been, and is still today, a controversial figure” (ibid., 2). And yet, as Beiser himself concedes, Strauß is in other respects “a thinker on the brink of oblivion in the anglophone world,” a largely forgotten figure who is more likely than not to be confused with the famous Viennese composers of waltzes Johannes Strauss I, II, and III, or with the late Romantic German composer Richard Strauss. So who was David Friedrich Strauß?8

Life of Strauß Born in the Swabian city of Ludwigsburg in 1808, David Friedrich Strauß went to school at Blaubeuren, where his teachers included Friedrich Heinrich Kern (1790–1842) and Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860). Baur had gone on to become the founder of the “Tübingen School” of New Testament criticism, and he instilled in the young Strauß

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a keen appreciation for classical texts as well as the principles of textual criticism. Above all, what Strauß learned from Baur was an important philological insight, namely, that these principles can be applied equally to sacred texts as well as to classical ones. As a student of theology in Tübingen at its famous Tübinger Stift, Strauß developed an interest in the ideas of F.W.J. Schelling, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and G.W.F. Hegel. In 1830 Strauß became a Vikar or assistant to a country clergyman, and in 1831 he was appointed professor at the seminary of the famous monastery of Maulbronn, teaching Latin, history, and Hebrew. (The fame of the monastery rests in part on the fact that Hermann Hesse chose it as the location for his novel of 1906 called Unterm Rad, variously translated as Beneath the Wheel and as The Prodigy.) After less than a year, however, Strauß resigned from this post, deciding instead to go to university in Berlin to study under Schleiermacher and Hegel. This plan succeeded only in part, for shortly after Strauß had arrived in Berlin in October 1831, Hegel died of cholera on 14 November. (Albert Schweitzer recounts an anecdote, according to which Strauß heard the news of Hegel’s death from Schleiermacher himself when in his house, and exclaimed: “And it was to hear him that I came to Berlin!”—a remark made, Schweitzer notes, with “a certain want of tact, considering who his informant was”….)9 The chance to hear Hegel having disappeared, Strauß returned in 1832 to the Tübinger Stift, where he became a Repentent or assistant lecturer, as well as giving lectures at the university on logic, Plato, and the history of philosophy and ethics. In 1835 Strauß was removed from this post and redeployed as a teacher at a school in Ludwigsburg, but in less than a year he had given up this post and moved to Stuttgart. In 1839, he was appointed a professor of theology (dogmatics and Church history) at the University of Zurich, but disaster struck. His appointment was so controversial and aroused such indignation in orthodox and Pietist circles that his appointment was revoked and he was pensioned off before he ever took up the post; feelings about the controversy (known as the Strauß affair or the Straussenhandel) ran so high that the liberal government of Zurich was brought down in the so-called Züriputsch later that year.10 In 1848, Strauß was put forward as a candidate to represent Ludwigsburg in the German Parliament, but he was

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never elected; later that year, he was elected for the Württermberg chamber, but his conservative stance proved so unpopular he had to resign. Aside from his turbulent private life—in August 1841, he married the mezzo-soprano Agnese Schebest, a famous opera singer, but after five years and two children, they divorced—Strauß devoted himself during subsequent years in Heidelberg, Munich, Darmstadt, Heilbronn, and finally Ludwigsburg to academic studies, publishing a series of biographies on Schubert (2 vols, 1847); on Christian Märklin (1851); on Nikodemus Frischlin (1855); on Ulrich von Hütten (3 vols, 1858–1860; 6 1895); and on H.S. Reimarus (1862). Yet the reason for Strauß being removed from his post as a lecturer in Tübingen on the insistence of such members of the theological faculty as Johann Christian Friedrich Steudel (1779–1837), and for never actually being able to take up his professorship in Zurich, had nothing to do with his conservative political stance, and everything to do with the two-volume work he had published in 1835–1836 under the title The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet), widely regarded as one of the most discussed and most controversial works of the mid-nineteenth century.11 Strauß defended this work against the criticism it aroused, particularly from Hegelian quarters, in a series of pamphlets entitled Streitschriften zur Verteidigung meiner Schrift uber das Leben Jesu und zur Charakteristik der gegenwärtigen Theologie (Tübingen, 1837).12 Although he went on to write further theological studies, notably On Christian Doctrine (Die christliche Glaubenslehre in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung und im Kampfe mit der modernen Wissenschaft, 2 vols, 1840–1841), in which he argued that the history of Christian doctrine was the history of its disintegration, and The Old Faith and the New (Der alte und der neue Glaube) (1872; English translation by M. Blind, 1873), in which he surrendered the Hegelian principles he had previously held, abandoned any sense of the spiritual in philosophy, and embraced the materialism of modern science, his most controversial work remained his Life of Jesus.13 Even when he made concessions to its critics in its third edition of 1839 (albeit withdrawing some of them in the fourth edition of 1840) and even when he published Life of Jesus for the German People (Das Leben Jesu für das deutsche Volk bearbeitet) (1864; 21864; 31874; 131904), which provoked critical responses from Daniel Schenkel (1813–1885) and Ernst Wilhelm

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Hengstenberg (1802–1869), to which Strauß replied in a work entitled Die Halben und die Ganzen (1865), it was of all his writings the Life of Jesus that provoked the greatest response—except, that is, in the case of Nietzsche. That said, Strauß’s Life of Jesus may also have had a profound effect on Nietzsche as a young man,14 and it is likely to have been bound up with his crisis of faith, experienced when he was twenty years old and reflected in his famous letter of June 1865 to his sister Elisabeth, in which he wrote: “Hence the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire” (KSB 2, 61). (As Edith Düsing has suggested, the three versions of the hymn he wrote as a nineteen year old on Christ’s Passion serve as a dramatic expression of the young Nietzsche’s religious faith.)15 The central controversy surrounding Das Leben Jesu was its approach to the biblical accounts of the miracles in terms of their “mythical” character. As opposed to the rationalist approach, which explained (away) miracles in terms of non-supernatural events that had been misunderstood, and the supranaturalist approach, which took the biblical accounts at face value (despite or because of the scientific impossibility of the events they describe), Strauß characterized the accounts of miracles as “myths.” Analysing the Bible as a text that was not entirely self-coherent and contained numerous contradictions, Strauß proposed the view that the function of the miracles was to support the early Church in its presentation of Jesus as the Jewish Messiah, announced in the prophets. By going beyond the rationalists, who sought to deny that the miracles had any basis in history, and the supranaturalists, who “believed” in them as historical events, Strauß sought to understand the function of the miracles as stories: in effect, his approach announced a new epoch in the historical and textual understanding of Christianity and heralded a philological turn in the debate. Strauß had numerous opponents (and, to be fair, supporters) (see Schweitzer 1910, 97), and one of his most vociferous critics turned out to be Nietzsche—but not because of his Life of Jesus. Rather than to the Life of Jesus, the work to which Nietzsche took exception was Strauß’s The Old Faith and the New. A critique of this work stood at the centre of the first of a planned series of as many as thirteen essays, of which in the end only four were written, published collectively

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under the title Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen (translated variously as Untimely Meditations, Unfashionable Reflections, Unmodern Observations, Thoughts Out of Season, or virtually any combination of these, and referred to here collectively as Untimely Observations or the “Untimelies”).16 In “David Strauss: the Confessor and the Writer” (David Strauss der Bekenner und der Schriftsteller) (1873), Nietzsche holds up Strauß’s The Old Faith and the New as emblematic of a tendency in German culture of his day (and arguably even more of Western culture in general in our own time)—a predisposition to see history in naïve terms of a simple progression, in order to defend a degenerate cultural status quo that is essentially Philistine. Philistine? The term is frequently used by Nietzsche, and in its original biblical context it referred to the ancient people who occupied the south-­ western part of Canaan and were known for their conflict with the Israelites; in the nineteenth century, the term came to refer (in Germany) to anyone who had not studied at university and (more generally) to anyone lacking cultural knowledge and appreciation, and invested in materialistic values alone.17 (In England, Matthew Arnold was responsible for transporting this term from its German context and introducing it into Anglo-American discourse.)18 For Nietzsche, the term acquired an almost existential urgency—and in the context of understanding the Untimelies and The Anti-Christ, this is significant: what Nietzsche objected to was not the philological turn of the Life of Jesus, but the complacency and acquiescence in non-belief characterized by The Old and the New Faith. As far as Nietzsche was concerned, Strauß had simply failed to grasp what was at stake in the decline of religion and the death of God; Strauß was, in the end, simply content not to believe. By contrast, for Nietzsche the “death of God” inaugurated a crisis to the solution of which The Anti-Christ was, in part, a contribution. Tellingly, Nietzsche spent the first half of 1875 working on an essay intended for his series of Untimely Observations, one entitled “We Philologists” (or, as it is sometimes translated, “We Classicists”) and devoted to his own profession of classical philology. In the end, however, he left it incomplete19; perhaps the work was simply too close to home for comfort. For in it Nietzsche achieves his final reckoning with philology, concluding that “ninety-nine classicists out of a hundred shouldn’t be in

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the profession.”20 Thanks in good measure to the work of David Friedrich Strauß, a philological approach to biblical texts and matters of faith was now firmly on the agenda by the early to mid-nineteenth century.

David Friedrich Strauß, Life of Jesus Twenty-five years after the publication of the first edition of his Life of Jesus (Das Leben Jesu), Strauß summarized the impact of this book on his professional and personal life: “It excluded me from public teaching, for which I had desire and perhaps even talent; it tore me out of natural relationships and drove me into unnatural ones; it made the course of my life lonely.”21 When it had first appeared, the reaction to the book had been one of widespread shock and dismay. According to Eduard Zeller, the book had been “a bombshell”; in the words of Karl Schwarz (cited by Adolf Hausrath), it had delivered “an electric shock,” while F.C. Baur wrote that there had been “panic-stricken terror” among the public at large!22 The scholarly response was swift and enormous: according to Schweitzer, “scarcely ever has a book let loose such a storm of controversy”—he calculated that between 1835 and 1839 some forty or fifty books on (or against) Strauß appeared, a figure he later revised upward to some sixty books (although Theobald Ziegler notes that even this list omits some important literature); more to the point, “scarcely ever has a controversy been so barren of immediate result” and “the fertilising rain brought up a crop of toad-stools,” for of those books only four or five are said to be of any value and “even of these the value is very small.”23 In questioning the historical credibility of the New Testament, it seemed as if Strauß had attacked the very basis of Protestants’ faith and now the sky was falling (Beiser 2020, 8). Yet there was not only an evidently religious aspect to the importance of Strauß’s Life of Jesus, there was a political one, too. In fact, the famous distinction between right Hegelianism and left Hegelianism (which echoed the use of the terms “right” and “left” during the French Revolution of 1789 when the supporters of the king and the Ancien régime sat in the National Assembly to the right of the presiding officer and the supporters of the revolution sat on his left) revolved around the extent to which

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Hegel’s system was considered able to explain and justify Christian revelation; indeed, the source of this distinction was Strauß himself.24 In his essay “Verschiedene Richtungen innerhalb der Hegel’schen Schule in Betreff der Christologie,” Strauß claimed that right Hegelians hold that all Christian revelation conforms to the system of philosophy, left Hegelians hold that none of it does, while centre Hegelians hold that some does. (Strauß saw himself as someone belonging to the left Hegelians, or who would do, if they did not reject him.) These disputes and divisions in the Hegelian school, which became a major source of controversy in the late 1830s and early 1840s, demonstrates the significance of Hegel as a figure situated at the intersection of politics and religion.25 As we shall see, Hegelian conceptions underpin Strauß’s approach in his Life of Jesus. The central argument behind that approach can be found in his Preface to the first German edition of his Life of Jesus (1856: vol. 1, 3–5). Here Strauß announces the attempt to consider the life of Jesus in a third way: neither supranaturalist (i.e., the miracles took place exactly as described) nor naturalist (i.e., rationalist), but mythical. He examines these three approaches in turn. First, the supranaturalist approach: here Strauß explains how the exegesis of the ancient Church set out from a “double presupposition,” namely, that “the gospels contained a history” and that “this history was a supernatural one” (Strauss 1856, vol. 1, 3). This approach had, he claimed, long been in a state of crisis: it had ceased to satisfy “an advanced state of culture,” while “the recent attempts to recover, by aid of a mystical philosophy, the supranatural point of view held by our forefathers, betray themselves, by the exaggerating spirit in which they are conceived, to be final, desperate efforts to render the past present, the inconceivable conceivable” (ibid., 3). Second, the rationalist approach: it accepted the first presupposition of the Church (i.e., the gospels contain a history), but it rejected its second presupposition (i.e., that this history was supranatural). In fact, Strauß argued, rationalism clung “tenaciously” to the former, insisting that these texts present “unadulterated, though only natural, history” (Strauss 1856, vol. 1, 3). Yet rationalism, too, was in a state of crisis: for “the interest excited by the explanations of the miracles and the conjectural facts of the rationalists” had, in his view, “long ago cooled”; science, he wrote, could no longer be satisfied by rationalism’s “half-measure,” and even the

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Church’s first presupposition must be “relinquished.” Instead the inquiry must be made “whether in fact, and to what extent, the ground on which we stand in the gospels is historical” (ibid., 3–4). Third, the mythical approach advocated by Strauß himself: this approach arises through his engagement with the supranatural and rationalist approaches and their “respective refutations,” and, “as becomes a valid refutation, with an acknowledgement of what is true in the opinions combatted, and an adoption of this truth into the new theory” (Strauss 1856, vol. 1, 5). (At this point, the Hegelian roots of Strauß’s methodology become evident.) So Strauß’s approach involves the idea of “historical myth”—that is, the way in which the beliefs and hopes of the primitive Christian communities became, in the second century, cast in the form of legends―more specifically, the way in which the Messianic conceptions of the Jews were adopted and adapted for its own use by the early Christian Church. In his “Introduction” to his Life of Jesus, Strauß set out in greater detail the development of the mythical point of view in relation to the gospel histories (§1-§16; Strauss 1856, vol. 1, 11–76). The problem of how to reconcile different modes of explaining sacred histories is, Strauß wrote, a perennial one, and he pointed to the different explanations of sacred legends among the ancient Greeks. True, they did not have anything that was the exact equivalent of Judeo-Christianity’s sacred scriptures; nevertheless, the Hellenic religion had become “enshrined” in the poems of Homer and Hesiod. These texts came to represent a challenge to the “rigid” philosophy of the Greeks: hence the quarrel of Pindar and Plato with Homer; the decision by Anaxagoras to invent the allegorical mode of interpretation and apply it to Homeric representations of virtue and justice; and the interpretation by the Stoics of Hesiod’s Theogony in terms of the action of the elements whose union, so they believed, constituted the divine nature. Each of these thinkers in his own way had succeeded in discovering “an absolute meaning in these representations: the one finding in them a physical, the other an ethical signification, whilst, at the same time, they gave up their external form, ceasing to regard them as strictly historical” (§2; Strauß 1856, vol. 1, 13). On Strauß’s account, this was one possible approach. Another approach was taken by “the more popular and sophistical culture” of another set of thinkers, who believed that “every semblance of the divine had

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evaporated from these histories,” yet nevertheless did not want to abandon “the historical sense of these narratives” (§2; Strauss 1856, vol. 1, 13). Hence Euhemerus (sometimes called Euemeros or Evemerus) “transformed the subjects of these histories from gods to men, to heroes and sages of antiquity, kings and tyrants, who, through deeds of might and valour, had acquired divine honours,” while Polybius went even further and “considered the whole system of heathen theology as a fable, invented by the founders of states to awe the people into subjection” (§2; ibid., 13).26 In the case of Hebrew culture, a different strategy was applied to the texts of the Old Testament in order to “remove offensive literalities, supply deficiencies, and introduce the notions of a later age” (§3; Strauss 1856, vol. 1, 13). This strategy took the form of allegorical interpretation, examples of which can be found in Rabbinic literature (i.e., the Talmudim, Midrash), in the New Testament, and in Alexandria, where the allegorical mode of interpretation was “first consistently applied to the whole body of historical narrative in the Old Testament” (§3; ibid., 13).27 The chief figure is, of course, Philo of Alexandria, who first fully developed “the doctrine of both a common and a deeper sense of the Holy Scriptures,” not dismissing the former but placing the two “side by side.” Often, however, Philo “discarded the verbal meaning and historical conception, and considered the narrative merely as the figurative representation of an idea” (§3; ibid., 13–14). Allegorical interpretation was taken up enthusiastically by the early Christians, for whom this technique proved to be “indispensable, inasmuch as they had made greater advances beyond the views of the Old Testament writers than even the most enlightened of the Jews” (§4; Strauss 1856, vol. 1, 14). Once again, Alexandria was the location of a figure who applied this technique to its fullest extent, namely, Origen.28 Corresponding to his division of the human being into three parts (body, soul, and spirit), Origen attributed three different meanings to the Scriptures29: • the body = literal sense • the soul = moral sense • the spirit = mystical sense

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In one of his homilies on the Book of Exodus, Origen asserted that the purpose of biblical narratives is not to transmit old tales, but to instruct in the rules of life.30 In one of his homilies on the Book of Leviticus, he claimed that a (merely) literal interpretation would, in the case of many narratives, destroy the Christian religion31; and in Against Celsus, he applied Paul’s observation, “the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life” (2 Corinthians 3:6), to the relative worth of the allegorical and literal modes of biblical interpretation, arguing that “by the ‘letter’ he means that ‘exposition of Scripture which is apparent to the senses,’ while by the ‘spirit’ that which is the object of the ‘understanding.’”32 From Origen’s remarks in De principiis, book 4, §19-§20, and elsewhere, Strauß concluded that, for Origen, allegorical meaning could supplant the literal altogether (Strauss 1856, vol. 1, 15). For Origen, it was not the case that the Scriptures only contained things that had happened, and in fact he argued that the reverse was the case: The word of God has arranged that certain stumbling-blocks, as it were, and offenses, and impossibilities, should be introduced into the midst of the law and the history, in order that we may not, through being drawn away in all directions by the merely attractive nature of the language, either altogether fall away from the (true) doctrines, as learning nothing worthy of God, or, by not departing from the letter, come to the knowledge of nothing more divine. And this also we must know, that the principal aim being to announce the spiritual connection in those things that are done, and that ought to be done, where the Word found that things done according to the history could be adapted to these mystical senses, He made use of them, concealing from the multitude the deeper meaning; but where, in the narrative of the development of super-sensual things, there did not follow the performance of those certain events, which was already indicated by the mystical meaning, the Scripture interwove in the history (the account of ) some event that did not take place, sometimes what could not have happened; sometimes what could, but did not.33

Indeed, in what Strauß describes as a “remarkable passage” of Against Celsus,34 Origen places fabulous stories of profane history and heathen mythology in the same category as the gospel narratives (§4; Strauss 1856: vol. 1, 15). And so, on Strauß’s account, there developed two forms

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of interpretation of Hebrew and Christian scriptures: one which “recognizes in them the divine, but denies it to have actually manifested itself in so immediate a manner,” that is, an allegorical reading, and another which, “to a certain extent, acknowledges the course of events to have been historically true, but assigns it to a human and not a divine origin,” that is, the kind of reading offered by Celsus, Porphyry, or Julian (§5; ibid., 17). Moving forward to more modern times, Strauß now considers the attacks on Christianity by the deists and naturalists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This was the era of Thomas Chubb (1679–1747) and his numerous Deist tracts, and of Thomas Woolston (1668–1733) and his Six Discourses on the Miracles of our Saviour (1727–1729). And Strauß reviews the publication by G.E. Lessing of the so-called Wolfenbüttel Fragments, portions of the manuscript by Reimarus that had been found in the Wolfenbüttel library. Then, Strauß explores the natural mode of explanation offered by such rationalists as Johann Albrecht Friedrich Eichhorn (1779–1856) and Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob Paulus (1761–1851), before turning to Kant’s “moral interpretation” of scripture (Strauss 1856, vol. 1, 25–26). Into the tension between “modes of proceeding so unhistorical on the one hand, and so unphilosophical on the other” there now entered the study of mythology. Pioneered by Johann Philipp Gabler (1753–1826), a Protestant theologian belonging to the school of Eichhorn and Johann Jakob Griesbach (1745–1812), F.W.J. Schelling, and others, this approach sought to establish the notion of the mythus as one of universal application to all ancient history, whether sacred or profane.35 It based itself on the principle set up by the classical scholar and archaeologist Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729–1812): A mythis […] omnis priscorum hominum cum historia tum philosophia procedit (i.e., “throughout history all philosophy proceeds from the myths of ancient men,” or “all the history, as well as the philosophy of ancient times arises out of myths”).36 What is then, on this account, a myth? Here Strauß adopts the definition offered by Georg Lorenz Bauer (1755–1806) in his Hebrew Mythology of the Old and New Testaments with Parallels from the Mythology of Other Peoples, Notably the Greeks and the Romans (2 vols, 1802–1803), according to whom a narrative is recognizable as mythus if it:

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• proceeds from an age in which no written records existed, but in which facts were transmitted through the medium of oral tradition alone; • presents an historical account of events which are either absolutely or relatively beyond the reach of experience, such as occurrences connected with the spiritual world, and incidents to which, from the nature of the circumstances, no one could have been witness; • deals in the marvellous and is couched in symbolical language. (§8; Strauss 1856, vol. 1, 27) In turn, these critics distinguished different kinds of mythi: • historical mythi, i.e., narratives of real events coloured by the light of antiquity, which confounded the divine and the human, the natural and the supernatural • philosophical mythi, i.e., narratives which clothe in the garb of historical narrative a simple thought, a precept, or an idea of the time • poetical mythi, i.e., historical and philosophical mythii partly blended together, and partly embellished by the creations of the imagination, in which the original fact or idea is almost obscured by the veil which the fancy of the poet has woven around it. (§8; Strauss 1856, vol. 1, 27–28) Having defined them, the next question is: How do these myths arise? On this point, Strauß cites the view of Schelling in his treatise On Myths, Historical Sagas, and Philosophemes of the Most Ancient World (1793), who emphasizes not just their “unartificial and spontaneous origin” but their essentially expressive function (§8; Strauss 1856, vol. 1, 29).37 “If we know the mind,” Schelling argued, “of the most ancient world, then we shall find it quite natural that even those who first began to reflect on higher things chose, not only to their advantage of a people orientated around the senses, but also to their own advantage, the garments of history for their philosophemes,” adding: “that they even used their lack of perfectly developed concepts, of fixed principles, of signs for abstract representations; that they were even compelled to illuminate the darkness of their representations, what was secret about their intuitions, through the light of sensuous expression” (Schelling 1856, 68–69).

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The mythical view of sacred histories was developed and established, Strauß continues, by such theologians as Johann Severin Vater (1771–1826) and Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette (1780–1849). In his Commentary on the Pentateuch, with […] a Treatise on Moses and the Author of the Pentateuch (3 vols, 1802–1806), Vater argued against the traditional view of Moses as the sole author of these five books and suggested that it was a misunderstanding to regard them as an eye-witness account rather than a series of transmitted traditions. And in his Critique of Mosaic History (1806), de Wette argued that the very narrative structure of the works in the Old Testament histories underscored their origin in tradition.38 So how could the mythical mode of interpretation be applied to the New Testament? On the face of it, only with difficulty, since mythi had usually been sought in primitive ages where no written records of events existed, whereas in the time of Jesus writing had become commonplace. On the basis of a footnote, in which Schelling maintained that the term mythi could also be applied in an extended sense to narratives which, despite documentary records, were nevertheless transmitted orally (Schelling 1856, 44: fn. 1), the way was open to apply this interpretative technique to the New Testament (§9; Strauss 1856, vol. 1, 33). Consequently, Strauß undertook to “apply the notion of the mythus to the entire history of the life of Jesus” and to “recognize mythi or mythical embellishments in every portion,” and to “range under the category of mythus not merely the miraculous occurrences during the infancy of Jesus, but those also of his public life, not merely miracles operated on Jesus but those wrought by him” (§11; Strauss 1856, vol. 1, 42). In so doing, Strauß distinguished the following kinds of mythus in the New Testament: • the evangelical mythus, i.e., a narrative relating directly or indirectly to Jesus • the pure mythus, i.e., a mythus with two sources: first, the Messianic ideas and expectations of the Jews; and two, the particular impression left by the personal character, actions, and fate of Jesus

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• the historical mythus, i.e., a mythus grounded in a definite individual fact which religious enthusiasm has taken up and entwined with mythical conceptions culled from the idea of the Christ • the distinction between the mythus and the legend, in accordance with the one made by Leopold George (1811–1873) in Mythus und Sage: Versuch einer wissenschaftlichen Entwickelung dieser Begriffe und ihres Verhältnisses zum christlichen Glauben (1837), so that ‘those parts of history which are characterized by indefiniteness and want of connexion, by misconstruction and transformation, by strange combinations and confusion,—the natural results of a long course of oral transmission,’ or which are ‘distinguished by highly coloured and pictorial representations, which also seem to point to a traditionary origin,’ are regarded as legendary. (§15; Strauss 1860, vol. 1, 69–70) Finally, Strauß set out the criteria by which he proposed to distinguish the unhistorical in the gospel narratives. We should remember that the mythus is not history, but it is fiction, giving rise to a negative criterion and a positive criterion by which the mythus may be recognized. Negatively, an account is not historical, that is, it is evident that the matter related could not have taken place in the manner described, in accordance with the following rules: first, if the narration is irreconcilable with the known and universal laws which govern the course of events; and second, if it is inconsistent with itself or in contradiction with other accounts (§16; Strauss 1856, vol. 1, 70–72). Positively, legend and fiction can be recognized in the form or in the substance of a narrative, say, if the form is poetical or if characters converse in hymns, or if the contents of a narrative strikingly accord with certain ideas associated with the circle from which the narrative proceeded (§16; ibid., 72–73). On the basis of these and other considerations, Strauß propounded the following rule: Where not merely the particular nature and manner of an occurrence is critically suspicious, its external circumstances represented as miraculous and the like; but where likewise the essential substance and groundwork is either inconceivable in itself, or is in striking harmony with some Messianic idea of the Jews of that age, then not the particular alleged course and

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mode of the transaction only, but the entire occurrence must be regarded as unhistorical. Where on the contrary, the form only, and not the general contents of the narration, exhibits the characteristics of the unhistorical, it is at least possible to suppose a kernel of historical fact […]. (§16; Strauss 1856, vol. 1, 75).

As examples where this rule might apply Strauß considered Luke’s account of the Visitation, when Mary went to visit Elizabeth and her baby, John the Baptist, leapt in her womb (Luke 1:39–45), a story which, according to Strauß, seems to have originated “entirely in the wish to exhibit a connexion between the mother of John the Baptist, and the mother of the Messiah” (§16; Strauss 1856, vol. 1, 75). Likewise, the accounts found in Matthew (17:1–8), Mark (9:2–8), and Luke (9:28–36) of the Transfiguration were read by Strauß as being “predisposed, by virtue of the current idea concerning the relation of the Messiah to these two prophets, not merely to make any two men […] into Moses and Elias, but to create the whole occurrence,” and “not merely to conceive of some certain illumination as a supernatural effulgence […], but to create it at once after the pattern of the brightness which illuminated the face of Moses on Mount Sinai” (§16; ibid., vol. 1, 75). After the two volumes of the work itself, the approach which he had outlined in his Introduction led Strauß to the following conclusions in the final pages of his second volume, its famous “Concluding Dissertation” on “the dogmatic import of the life of Jesus” (Strauss 1856, vol. 2, 867–901). Here Strauß’s aim is made explicitly clear: not to destroy Christianity, but to preserve it; not to attack (or even defend) its traditional historical foundation, but to replace it with a speculative one (Beiser 2020, 17). Or in Strauß’s terms, a transition has to be made from criticism to dogma. For at the conclusion of the critique of the history of Jesus (or the inquiry which has “apparently annihilated the greatest and most valuable part of that which the Christian has been wont to believe concerning his Saviour Jesus”), Strauß reconceives his project as being how “to re-establish dogmatically that which has been destroyed critically” (§144; Strauss 1856, vol. 2, 867). Now that “the data of Christianity, as historically presented in the evangelical records,” had been “called in question in their historical form,” could they—he now asked—instead

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“assume [the form] of a mental product, and find a refuge in the soul of the believer” (§144; ibid., vol. 2, 868)? Could they exist here “not as a simple history, but as a reflected history, that is, a confession of faith, a received dogma” (§144; ibid., vol. 2, 868; my emphasis)? Core to that confession or that dogma were two main beliefs: the Incarnation and the Resurrection. After considering in turn the “orthodox” Christology of the Church (and objections to it), the Christology of rationalism, the “eclectic” Christology of Schleiermacher, and the “symbolic” Christianity of Kant and of de Wette, Strauß turns finally to what he calls “speculative” Christology (§150). In this section Strauß alludes to Kant and to Schelling, but above all to Hegel, and it is Hegel—specifically, his Phenomenology of Spirit and his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion—who sets the parameters for Strauß’s argumentation. On this Hegelian account, “when it is said of God that he is a Spirit, and of man that he also is a Spirit, it follows that the two are not essentially distinct,” for it is “the essential property of a spirit, in the distribution of itself into distinct personalities, to remain identical with itself ” and “to possess itself in another than itself ” (§150; Strauss 1856, vol. 2, 892). Consequently, the dogma of the incarnation contains (or perhaps it would be better to say conceals?) a deeply Hegelian truth, viz.: “Man being once mature enough to receive as his religion the truth that God is man, and man of a divine race; it necessarily follows, since religion is the form in which the truth presents itself to the popular mind, that this truth must appear, in a guise intelligible to all, as a fact obvious to the senses: in other words, there must appear a human individual who is recognized as the visible God” (§150; ibid., 893). Thus by “a higher mode of argumentation,” Strauß concludes, “from the idea of God and man in their reciprocal relation, the truth of the conception which the Church forms of Christ appears to be confirmed, and we seem to be reconducted to the orthodox point of view, though by an inverted path” (§151; Strauss 1856, vol. 2, 894). “That which is rational is also real,” he writes, alluding to Hegel’s famous dictum (from his Elements of the Philosophy of Right); and “the idea is not merely the moral imperative of Kant, but also an actuality” (§151; ibid., 894). And so Philip Marheineke (1780–1846), Karl Rosenkranz (1805–1879), and Casimir Conradi (1784–1849) were right: the unity of God with

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humankind was manifested in Jesus Christ; miracles are natural to someone in whom the divine power over nature was concentrated; and it would have been more surprising if his resurrection had not taken place than that it did (§151; ibid., 894)! However, a “last dilemma” remains. Earlier on, Strauß had cited Schleiermacher’s difficulty (as expressed in the second volume of his Glaubenslehre, §96-§98) in accepting that “by the expression, divine nature and human nature, divinity and humanity are placed under one category, and what is more, under the category of nature, which essentially denotes only a limited being, conceived by means of its opposite” (§146; ibid., 877). Here Strauß returns to the question of “how the divine and human natures can have constituted the distinct and yet united portions of an historical person” (§151; ibid., 894). As “the key to the whole of Christology,” Strauß proposes the view that, “in an individual, a God-man, the properties and functions which the Church ascribes to Christ contradict themselves; in the idea of the [human] race, they perfectly agree” (§151; Strauss 1860: vol. 2, 895). Hence humanity itself is “the union of the two natures—God become man, the infinite manifesting itself in the finite, and the finite spirit remembering its infinitude,” and it is humanity that “dies, rises, and ascends to heaven, for from the negation of its phenomenal life there ever proceeds a higher spiritual life; from the suppression its mortality as a personal, national, and terrestrial spirit, arises its union with the infinite spirit of the heavens” (§151; ibid., 895–896). This argument has immediate practical consequences for faith, as the concluding section on the “relation of the critical and speculative theology to the Church” makes clear (§152). Here Strauß declares that it is “an evidence of an uncultivated mind” (!) to “denounce as a hypocrite a theologian who preaches, for example, on the resurrection of Christ,” since “though he may not believe in the reality of that event as a single sensible fact,” he may nevertheless “hold to be true the representation of the process of spiritual life, which the resurrection of Christ affords” (§152; ibid., 898–899). In practical terms, this means that, at the festival of Easter, the theologian “will indeed set out from the sensible fact of the resurrection of Christ, but he will dwell chiefly on the being buried and rising again with Christ, which the Apostle himself has strenuously inculcated” (§152; Strauss 1856, vol. 2, 900). Strauß is aware of the distinction between the

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way “the orthodox preacher builds his moral on the text in such a way, that the latter remains as an historical foundation […] whereas, with the speculative preacher, the transition from the biblical history or the Church doctrine, to the truth which he thence derives, has the negative effect of annihilating the former” (§152; ibid., 900). Thereby the danger is incurred that “the community may discover this difference, and the preacher appear to it, and consequently to himself, a hypocrite”—with the result that the theologian may find himself “driven […] in the end to leave the ministerial profession” (§152; ibid., 900). In so writing, Strauß is addressing the same problem that Nietzsche did when, in Human, All-Too-Human, he set up a contrast between antiquity and modernity, between an age of belief and (implicitly) an age of disbelief: “When on a Sunday morning we hear the old bells ringing, we ask ourselves: Is it possible? All this for a Jew crucified two thousand years ago who said he was God’s son?”, whereas—as Nietzsche is swift to add— “the proof of such an assertion is lacking” (HA I §113). As a consequence of this lack of proof, he continues, “the Christian religion constitutes in our time a protruding bit of antiquity from very remote ages,” and “that its assertions are still generally believed […] constitutes the oldest relic of this inheritance” (HA I §113). In the rest of this section, Nietzsche goes on to present a cartoon-sketch-version of Christianity, but one that culminates in the proposition that the essence of Christianity is, in fact, no longer understood today: A god who begets children by a mortal woman; a sage who demands that no more work be done, that no more justice be administered but that the signs of the approaching end of the world be heeded; a system of justice that accepts an innocent as a vicarious sacrifice in the place of the guilty; a person who bids his disciples drink his blood; prayers for miracles; sins against a god expiated upon a god; fear of a hereafter to which death is the portal; […]

but above all “the figure of the cross as a symbol in an age that no longer knows the purpose and the ignominy of the cross”—when we hear the bells on Sunday morning, “how ghostly all these things flit before us out

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of the grave of their primitive antiquity! Is one to believe that such things can still be believed?” (HA I §113). For Strauß, such things could indeed no longer be believed as historical, but they could be—and should be—believed as dogmatic. Yet the collision between critical and speculative theology on the one hand and the Church on the other was, Strauß believed, “necessarily introduced by the progress of time and the development of Christian theology” and “surprises and masters the individual without his being able to guard himself from it” (§152; Strauss 1856, vol. 2, 901). In the case of Nietzsche, the “collision” between the discourse of philology and the discourse of theology did not just “surprise”; in the end it overwhelmed him—and out of the resultant wreckage he built his philosophy. In his revised and more popular edition of 1864 entitled The Life of Jesus for the People, Strauß restated the conclusions he had reached in 1835–1836. Using the mythical approach of interpretation to the historical Jesus had, he argued, had the curious effect of dissolving this figure itself: “Every mythical feature added to the form of Jesus has not only obscured an historical one, so that with the removal of the first the latter would come to light, but very many have been destroyed by the mythical forms that have overlaid them, and been thus completely lost” (§99; Strauss 1879, 430–431). Thanks to Xenophon and Plato, we know much more about Socrates than we do about Jesus; and compared with what Matthew and John say in their respective gospels about Jesus, what Xenophon and Plato say about Socrates is simply much more credible. In the end, then, it all comes down to belief—a belief which is, in Strauß’s eyes, simply no longer tenable or possible (§99; ibid., 434). And yet Strauß also followed Reimarus, Spinoza, and Kant in supporting the ethical ideal that was represented by the historical Jesus: in so arguing, Strauß sought to recuperate the message of Christianity, and to “update” it in a way that was suitable for the modern age: “This distinguishing between the historical and the ideal Christ, that is, the exemplar of man as he is destined to be, and the transferring of beatifying faith from the first to the second, is the unavoidable result of the modern spiritual development; it is that carrying forward of the Religion of Christ to the Religion of Humanity to which all the noblest efforts of the present time are directed,” Strauß wrote. In fact, he concluded, “in the only

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writing of our New Testament which perhaps comes from an immediate disciple of Jesus, the Revelation of John, there lives a Christ from whom little is to be gained for the ideal of humanity; but the features of patience, gentleness, and charity which Jesus made predominant in that image, have not been lost to mankind, and are exactly those from which all that we now call Humanity might germinate and grow” (§100; Strauss 1879, 436–437). Thus Strauß approached the historical Jesus through the Hegelian notion of the “cunning of reason,” in which the changes made to this figure through its emergence against the background of Jewish culture and the accretion of elements from Greek and Roman mythology paradoxically served as a means to recuperate its message today. As a result, Strauß did not see himself as sweeping away Christianity but rather as, in a quasi-Hegelian mode, uncovering and rediscovering its truth: Therefore the critic is convinced that he is committing no offence against what is sacred, nay rather that he is doing a good and necessary work, when he sweeps away all that makes Jesus a supernatural Being, as well meant and perhaps even at first sight beneficial, but in the long run mischievous and now absolutely destructive, restores, as well as may be, the image of the historical Jesus in its simply human features, but refers mankind for salvation to the ideal Christ, to that moral pattern in which the historical Jesus did indeed first bring to light many principal features, but which as an elementary principle as much belongs to the general endowment of our kind, as its improvement and perfection can only be the problem and the work of mankind in general. (§100; Strauss 1879, 438–439)

This was then the Hegelian nub of Strauß’s ambition: to replace the traditional, historical foundation of Christianity, that had been swept away by historical criticism, with a new (quasi-Hegelian) speculative foundation. (In Hegelian terms, the historical form of Christianity was to be negated, but its content was to be preserved; as Strauß described his ambition for his Life of Jesus, “in this manner I will partly destroy, partly destabilize, the infinite content which faith has in this life—but, of course, only to restore it again in a higher manner.”)39 This project was centred on the argument that what Hegel called the Idea—that is, the

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unity of the infinite and the finite—is embodied not simply in the single historical figure of Jesus as a preeminent example of divinity-in-history, but in the whole of humanity (Beiser 2020, 17 and 12). Even if, for Strauß, Christ was but a symbol for incarnation, he expressed the truth of this dogma—that the divine appears in history in human form (Beiser 2020: 18). This resoundingly Hegelian conclusion was one that Nietzsche was bound to reject: first, because his reading of Strauß was part and parcel of his own loss of faith and, having lost it, he believed his life to be (in the famous words of Stephen Fry talking about abandoning belief in God) “simpler, purer, cleaner, and more worth living”40; and second, because Nietzsche had embarked on a path that would eventually lead him to describe Christianity as “the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct of revenge […] the one immortal blemish upon the human race” (AC §62). Yet already in 1873, when Nietzsche published the first of his Untimely Observations entitled “David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer,” one can find intimations of the direction his thinking was to take in the form of his excoriating attack on Strauß in this work.

Nietzsche on D.F. Strauß The immediate political background to Nietzsche’s composition of his Untimely Observation on “David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer” was the Franco-Prussian War, a conflict that lasted from July 1870 to May 1871. Although Nietzsche had renounced his Prussian citizenship when he moved to Basel in 1869 (and, in fact, never acquired Swiss or any other citizenship for the rest of his life), he had served in the Prussian forces as a medical orderly. Having contracted diphtheria and dysentery, Nietzsche was withdrawn from the battlefield after only a few weeks, and returned to Switzerland; later, in his “Attempt at a Self-Criticism” he evoked his work at this time on The Birth of Tragedy when he wrote that, “as the thunder of the Battle of Wörth was rolling over Europe, the muser and riddle-friend who was to be father of this book sat somewhere in an Alpine nook, very bemused and beriddled, hence very concerned and yet

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unconcerned, and wrote down his thoughts about the Greeks” (BT Attempt §1). When the French parliament voted to declare war on the Kingdom of Prussia on 16 July 1870, it did so out of fear of the consequences of German unification and the shift in the balance of power in Europe away from France. In the course of six months of a military bloodbath that has been described as “a dress rehearsal for the horrors of the First World War” (Young 2010, 136), the Germans advanced through Alsace and into France, besieging Paris until it fell at the end of January 1871. On 18 January 1871 King Wihelm I had been proclaimed Emperor in the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles; on 28 January 1871 the Armistice of Versailles was signed, bringing an end to military hostilities; and on 10 May 1871, the Treaty of Frankfurt was signed, signalling the end of the Franco-Prussian War and ceding the territory of Alsace-­ Lorraine to the new German Empire. Germany had won the war; looking on events as an outsider from Basel, Nietzsche wondered whether it was going to lose the peace. Or as he put it in section 1 of the first of his Untimelies, the domestic consequences of the victory risked turning it into a defeat—“into the defeat, if not the extirpation, of the German spirit for the benefit of the ‘German Reich’” (UM I §1). What Nietzsche worried about was the consequences of the outcome of the war for German culture. What did Nietzsche understand by “culture”? For him, the term implies more—much more—than it does today to our postmodern (and, in this sense, relativist) ears; Nietzsche defines culture as “the unity of style in all expressions of the life of a people” (UM I §1). Hence its opposite is “a lack of style or a chaotic jumble of all styles,” or what Nietzsche calls barbarism. In so doing, Nietzsche is aligning himself with Goethe’s critique of his fellow countrymen in his conversation of 3 May 1827, when he told Eckermann: “We Germans are of yesterday. We have indeed been properly cultivated for a century; but a few centuries more must elapse before so much mind and elevated culture will become universal amongst our people that they will appreciate beauty like the Greeks, will be inspired by a beautiful song; before it will be said of them, ‘it is a long time since they were barbarians’” (Eckermann 1998, 202).41

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For Nietzsche, barbarism takes a particular form which he calls cultural philistinism. In its broadest sense, he writes, the term “philistine” refers to “the antithesis of a son of the muses, of the artist, of the man of genuine culture” (UM I §2). And cultural philistines distinguish themselves through the fact that they do not realize that they are philistines. (Here lies the contemporary relevance of Nietzsche’s critique, otherwise so rooted in the concerns and preoccupations of the nineteenth century; as the so-­ called Dunning-Kruger effect explains, stupid people lack precisely the capability to realize how stupid they are ....) And it is as an exemplar of such cultural philistinism that Nietzsche advances the figure of David Friedrich Strauß. The impetus for Nietzsche’s essay on Strauß was probably the publication of the book The Old Faith and the New in 1872. Nietzsche was already familiar with Strauß’s work from the time when he was a student of theology at Bonn in 1864–1865; Nietzsche had included Strauß in the reading for his vacation travels in March and April 1865.42 According to J.P. Stern, reading the Life of Jesus sealed Nietzsche’s decision to reject Christianity and, at Easter in 1865, to refuse to take communion (Stern 1983, xi). But why should Nietzsche have decided to pay this work so much attention? As Stern suggests, there were at least three reasons for choosing Strauß’s The Old Faith and the New for its extensive treatment. First, in 1865 Strauß had criticized Wagner for petitioning Ludwig II to dismiss a rival composer, and (at Wagner’s request to Nietzsche) now it was pay-back time. Numerous scholars have traced the origin of the contextual motives for Nietzsche’s polemic against Strauß to Nietzsche’s infatuation with Wagner (and, in fact, in an unpublished sketch from Spring-Summer 1875 for a preface to a projected, single-volume republication of the Untimely Observations Nietzsche cites three main motives for this work: his “desperation” after what had happened to Wagner’s plans in Bayreuth; his belief that had “stumbled across the most fundamental problem of all culture”; and some words of Wagner’s spoken in Strasbourg that had persuaded him to choose D.F. Strauß as his target (KSA 8, 5[98], 66).43 Second, Strauß was certainly (as hard as it might be today for us to imagine …) a popular writer at the time, so he could be used as a cipher (or, in the terms of Ecce Homo, as a “semiotic code”) for everything

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Nietzsche regarded as hindering the revival of a tragic culture of the kind envisioned in the final sections of The Birth of Tragedy. In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche speaks about “tak[ing] two famous and still altogether undetermined types by the forelock […] in order to say something, in order to have a couple more formulas, sign, means of expression in my hands,” adding that “it was in this way that Plato employed Socrates, as a semiotic for Plato” (EH UM §3). (In his second Epistle, Plato writes about how he himself has “never yet written anything on these subjects,” i.e., the philosophical doctrines of Platonism, adding that “no treatise by Plato exists or will exist, but those which now bear his name belong to a Socrates become fair and young” [Epistle 2, 314c].)44 Or as Nietzsche put it earlier in Ecce Homo, he had not so much attacked the person of D.F. Strauß as used his person “as a strong magnifying glass that allows one to make visible a general, but creeping and elusive crisis” (EH Wise §7). And third, a reason which may be closer to home for Nietzsche. For as Stern recognizes, some of Strauß’s views would have in fact been perhaps uncomfortably close to Nietzsche’s own. His subversion of the idea of the supernatural and his view of belief in transcendence as a kind of compensation; his critique of the Church and organized religion; and the idea of myth as a socially sanctioned lie that arises from the existential needs of a people (Stern 1983, xii–xiii)—these are themes one discovers in the late Nietzsche, above all in The Anti-Christ. To these three reasons Frederick Beiser adds a fourth, more strategic one: Nietzsche had once been an admirer of Strauß, but now he wanted to inherit his mantle as a freethinker—even if only by stealing it!45 And Barbara Neymeyr has suggested that the first of the Untimelies anticipates key aspects of the subject of the third, that is, Schopenhauer, in at least five respects (NK 1/2, 22–23). First, as a committed disciple of his more pessimistically inclined “educator,” Schopenhauer, Nietzsche criticizes Strauß for what he sees as Strauß’s absurd optimism. Second, Nietzsche directed much of his invective against Strauß as a Hegelian, much as Schopenhauer himself had polemicized against Hegel and against all kinds of Hegelei (see, e.g., his essay Ueber die Universitäts-Philosophie). Third, Nietzsche shared with Schopenhauer a profound contempt (expressed, too, on Schopenhauer’s part in Ueber die Universitäts-­ Philosophie) for academic philosophy itself.

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Fourth, Nietzsche took up and carried forward Schopenhauer’s polemics against the impoverishment (or, in Schopenhauer’s terms, the Verhunzung) of language, criticizing Strauß’s written style as much as he had praised his educator’s, Schopenhauer’s, use of language; in the opening sentence of section 12, Nietzsche wondered whether Schopenhauer would have described this collection of examples of Strauß’s style as “new documents of the shabby jargon of today” (UM I §12). Finally, the very concept of untimeliness, part and parcel of Nietzsche’s ambition to offer a critical diagnosis of his age, owed much to Schopenhauer, as reflected in his educator’s distinction between “extraordinary works” (außerordentliche Werke) and those “usual kinds of works […] strictly bound to the spirit of the age” (Werke gewöhnlichen Schlages […] mit dem Geiste der Zeit […] genau verbunden) in the second volume, chapter 20, of his Parerga and Paralipomena (entitled “On Judgement, Criticism, Approbation, and Fame”) (NK 1/2, 23–24). In his unpublished notes from the time of the Untimely Observations, Nietzsche focuses on what he sees as the shortcomings of Strauß’s conception of culture. It had been a mistake, he wrote, for Strauß to write a Life of Jesus, because he “had to limit himself to the historical work,” even though he “should not have forgotten what was actu[ally] real Christianity, monasticism” (KSA 7, 27[3], 588–589). Indeed, Strauß is said to have “ignored the best part of Christianity, the great recluses and saints—in short, its genius” (KSA 7, 27[1], 587), and “constantly takes Christianity, art, in their lowest democratic atrophied form and then refutes them.” For as someone who “believes in modern culture,” he overlooks the fact that “ancient culture was a much greater one, and yet Christianity still became master over it” (KSA 7, 27[2], 588). These intellectual failings are, in Nietzsche’s eyes, reflected in Strauß’s own stylistic shortcomings: he is “no philosopher,” he “has no sense of style,” he “is no artist,” he is “a schoolmaster” and “displays the schoolmasterly type of cultivation [Bildung] typical of our bourgeoisie” (ibid.); in short, Strauß pursues a strategy of domesticating literature and culture in a way that is surely not unknown in academic circles today. As Nietzsche puts it, Strauß “never sees where the problems are” (ibid.). The Old Faith and the New opens with an introduction that is intended to explain Strauß’s standpoint, but this standpoint is expressed both in

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the first person singular and in the first person plural, that, he uses “I” (ich) and “we” (wir) interchangeably.46 This use of the first person plural is a device we also find in Nietzsche: in the second and third of the Untimelies, for instance, where Nietzsche uses the plural form to identify with the youth that has undertaken “the wild and erring voyage over strange dark seas” and at last espies “a coast […]: we must land on it whatever it may be like” (UM II §10), and describes himself as “we [who] have our task and our sphere of duties” and “we [who] know what culture is” (UM III §1, §5, and §8); in The Gay Science, where Nietzsche speaks of “we philosophers and ‘free spirits’ [who] feel, when we hear the news that ‘the old god is dead,’ as if a new dawn shone on us; […] the sea, our sea, lies open gain; perhaps there has never yet been such an ‘open sea’—” (GS §343); and in Beyond Good and Evil, where he identifies as “we whose task is wakefulness itself,” “we good Europeans and free, very free spirits,” “we opposite men,” “we scholars,” “we [who] have a different faith” (!), and “we [who] sail right over morality, we crush, we destroy perhaps the remains of our own morality by daring to make our voyage there—but what matter are we!” (BGE Preface, §44, §203, and §23).47 Its first section, using the first person plural, has a question for its title, “Are we still Christians?” (Strauß 1872, 13). The response, “We are no longer Christians,” became as famous as the question it purported to answer, and is described by Beiser as Strauß’s own “version avant la lettre of Nietzsche’s notorious ‘God is dead,’” and—like Nietzsche’s later version—as much a challenge to Christians as a rallying-cry for ex-believers (Beiser 2020, 255). Equally, the question anticipates Nietzsche’s only slightly more rhetorical one in Twilight of the Idols, “whether we have really grown more moral” (TI Skirmisches §37). Behind Strauß’s question (as, indeed, behind Nietzsche’s) lies the observation that, as Strauß put it, “if we open our eyes, and if we honestly admit the findings of doing so, then we must confess—the whole life and striving of the civilized peoples of our age us based on a world-view flatly opposed to the world-view of Jesus.”48 (Three examples of core Christian dogmas that are nowadays unacceptable or, one might say, “politically incorrect,” would be: (a) the doctrine of original sin; (b) the doctrine, associated with St Augustine, but originating with Cyprian of Carthage (d. 258) (see Epistle 72), of extra Ecclesiam nulla salus, that is, “outside the Church there is no

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salvation”; and (c) the doctrine of reconciliation that states Christ died as a propitiatory sacrifice for our sins.49 These doctrines are often simply not believed, even or especially by those who call themselves Christians.) Section 2 is entitled “Do we still have religion?”, in which Strauß accepts the Epicurean account of the origin of religion, but rejects the conclusion Epicureans drew from it, that is, that religion is nothing more than superstition. Rather, Strauß proposes a theory of religion that borrows in various ways from Schleiermacher, Feuerbach, Hegel, and Spinoza.50 The model of religion proposed by Strauß is, however, considerably attenuated in comparison with the one passionately embraced by Schleiermacher. Section 3, “How do we understand the world?”, offers a “freethinker’s cosmology,” to use Beiser’s phrase.51 If, in his Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels), subtitled or an Attempt to Account for the Constitutional and Mechanical Origin of the Universe upon Newtonian Principles, written and published anonymously in 1755, Immanuel Kant had promised, “Give me the material, and I will build a world out of it! That is, give me the material, and I will show you how a world is to come into being out of it,” he had also admitted that “we will be able to understand the development of all the cosmic bodies, the causes of their movements, in short, the origin of the entire present arrangement of the planetary system, before we completely and clearly understand the development of a single plant or caterpillar on mechanical principles” (Kant 2008). For his part, however, Strauß appears more confident that a naturalistic, materialistic, and mechanistic account of the world is a possibility, and one to be welcomed. (Astonishingly, Strauß even argued in a letter to F.T. Vischer of 11 February 1873 that materialism and idealism were not opposites, but alternate or complementary forms of monism, either explaining “from above” by beginning from the subject and deriving the object (idealism), or explaining “from below” by beginning from the object and deriving the subject (materialism).)52 The fourth and final section bears the title, “How do we organise our life?”, or in other words: What is an ethical life? The ethics proposed in this chapter elaborates the “pure humanism” outlined by Strauß in his essay of 1848 entitled “Political and Theological Liberalism,” in which he

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argued in favour of a new religion that arises from “the laws of our own being,” or in other words: a kind of humanism.53 In this essay, Strauß had sought a synthesis of two sources of German culture: on the one hand, the rationalism and naturalism of classical culture or “occidental” Greece and Rome, and, on the other, the spirituality and ethics of Christian culture of “Asiatic” Christianity.54 Through such a synthesis, Strauß had advocated for “this development of Christianity toward pure humanism, or rather the growth of pure humanism from the general ground of modern European culture, of which Christianity is only a part,” as “the only way to get beyond the opposition between Catholicism and Protestantism” (Strauß 1848, 15), thereby subsuming Catholicism and Protestantism under the category of “pure humanism.” Now Strauß tries to work out in more detail the moral principles of this humanist ethics, inserting himself into a German tradition developed by Wieland, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Wilhelm vom Humboldt, and Georg Forster (1754–1794)—a tradition which, as Beiser notes, emphasized the need to develop all human capacities, including sensibility …55—and a tradition which, given a vitalist twist, Nietzsche would try to claim for his own. (Both Nietzsche, in Twilight of the Idols, and Strauß, in this final chapter of The Old Faith and the New, try to defend the importance of sexuality as part of this humanist ethic.56 And ironically, while Nietzsche was—and often still is— accused of nationalism, Strauß reveals himself as a far more committed nationalist in his suggestion that the nation (Volk) is the middle term between the individual and humankind as a whole.)57 In his Untimely Observation on D.F. Strauß, Nietzsche was savagely sarcastic about what all this meant in practical terms. When Strauß wrote about what “we”—by which he meant “by no means only scholars and artists but also office workers and soldiers, tradesmen and landed proprietors”—had achieved in recent years, including “hav[ing] participated in the liveliest way in the great national war and the construction of the German state, […] assist[ing] our understanding of these things through historical studies, […] seek[ing] to broaden to broaden our knowledge of nature, for which there is likewise no lack of aids accessible to the common understanding; and […] find[ing] in the writings of our great pots, in performances of the works of our great composers, a stimulus for the spirit and the heart, for the imagination and the sense of humour,”58

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Nietzsche mockingly glossed these examples as really meaning visiting the pub, reading the newspaper, strolling through the zoological garden, and going to theatres and concerts (UM I §4)! Or in short, using the terminology introduced above, being a philistine. For his part, Nietzsche was fully aware of the tone of his essay. Writing to Erwin Rohde (1845–1898) on 5 May 1873 and picking up on a remark made in a letter by Carl von Gersdorff (1844–1904) about how the atmosphere in Basel was “volcanic,” Nietzsche described himself having “spewed some lava” in the form of his Strauß essay, and placing this work in the context of his own growing disenchantment with Wagner by adding: “I came back from Bayreuth in a state of such persistent melancholy that in the end I could only take refuge in sacred anger [die heilige Wuth]”—an allusion to Hippocrates’s definition of epilepsy as the “sacred disease” (morbus sacer) (KSB 4, 149–150). (Elsewhere in this letter Nietzsche refers to how “extremely, extremely melancholy” [höchst, höchst schwermüthig] he was feeling—a hint of the psychogenic state in which he wrote this essay.) When Strauß died six months after the publication of Nietzsche’s first Untimely Observation, Nietzsche wrote in worried terms to his friend Carl von Gersdorff: “Yesterday in Ludwigsburg they buried David Strauss. I hope I did not sadden him in his last few months and that he died without knowing anything about me.—It’s preying on my mind” (KSB 4, 200).59 But Strauß did know. As he wrote to his friend, the philologist Adolf Rapp (1841–1905), on 19 December 1873: “First they draw and quarter you, then they hang you … What intrigues me about the fellow is the psychological point: how one can get into such a rage with someone who has never crossed one’s path—in brief, the real motive behind this passionate hatred.”60 (Looking back on the Untimelies in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche blamed Heinrich Einwald (1803–1875), a theologian in Göttingen, for spreading the rumour that his attentat had “proved fatal” to Strauß61, and, citing a maxim by Stendhal,62 implied that his essay on Strauß could be described in terms of a “duel” [Duell] [EH UM §2].) In this respect, Strauß can be said to have suffered the same fate as had J.C.F. Steudel, one of his former professors of theology of Tübingen and a figurehead of its old school of theology and its embrace of the

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standpoint of supernaturalism.63 The target of the first of the Streitschriften, Steudel had written a polemical attack on Das Leben Jesu, entitled Vorläufig zu Beherzigendes bei Würdigung der Frage über die historische oder mythische Grundlage des Lebens Jesu (Tübingen, 1835), and now it was time for “merciless revenge” (eine unbarmherzige Rache),64 in the form of an equally polemical response which runs to some 180 pages. Beiser describes these two works as a re-run of the conflict that had played out in the eighteenth century between G.E. Lessing and the Lutheran pastor and theologian Johann Melchior Goeze (1717–1786), inasmuch as Steudel, like Goeze, writes from a classical Protestant standpoint according to which reason is post fidem (i.e., we believe in order to understand), not per fidem (i.e., we believe only after understanding), and hence faith stands above reason, whereas Strauß challenges this priority and reverses it, examining the foundations of Christianity as an intellectual or historical question, not a religious one.65 In the view of Hausrath, the effect of this work was devastating: “The impression that the work against Steudel made was a terrible one,” he writes, and “supernaturalism”—that is, the belief that the Bible is the basis of the faith, and that biblical revelation must be regarded as literally, historically true—“which had long been untenable, here received its mortal blow,” and “from now on no theologian wanted any longer to be designated by a name that rang with such a risible sound in the ears of the age” (Hausrath 1876, vol. 1, 213). And from now on, no one wanted to listen to Steudel any more either, according to F.T. Vischer: “Poor old Steudel,” he wrote to Strauß on 21 April 1837, “who, like Louis XVI, has brought the guilt of his house under your sharp guillotine; everything now goes poorly for him,” and “his lectures on [the Gospel of ] John, once famous, now have no listeners; and even the people who are no friends of yours maintain that he has been knocked dead.”66 And in fact, seven months after Strauß’s pamphlet had appeared on 15 March, Steudel died on 24 October 1837. Even though it is a very early work, Nietzsche’s argumentational strategies in his essay on Strauß in his Untimely Observations anticipate those he would later use in The Anti-Christ to a remarkable degree, especially in its use of invective, a form of libel used in Greek and Roman polemical verse and deployed by, for instance, Cicero in his Catiline Orations (against Clodius or Catilina) and in his Philippics (against Mark Antony).

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For his part, Nietzsche uses what J.P. Stern calls “quotational satire,” identifying the turns of phrase, clichés, idées reçues, as well as grammatical errors, mixed metaphors, and garbled imagery of Strauß’s writing in order to prosecute the case that, behind such bad style, there is bad thinking. Or, in the famous words of the French encyclopédiste Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–1788), in his celebrated “Discourse on Style” (Discours sur le style) of 1753, Le style c’est l’homme même (“the style is the man himself ”). (Later on, in The Anti-Christ, §45, Nietzsche uses a similar technique when he cites a series of biblical passages and makes jokes about them.)67 As Stern notes, this satirical procedure amounts to an aesthetic evaluation of moral conceptions and attitudes, and their condemnation on aesthetic grounds (Stern 1983, xiii), a technique that Nietzsche frequently deploys in his later writings, including The Anti-­ Christ in the passage mentioned and others. After considering some seventy short extracts from The Old Faith and the New, Nietzsche sums up in his essay’s penultimate paragraph exactly what is at stake for him: To speak frankly, what we have seen here are feet of clay, and what appears a healthy flesh tone is only cosmetic veneer. Naturally, philistine culture in Germany will be indignant when we call ‘painted idols’ what it regards as a ‘living god.’ But whoever dares to overthrow its idols will not fear to tell philistine culture to its face, in the teeth of all its indignation, that it has forgotten how to distinguish between living and dead, between original and fake, and finally between a god and an idol. He will tell philistine culture that it has lost the healthy, virile instinct for everything real and just. It has earned its downfall. Already the signs of its dominion are fading. Already its purple robes have fallen. And when the robe falls, the sovereign soon follows. (UM I §12)

Here we already find the image of the idol, which forms the basis of the title and foreword of Twilight of the Idols; the vitalist emphasis on a culture of life rather than a culture of death, central to The Anti-Christ; the emphasis on the real (as opposed to the ideal) that leads Nietzsche to embrace Thucydides, not Plato (TI Ancients §2); and the use of imagery or sustained metaphor as means of developing an argument. The

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vituperative tone of certain remarks in the essay on Strauß anticipates the hectoring tone, often (wrongly) assumed to be signs of incipient madness, in The Anti-Christ, for instance, when Nietzsche writes that “to the worm a corpse is a pleasant thought, and to everything living a worm is a dreadful one,” adds that “the worm’s idea of Heaven is a fat carcass, the philosophy professor’s is grubbing about in the entrails of Schopenhauer, and as a long as there are rats there will also be a rat Heaven,” and concludes by describing Strauß himself as “lodge[d] in the works of our great poets and composers like a worm which lives by destroying, admires by consuming, reveres by digesting” (UM I §6). Moreover, this early essay points to a central (and, indeed, crucial) difference between Strauß and Nietzsche. As J.P. Stern observes, Strauß’s argument that the Jews created the myth of Yahweh, their own God, because a communal need gave rise to this myth, is entirely compatible with Nietzsche’s idea that “God is dead” because human beings no longer need him, dramatically stated in The Gay Science, §125, and in the Preface to Thus Spoke Zarathustra. And this is the point: what Nietzsche states is the same idea, only expressed far more dramatically, far more urgently, far more radically; and what Nietzsche misses in Strauß’s critique of religion is precisely this sense of radical urgency. This radical urgency is something that Nietzsche did find in the works of the German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843)—the “glorious” (herrlich) Hölderlin, as Nietzsche called him—although not in the remarks about him by Friedrich Theodor Vischer, made on 1 May 1873 on the occasion of the unveiling of a commemorative plaque to Hölderlin in Lauffen—remarks which Nietzsche sharply rejected (see UM I §2).68 By the time of The Anti-Christ, this sense of radical urgency has intensified almost to the point of an agonizing despair. In his recent intellectual biography of Strauß, Frederick Beiser describes him as “the father of modern unbelief in Germany”—and hence as belonging to the ranks of such nineteenth-century German intellectuals who attacked the authority of revealed religion and orthodox Christianity (or, in other words, who pitted the discourses of philosophy in general and of philology in particular against the discourse of theology) as Ludwig Feuerbach, Max Stirner, Karl Marx, Schopenhauer, Eduard von Hartmann, Ludwig Büchner (1824–1899), Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919),

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and of course Nietzsche himself (Beiser 2020, 1). As such, Beiser tries to mount something of a defence of Strauß, countering the views of three critics in particular—those of the nationalist historian Heinrich von Treitschke (1834–1896); of the Alsatian theologian Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965); and those of Nietzsche. On what grounds, then, might one try to defend Strauß? In a strange passage in section 4, Nietzsche recounts how one of his friends had a dream in which the classic authors were waxwork figures, whose arms and eyes made a squeaking sound as they moved. In the dream an uncanny, formless figure stands amid them, draped in ribbons with a paper label hanging from its mouth—on which the name “Lessing” is written! Like the mythical chimera, a monstrous creature composed from the parts of more than one animal and described by Homer in the Iliad as “a thing of immortal make, not human, lion-fronted and snake behind, a goat in the middle, and snorting out the breath of the terrible flame of bright fire,” this curious figure has Strauß at the front, the German literary and political historian Georg Gottfried Gervinus (1805–1871) behind, and the chimera in the middle: it is a figure of what the philistines have made of Lessing. Yet Lessing was a figure of great admiration for Strauß and Nietzsche alike—an emblematic Aufklärer who defied the authorities and published the Wolffenbüttler Fragmente, thus giving voice to the views of Reimarus and initiating the quest for the historical Jesus. While noting that Strauß admires Lessing for the universality of his interests and for his unity as a man and a writer, Nietzsche apparently overlooks (or ignores) Strauß’s admiration for Lessing’s intellectual courage.69 Yet the central thrust of Nietzsche’s argument (as Beiser shrewdly observes) is that, in the end, Strauß betrays his own freethinking ideals, and in Nietzsche’s view The Old Faith and the New bears witness to this betrayal on Strauß’s part. For one thing, his acceptance of Darwinism is undermined by his failure to follow through on the logic of this position and to abandon Christian morality as a bulwark against the right of the stronger and the war of all against all. “Where has the moral teaching of Strauss-Darwin now gone, where has any courage whatever gone!”, Nietzsche exclaims (UM I §7). For another, his embrace of a pantheistic view of the universe is compromised by his insistence in retaining a

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vestigial “feeling of piety,” borrowed from the belief in God. As Gretchen says of Faust, as she plucks a flower, “He loves me!”—before she has her conversation with him in Marthe’s Garden about whether or not he believes in God (UM I §6).70 And for a third, his emphasis that his new faith was for only a few select intellectuals proved a convenient strategy for refusing to offend the faith of the masses. “He announces with admirable frankness that he is no longer a Christian, but he does not wish to disturb anyone’s peace of mind” (UM I §7).71 By contrast, Nietzsche was willing to ask if we have really grown more moral (TI Expeditions 37), to declare the “death of God” (GS §125), and he was certainly not reluctant to disturb anyone’s peace of mind or cause offence. In other words, Strauß may have been “a father of unbelief,” but his form of unbelief lacked the radicality, the urgency, the passion that it would acquire in the soul of Nietzsche.

Nietzsche and the Post-Straussian Tradition With his Life of Jesus, David Friedrich Strauß had inaugurated a tradition of writing about the historical Jesus that Schweitzer in The Quest for the Historical Jesus describes as the “liberal” Lives of Jesus. In point of fact, Schweitzer’s verdict on Strauß’s attempt to write a popularizing version of his Life of 1835 in the form of his Life of Jesus for the German People of 1864 is quite harsh in its evaluation compared to Renan’s Vie de Jésus. “It is true Strauß, like Renan, was an artist,” he concedes, “but he did not write, like an imaginative novelist, with a constant eye to effect,” and Schweitzer goes on: “His art was unpretentious, even austere, appealing to the few, not to the many,” and for this reason, in response to the “demand” of “the people” for “a complete and vivid picture,” Renan had given them “a figure which was theatrical no doubt, but full of life and movement, and they had been grateful to him for it’; Strauß, however, “could not do that” (Schweitzer 1910, 193–194). Strauß’s Life of Jesus for the German People marked a step away from Hegel, which Schweitzer regards as something of a loss, since the first Life had been “steeped in the Hegelian theory regarding the realisation of the Idea.” With the decline of Hegelianism, Strauß now found “no way of

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reconciling history and idea,” which meant that his new Life of Jesus was “a mere objective presentment of history” (Schweitzer 1910, 194–195). In the wake of Strauß’s Lives, a plethora of other “Lives” appeared. In his account of these post-Straussian publications, Schweitzer touches on the so-called Schenkel controversy, that is, the debate that centred on The Portrait of Jesus (Das Charakterbild Jesu) (1864; 41873) by Daniel Schenkel (1813–1885). This Swiss Protestant theologian had opposed the appointment of Strauß to a chair of theology at Zurich, yet now a similar fate befell him. Up to this point, Schenkel had been able to mediate between liberal and conservative elements among the members of the German Protestantverein, but with the publication of his Portrait of Jesus, his apparent embrace of more liberal views provoked a critical backlash in which 117 Baden pastors in 1863 signed a protest declaring Schenkel unfit for office as a theological teacher. In a counter-protest in 1864, the famous Swiss politician and lawyer Johann Bluntschli (1808–1881) and the German Protestant theologian Heinrich Julius Holtzmann (1832–1910) defended him; within ten years, Schenkel had died (in 1885), a figure who had, whilst doing (in Schweitzer’s estimation) “nothing remarkable in theology,” nevertheless accrued “a vast debt” from German Protestantism for “acting as its tribune in the ’sixties” (ibid., 210). At this point the quest for the historical Jesus that had begun with Reimarus (see Chap. 3) was reaching a kind of stalemate: according to Schweitzer, most of the Lives of Jesus that followed Schenkel’s—with the notable exception of Die Geschichte Jesu von Nazara in ihrer Verkettung mit dem Gesamtleben seines Volkes or The History of Jesus of Nazareth in Relation to the General Life of His People, Freely Examined and Fully Narrated (3 vols, 1867–1872; translated as Jesus of Nazareth, and the National Life of Israel, 6 vols, 1873–1882) by Karl Theodor Keim (1815–1878)—had “nothing very exciting about them,” inasmuch as they were “variants of the type established during the 1860s, variants of which were only discernible by theologians, and which were otherwise exactly alike in arrangement and time” (Schweitzer 1910, 210). What made Keim’s work exceptional was that, in his approach to the relation between the spiritual and the eschatological elements in Jesus’s teaching, he introduced the idea of a development in Jesus’s consciousness of his vocation, and so “the thought which had hovered before the mind of

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Renan, but which in his hands had become only the motive of a romance—une ficelle de roman, as the French express it—was realised by Keim”; in Schweitzer’s view, “nothing deeper or more beautiful has since been written about the development of Jesus” (ibid., 213–214). The “net result” of these “liberal Lives of Jesus,” written at the same time as Nietzsche was developing his philosophy, can be summarized as follows. First, they helped to clear up the relation between John and the Synoptics, that is, between the fourth Gospel attributed to John and the three others, which seem to share a common perspective, the same stories, and similar (and sometimes even identical) wording, and are hence known as synoptic Gospels. (The question of the relation between these two traditions was solved when, in effect, the fourth Gospel ceased to be regarded as a historical source.) Second, they recognized the “fundamentally eschatological character” of the teaching and influence of the figure of Jesus as found in the Gospels of Mark and Matthew, that is, its concern with the “end times” and hence with “the end of the world” (Schweitzer 1910, 218–219). Third, they suggested that (apart from the references to the Son of Man in Mark 2: 10 and 28, Jesus had, before the incident at Caesarea Philippi (when Peter, in response to Jesus’s question as to who people say he is, declares that Jesus is the Messiah; see Mark 8: 27–33), never claimed to be the Messiah nor been recognized as such. (In turn, this insight raised two further questions, namely, Why had Jesus made a secret of his Messiahship, even to his disciplines? And if the people were told about his claims to Messiahship, when and how did this happen? Yet such questions were never properly investigated, thanks to what Schweitzer describes as “ill-starred psychologising.”) And fourth, the “striking thing” about all these liberal, critical Lives of Jesus is that they “unconsciously prepared the way for a deeper historical view” which, without them, would never have been reached (Schweitzer 1910, 220–221). On this basis, Schweitzer declares that “a deeper understanding of a subject is carried to its utmost limit and finally proves its own inadequacy,” and he sums up the “net result” (from a historical point of view) of the study of the life of Jesus in the post-Straussian period as follows. “The liberal critical school had carried to its limit the explanation of the connexion of the actions of Jesus, and of the events of His life, by a

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‘natural’ psychology,” Schweitzer wrote, “and the conclusions to which they had been driven had prepared the way for the recognition that the natural psychology is not here the historical psychology, but that the latter must be deduced from certain historical data.” And thus “through the meritorious and magnificently sincere work of the liberal critical school,” he concluded, “the a priori ‘natural’ psychology gave way to the eschatological” (Schweitzer 1910, 221). This shift towards the “eschatological question” governs a series of works that constitute the next step after the “liberal Lives” in the quest for the historical Jesus—and were written in a period roughly contemporaneous with the composition of The Anti-Christ.72 By the “eschatological question,” Schweitzer means the extent to which Jesus could be said to have believed that he himself was bringing about “the end of time” by ushering in the Kingdom of God. Or to put it another way: What is the role of the apocalyptic discourse one finds in the gospels? By eliminating the idea that a Jewish-Christian Apocalypse was intended by the gospel material, in Jesus’ Conception of His Second Coming (1873) the Protestant theologian Wilhelm Weiffenbach (1842–1905) is left with no more than “a discourse, spoken on the Mount of Olives, in which Jesus exhorted His disciples to watchfulness, in view of the near, but nevertheless undefined, hour of the return of ‘the Master of the House’” (Schweitzer 1910, 230). This discourse provided Weiffenbach with a “standard” by which criticism could test all the other eschatological sayings and discourses, an approach which Schweitzer described as “a bludgeon with which [Weiffenbach] goes seal-hunting and clubs the defenceless Synoptic sayings right and left. When his work is done you see before you a desert island strewn with quivering corpses” (ibid., 231)! Nevertheless (and continuing his metaphor), “the slaughter was not aimless, or at least it was not without result,” Schweitzer adds, and for the following reasons. First, these critical approaches suggested that Jesus’s discourses had nothing to do with a historical prediction of the destruction of Jerusalem. (That destruction took place in 70 CE, when the Second Temple was destroyed and, in the words of Josephus, the entire city was “so thoroughly razed to the ground by those that demolished it to its foundations, that nothing was left that could ever persuade visitors

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that it had once been a place of habitation” [The Jewish War, 7:1:1].) Second, the discourse on the mission of the twelve apostles (Matthew 10) turns out on this reading to be not so much a discourse of instruction as rather a collection of eschatological sayings. And third, the expectation expressed by Jesus towards the end of his life about his Second Coming was judged to be probably authentic. Following Schleiermacher and Christian Hermann Weisse, Weiffenbach sought to prove the identity of the predictions concerning the Second Coming and the Resurrection, arguing that it was only after the death of Jesus that the disciples began to differentiate the one from the other (Schweitzer 1910, 232). In Schweitzer’s view, a breakthrough was achieved by the Protestant theologian Johannes Weiss (1863–1914), whose Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes (1892; Preaching of Jesus Concerning the Kingdom of God) he judges to be of “equal importance” to Strauß’s Life of Jesus. To the already existing great binaries in relation to the study of the life of Jesus as formulated by Strauß (i.e., either historical or purely supranatural), and by the Tübingen School and Holtzmann (i.e., either Synoptic or Johannine), Weiss now added a third option, that is, either eschatological or non-­ eschatological (ibid., 237). On Weiss’s account, the eschatological dimension in the gospels is crucial: since Jesus understood the Kingdom of God to imply an imminent end to the world, it turned out to be necessary, when that end of the world failed to come about, to add further teachings about ethics (Burkitt 1915, 293–294). Thanks to their respective false conceptions of the Kingdom of God, Weiffenbach had failed to solve the problem of the Second Coming, and the Franco-German Protestant theologian, Wilhelm Baldensperger (1856–1936) (who had studied from 1876 to 1878 at the University of Göttingen under Albrecht Ritschl [1822–1889], a relative of Friedrich Ritschl [1806–1876], Nietzsche’s former tutor at Bonn, then Leipzig), had failed to solve the problem of the Messianic consciousness of Jesus (Schweitzer 1910, 238). Instead Weiss’s contribution lay in his attempt to prove that “the Messianic self-consciousness of Jesus, as expressed in the title ‘Son of Man,’ shares in the transcendental apocalyptic character of Jesus’ idea of the Kingdom of God, and cannot be separated from that idea” (cited in ibid., 239). (In his turn, Nietzsche would also focus in The Anti-Christ on the concepts of the “Son of Man” and the

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“Kingdom of God” [see AC §34], albeit without the same degree of theological or conceptual sophistication displayed by Johannes Weiss.) In this respect, Schweitzer saw a link back to Reimarus—the only writer prior to Johannes Weiss to have grasped that the preaching of Jesus was “purely eschatological” (ibid., 240). Inevitably, the focus on the eschatological question brought a flurry of responses that Schweitzer describes as “the struggle against eschatology.” This struggle took the form of a series of books, and in some cases (or so Schweitzer observed) their shortness was an indication of their importance (although not all were short—several of them ran to hundreds of pages!). If the brevity of, say, The Antithesis between Jesus’ Preaching and Judaism: A Religious-Historical Comparison (Jesu Predigt in ihrem Gegensatz zum Judentum. Ein religionsgeschichtlicher Vergleich) (1892) by Wilhelm Bousset (1865–1920) was a reflection of the fact that people had begun to see that “the elaborate Lives of Jesus which had hitherto held the field, only masked the fact that the study of the subject was at a standstill; and that the tedious rehandling of the problems which had been solved so far as they were capable of solution only served as an excuse for not grappling with those which still remained unsolved” (Schweitzer 1910, 241), what does the length of these other works say? Seen in this light, Nietzsche’s insistence on the brevity of his thought—his ambition to say in an aphorism what others say (or do not say) in a book (TI Expeditions §51)— seems less strange …. On Schweitzer’s account, the struggle against eschatology led to an important new direction in the quest for the historical Jesus: for, “just when ingenuity appeared to have exhausted itself in attempts to solve the most difficult of the problems raised by the eschatological school, the historical discussion suddenly seemed about to be rendered objectless”—because “philology entered a caveat” (ibid., 268). This shift towards philology was inaugurated by an essay by Hans Lietzmann (1875–1942) on the linguistic basis of Jesus’s enigmatic designation of himself in the gospels as “the Son of Man.” Yet Lietzmann’s The Son of Man: A Contribution to New Testament Theology (Der Menschensohn: Ein Beitrag zur neutestamentlichen Theologie) (1896) is but one of many works discussed by Schweitzer, who devotes an important chapter to questions regarding the Aramaic language, Rabbinic parallels, and

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Buddhistic influence. Now the work of one of these critics, the German biblical scholar and orientalist Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918), was well known to Nietzsche,73 but the general thrust of the direction of these critics as a whole offers significant parallels to the approach taken—for the most independently, it seems—by Nietzsche in The Anti-Christ and in other works, particularly Daybreak. As we saw earlier (in the Introduction and in Chap. 3), philological issues (especially in relation to the interpretation of scripture) had been of great interest since the time of the early Christian Church, and in the sixteenth century one of the most hotly debated philological issues had been the question concerning the language Jesus would have spoken: Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek? In his History of Israel and the Jews (Israelitische und Jüdische Geschichte) (1894; 31897; 41901), Wellhausen pursued his project of taking the techniques of literary analysis used to interpret pagan or secular texts and applying them to biblical texts. The results of this approach led him to question the historicity of the biblical accounts, which he explained as the projection of later epochs, particularly the socalled Era of the Kings, that is, from the era of Saul, David, and Solomon to the fall of the house of Israel and the fall of the house of Judah. What was at stake in Jesus’s self-designation as the “Son of Man,” an expression which intrigued Nietzsche in The Anti-Christ as well (AC §34), was both a technical question of language and a fundamental one, as Schweitzer realized. Inasmuch as “that act of self-consciousness of Jesus by which He recognised Himself in His earthly existence as the future Messiah is the act in which eschatology supremely affirms itself ” and insofar as “the Messianic secret of Jesus is the basis of Christianity, since it involves the de-nationalising and the spiritualisation of Jewish eschatology,” this question is in fact the central one (Schweitzer 1910, 283). According to Schweitzer, “the Messianic consciousness of the uniquely great Man of Nazareth sets up a struggle between the present and the beyond, and introduces that resolute absorption of the beyond by the present, which in looking back we recognise as the history of Christianity, and of which we are conscious in ourselves as the essence of religious progress and experience—a process of which the end is not yet in sight” (ibid., 283–284). This remarkable passage looks back to Nietzsche—and at the same time forward to C.G. Jung (1875–1961).

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It looks back to Nietzsche’s analysis in The Anti-Christ of the concept of the “Son of Man” as connoting not “a concrete person in history, an isolated and definite individual, but an ‘eternal’ fact, a psychological symbol set free from the concept of time” and of the concept of the “Kingdom of Heaven” as “a state of the heart” (AC §34). In so arguing, Nietzsche effectively de-eschatalogizes the message and the figure of Christ, placing them on a psychological footing. So it is fitting that it also looks forward to Jung’s argument—as set out in his late, great work Answer to Job (Antwort auf Hiob) (1952)—that the key moments or events in the history of salvation as told in the Old Testament and in the New should be read as psychological developments in the consciousness of Yahweh and its relation to human consciousness as well (Jung 1969: §553-§758).74 For Schweitzer, nineteenth-century scholarship in the form of biblical criticism had had the paradoxical result of actually confirming, rather than contradicting, the Gospel tradition—a conclusion that stands at the precise antipodes of Nietzsche’s conviction in The Anti-Christ that a philological approach to the Bible could only destroy belief: “Thus the use of the term Son of Man […] becomes a proof of the certainty and trustworthiness of that tradition,” Schweitzer argued, adding that one could even say that “the progressive recognition of the eschatological character of the teaching and action of Jesus carries with it a progressive justification of the Gospel tradition” (Schweitzer 1910, 285). Philology, on this account, rescues belief, rather than condemning it, but scholarly work of this period also approached the Bible from other perspectives, too, at least one of which mirrors a key interest of Nietzsche’s in The Anti-Christ. In 1883, the German-born (but Oxford-based) philologist and Orientalist Max Müller (1823–1900) noted the “startling coincidences” between Buddhism and Christianity (Müller 1883: 279), and one year before Müller’s lectures the German philosopher and theologian Rudolf Seydel (1835–1892), a professor at Leipzig who was influenced by C.H. Weisse, undertook to investigate the parallels between Buddhism and Christianity in a series of publications. And in the 1870s and 1880s, that is, in the decade or so prior to the composition of The Anti-Christ, the question of the relationship between Buddhism and Christianity was very much in the air (Jongeneel 2009, 200–201). (As always, nothing is ever entirely innocent: the thesis proposed by Ernest C.L. de Bunsen

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(1819–1903) in The Angel-Messiah of Buddhists, Essenes, and Christians (1880) that Buddhism, Essene Judaism, and Christianity shared a common origin provided a platform for later speculations about the existence of a pure Aryan mythology….)75 However, Seydel carefully distinguished (in a way that, to be honest, Nietzsche largely did not) three different classes of likeness or analogy, and concluded—in a way consonant with the theory of Q being developed at this time (see Chap. 7)—that, alongside the early form of Matthew and Luke, there must have existed a third source or “a poetic-­ apocalyptic Gospel of very early date which fitted its Christian material into the frame of a Buddhist type of Gospel, transforming, purifying, and ennobling the material taken from the foreign but related literature by a kind of rebirth inspired by the Christian spirit.”76 In the case of Nietzsche, he was as concerned to show the differences (Buddhism is “a hundred times more realistic”) as well as the commonalities (“both belong together as nihilistic religions”) between Buddhism and Christianity (AC §20), but not everyone was convinced by the parallels proposed by Seydel and others. In The Christianity of the New Testament (Das Christentum des neuen Testaments) (1905), Eduard von Hartmann denied there was any kind of relation between the Buddha and Jesus or between their respective teachings, but only a parallel formation of myth (Schweitzer 1910, 292).

Eduard von Hartmann The objection made by Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906) to the Jesus of modern theology is one based primarily on ethical grounds. Hartmann’s emphasis on the distinction between the historical and the “authentic” Jesus means that “when criticism has removed the paintings-over and retouchings to which this authentic portrait has been subjected, it reaches […] an unrecognisable painting below, in which it is impossible to discover any clear likeness, least of all one of any religious use and value” (Schweitzer 1910, 318). Schweitzer contextualizes Hartmann’s work in three ways. First, he describes Hartmann’s positions as a kind of “modernisation” of those of Reimarus, inasmuch as Hartmann had been

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anxious—as Reimarus had been—to show that Christian theology has lost the right “to treat the ideal Kingdom of God as belonging to itself.” Second, Hartmann avoids falling into “the mistake of Schopenhauer and many other philosophers”—including, perhaps, Nietzsche?—of identifying the pessimism of Jesus with “the Indian speculative pessimism of Buddha.” And third, Schweitzer describes what is positive about Hartmann’s book as “the open struggle of the Germanic spirit with Jesus”—a remark whose meaning will become clear in relation to what Schweitzer says elsewhere (ibid., 319–320). For Hartmann’s study of The Christianity of the New Testament was representative of a plethora of works with which the quest of the historical Jesus moved from the end of the nineteenth century into the twentieth. At this point, we find ourselves over ten years after the composition of The Anti-Christ (in 1888), about five years after its first publication (in 1895), and in a period more or less contemporaneous with the death, after a decade or so spent in insanity, of Nietzsche (in 1900). Yet these “quester” works, perhaps even more than those already considered in this chapter and in the previous one, provide a clear sense of the historico-­ intellectual context in which The Anti-Christ should be read. According to Schweitzer, the ideal “Life of Jesus” from the end of the nineteenth century is the one which Heinrich Holtzmann did not actually write, but which can be pieced together from his Handkommentar (1889; 31901) on the Synoptic Gospels and from his Lehrbuch (vol. 1, 1896) of New Testament theology. And Schweitzer recalls that C.H. Weisse also refrained from writing a Life of Jesus, because of the sheer difficulty of the task. Schweitzer contrasts this reluctance to write a Life of Jesus because of “a certain historical scepticism” with the complete lack of scepticism that attended the study of the life of Jesus from the standpoint of the Catholic Church (in its pre-Vatican II days). Hence at the turn of the century the Catholic Church remained “at a pre-Straussian standpoint” and did not venture to apply historical considerations either to the question of miracles or the Johannine question, that is, the question of the origin and authorship of the Fourth Gospel,77 and thus entirely refused to attempt to “take account of and explain the great historical problems” (Schweitzer 1910, 294).

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Nevertheless, Lives of Jesus continued to be produced by German Catholic writers and French Catholic writers alike (Schweitzer 1910, 294–295), and Schweitzer notes that the year 1885—the date of the publication of The Anti-Christ—saw the publication of Père Didon’s Jésus-­ Christ (2 vols, 1891) in a German translation; a new edition of the Bitter Sufferings of Our Lord Jesus Christ (Das bittere Leiden unsers Herrn Jesu Christi) by the German visionary and mystic Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich (1774–1824) (cf. ibid., 109); a popular and inexpensive edition of the German translation of Renan’s Life of Jesus; and the eighth (!) edition of Strauß’s Life of Jesus for the German People. Clearly, among such company Nietzsche’s The Anti-Christ might appear as something of an outlier… The Life of Jesus (Leben Jesu) published in 1901 by the German theologian Oskar Holtzmann (1859–1934) is described by Schweitzer as being “strictly scientific” and yet at the same time “foredoomed to failure,” because of its (over)reliance on Mark as a framework (Schweitzer 1910, 295). It constitutes “the last large-scale Life of Jesus, the only one which the Marcan hypothesis”—that is, the hypothesis that Mark was the first of the three Synoptic Gospels to be written and served as the source for Matthew and Luke—“has produced, and aims at providing a scientific basis for the assumptions which the general lines of that hypothesis compel him to make” (ibid., 300). By contrast, Holtzmann’s work entitled War Jesus Ekstatiker? (1903) offers an entirely new reading of the life of Jesus in terms of the category of the ecstatic. The sense in which Holtzmann understands this category, that is, not so much as a condition of excitement in which the individual’s capacities of thought and feeling are suspended, but rather as a permanent ecstatic state that brings the term close to being an eschatological fixed idea (ibid., 300), has a curious affinity with Nietzsche’s understanding of Christ’s “sonship” as “the entrance into a feeling of the total transfiguration of all things (beatitude)” (AC §34) and his application to Christ of the term “idiot” (AC §29).78 Indeed, Schweitzer argues that “for the last ten years”—that is, from 1886 to 1906—79 modern historical theology had “more and more adapted itself to the needs of the man in the street,” and had as a

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consequence become more and more confident in its cause and its results. Yet he called upon this theology to “doubt itself, to doubt its ‘historical’ Jesus, to doubt the confidence with which it has looked to its own construction for the moral and religious regeneration of our time,” summing up his critique in these words: “Its Jesus is not alive, however Germanic they may make Him” (Schweitzer 1910, 310). Now it is easy to contrast the obloquy and polemics we find in Nietzsche’s Untimely Observation on Strauß and in The Anti-Christ with the scholarly sophistication and subtle theological learning of the numerous works surveyed in Schweitzer’s quest for the historical Jesus. Yet Nietzsche avoided a problem that scholarship—particularly German scholarship—was starting to create for itself by mixing its historical investigation into the life of Jesus with its investment in the ideologies of the time. Specifically, Schweitzer notes that “historical criticism had become, in the hands of most of those who practised it, a secret struggle to reconcile the Germanic religious spirit with the Spirit of Jesus of Nazareth” (Schweitzer 1910, 310). So it is one of the great ironies that the modern academic establishment, which is the inheritor of the academic establishment of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, should be so keen to accuse Nietzsche of investment in the Germanic ideology and, in effect, of being a proto-Nazi! Schweitzer’s point is an important one and is worth spelling out and exploring in a bit more detail. Leaving to one side the likes of Gustav Frenssen (1863–1945), the German novelist who abandoned Christianity and its ascetic ideal for Germanic Neopaganism with a more tolerant view of sexuality, reflected above all in his novel Hilligenlei (or Holyland) of 1905 and its hope for “a spiritual re-birth of the German nation” (cf. Schweitzer 1910, 307), let alone the likes of Jakob Wilhelm Hauer (1881–1962), the Indologist and comparative religionist at Tübingen who was the founder of the Deutsche Glaubensbewegung or German Faith Movement, aiming at moving Germany away from Christianity and towards Germanic paganism, the core of the problem lies much to closer to home. For “this German critical study of the Life of Jesus is an essential part of German religion,” Schweitzer writes, and he uses the following striking image:

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As of old Jacob wrestled with the angel, so German theology wrestles with Jesus of Nazareth and will not let Him go until He bless it—that is, until He will consent to serve it and will suffer Himself to be drawn by the Germanic spirit into the midst of our time and our civilisation. […] The consequence is that [our theology] creates the historical Jesus in its own image, so that it is not the modern spirit influenced by the Spirit of Jesus, but the Jesus of Nazareth constructed by modern historical theology, that is set to work upon our race. (Schweitzer 1910, 311–312)

Of other contributions to the quest for the historical Jesus at the end of the nineteenth century (and hence the closest, chronologically speaking, to Nietzsche’s The Anti-Christ), the following resonate the most clearly with themes that would have been of interest to Nietzsche and which find mention in his own work, even if or because they were independently written. To begin with, there is a German Protestant theologian Otto Pfleiderer (1839–1908), who became a major representative of liberal theology through such works as Primitive Christianity: Its Documents and Doctrines in Their Historical Context (1878; 21902) and How Primitive Christianity Arose (1905). Pfleiderer proposed the thesis (echoed in The Anti-Christ) that the real founder of Christianity was Paul (Pfleiderer 1885), and that Christianity was essentially a cultural achievement of Hellenism (shades, here, of his teacher Ferdinand Christian Baur).80 Yet how did the historical Jesus come to be connected with primitive Christianity? And how did the primitive Church develop its belief in the Messiahship of Jesus? To these questions, Schweitzer notes, Pfleiderer could give no answer, and in this sense he could be said to have laboriously brought together “wood, straw, and stubble, but where he gets the fire from to kindle the whole into the ardent faith of primitive Christianity he is unable to make clear” (Schweitzer 1910, 313). An altogether different sort of answer to these questions was proposed by Albert Kalthoff (1850–1906), a German Protestant theologian who, together with such figures as Emil Felden (1874–1959), Oscar Mauritz (1867–1958), Moritz Schwalb (1833–1916), and Friedrich Steudel (1866–1939), had—influenced by the biologist Ernst Haeckel—founded a group in Jena in 1906 called the Deutscher Monistenbund (German

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Monists League). Promoting Darwin’s theory of evolution and searching for a link between religion and science, the group also rejected the claim that Jesus had been a historical figure (Herrmann 1913). In such works as The Problem of the Christ: Ground-Plan of a Social Theology (1902) and The Christ-Problem: New Contributions to the Christ-Problem (1904), Kalthoff in effect proposed that the fire had lit itself by spontaneous combustion, that is, Christianity spontaneously arose when “the inflammable material, religious and social, which had collected together in the Roman Empire, came into contact with the Jewish Messianic expectations” (Schweitzer 1910, 313). On this account, Jesus of Nazareth had never existed; the problem, therefore, was not how to write the Life of Jesus, but rather to solve “the problem of the Christ” (ibid., 313). In this way, Kalthoff sought to revive the “Christ myth” thesis as it had been proposed by Bruno Bauer. The approach to the historical Jesus taken by the philosopher Eduard von Hartmann found support from legal quarters in the form of the jurist Morris de Jonge (1864–1920), the son of a prominent member of the Jewish community in Cologne. Around 1890 de Jonge had converted to Christianity, but a couple of years later he wished to be received back into Judaism—a wish that was refused. In Jeshua: The Classical Jewish Man: In which the Jewish Picture of Jesus is Unveiled, and the Ecclesiastical Picture Destroyed (Jeshua: Der klassische jüdische Mann: Zerstörung des kirchlichen, Enthüllung des jüdischen Jesus-Bildes) (1904), de Jonge undertook to do exactly what his title promised, presenting Jesus as a disciple of Hillel the Elder, the celebrated Jewish sage and scholar. Schweitzer is sceptical about de Jonge’s approach, arguing that “a writer who is attacking the common theological picture of Jesus, and who displays […] not only wit and address, but historical intuition, ought not to fall into the error of the theology with which he is at feud”—a critique which might well apply to Nietzsche too?—namely, he “ought to use sober history as his weapon against the supplementary knowledge which his opponents seek to find between the lines, instead of meeting it with an esoteric historical knowledge of his own” (Schweitzer 1910, 321–322). As we shall see in Chap. 7, Nietzsche’s pronouncements on what Jesus “really meant” by his self-designation as Son of Man and his concept of the Kingdom of God are presented in The Anti-Christ in an entirely

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unargued, apodictic way. Still, Nietzsche’s interpretation of the figure of Jesus was not as eccentric as de Jonge’s, who suggested we should think of Jesus as (in Schweitzer’s words) “the aristocratic Jew, more accustomed to a dress coat than to a workman’s blouse, something of an expert, as appears from some of the parables, in matters of the table, and conning the menu with interest when He dined with ‘privy-finance-councillor’ Zaccheaus” (Schweitzer 1910, 322). As Schweitzer understandably exclaims, “but this is to modernise more distressingly than even the theologians!” (ibid., 322). Neither Nietzsche’s account of Jesus nor even de Jonge’s can compete in terms of eccentricity or esotericism with those theosophical “Lives” that came into vogue at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, accounts which (in Schweitzer’s view) play “fast and loose” with history in order to prove that Jesus had absorbed Egyptian and Indian theosophy and had been initiated into “occult science.” The Theosophical Society—the word derives from the Greek theosophia (θεοσοφία), that is, theos (θεός) = “God” and sophia (σοφία) = “wisdom”—had been founded in New York in 1875, and it came to be associated above all with the figure of the Russian occultist and medium Helena Blavatsky (1831–1891), author of The Secret Doctrine (1888), a work published at the same time Nietzsche was writing The Anti-Christ. (The follower of Theosophy who broke away to found a movement called Anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner [1861–1925], had served Mass as an altar boy in his childhood, but moved away from organized religion until an intense religious experience in 1899. Thereafter Steiner, who edited Goethe’s scientific writings and worked briefly in the Nietzsche Archive in Weimar, virtually reinvented Christianity within the terms of his own esoteric cosmology, reflected in his four Mystery Dramas and innumerable lectures on esoteric Christianity.) A classic example of this theosophical approach is The Secret Life of Jesus of Nazareth, and the Oriental Origins of Christianity (La Vie ésotérique de Jésus de Nazareth et les origines orientales du christianisme) (1902) by Ernest Bosc (1837–1913), a French esoteric writer who contributed to such journals as L’Initiation and Le Voile d’Isis founded by the occultist

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Gérard Encausse (aka Papus) (1865–1916). Bosc propounded the view that Jesus had not been a Semite but rather an Aryan, a term meaning “noble” and used by such writers as Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882) and Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927) to refer to their fantasy of a race of blonde Northern Europeans who had founded all the major civilizations. To the detriment of the reception of his philosophy in some quarters, Nietzsche also used the term “Aryan,” arguably stripped of its ideological racial associations (although some commentators continue to dispute this). The basis of Bosc’s account is the Gospel of John, combined with the purported “revelations” in the anonymous work published in Leipzig in 1849 entitled Important Historical Disclosures concerning the Manner of Jesus’ Death. The thesis that, after the crucifixion, the disciples stole the body of Jesus who subsequently revived, or the so-called swoon hypothesis, had been proposed by Reimarus in the fragmentary work published in 1777 by Lessing and entitled “The Goal of Jesus and His Disciples,” revived by Karl Venturini (1768–1849) in the 1800s, restated by Werner Herzog in Christ Rescued (1928) and again in more recent times by Hugh Schonfield in The Passover Plot (1965), by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln in Holy Blood, Holy Grail (1982), by Barbara Thiering in Jesus and the Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls (1992), and most recently by Michael Baigent in The Jesus Papers (2006). The confluence between esoteric (or occult) readings of the life of Jesus and the racism of the ideology of the Right points to a disturbing undercurrent in Western thought. Bosc was by no means alone in suggesting that Jesus was not Jewish, and the titles of such works as Jesus ein Arier: Ein Beitrag zur völkischen Erziehung (1904) by A. Müller or Jesus der Arier (1930) by Hans Hauptmann (1865–1946) succinctly state the thesis of the “Aryan Jesus.”81 At any event, the accommodation of racist ideology among the proponents of esotericism reminds us of the extent of the problem of anti-Semitism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and relativizes the problem posed by some of the passages found in Nietzsche, however regrettable or distasteful we might well nowadays consider them to be.

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Wrede Schweitzer’s account of the quest for the historical Jesus is subtitled “from Reimarus to Wrede,” and the figure of the German Lutheran theologian William Wrede (1859–1906) marks an appropriate point to begin to turn away from the historical context of The Anti-Christ to a closer examination of Nietzsche’s work itself. For Wrede’s work, The Messianic Secret in the Gospels: Forming a Contribution also to the Understanding of the Gospel of Mark (1901), stands in a tension with Schweitzer’s own book, The Secret of the Messiahship and the Passion: A Sketch of the Life of Jesus (1901), described by Schweitzer as a tension between thorough-going scepticism and thorough-going eschatology. In a sense, precisely this tension can be found within Nietzsche’s The Anti-Christ, as well as more broadly within Nietzsche’s work as a whole between (to use the terms proposed by R.J. Hollingdale) “nihilism” and “anti-nihilism,” that is, between scepticism pushed to its most radical form and the “non-­ metaphysical transcendence” of the will-to-power, embodied in the form of the Superman, and put through its hardest test in the postulate of “eternal recurrence” (Hollingdale 1977, 11).82 Wrede’s fame—to which we shall return when we consider in Chap. 7 the question of the gospel of Q—rests on his work on the so-called Messianic secret in the Gospel of Mark, that is, those passages where Jesus calls for silence about his miracles (Mark 5:43) and about his identity (7:24 and 9:30), using the expression “Son of Man” (2:10) rather than “Messiah” (8:29–30). As Wrede himself acknowledged, his predecessors included Bruno Bauer, the Zurich-based German Protesant theologian Gustav Volkmar (1809–1893) (the author of Jesus Nazarenus und die erste christliche Zeit, mit den beiden ersten Erzählern [1882] and Die Evangelien oder Marcus und die Synopsis der kanonischen und ausserkanonischen Evangelien: Nach dem ältesten Text mit historisch-exegetischem Commentar [1869–1870], republished in 1876 as Markus und die Synopse der Evangelien nach dem urkundlichen Text und Das Geschichtliche vom Leben Jesu), and the Dutch theologian Sytse Hoekstra (1822–1898). And Wrede also argued, in a book entitled Paulus (1904; 21907, published in English in 1907 as Paul), that, without Paul of Tarsus, Christianity would have

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remained just another minor Jewish sect, and he went so far as to describe Paul as “the second founder of Christianity” (Wrede 1907, 179). For Nietzsche, of course, even this claim would not have been radical enough; in Daybreak and The Anti-Christ, he describes Paul as the real founder of Christianity as an organized religion, claiming that “there was really only one Christian, and he died on the cross” (AC §39). Wrede foregrounded the Hellenistic elements in Paul’s conception of the dualism of the flesh and the spirit, emphasizing how Hellenistic elements had shaped early Christianity. What is at stake in this opposition as Schweitzer sees it between Wrede’s work and his own, which appeared at the same time, with almost identical titles, and with their modern historical critical outlook? Essentially, on Schweitzer’s account, it is a philological one, namely, that “in order to find in Mark the Life of Jesus of which it is in search, modern theology is obliged to read between the lines a whole host of things, and those often the most important, and then to foist them upon the text by means of psychological conjecture” (Schweitzer 1910, 330). Schweitzer uses the following image to describe the crisis of the biblical critical project: “Formerly it was possible to book through-tickets at the supplementary-­ psychological-­knowledge office which enabled those travelling in the interests of Life-of-Jesus construction to use express trains, thus avoiding the inconvenience of having to stop at every little station, change, and run the risk of missing their connexion. This ticket office is now closed. There is a station at the end of each section of the narrative, and the connexions are not guaranteed” (ibid., 331–332). Thus the quest for the historical Jesus runs up against the difficulties inherent in understanding in the nineteenth and twentieth (and now the twenty-first) centuries a text composed two millennia previously. As a result, the quest for the historical Jesus turned into a search for a lost gospel—a gospel known (thanks to the work of Johannes Weiss) by the German name for source, that is, Quelle, or more simply, Q. In many respects, the two schools of scepticism and of eschatology can be said to have much in common: their critical arguments are “identical,” and their construction is “analogous” and “based on the same principle,” as far as “the complete reconstruction of the system which runs through the disconnectedness” and “the tracing back of the dogmatic element to

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the Messianic secret” are concerned (Schweitzer 1910, 335). Here then lies the difference between these two approaches in terms of explaining “the system that runs through the disconnectedness,” for “the inconsistency between the public life of Jesus and His Messianic claim” lies in one of two places: either in the nature of the Jewish Messianic conception, or in the representation of the Evangelist (ibid., 335). Hence there is, on the one hand, the eschatological solution, which “raises the Marcan account as it stands, with all its disconnectedness and inconsistencies, into genuine history,” or, on the other, the literary solution, which “regards the incongruent dogmatic element as interpolated by the earliest Evangelist into the tradition” and hence eliminates the Messianic claim from the historical Life of Jesus (ibid., 335). This second option is the solution chosen by Bruno Bauer, who thought there was no evidence for an eschatological expectation in the time of Jesus, while Wrede, following Johannes Weiss, assumes the existence of a Jewish eschatological expectation of the Messiah, and discovers in the gospels only a Christian Messianic conception (ibid., 336). As a result, the question about the nature and identity of Christ turns into one about the genesis of the Gospel of Mark—and into a question of textual interpretation. Schweitzer illustrates this point with reference to those parables which involve the mystery of the Kingdom of God, that concept which so fascinates Nietzsche in The Anti-Christ (cf. AC §34). Take, for example, the parable of the sower and the seed (Mark 4:1–9, cf. Matthew 13:1–9; Luke 8:4–8), traditionally read on the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany. What in The Anti-Christ Nietzsche interprets as “not something that one waits for; it has no yesterday and no day after tomorrow, it is not going to come at a ‘millennium’—it is an experience of the heart, it is everywhere and it is nowhere …” (AC §34), is seen by Schweitzer as something at once real and temporal as well as symbolic or analogical: as referring to “the movement of repentance evoked by the Baptist and now intensified by His own preaching,” which in turn “necessarily involves the bringing in of the Kingdom by the power of God; as man’s sowing necessitates the giving of the harvest by the same Infinite Power” (Schweitzer 1910, 354). While referring to something historical, the parable also invokes something consciousness-changing: “Anyone who knows this sees with different eyes the corn growing in the fields and the harvest ripening, for he sees the one

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fact in the other, and awaits along with the earthly harvest the heavenly, the revelation of the Kingdom of God” (ibid., 354–355). On the account offered by Johannes Weiss, this eschatological perspective was crucial to understanding the gospels. By the “Kingdom of God,” Jesus understood that the end of history was imminent, and, when that end failed to come about, the early Church added the ethical dimension to his teaching so as to ensure its relevance. For Schweitzer, however, the ethical teachings of Jesus cannot be so easily detached from the apocalyptic concerns of eschatology. As he puts it, “the secret of the Kingdom of God which Jesus unveils in the parables about confident expectation in Mark 4, and declares in so many words in the eulogy on the Baptist (Matthew 11),” does amount to something with a historical dimension. Namely, that “in the movement to which the Baptist gave the first impulse, and which still continued, there was an initial act which was drawing after it the coming of the Kingdom, in a fashion which was miraculous, unintelligible, but unfailingly certain, since the sufficient cause for it lay in the power and purpose of God” (ibid., 356). And for the rest of this chapter Schweitzer discusses the relation between the parousia (i.e., the second coming of Christ), the resurrection, and metamorphosis. In turn, these notions, found in the Synoptic Gospels, the Pauline letters, and Christian apocalyptic texts, are related to the Jewish apocalyptic tradition, going back to the Psalms of Solomon, the Book of Enoch, and the Book of Daniel, and forward to the apocalypses of Baruch and Enoch.83 In essence, Schweitzer is exploring the way in which biblical texts produce their own meaning within a historical dimension which they nevertheless transcend, much in the way that Nietzsche saw his own writings as creating a caesura in world history (see, e.g., his letter to Franz Overbeck about Thus Spoke Zarathustra of 8 March 1884 [KSB 6, 485] and his letters to Paul Deussen of 14 September 1888 [KSB 8, 426] and his draft letter to Georg Brandes of December 1888 [KSB 8, 500] about the proposed work called The Revaluation of Values, as well as EH Why I am a Destiny §1).84 With reference to the identification of John the Baptist with the prophet Elijah (or Elias), expected to return before the end times (cf. Malachi 4:5–6),85 Schweitzer writes that, “in the thought of Jesus, Messianic doctrine forces its way into history and simply abolishes the

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historic aspect of the events. […] But Jesus must somehow drag or force the eschatological events into the framework of the actual occurrence” (Schweitzer 1910, 373–374). From this perspective, Schweitzer offers an approach to understanding the institution of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper as sacraments in “the eschatological movement which later detached itself from Judaism under the name of Christianity,” as well as to explaining the incident at Caesarea Philippi when Peter proclaims Jesus to be the Christ or “Messiah” (Matthew 16:13–20, Mark 8:27–30, and Luke 9:18–20, cf. “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God”), the sending forth of the disciples and the feeding of the multitude (ibid., 378–383), and finally Jesus’s sufferings and death. Here, too, what is key is the textual element: “The enigmatic πολλοί for whom Jesus dies are those predestined to the Kingdom, since His death must at last compel the Coming of the Kingdom. This thought Jesus found in the prophecies of Isaiah, which spoke of the suffering Servant of the Lord”—and applied to himself (ibid., 388).86 Given which, the very project of writing a Life of Jesus—for all the many examples discussed above—appears to have been questionable from the earliest times, since “even its most critical moments were totally unintelligible to the disciples who had themselves shared in the experiences, and who were the only sources for the tradition” (Schweitzer 1910, 392). Nevertheless, the very attempt at writing these lives produced the important insight that “the reality had been incoherent too, since it was only the secret Messianic self-consciousness of Jesus which created alike the events and their connexion,” and as a result “every Life of Jesus remains therefore a reconstruction on the basis of a more or less accurate insight into the nature of the dynamic self-consciousness of Jesus which created the history” (ibid., 393). While it is true that The Anti-Christ does not represent an attempt by Nietzsche to write a Life of Jesus, nevertheless his comments on Jesus as a hero, as a genius, and as an “idiot” (AC §29), as a fanatic and as a “free spirit” (AC §32), and above all as a symbolist (AC §34), are an attempt to reconstruct the self-consciousness of “the type of the redeemer” (AC §28-§29 and §31). Schweitzer’s concluding remarks in the final chapter of The Quest of the Historical Jesus serve as a summary of the essential historico-cultural context in which Nietzsche’s The Anti-Christ is embedded. His initial

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conclusion could not be expressed more plainly, even if it is, for a theologian, a startling one: “The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the ethic of the Kingdom of God, who founded the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth, and died to give His work its final consecration, never had any existence. He is a figure designed by rationalism, endowed with life by liberalism, and clothed by modern theology in an historical garb” (Schweitzer 1910, 396; my italics). On this point, Nietzsche and Schweitzer would be in agreement. And Schweitzer explains the demise of this figure of Jesus in a way that might also recommend itself to Nietzsche, and could be read as a kind of gloss avant la lettre on Nietzsche’s cry, “God is dead!”: This image has not been destroyed from without, it has fallen to pieces, cleft and disintegrated by the concrete historical problems which came to the surface one after another, and in spite of the artifice, art, artificiality, and violence which was applied to them, refused to be planed down to fit the design on which the Jesus of the theology of the last hundred and thirty years had been constructed, and were no sooner covered over than they appeared again in a new form. (Schweitzer 1910, 396)

And yet… Schweitzer’s ultimate conclusion is based on a final step that Nietzsche was unwilling or simply unable to make. For all that the figure of the historical Jesus might have fallen apart, what has emerged in its place is something one might call the Jesus of history. Or in Schweitzer’s words, “the historical foundation of Christianity as built up by rationalistic, by liberal, and by modern theology no longer exists; but that does not mean that Christianity has lost its historical foundation,” for “the work which historical theology thought itself bound to carry out, and which fell to pieces just as it was nearing completion, was only the brick facing of the real immovable historical foundation which is independent of any historical confirmation or justification” (Schweitzer 1910, 397). Now none of this is to say that Schweitzer denies the value of the quest for the historical Jesus, least of all in the German context, since it is “impossible to over-estimate the value of what German research upon the Life of Jesus has accomplished,” as he concedes (Schweitzer 1910, 397). Yet he also argues that “in the process we ourselves have been enfeebled,

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and have robbed our own thoughts of their vigour in order to project them back into history and make them speak to us out of the past” (ibid., 398). So instead of the historical Jesus, what the quest for him has discovered is what one could also call the supra-historical Jesus: in line with the experience of Paul of Tarsus, “it is not Jesus as historically known, but Jesus as spiritually arisen within men, who is significant for our time and can help it,” and it is “not the historical Jesus, but the spirit which goes forth from Him and in the spirits of men strives for new influence and rule” which (in the words of John 16:33) “overcomes the world’ (ibid., 399). For Schweitzer, what this means is that “in proportion as we have the Spirit of Jesus we have the true knowledge of Jesus” (ibid., 399). Or in other words, Jesus “as a concrete historical personality remains a stranger to our time, but His spirit, which lies hidden in His words, is known in simplicity, and its influence is direct. Every saying contains in its way the whole Jesus” (ibid., 399–400). And even Nietzsche, as becomes clear in The Anti-Christ, managed to maintain his own “personal standpoint” in regard to the figure of Jesus, whom he never directly criticizes or refutes. Where Nietzsche clearly parts company with Schweitzer is in the latter’s introduction of the category of mystery: “Modern Lives of Jesus are too general in their scope. […] They understood Him so far as it was necessary for them to understand, without forming any conception of His life as a whole, since this in its ultimate aims remained a mystery even for the disciples” (Schweitzer 1910, 400). Ultimately, Schweitzer’s stance is inevitably going to be that of a believer, for whom mystery presents no problem, but is in fact a token or guarantee of authenticity or validity: He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lake-­ side, He came to those men who knew Him not. […]. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is. (Schweitzer 1910, 401)

By contrast, Nietzsche saw himself as writing for an age in which there is no longer the possibility of understanding what happened by the

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lakeside in Galilee; in which the words “follow me” are devoid of any meaning (unless, that is, they serve as the basis of a parodic inversion by Zarathustra); and in which “ineffable mystery” has dissolved or evaporated, making it—in his view—no longer possible to experience the divine or the sacred.87 In the famous parable announcing the death of God, the madman is said to have recognized that he might have come “too early” and “not yet at the right time,” because “this prodigious event is still on its way, and is traveling—it has not yet reached men’s ears.” After all, “lightning and thunder need time, the light of the stars needs time, deeds need time, even after they are done, to be seen and heard,” and “this deed is as yet further from them than the furthest star—and yet they have done it themselves!” (GS §125). The parable adds that the madman is said to have “made his way into different churches on the same day, and there intoned his Requiem aeternam deo,” and when led out and called to account, gave the reply: “What are these churches now, if they are not the tombs and monuments of God?” (GS §125).

Notes 1. See his letter to Bertrand Russell of January 1914; see McGuinness 2008, 164–165. 2. See Youens 2004. 3. F.T. Vischer was a cousin of Ludwig Uhland (1787–1862) and Friedrich Haug (1761–1829), representatives of the so-called Schwäbische Dichterschule; a nephew of Friedrich Stäudlin (1758–1796); a friend and supporter of Hölderlin; and a friend of D.F. Strauß. After his studies at the Tübinger Stift from 1825 to 1830, Vischer moved in 1833 to Berlin and can indeed be considered, as Nietzsche describes him, as “a celebrated aesthetician of the Hegelian school of reasoning” (UM I §2), although this hardly does justice to the sophistication of his work. For further discussion of Vischer, see Potthast and Reck 2011. 4. Cited in Cooper 2008, 85; cf. Strunk 2004, 113. 5. As Cooper notes (2008, 16), in Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason (Die Religion innerhalb der Gremzen der bloßen Vernunft) (1792–1793), Kant accords the traditional Protestant privilege to the interpreter of

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texts, and especially the scholar who has made that his vocation; see Kant 1998, 120 (= VI, 112). 6. Cooper 2008, 85; cf. 16–17, citing Kant 1998, 128 (= VI, 122). 7. For further discussion, see Albert Camus, “An Absurd Reasoning” (1942), extracted from The Myth of Sisyphus (in MacDonald 2001, 151–183). 8. For further discussion, aside from Beiser 2020, see Hausrath 1876; Ziegler 1908; Harris 1974; and Paul 1982; as well as Graf 1982; Potthast and Drecoll 2018; and Fabisiak 2015. 9. Schweitzer 1910, 70; cf. Beiser 2020, 37. 10. See McGaughey 1994; cf. Beiser 2020, 132–146. 11. See Dawes 2001, 76–121. 12. Translated into English by Marilyn Chapin Massey and published as Strauss 1893. 13. For a helpful overview of the changes between the 1835 and 1864 editions of Das Leben Jesu, see Beiser 2020, 236–237. 14. Schaberg 1996: 32, citing Hayman 1982: 62–63. 15. See “Gethsemane und Golgotha” (BAW 2, 400–405); and Düsing 2020. 16. These translations (among others) have been proposed by R.J. Hollingdale, Jeffrey Church, William Arrowsmith, and Anthony M. Ludovici; for the abbreviated form Untimelies I am indebted to Anthony K. Jensen. See Church 2019, 6–7; and Jensen 2016. 17. See Bunia, Dembeck, and Stanitzek 2011. 18. See Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism (1869): “Now, the use of culture is that it helps us, by means of its spiritual standard of perfection, to regard wealth as but machinery, and not only to say as a matter of words that we regard wealth as but machinery, but really to perceive and feel that it is so. If it were not for this purging effect wrought upon our minds by culture, the whole world, the future, as well as the present, would inevitably belong to the Philistines. The people who believe most that our greatness and welfare are proved by our being very rich, and who most give their lives and thoughts to becoming rich, are just the people whom we call the Philistines” (Arnold 1993, 65). 19. KSA 8, 11–127. See “We Classicists,” in Nietzsche 1990. 20. “We Classicists,” in Nietzsche 1990, 330–331. 21. See the “Preface” to Huttens Gespräche [1860] in Strauss 1876, vol. 7, 561 (cited in Beiser 2020, 8).

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22. Zeller 1908, 100; Hausrath 1876, vol. 1, 184; Baur, letter to L.F. Heyd of 10 February 1836, in Harris 1974, 87 (cited in Beiser 2020: 7–8). 23. Schweitzer 1910, 97–98; and Ziegler 1908, vol. 1, 207: note 1 (cited in Beiser 2020, 8: fn. 7). 24. See Strauss 1837, 100–120 (cited in Beiser 2020, 10); and Stewart 2021, 120 and 246. 25. See Stewart 2021, 39–64. 26. For Socrates’s definition of the hero as a semidivine figure, see the Cratylus, 398c: “SOCRATES: Do you not know that the heroes are demigods? HERMOGENES: What then? SOCRATES: All of them sprang either from the love of a God for a mortal woman, or of a mortal man for a Goddess; think of the word in the old Attic, and you will see better that the name heros is only a slight alteration of Eros, from whom the heroes sprang: either this is the meaning, or, if not this, then they must have been skilful as rhetoricians and dialecticians […]” (Plato 1989, 436). 27. For useful contextual discussion of early Greek allegory and Hellenistic allegory, see the essays by Dirk Obbink and Glenn W. Most, in Copeland and Struck 2010, 15–25 and 26–38 and 39–54. 28. For further discussion of Origen as a theorist of allegory, see the essay by Daniel Boyarin in Copeland and Struck 2010, 39–54. 29. Origen, Homilies on Leviticus, §5: “For we have often said that a triple mode of understanding is to be found in divine Scriptures: the historical, the moral, the mystical. From this we understand the body, the soul, and the spirit,” and for confirmation of this approach Origen pointed to the threefold preparation of the sacrifices in Leviticus 7:9 (Origen 1990, 100). 30. Origen, Homilies on Exodus, §2 (alluding to 1 Corinthians 10:11: “Now all these things happened to them in figure: and they are written for our correction, upon whom the ends of the world are come”: “But we, who have learned that all things which are written are written not to relate ancient history, but for our discipline and use, understand that these things which are said also happen now not only in this world, which is figuratively called Egypt, but in each of us also” (Origen 1982, 240). 31. Origen, Homilies on Leviticus, §5: “Unless we take all these words in a sense other than the literal text shows, as we already said often, when they are read in the Church, they will present more an obstacle and ruin of the Christian religion than an exhortation and edification” (Origen 1990, 88).

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32. Origen, Against Celsus (Contra Celsum), book 6, chapter 70; cited in Roberts, Donaldson, and Coxe 1885, 605. 33. Origen, On First Principles (De principiis), book 4, §15; in Roberts et al. 1885, 364. 34. Origen, Against Celsus, book 1, §42; in Roberts et al. 1885, 414. 35. For the background to this development of a German interest in myth, see Williamson 2004. 36. Heyne, Commentary on the Library of Apollodorus (1803), in Heyne 1803, xvi (cited in Hartlich and Sachs 1952, 13). 37. For further discussion, see Dupré 2007. 38. For further discussion, see Rogerson 1992; and Howard 1999. 39. See Strauß’s letter of 6 February 1832 to Christian Märklin (Zeller 1895, vol. 1, 13) (cited in Beiser 2020, 17). 40. Stephen Fry interviewed by Gay Byrne on The Meaning of Life, broadcast by the Irish public service broadcaster RTÉ on 1 February 2015. 41. For further discussion of the complicated relation between Germany and Greece or German Philhellenism, see Butler 1935; Trevelyan 1941; and Valdez 2014. 42. See Nietzsche 1994, 99–103 (cited in Beiser 2020, 9: fn.10). 43. See Brooks 2018, 26. 44. Compare with the remarks in Epistle 7 about the moment of philosophical insight: “But thus much I can certainly declare concerning all these writers, or prospective writers, who claim to know the subjects which I seriously study, whether as hearers of mine or of other teachers, or from their own discoveries; it is impossible, in my judgement at least, that these men should understand anything about this subject. There does not exist, nor will there ever exist, any treatise of mine dealing therewith. For it does not at all admit of verbal expression like other studies, but, as a result of continued application to the subject itself and communion therewith, it is brought to birth in the soul on a sudden, as light that is kindled by a leaping spark, and thereafter nourishes itself ” (341c; Plato 1981, 531); cf. Diotima in the Symposium on the “suddenness” of the mystic vision of the Idea (210e). 45. See Beiser 2020, 271. Beiser’s comparison of Nietzsche’s critique of Strauß with that by Albert Schweitzer and by Heinrich von Treitschke (1834–1896) is extremely insightful. 46. Beiser 2020, 254; cf. Brooks 2018, 33. 47. See Brooks 2018, 34.

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48. Strauß 1872, 75; see Beiser 2020, 256. 49. See Beiser 2020, 256–257. For agreement on the second of these three points, see the comment by Joseph Ratzinger in 1958: “Today, our humanity prevents us from holding such views. We cannot believe that the man next to us, who is an upright, charitable, and good man, will end up going to hell because he is not a practising Catholic” (Ratzinger 1958, 6). 50. See Beiser 2020, 259–260. 51. See Beiser 2020, 261–263. 52. Rapp 1952, vol. 2, 296–297. 53. Strauss 1848; see Beiser 2020, 193–196, cf. 215. 54. See Beiser 2020, 195. 55. See Beiser 2020, 266. 56. See TI Ancients §4-§5; and Strauß 1848, 251–254. 57. Strauß 1848, 262–263. See Beiser 2020: 267. 58. Strauß 1848, 293–294; cf. NK 1/2, 120–121. 59. Nietzsche showed rather less remorse when he wrote in a Nachlass fragment for Autumn 1885 of how he had “publicly laughed to death a wretched, presumptuous, musty book” and wondered whether he “had thereby unintentionally ‘murdered’ an old man, the venerable old David Strauß, virum optime meritum?—this is what I am told” (KSA 11, 41[15], 689). 60. Zeller 1895, 598; cf. Stern 1983, xiv. 61. EH UM §2; see NK 6/2, 496–497. 62. “[…] Saisir aux cheveux la première occasion du duel à son début dans le monde […]” (Stendhal 1855, vol. 1, ix; cited in NK 6/2, 501). 63. See Beiser 2020, 86–91. 64. See Hausrath 1876: vol. 1, 215. 65. See Beiser 2020: 88. 66. Rapp 1952, vol. 1, 31; see Beiser 2020, 91: fn. 19. 67. For further discussion of Nietzsche’s different uses of biblical language, see Large 2001. 68. See NK 1/2, 108–110. For the passage from Vischer cited by Nietzsche, see as primary sources Vischer 1873 (cf. Vischer 1905); and Klaiber 1873; and for recent discussion, KGW III.1 [Nachbericht zur dritten Abteilung], 1452; Jamme and Völkel 2003, 356–357; and MorillasEstaban 2011. 69. Beiser 2020: 272; and NK 1/2, 124.

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70. See Faust, Part One, ll. 3179–3186 and 3415–3422 (Goethe 2001, 87 and 96). 71. See Beiser 2020, 272–273. 72. In a sense, another set of eschatological questions remain for believers, even or perhaps especially today; see the report of the International Theological Commission established by the Vatican entitled “Some Current Questions in Eschatology” (International Theological Commission 1992). 73. See, for example, the excerpts in the Nachlass for November 1887 to March 1888 from Wellhausen’s Skizzen und Vorabeiten III: Reste arabischen Heidenthumes (1887) in KSA 13, 11[287]-11[293], 112–114, and from Wellhausen’s Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels (1883) in KSA 13, 11[377], 169–174. For further discussion of Nietzsche’s account of the history of Israel in The Anti-Christ (AC §25-§26) and his use of Wellhausen in particular, see Stern 2019; and for a discussion of Wellhausen’s standing in the past and today, see Irwin 1944 and Nicholson 2002. 74. For further discussion, see Bishop 2002; and, in relation to Jung’s important intellectual exchange with the English Dominican priest Victor White (1902–1960), see Lammers 1994; and Lammers and Cunningham 2007. 75. For further discussion, see Moxnes 2012. Moxnes’s detailed critique of Schweitzer’s “quest” highlights the social, cultural, and political agendas pursued by such “questers” as Schleiermacher and Renan, and constitutes a plea for examining how issues of power, gender, and class inform different approaches in biblical studies. 76. Seydel 1882, 304 (cited in Schweitzer 1910, 291). 77. For further discussion of this question, which has preoccupied thinkers from J.G. Fichte to Rudolf Steiner (Wood 2015), see Hengel 2009. 78. For further discussion of Nietzsche’s use of this term, see Chap. 2 and Chap. 4 . 79. As a point of historical orientation, note that the First Vatican Council had been held over a decade and a half earlier (from 1869 to 1870). The work of the Council included the promulgation of the dogmatic constitution on the Catholic faith (Dei Filius, 1870) and the dogmatic constitution on the nature of the Church (Pastor Aeternus, 1870), which included a definition of papal infallibility. Interrupted in October 1870 against the background of the Franco-Prussian War and the Capture of

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Rome (when the Kingdom of Italy occupied Rome and Pope Pius IX became a “prisoner in the Vatican”), the Council was not formally closed until 1960—prior to the opening of the Second Vatican Council by Pope John XXIII. 80. See Pfleiderer 1906–1911; Pfleiderer 1910. 81. For further discussion, see Heschel 2008. 82. For further discussion, see Emden 2019a and 2019b. 83. For further discussion of the apocalyptic tradition, see McAllister 2020. 84. In fact, this idea originated with Heinrich Köselitz/Peter Gast, who wrote to Nietzsche on 26 February 1884 that Zarathustra “gives one the feeling that time should be newly dated from it” and that one day Nietzsche would have accorded “a higher reverence than that accorded to the founders of Asian religions” (KGB, vol. 3.2: 420) (cited in Young 2010, 610: fn. 10). 85. The alleged continuity of Elijah/Elias and John the Baptist (as well as Raphael and Novalis!) became a key theme in the later anthroposophical thought of Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925); see his lectures given in 1912 on the Gospel of Mark (Steiner 1986) as well as his last address given on 28 September 1924 on “the individuality of Elias, John, Raphael, and Novalis” (Steiner 1967). 86. For further discussion of this prophetic book and its symbolic and textual relation to Christianity, see Bock and Glaser 2012. 87. Tellingly, just as it was disappearing, the sacred or the holy was being intensively theorized by such scholars as Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), Mircea Eliade (1907–1986), and Rudolf Otto (1869–1937); see Durkheim 1915 (21926; 31954; 41957; 51964); Eliade 1957; and Otto 1923 (21950; 1970). On Otto’s account, the holy is a numinous experience best described as the mysterium tremendum et fascinans (see Alles 1996, 2 and 13–15 and 25)

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Beiser, Frederick C. 2020. David Friedrich Strauß, Father of Unbelief: An Intellectual Biography. New York: Oxford University Press. Bishop, Paul. 2002. Jung’s “Answer to Job”: A Commentary, 2002. Hove and New York: Brunner-Routledge. Bock, Darrell L., and Mitch Glaser, eds. 2012. The Gospel According to Isaiah 53: Encountering the Suffering Servant in Jewish and Christian Theology. Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications. Brooks, Shilo. 2018. Nietzsche’s Culture War: The Unity of the “Untimely Meditations”. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Bunia, Remigius, Till Dembeck, and Georg Stanitzek, eds. 2011. Philister: Problemgeschichte einer Sozialfigur der neueren deutschen Literatur. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Burkitt, F. Crawford. 1915. Johannes Weiss: In Memoriam. Harvard Theological Review 8 (3): 291–297. Butler, E.M. 1935. The Tyranny of Greece over Germany: A Study of the Influence Exercised by Greek Art and Poetry over the Great German Writers of the Eighteenth, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Church, Jeffrey. 2019. Nietzsche’s “Unfashionable Observations”: A Critical Introduction and Guide [Edinburgh Critical Guides to Nietzsche]. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Cooper, Ian. 2008. The Near and Distant God: Poetry, Idealism and Religious Thought from Hölderlin to Eliot. Oxford: Legenda. Copeland, Rita, and Peter T. Struck, eds. 2010. The Cambridge Companion to Allegory. New York: Cambridge University Press. Dawes, Gregory W. 2001. The Historical Jesus Question: The Challenge of History to Religious Authority. Louisville, KY: Westminster; John Knox Press. Dupré, Louis. 2007. The Role of Mythology in Schelling’s Late Philosophy. The Journal of Religion 87 (1): 1–20. Durkheim, Émile. 1915. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, translated by Joseph Ward Swain. London: George Allen & Unwin (reprinted 21926; 3 1954; 41957; 51964). Düsing, Edith. 2020. Jesu Kreuzesschrei: Nietzsches Deutung im Horizont seines “Duells” mit David F. Strauß. Nietzscheforschung 27: 129–155. Eckermann, Johann Peter. 1998. Conversations of Goethe, edited by J.K. Moorhead, translated by John Oxenford. New York: Da Capo Press. Eliade, Mircea. 1957. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion., translated by Willard R. Trask. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.

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Emden, Christian J. 2019a. Nihilism, Naturalism, and the Will to Power in Nietzsche’s The Antichrist. In Nietzsche and “The Antichrist”: Religion, Politics, and Culture in Late Modernity, ed. Daniel Conway, 159–180. London: Bloomsbury Academic. ———. 2019b. Nihilism, Pessimism, and the Conditions of Modernity. In The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought, vol. 1, The Nineteenth Century, ed. Warren Breckman and Peter E. Gordon, 372–397. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fabisiak, Thomas. 2015. The “Nocturnal Side of Science” in David Friedrich Strauss’s “Life of Jesus Critically Examined”. Atlanta: SBL Press. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. 2001. Faust: A Tragedy, edited by Cyrus Hamlin, translated by Walter Arndt, 2nd ed.. New York and London: Norton. Graf, Friedrich Wilhelm. 1982. Kritik und Pseudo-Spekulation: David Friedrich Strauß als Dogmatiker im Kontext der positionellen Theologie seiner Zeit. Munich: Kaiser. Harris, Horton. 1974. David Friedrich Strauss and His Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hartlich, Christian, and Walter Sachs. 1952. Der Ursprung des Mythosbegriffs in der modernen Bibelwissenschaft. Tübingen: Mohr (Siebeck). Hausrath, Adolf. 1876. David Friedrich Strauß und die Theologie seiner Zeit, 2 vols. Heidelberg: Bassermann. Hengel, Martin. 2009. The Johannine Question, translated by John Bowden. London; Philadelphia: SCM Press; Trinity Press International. Herrmann, Otto. 1913. The Monism of the German Monistic League. The Monist 23 (4): 543–566. Heschel, Susannah. 2008. The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany. Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Heyne, Christian Gottlob, ed. 1803. Apollodori Bibliothecae Libri Tres et Fragmenta. 2nd ed. Göttingen: Dieterich. Hollingdale, R.J., ed. and trans. 1977. A Nietzsche Reader. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Howard, Thomas Albert. 1999. Religion and the Rise of Historicism: W.M.L. De Wette, Jacob Burckhardt, and the Theological Origins of Nineteenth-Century Historical Consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. International Theological Commission. 1992. Some Current Questions in Eschatology. Accessed 7 February 2022. https://www.vatican.va/roman_ curia/congregations/cfaith/cti_documents/rc_cti_1990_problemi-­attuali-­ escatologia_en.html.

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Irwin, William A. 1944. The Significance of Julius Wellhausen. Journal of Bible and Religion 12 (3): 160–173. Jamme, Christoph, and Frank Völkel, eds. 2005. Hölderlin und der Deutsche Idealismus, vol. 4, Von Nürtingen bis zum Tübinger Turm (1800–43). Stuttgart-­ Bad Cannstatt: frommann-holzboog. Jensen, Anthony K. 2016. An Interpretation of Nietzsche’s “On the Uses and Disadvantage of History for Life.” New York and London: Routledge. Jongeneel, Jan A.B. 2009. Jesus Christ in World History: His Presence and Representation in Cyclical and Linear Settings. Frankfurt am Main: Lang. Jung, C.G. 1969. Psychology and Religion: West and East [Collected Works of C.G. Jung, vol. 11], translated by R.F.C. Hull. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Kant, Immanuel. 1998. Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, and Other Writings, edited and translated by Allen Wood and George di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2008. Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens or An Essay on the Constitution and the Mechanical Origin of the Entire Structure of the Universe Based on Newtonian Principles [1755], translated by Ian Johnston. Accessed 26 January 2021. http://johnstoi.web.viu.ca/kant/kant2e.htm. Klaiber, Julius. 1873. Bericht der deutschen Zeitung in Wien über die Enthüllung des Hölderlin-Denkmals. Neckar-Zeitung. Beilage: Heilbronner Unterhaltungsblatt. 21 May 1873: 242-244. Lammers, Ann Conrad. 1994. In God’s Shadow: The Collaboration of Victor White and C. G. Jung. New York, NY: Paulist Press. Lammers, Ann Conrad, and Adrian Cunningham, eds. 2007. The Jung-White Letters. London and New York: Routledge. Large, Duncan. 2001. Nietzsche’s Use of Biblical Language. Journal of Nietzsche Studies 22 (Fall): 88–115. MacDonald, Paul S. 2001. An Existentialist Reader: An Anthology of Key Texts. New York: Routledge. McAllister, Colin, ed. 2020. The Cambridge Companion to Apocalyptic Literature. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. McGaughey, Douglas R. 1994. On D.F. Strauß and the 1839 Revolution in Zurich. Accessed 4 February 2022. www.chora-­strangers.org/files/chora/ mcgaughey_1994.pdf. McGuinness, Brian, ed. 2008. Wittgenstein in Cambridge: Letters and Documents 1911–1951. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

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Morillas-Estaban, Antonio. 2011. Nachweis aus Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung. Nietzsche-Studien 40: 323–324. Moxnes, Halvor. 2012. Jesus and the Rise of Nationalism: A New Quest for the Nineteenth-Century Historical Jesus. London and New York: Tauris. Nicholson, Ernest. 2002. The Pentateuch in the Twentieth Century: The Legacy of Julius Wellhausen. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1990. We Classicists. In Unmodern Observations, ed. William Arrowsmith, 321–387. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. ———. 1994 [1933–1940]. Frühe Schriften, 1854–1869, edited by Hans Joachim Mette, Karl Schlechta, and Carl Koch. 5 vols. Munich: Beck. NK 1/2 = Neymeyr, Barbara. 2020. Kommentar zu Nietzsches “Unzeitgemässen Betrachtungen”: I. David Strauss der Bekenner und der Schriftsteller II. Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben [Historischer und kritischer Kommentar zu Friedrich Nietzsches Werken, vol. 1/2]. Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter. NK 6/2 = Andreas Urs Sommer. 2013. Kommentar zu Nietzsches “Der Antichrist”, “Ecce homo”, “Dionysos-Dithyramben”, “Nietzsche contra Wagner” [Historischer und kritischer Kommentar zu Friedrich Nietzsches Werken, vol. 6/2]. Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter. Origen. 1982. Homilies on Genesis and Exodus [The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation, vol. 71], translated by Ronald E. Heine. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. ———. 1990. Homilies on Leviticus 1-16 [The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation, vol. 83], translated by Gary Wayne Barkley. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Otto, Rudolf. 1923. The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the non-rational factor in the idea of the divine and its relation to the rational [1917], translated by John W. Harvey. New York: Oxford Universoty Press (reprinted 1950; 1970). Paul, Jean-Marie. 1982. D.F. Strauss (1808-1874) et son époque. Paris: Société les Belles Lettres. Pfleiderer, Otto. 1885. Lectures on the Influence of the Apostle Paul on the Development of Christianity., translated by J. Frederick Smith. London and Edinburgh: Williams and Norgate. ———. 1906–1911. Primitive Christianity: Its Writings and Teachings in Their Historical Connections, edited by W.D. Morrison, translated by W. Montgomery. 4 vols. London: New York: Williams & Norgate; Putnam.

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———. 1910. The Development of Christianity, translated by Daniel A. Huebsch. New York: Huebsch. Plato. 1981. Plato in Twelve Volumes, vol. 9, Timaeus; Critias; Cleitophon; Menexenus; Epistles, translated by R.G. Bury. Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press; Heinemann. ———. 1989. Collected Dialogues, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Potthast, Barbara, and Volker Henning Drecoll, eds. 2018. David Friedrich Strauß als Schriftsteller. Heidelberg: Winter. Potthast, Barbara, and Alexander Reck, eds. 2011. Friedrich Theodor Vischer: Leben – Werk – Wirkung. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. Rapp, Adolf, ed. 1952. Briefwechsel zwischen Strauß und Vischer. 2 vols. Stuttgart: Klett. Ratzinger, Joseph. 1958. Die neuen Heiden und die Kirche. Hochland 51, no. 1 (October): 1–11. Roberts, Alexander, James Donaldson, and Arthur Cleveland Coxe, eds. 1885. The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 4, Fathers of the Third Century: Tertullian, Part Fourth; Minucius Felix; Commodian; Origen, Parts First and Second. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Rogerson, John W. 1992. W.M.L. de Wette, Founder of Modern Biblical Criticism: An Intellectual Biography. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph. 1856. Ueber Mythen, historische Sagen und Philosopheme der ältesten Welt. In Sämmtliche Werke, section I, vol. 1, Sämmtliche Werke 1792-1797, ed. Karl Friedrich August Schelling, 41–84. Stuttgart and Augsburg: Cotta. Schweitzer, Albert. 1910. The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede. Translated by W. Montgomery. London: Adam and Charles Black. Seydel, Rudolf. 1882. Das Evangelium von Jesu in seinen Verhältnissen zur Buddha-Sage und Buddha-Lehre. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel. Steiner, Rudolf. 1967. The Last Address given by Rudolf Steiner at Dornach, on Michaelmas Eve, 1924, translated by George Adams. London: Rudolf Steiner Press. ———. 1986. The Gospel of St. Mark: A Cycle of Ten Lectures, ed. Stewart C. Easton and translated by Conrad Mainzer. Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press.. Stendhal. 1855. Correspondance inédite. 2 vols. Paris: Lévy.

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Williamson, George S. 2004. The Longing for Myth: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Wood, David W. 2015. The Johannine Question: From Fichte to Steiner. Deepening Anthroposophy 4 (2): 6–18. Wrede, William. 1907. Paul. Translated by Edward Lummis. London: Philip Green. Youens, Susan. 2004. Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Young, Julian. 2010. Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zeller, Eduard, ed. 1895. Ausgewählte Briefe von David Friedrich Strauss. 2 vols. Bonn: E. Strauss. ———. 1908. Erinnerungen eines Neunzigjährigen. Stuttgart: Uhland. Ziegler, Theobald. 1908. David Friedrich Strauß, 2 vols. Strasbourg: Trübner.

5 Nietzsche and St Paul

In his pontifical role as Benedict XVI, from 2 July 2008 to 4 February 2009, Joseph Ratzinger (1927–2022) gave as part of his General Audiences in the Vatican a series of Catecheses to coincide with the special Jubilee Year dedicated to the Apostle Paul. This Jubilee Year ran from 28 June 2008 to 29 June 2009 on the occasion of the bi-millennium of Paul’s supposed birth, which historians have placed between the years 7 and 10  CE.  In his twentieth and final catechesis Benedict/Ratzinger examined Paul’s legacy, from his death by beheading in the final year of the reign of Nero, that is, the year 68 CE (cf. Jerome, De Viris Illustribus [On Illustrious Men], 5.8), around which various traditions have grown up. According to one, found in the fifth-century apocryphal Acts of Peter and Paul attributed to Pseudo-Marcellus, Paul’s martyrdom occurred at the Aquae Salviae, the springs on the Via Laurentina that give the Latin name to the church dedicated to Paul that stands on the site (Sancti Pauli ad Aquas Salvias). After decapitation, Paul’s head is said to have rebounded three times, each time giving rise to a source of water, which is why the church is known in Italian as San Paolo alle Tre Fontane (i.e., St Paul at the Three Fountains). According to another, found in the fourth-century Passion of Paul attributed to Pseudo-Abdias, Paul was buried “outside the city […] at the second mile on the Ostian Way,” an account that agrees with a statement made by a Roman priest named Gaius and cited in the fourth century by Eusebius of Caesarea in his Ecclesiastical History (2. 25, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Bishop, Discourses of Philology and Theology in Nietzsche, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42272-0_5

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5–7). On this site Emperor Constantine the Great founded a basilica, consecrated by Pope Sylvester in 324, called Saint Paul’s Outside the Walls (San Paolo fuori le Mura), one of the four papal basilicas in Rome (the others being Saint John in the Lateran, Sainy Mary Major, and, of course, Saint Peter’s). Enlarged in the fourth and fifth centuries by the Emperors Theodosius, Valentinian II, and Arcadius, the basilica was damaged in the ninth century during a Saracen raid and almost totally destroyed by fire in 1823, after which the present-day basilica was built. In his Catechesis of 4 February 2009 Benedict notes that, very early in the Church, Paul’s letters entered the liturgy as part of the prophet-­ apostle-­Gospel structure of its readings, and defined the “spiritual nourishment” subsequently provided to all believers and to the Fathers of the Church alike (Benedict XVI 2009, 128–129). After referring specifically to Origen’s (only partially extant) commentary on the Letter to the Romans; St John Chrysostom’s seven panegyrics on Paul; St Augustine’s conversion through Paul and subsequent engagement with him; St Thomas Aquinas’s commentary on the Pauline letters; Luther’s Turmerlebnis (1517), his interpretation of the Pauline doctrine of justification, and the Council of Trent’s response; and the new revival of Paulinism in the nineteenth century, thanks to historical-critical interpretations of Scripture, Benedict alludes to “a true and proper denigration of Saint Paul” that emerged in the twentieth century. Here Benedict was thinking, of course, primarily of Nietzsche, whom he describes as having “derided the theology of Saint Paul’s humility, opposing it with his theology of the strong and powerful man” (ibid., 130). Not surprisingly, Benedict immediately moves to “set this aside” and proposes instead to examine “the essential current of the new scientific interpretation of Sacred Scripture and of the new Paulinism of that century,” that is, the nineteenth (ibid., 130). Yet one of Nietzsche’s key claims in The Anti-­ Christ about Paul is, in fact, recapitulated by Benedict and attributed to historical-critical science when he argues that the importance placed on the concept of freedom in Pauline thought led to an emphasis on a differentiation between the proclamation of Jesus and that of Paul: “And Saint Paul appears almost as a new founder of Christianity” (ibid., 130). Benedict again moves swiftly to correct this misperception (as he, of course, sees it). He told his audience that while “it is true that in Saint

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Paul the centrality of the Kingdom of God, crucial for the proclamation of Jesus”—again, an important theme for Nietzsche in The Anti-Christ— “was transformed into the centrality of Christology, whose crucial point is the Paschal Mystery,” he would argue that “precisely in the new centrality of Christology and of the Paschal Mystery the Kingdom of God is realized and the authentic proclamation of Jesus becomes concrete, present and active” (Benedict XVI 2009, 130–131). Indeed, in the process of exegesis over the last two centuries, he added, a convergence between Catholic exegesis and Protestant exegesis had taken place, achieving “a notable consensus precisely on the point that was the origin of the greatest historical dissent”—and giving rise to hope for the cause of oecumenism that had been “so central” to the Second Vatican Council (ibid., 131). However, is Benedict’s assessment of the nineteenth century’s interpretation of Paul correct? (His interpretation of Nietzsche certainly isn’t.) And what are the points of connection, if any, between Nietzsche and nineteenth-century scholarship on the Pauline corpus? In this chapter we shall examine what could be called the various textual uses of Paul, including the (mis)use (or abuse) of them by Nietzsche, in which the discourses of philology and theology once again emerge as in competition.

 ietzsche and the Role of Paul of Tarsus (AC N §41–§43) Separated from us as its origins are by nearly two millennia, and linguistically (and hence conceptually) obscured by the socio-cultural changes that have taken place in the meantime, can we ever know the truth about Christianity? Can we ever know what its real history is? In section 39 of The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche pauses a moment to resume the thread of his argument and undertakes to give what he boldly describes as “the authentic history of Christianity” (AC §39). This historical account begins with a very simple proposition—“there was really only one Christian, and he died on the Cross” (AC §39). With the death of Jesus, the argument goes, so the evangelion (or in Greek

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εὐαγγέλιον)—the “gospel” or the good news—died on the cross as well. What has taken its place is, according to Nietzsche, a dysevangelion—that is, bad tidings, the opposite of a gospel—which is the opposite of what Jesus, as Nietzsche conceives him, had represented. These bad tidings are, as we shall see in this chapter, associated in a unique way with a figure known as Paul of Tarsus (or, as he is usually called, St Paul).1 Following the Crucifixion and the death on the Cross, the “good news” which Jesus had brought, at least as that is imagined by Nietzsche, is faced with the almost impossible task of having to explain “this unexpected and shameful death” (AC §40). “Who was that? What was that?”— these were the questions with which his disciples were faced (AC §40). As Nietzsche conceives of the gospel—as not about believing but doing, as “not faith but acts; above all, as an avoidance of acts, a different state of being” (AC §39)—it was not designed to cope with such an explanatory task. No wonder Nietzsche describes the reactions of the disciplines as a feeling of “dismay, of profound affront and injury” (AC §40). Then the questions asked suddenly changed. Not “Who was that? What was that?”, but rather “Who put him to death? Who was his natural enemy?”, and with those questions, “cracks began to appear” (AC §40). Just as these questions “jumped out like a bolt of lightning,” so the answer resounds back like a roll of thunder, for the answer to the questions “Who put him to death? Who was his natural enemy?” turns out to be—“the Jewish rulers, the upper class” (AC §40). This development is, in Nietzsche’s eyes, a complete reversal of what Jesus’s project had been about: All that Jesus could hope to accomplish by his death, in itself, was to offer the strongest possible proof, or example, of his teachings in the most public manner. But his disciples were very far from forgiving his death—[…]. On the contrary, it was precisely the most unevangelical of feelings, revenge, that now possessed them. (AC §40)

Now revenge and ressentiment are of course two of Nietzsche’s big themes. (The complement of them is guilt, so that we may say that Nietzsche objects to two chief characteristic human strategies: of saying “you’re wrong,” i.e., ressentiment, and of saying “I’m wrong,” i.e., guilt.) The logic of revenge and ressentiment brings about the inversion of Jesus’s

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original project. So whereas the gospel had been about the “kingdom of God” as something that enacted “the existence, the fulfilment, the actuality of this kingdom,” instead the “kingdom of God” becomes caught up with notions of “retaliation,” “judgement,” and “punishment,” and turned into “a historical moment,” one associated with “the popular expectation of a Messiah”; from something alive and actual, it becomes “a closing ceremony, a promise”(AC §40)! On this account, there is a concomitant shift in the way that Jesus is seen by his disciples and by the Jewish people. The “contempt and bitterness” with which they viewed the Pharisees and theologians was now redirected to create the figure of a master, who himself came to be made into a Pharisee and a theologian. At the same time, however, they take revenge on this master figure by distorting his teaching of equality and elevating Jesus “in an extravagant manner,” thereby distancing him from themselves. In the past, so Nietzsche argues, the Jews had “taken revenge” on their enemies by “separating off their God and raising him up into the heights” (AC §40). And so the same now happens with Jesus, who is transformed into being the son of God. In this way, Nietzsche concludes, “the one God and the only Son of God” are “both products of ressentiment” (AC §40). So the argumentational context established in section 40 of The Anti-­ Christ is the shift in the wake of the Crucifixion from such questions as “Who was that? What was that?” to such questions as “Why this, of all things” and then “Who put him to death? Who was his natural enemy?” (AC §40). Now the focus of these questions shifts yet again—this time to “How could God have allowed that?”—at which point the answer is introduced, “God gave his son as a sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins,” an answer that Nietzsche describes as “terrifying in its absurdity” (AC §41). For with this doctrine, he asserts, the good tidings or the gospel came once and for all to an end—to be replaced by “the guilt sacrifice, and in fact in its most revolting, barbaric form, the sacrifice of the innocent for the sins of the guilty!” (AC §41). Nietzsche dismisses this doctrine as “appalling paganism,” since on his account Christ had done away precisely with the concept of “guilt,” denying that there was “a gulf ” fixed between humankind and God; indeed, the entire life of Jesus had been an

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expression of “this unity between God and human beings,” and therein lay the essence of his “glad tidings” (AC §41). With the introduction of the doctrine of sacrifice, Nietzsche contends, a whole slew of other doctrines followed, distorting and corrupting Christ’s status as a redeemer or saviour: the doctrine of the Judgement and the Second Coming, the doctrine of death as a sacrifice, and the doctrine of the Resurrection. All these doctrines project the notion of “blessedness” away from the present moment and into the future, into a putative state after death. And this doctrinal shift is associated for Nietzsche with one figure in particular—with St Paul. In his First Letter to the Corinthians, in a long discourse discussing the resurrection of the dead, Paul summarizes his stance with arresting succinctness: “And if Christ be not risen again, your faith is vain” (1 Cor. 15:17). Nietzsche cites this passage, but he omits to quote the remainder of the sentence: “[…] our faith is in vain, for you are yet in your sins.” This phrase is glossed by the NJB commentary in relation to the argument made by Paul in his Letters to the Romans (Rom. 5:12) and to the Philippians (2:6) to the effect that “what makes sin disappear is the new life, particularly in the life of the risen Christ”2—a view that is surely not so far removed from Nietzsche’s insistence on “blessedness” as “the whole and only reality of the gospels” (AC §41). … Yet for Nietzsche this moment marks the beginning of one of the most problematic aspects of Christianity as he sees it, “the shameless doctrine of personal immortality,” taught by Paul as a “reward” (AC §41). Moreover, this doctrine marks the “fundamental difference,” as Nietzsche sees it, between Buddhism and Christianity: both are, in his view, “religions of decadence,” but whereas Buddhism “promises nothing, yet actually fulfils,” Christianity “promises everything, yet fulfils nothing” (AC §42). And against this backdrop Nietzsche commences his portrait of the figure who is in some ways presented quite literally as an anti-­ Christ, Paul of Tarsus—the embodiment or incarnation of “the antithesis of the ‘bringer of glad tidings,’ the genius in hatred, in the vision of hatred, in the merciless logic of hatred” (AC §42). Nietzsche’s invective is so ferocious it is memorable; when in 1983 Karen Armstrong presented her landmark series on Paul on Britain’s Channel 4, it was these words she chose at the outset to summarize her misgivings about him:

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What, indeed, has this dysangelist sacrificed to hatred! Above all, the Saviour: he nailed him to his own cross. The life, the example, the teaching, the death of Christ, the meaning and the law of the whole gospels—nothing was left of all this after that counterfeiter in hatred had reduced it to his uses. (AC §42; cf. Armstrong 1983, 15)

Of course, such a view of Paul stands in the starkest possible contrast to the respect in which he is held in Christian doctrine, and across all denominations. For instance, Paul’s pre-eminence in Roman Catholicism is reflected in the fact that he is remembered on two feast days, the Feast of the Conversion of St Paul (25 January) and the shared Feast of Saints Peter and Paul (29 June) (with, in the former liturgical calendar, an extra commemoration of Paul the Apostle on June 30), while for good measure a separate feast commemorates dedication of the basilicas of Saints Peter and Paul (18 November).3 (In the Orthodox tradition, Paul is celebrated as (together with Peter) one of the two holy, glorious, and all-praised leaders of the apostles. The fast of Saints Peter and Paul is the summer fast, commencing nine days after Pentecost and continuing until their joint feast day on 29 June. On Malta, a special holiday observed on February 10 commemorates the Feast of St Paul’s shipwreck, as described in Acts 28.) And throughout the history of theology Paul has served as the inspiration for numerous thinkers and movements, including Augustine, Luther, John Calvin (1509–1564),4 Karl Barth (1886–1968), and the Second Vatican Council (held 1962 to 1965). As is his wont, Nietzsche tells us very little about St Paul, relying on the fact that the reader will know all about him—which today may very well not be the case. So it is useful to remind ourselves that Paul is said to have been born in Tarsus in Cilicia, today part of Turkey; in Paul’s time, however, it was one of the largest trading centres on the coast of the Mediterranean, and home to a renowned university, an important centre of Stoic philosophy. (The fusion of the Greek concept of logos with the figure of Christ was a crucial step in the development of Christian theology, as Benedict XVI reminded an audience in 2007.)5 Yet Paul originally identified himself as a Jew, writing in his Letter to the Philippians: “Being circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin,

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a Hebrew of the Hebrews, as to the law a Pharisee, as to zeal, persecuting the church of God, as to the justice that is in the law, conversing without blame” (Phil. 3:5–6). To the extent that he regarded himself as a Jew, Paul had much in common with Jesus who, however, spent all his life in the Holy Land. In the case of Paul, by contrast, there were important Greco-­ Roman aspects to his life and thought. First, as a son of an economically thriving and intellectually sophisticated Greek city, Paul spoke—and wrote—in Greek (or, to be more precise, Koine Greek, the supra-regional form of Greek used in the Hellenistic period and in the Roman Empire). As such, Paul would have known the Old Testament not in Hebrew, but in its Greek translation, the Septuagint (so named after the seventy or seventy-two Jewish scholars that translated the Torah into Greek at the instigation of Ptolemy II Philadelphus). This is an important philological point: in effect, Paul’s knowledge of Jewish scripture (written in Hebrew) would have been through the linguistic prism of Greek.6 Yet curiously, Paul seems to have had no interest in the Greek philosophical tradition; the attribution to him of a correspondence with Seneca, a leading Stoic philosopher, is spurious (Grant 1915). Indeed, in some of his remarks Paul seems to present himself as positively anti-intellectual. In the first chapter of his First Letter to the Corinthians, for instance, Paul equates human wisdom with folly, writing (in words that echo the prophet Isaiah): “For the word of the cross, to them indeed that perish, is foolishness; but to them who are saved, that is, to us, it is the power of God. For it is written: I will destroy the wisdom of the wise: and the prudence of the prudent I will reject. Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this world? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?” (1 Cor. 1:18–90; cf. Isaiah 29:14 and 32:18). And in the third chapter of the same letter Paul returns to this theme, warning: “Let no man deceive himself: if any man among you seem to be wise in this world, let him become a fool that he may be wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is written: I will catch the wise in their own craftiness” (3:18–19; cf. Job 5:18). Second, Paul was a Roman citizen. At the time, the Romans were the occupying force in the Holy Land, a usurpation of the territory of the “chosen race” that had both religious and political implications. The Roman occupation is in the background to the New Testament

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narrative—Herod the Great (born c. 74 BCE, ruled 37–4 BCE), a vassal king of Judea, had rebuilt the Temple in Jerusalem, and features in the New Testament as the king who is involved in the visit of the Magi, the flight into Egypt, and the massacre of the Innocents (Matthew 2: 1–18). One of sons, Herod Antipas (born 21 BCE, ruled 4 BCE-39 CE), the tetrarch of Galilee and Peraea (the figure known in the New Testament outside the infancy narrative as King Herod), appears in the New Testament in relation to the beheading of John the Baptist (Matthew 14:1–12; Mark 6:14–29: Luke 3:1–20) and to the mocking of Christ before his crucifixion (Luke 23:8–12). It is Herod the tetrarch whom Christ describes as a wily “fox” (Luke 13:31–33), in one of those passages where Christ himself employs strong invective. Being a Roman citizen brought Paul important privileges: when he was arrested in Jerusalem, for instance, it enabled him to demand to be heard by a Roman court, and it is after he was sent under escort by Festus the procurator to Rome where he lived for two years that our knowledge of Paul’s life based on biblical sources ends. And the fact that the Romans had constructed an empire with trading routes connecting its different parts allowed Paul to travel—and to spread the word, so to speak, of the gospel. In this respect, Paul is known as the “apostle to the gentiles,” whereas Peter and many of the other apostles preached largely to fellow Jews. Paul’s preaching began after his famous conversion, before which he had built a reputation for himself as one of the fiercest persecutors of the early Christians. Paul had been involved, for instance, in the martyrdom of Stephen (Acts 7:58; 22:20). Yet when he was on the road to Damascus, circa 34 CE, he had undergone a miraculous conversion, described by Luke in the Acts of the Apostles (9:3–16) and alluded to by Paul himself in his Letter to the Galatians (1:12 and 15–16) and possibly in his Second Letter to the Corinthians (12:1–6). Thereafter Paul dedicated himself to serving Christ as one of his followers, writing in his Letter to the Philippians: “Not as though I had already attained, or were already perfect: but I follow after, if I may by any means apprehend that in which I am also apprehended by Christ Jesus. Brethren, I do not count myself to have apprehended. But one thing I do: forgetting the things that are behind, and stretching forth myself to those that are before, I pursue

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towards the mark, for the prize of the supernal vocation, of God in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 3:12–14). After spending some time in Arabia (Armstrong 1983, 56–57), Paul returned to Damascus where he began preaching. After a short visit to Jerusalem, Paul set off for Syria and Cilicia, until he was brought back to Antioch by another apostle, Barnabas, from where they set sail on Paul’s first missionary journey. It was on this journey that Paul started using his Greek name, that is, Paul, rather than Saul, and in 49 CE he went to Jerusalem with Barnabas as deputies from Antioch, a meeting which cemented the strategy that Paul and Barnabas would serve as the apostles to the gentiles, while the leaders of the church in Jerusalem would act as “the apostles to the circumcised” (Galatians 2:90). Subsequently, Paul set out on two further missionary journeys, in 50–52  CE from Syria to Macedonia and Greece and in 53–58  CE from Syria to Galatia, Macedonia, Greece, Ephesus, and Jerusalem, respectively. In 58 CE, Paul was arrested in Jerusalem, and imprisoned at Caesarea Palestinae; he was then sent to Rome where he stayed for two years, and tradition has it that his case was dismissed for lack of evidence and he travelled again in the East, and possibly to Spain. According to tradition, he was imprisoned a second time in Rome and ended his life as a martyr in 67 CE. Virtually none of this detail is ever mentioned by Nietzsche. And yet we need to know it in order to understand the case that he builds against Paul. In part, that critique is all the more remarkable for what it does not say about Paul, so let us consider first why Nietzsche rejects Paul of Tarsus as a “dysangelist” and as a “genius in hatred” (AC §42).7 The chief objection made by Nietzsche is that Paul is responsible for the falsification of history, or in his words: “Once more the priestly instinct of the Jew perpetrated the same old master crime against history—he simply struck out the yesterday and the day before yesterday of Christianity, and invented his own history of Christian beginnings” (AC §42). Not only did Paul invent for himself a history of the first Christianity, he went further and “treated the history of Israel to another falsification, so that it became a mere prologue to his achievement: all the prophets, it now appeared, had referred to his ‘Saviour’” (AC §42). In effect, Nietzsche is restating his objection to Christianity on philological grounds, and the manoeuvre that he associates with Paul of Tarsus was to become a blueprint for the later

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argumentation of the Church Fathers: “Later on the Church even falsified the history of man in order to make it a prologue to Christianity…” (AC §42). The operational shift effected by Paul was, in Nietzsche’s view, a massive one—from the entire life of Christ as it had been lived and experienced (see above) to a single, unique focus on his death: The figure of the Saviour, his teaching, his way of life, his death, the meaning of his death, even the consequences of his death—nothing remained untouched, nothing remained in even remote contact with reality. Paul simply shifted the centre of gravity of that whole life to a place behind this existence—in the lie of the “risen” Jesus. At bottom, he had no use for the life of the Saviour—what he needed was the death on the Cross, and something more. (AC §42)

While Nietzsche does note that Paul’s home town had been Tarsus, “at the centre of the Stoical enlightenment” (AC §42), he nevertheless regards Paul’s thinking as influenced not so much by Stoic philosophy as by his own personal psychology: as someone who had “convert[ed] an hallucination into proof of the resurrection of the Saviour”—or had even gone so far as to invent “this tale that he suffered from this hallucination” (AC §42). On Nietzsche’s account, Paul was someone who “willed the end,” and “therefore he also willed the means” (AC §42). Thus for Nietzsche, Paul was someone who was fundamentally dishonest, and prepared to deceive as many people as possible in order to gain one thing—power: What he wanted was power; in Paul the priest once more reached out for power—had use only for such concepts, teachings, and symbols as served the purpose of tyrannizing over the masses and organizing mobs. […] Paul’s invention, his device for establishing priestly tyranny and organizing the mob: the belief in the immortality of the soul—that is to say, the doctrine of ‘judgment.’ (AC §42)

For Nietzsche, these two doctrines, the immortality of the soul and the doctrine of judgement, are two sides of the same erroneous coin—a coin which elsewhere he identifies as one of the four great errors and defines as

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“the error of free will” (TI Errors §7). The consequence of this error, so he goes on to argue in section 43 of The Anti-Christ, is nihilism. Nihilism, for Nietzsche, arises “when the centre of gravity of life is placed, not in life itself, but in ‘the beyond’—in nothingness—then one has taken away its centre of gravity altogether” (AC §43). As opposed to the Goethean vitalism espoused by Nietzsche that says “the point of life is life,”8 the Christian doctrine developed by St Paul, that is, personal immortality, evacuates all meaning from life in general and our instinctual life in particular: The vast lie of personal immortality destroys all reason, all natural instinct— henceforth, everything in the instincts that is beneficial, that fosters life and that safeguards the future is a cause of suspicion. So to live that life no longer has any meaning. This is now the ‘meaning’ of life…. (AC §43)

In other words, Nietzsche’s argument is that belief operates a reorientation of one’s existential priorities in a way that is profoundly detrimental to one’s well-being, individual and collective. To explain what he means, Nietzsche refers back to an episode found in the Gospel of Luke, the famous story of Martha and Mary. In this episode (which attracted the attention of, e.g., Meister Eckhart in at least two of his sermons),9 Jesus comes to a village and is welcomed into her house by a woman called Martha. Martha has a sister, called Mary, who sits down at Jesus’s feet and listens to him as he speaks. (The fact that these two sisters also appear in the story of the raising of Lazarus, found in John 11:1–44, suggests we are dealing with two separate narrative traditions which have somehow become interlinked.) Martha is distracted by all the serving, and she complains that her sister is not helping her. Far from acceding to her request, Jesus gently chides her: “Martha, Martha, thou art careful, and art troubled about many things. But one thing is necessary. Mary hath chosen the best part, which shall not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:41–42). This phrase, “one thing is needful,” had been picked up by Nietzsche earlier in The Anti-Christ in the context of his discussion of Buddhism in section 20. There Nietzsche had related the phrase to the way in which Buddhism, in his view, relates everything back to the person, making a

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duty of egoism (AC §20). Here he uses the phrase to capture an attitude that is inimical to everything he considers to be beneficial: “Why be public-­spirited? Why take any pride in descent and forefathers? Why labour together, trust one another, or concern one’s self about the common welfare, and try to serve it? … Merely so many ‘temptations,’ so many strayings from the ‘straight path’—” (AC §43). As becomes clear, Nietzsche objects to the doctrine of personal immortality, not simply because it is (in his view) not true, but because of what he regards as its political implications—the doctrine of “equal rights for everyone” (AC §43). The argument here is that the doctrine of personal immortality translates into the political doctrine of equality, conferring on everyone, irrespective of rank or worth, an equal claim to the possibility of eternal “salvation”—so that “insignificant bigots and the three-­ fourths insane may assume that the laws of nature are constantly suspended on their behalf ” (AC §43), that is, the error which Nietzsche had identified in Twilight of the Idols as “the error of imaginary causes,” a concept under which “the entire realm of morality and religion falls” (TI Errors §6). And so Nietzsche returns to some of his favourite themes: the triumph of ressentiment, the erosion of the pathos of distance, and the abolition of noble values: The poisonous doctrine, ‘equal rights for all’, has been propagated as a Christian principle: out of the secret nooks and crannies of bad instinct Christianity has waged a deadly war upon all feelings of reverence and distance between man and man, which is to say, upon the first prerequisite to every step upward, to every development of civilization—out of the ressentiment of the masses it has forged its chief weapons against us, against everything noble, joyous and high spirited on earth, against our happiness on earth. … To allow ‘immortality’ to every Peter and Paul was the greatest, the most vicious outrage upon noble humanity ever perpetrated. (AC §43)

Thus Nietzsche’s critique of Paul turns out to be a special instance of his more general critique of Judeo-Christianity, a critique that regards Christianity as “a revolt of all creatures that creep on the ground against everything that is lofty: the gospel of the ‘lowly’ lowers …” (AC §43).

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In section 45, Nietzsche reveals his talent for humour (albeit humour of a dark and rather twisted kind) by selecting various passages from the New Testament and offering an ironic commentary on them.10 After a sequence of passages from the gospels, Nietzsche turns to the Letters of Paul. The First Letter to the Corinthians provides Nietzsche with several occasions for barbed remarks (see 1 Cor. 3:16 and 1 Cor. 6:2), culminating in a lengthy quotation from the end of this Letter’s first chapter (1 Cor. 1:20–21 and 26–29). At this point, Nietzsche advises the reader to consult the first essay in On the Genealogy of Morals, which advances the distinction between “good and bad” and “good and evil,” in order that the reader may “understand this passage” as “a first rate example of the psychology underlying every Chandala-morality” (AC §45)—the morality, that is, of those who deal with disposal of corpses and are thus, within the Hindu caste system, the lowest caste, considered to be untouchable. For in the Genealogy, Nietzsche claims, he had exposed for the first time “the antagonism between a noble morality and a morality born of ressentiment and impotent vengefulness,” and, as such, Nietzsche regards Paul as “the greatest of all apostles of revenge” (AC §45). From this perspective, Nietzsche argues that “one had better put on gloves before reading the New Testament” (AC §46), and one recalls that, in On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche had contrasted the “Old Testament” (and its “great human beings, a heroic landscape, and […] the incomparable naïveté of the strong heart,” and “a people”) with the New (and its “petty sectarianism, mere rococo of the soul, mere involutions, nooks, queer things, the air of the conventicle, not to forget an occasional whiff of bucolic mawkishness that belongs to the epoch (and to the Roman province) and is not so much Jewish as Hellenistic”) (GM III §22). In particular, he had made a jibe at St Peter: “An ‘immortal’ Peter: who could stand him?” (ibid.). Here Nietzsche sets up an opposition between Paul and Petronius, the Roman satirist who wrote a celebrated novel during the reign of Nero, the Satyricon. Nietzsche applies to Petronius the words attributed to Domenico (= Giovanni) Boccaccio in conversation with the Duke of Parma about Cesare Borgia, “è tutto festo,” that is, “all is festive” (AC §46).11 “Immortally healthy, immortally cheerful and sound”—whatever one makes of the writings of Paul, “festiveness” is not really one of their striking qualities ….

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Hence Nietzsche’s disdain for Paul’s attacks on the “wisdom of this world” (1 Cor. 1:20), for his claim to be “chosen by God” (1 Cor. 1:27), to be a “temple of God” (1 Cor. 3:16), or to be a “judge of angels” (1 Cor. 6:2)—all of which Nietzsche regards as being in opposition to “every other criterion, whether based upon honesty, upon intellect, upon manliness and pride, or upon beauty and freedom of the heart,” and which in turn are rejected by Paul and his followers as “worldly,” indeed as “evil in itself” (AC §46). Against the figure of St Paul, Nietzsche sets up the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, as the “one figure worthy of honour” in the New Testament, since “to regard a Jewish imbroglio seriously—that was quite beyond him” (AC §46). Aside from this provocative act of comparison, Nietzsche recurs to his argument that Paul’s attack on the “wisdom of this world” is, in fact, an attack on science—or scholarship. “A religion such as Christianity, which does not touch reality at a single point and which goes to pieces the moment reality asserts its rights at any point,” can only be opposed to Wissenschaft, but Nietzsche has a particular “science” in mind—philology. Paul’s enemies, Nietzsche claims, are “the good philologians and physicians of the Alexandrian School—on them he makes his war” (AC §47). (By the Alexandrian School, Nietzsche is thinking not so much of the syncretic mix of Jewish theology and Greek Neoplatonic philosophy found in the writings of Clement of Alexandria and Origen, as of the flowering of literature, philosophy, medicine, and sciences in Alexandria during the Hellenistic and Roman periods, reflected in the remarkable collection built up in the great Library of Alexandria.)12 Herein lies the essence of Nietzsche’s argument and the thinking behind the title of his book: “As a matter of fact no man can be a philologian or a physician without being also Antichrist [anti-Christian]” (AC §47). And this is because “as a philologian one looks behind the holy books, and as a physician one looks behind the physiological degeneration of the typical Christian”—where the physician sees something that is “incurable,” the philologist sees something that is in many ways for Nietzsche much worse—“fraud” (AC §47). In opposition to Paul, Nietzsche later sets up the figure of the ancient Greek philosopher, Epicurus (341–270 BC), the founder of the school of Epicureanism. In section 58, Epicurus is presented as combatting “not

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paganism, but ‘Christianity,’ which is to say, the corruption of souls by means of the concepts of guilt, punishment and immortality” (AC §58). On Nietzsche’s account, “Epicurus had triumphed, and every respectable intellect in Rome was Epicurean—when Paul appeared…” (AC §58), and with the appearance of Paul, everything is said to go into reverse: Paul, the Chandala hatred of Rome, of ‘the world,’ in the flesh and inspired by genius—the Jew, the eternal Jew par excellence … What he saw was how, with the aid of the small sectarian Christian movement that stood apart from Judaism, a ‘world conflagration’ might be kindled; how, with the symbol of ‘God on the cross,’ all secret seditions, all the fruits of anarchistic intrigues in the empire, might be amalgamated into one immense power. ‘Salvation is of the Jews.’ (AC §58)

By giving substance—for example, in Romans 9:4–5—to the words recorded in the Gospel of John as having been spoken by Christ in his conversation with the Samaritan woman (John 4:22), Paul substitutes in Nietzsche’s eyes the ressentiment-laden theology of Judaism for the nobility of Epicurean hedonism. This substitution is carried out through Paul’s re-reading and re-interpretation of Hebrew scripture.

Nineteenth-Century Scholarship In a groundbreaking study published in 1971, the New Testament scholar Robert Jewett (born in 1933) undertook a systematic examination of the anthropological terms found in the letters of St Paul. “From the early decades of historical-critical research on the Pauline letters,” he argued, “the anthropological terms such as flesh, body, conscience, spirit, mind, soul, inner and outer man have played an important and controversial role in the debate”—so much so that “to trace the discussion, for example, of the flesh-spirit categories is to touch on every important phase of Pauline research” (Jewett 1971, 1). Taking as its starting-point a current “hot topic” in historical theology, that is, the interpretation and evaluation of the work of the Marburg-based Lutheran theologian and professor of the New Testament Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) and its premise

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that “for Paul theology is anthropology because the anthropological terms are seem to constitute the very essence of Pauline existentialism,” Jewett sought to widen the debate by suggesting “a new approach to the anthropological terms and seek[ing] thereby to contribute to the historical analysis of the Pauline theology itself ” (ibid.). Yet there were, Jowett conceded, considerable problems posed by the way Paul used anthropological terms. First, even within one letter, let alone across different letters, terms often had strikingly varying connotations (e.g., the term συνείδησις [syneídēsis = “conscience”]). Second, some terms appeared with an oddly varying frequency, sometimes not being found in the early letters at all (e.g., the expression “body of Christ”), whereas other expressions (e.g., “body of death,” “body of sin,” and “dead” or “mortal body”) can only be found in the later Letter to the Romans. And the expressions “inner man”/“outer man” appear in the relatively later Second Letter to the Corinthians and nowhere else, except for the Letter to the Romans where they have different connotations (ibid., 2–3). Third, one and the same time can be used in entirely different settings (e.g., “sarx” (σάρξ) is usually used in argumentational and paranetic settings, but in Romans 1:3–4 and 8:3–4 it is used in a confessional, Christological setting (ibid., 3). Finally, what is the relationship between terms stemming from, on the one hand, the Hebraic tradition and those stemming from, on the other, the Hellenistic tradition? How do such typical elements of Hebraic anthropology as heart, spirit, soul, and body relate to such elements with a Hellenistic background as mind, conscience, inner/outer man, and a negative flesh concept? To put it another way, how to explain or reconcile the apparent conflict between (a) the traditionally Judaic anthropological dichotomy of body and spirit/ soul, (b) the Hellenistic trichotomy of body, soul, and spirit, and (c) the antithesis of flesh-spirit with its Hellenistic denigration of the human physical constitution (ibid., 3–4)? In fact, how to define Paul’s anthropological terms in the face of such variations has been, Jewett concludes, “a baffling task for researchers” who have been left with “a nagging series of discrepancies.” Part of the problem, Jewett suggested, lay with the “rather problematical lexical method” that had been used by interpreters when proposing their hypothesis. According to Jewett, the various locations where a term

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appeared had been “noted down and then classified according to some pattern which suggested itself to the researcher” (ibid., 4). (This point recalls Nietzsche’s criticism about the sheer arbitrariness of so many biblical interpreters.) The problem with this method is that taking into account only the most immediate phrase or clause results in “the virtual abstraction of the term from its context in the argument as a whole or its relation to the historical situation,” so that the term acquires its meaning, “not in relation to the actual sentence in which it is found or the historical situation it addresses, but rather in relation to the framework provided by the researcher” (ibid., 4). Instead, Jewett proposed the following approach: first, to take into account “the literary context of the sentence, the paragraph and the letter as a whole”; second, to analyze anthropological terms in relation to the historical situation in which they were used; and third, to relate those terms to the “linguistic horizon” of the first century CE, using the results of “previous historical-religious research” into Hellenistic, Judaic, popular-philosophical, and religious usage in order to discern “the uniqueness and derivation of the Pauline expressions” (ibid., 7–8). In short, Jewett argued, one was required to “make use of each appropriate method of exegesis”—that is, the historical-critical, the genetic, and the literary-critical methods of the nineteenth century, and the religious-­historical, the form-critical, and the theological methods of the twentieth—in order both to avoid the “partisan and apologetical concerns” which have frequently “limited the scope of anthropological research and determined the shape of its results” and to “make use of the results of many previous researchers from a variety of traditions” (ibid., 8). In other words, Jewett emphasized the importance of method, and, in particular, of recognizing that the “exegetical and historical insights” of previous researchers are “the essential raw materials for any contextual reconstruction” (ibid., 8). As a consequence, Jewett undertakes to examine some of the key terms in Pauline anthropology, viz. καρδία (kardia = “heart”), ψυχή (psyché = “soul” or “spirit”), νοῦς (nous = “mind,” “reason,” “understanding,” “intellect”), πνεῦμα τοῦ ἀνθρώπου (= the “spirit” or “soul of the human”), σάρξ (sarx = “flesh”), σῶμα (soma = “body”), συνείδησις (syneídēsis = “conscience”), and ἔσω vs. ἔξω ἄνθρωπος (= the

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“inner”/“outer person”).13 From the outset and on the basis of this methodology, Jewett proposed the following six preliminary theses: • while Paul’s use of anthropological terms is “erratic” if viewed chronologically, a clearer developmental pattern emerges when the argumentational context of each letter is taken into account; • each new connotation of a term emerges in relation to the specific historical situation Paul is addressing, and slips into disuse as the situation changes; • Paul’s use of anthropological terminology demonstrates a high level of sensitivity to the use of those terms by his listeners or readers; • the terms with the most consistent definitions are drawn from traditional Jewish or early Christian traditions; • consistency of terminological usage is not a great priority for Paul: in fact, the later letters display greater contradictoriness of definition and conflict of usage compared with the earlier ones; • anthropological terminology does not lie at the core of Paul’s gospel (which Jewett defines as “the eschatological righteousness of God revealed in the Christ event,” an expression which itself requires a good deal of terminological unpacking), but is rather used to defend it: ultimately, that anthropology “must be reconstructed from Paul’s argument as a whole.” (ibid., 9–10) In proposing these six theses, Jewett was engaging with the work of such previous scholars as Hermann Lüdemann (1842–1933) who was known to Nietzsche (see below), and had argued that Paul was a system builder who developed a Hebraic terminology into a Hellenistic one (Lüdemann 1872). Yet, Jewett argued, by integrating “the modern idealistic conception of the God-related inner man” into the centre of Paul’s anthropology, Lüdemann was abstracting from Paul’s historical situation (Jewett 1971, 4). Equally, to propose a development from one lexical category to another (as if Paul had “advanced from one definition to the next by metonymy and inspiration”), as Ernest DeWitt Burton (1856–1925) and others had done, was to move even further from Paul’s historical setting (Burton 1918).

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Another strategy of previous scholars had been to search for “a common denominator in the form of some philosophical or theological principle,” whether that principle be—as in the case of nineteenth-century liberal exegetes—idealism or—as in the case of such more recent theologians as Ernst Fuchs (1903–1983) and Rudolf Bultmann—existentialism (see Fuchs 1932; Bultmann 1956, 192–195). The results of such an approach were, Jewett believed, inevitable—“the most conducive expressions must be abstracted from their contexts and related to a framework which is quite distant from Paul’s historical setting, and then the rest which does not fit so well must be set aside as non-technical, traditional, or atypical” (1971, 5). Others had tried to fit Paul’s usages into some kind of biblical-theological framework, following the example of Walter Gutbrod (1911–1941) in attempting to fit all variations onto a Procustean bed of a threefold scheme of the human being as creature, as sinner, and as believer (Gutbrod 1934). Yet here, too, the result is “to abstract the actual Pauline terminology from its argumentative and historical setting and force it into theological modes” from later time, thereby producing “insoluble problems both in explaining the usages which do fit and those which do not” (1971, 5). A further (and, in Jewett’s view, more fruitful) approach had been to explain Pauline usage “through religious-historical precedents,” as such researchers as Otto Pfleiderer (1839–1908), Wilhelm Bousset (1865–1920), Richard August Reitzenstein (1861–1931), Adolf Deißmann (1866–1937), and Adolf Schlatter (1852–1938) had done,14 although the debate over whether Paul had been more influenced by Judaism or by Hellenism was judged to be less productive, as exemplified by the more recent work of Egon Brandenburger (b. 1928; see Brandenburger 1968). Similarly, the study of conscience (syneidesis) undertaken by Johannes Stelzenberger (1898–1972) identified six lexical categories but ignored the different historical circumstances being addressed, while Hans Lietzmann’s commentary on Romans failed to clarify the historical role these anthropological terms played in the controversies in which Paul was caught up (Stelzenberger 1961; Lietzmann 1906/41933). All these studies, Jewett argued, inevitably ended up making Pauline anthropology “the abstract result of certain ‘influences,’ thus diverting attention from the concrete historical circumstances” these

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term addressed—even studies that eschewed a theological hypothesis or a historico-religious derivation fell prey to “self-defeating abstractions” (Jewett 1971: 6). While C.A. Pierce’s analysis of the role played by the category of conscience in the controversies in Corinth and J.J. Meuzelaar’s study of the term σῶμα (soma) and its hypothesis that this category was a means to express the unity of Jews and Gentiles in the Church represented steps in what Jewett saw as the right direction (Pierce 1955; Meuzelaar 1961), he called for replacing the search for single, global explanations with an examination of the use of each term in its context, or in other words, an examination of these anthropological terms “in the relation to the concrete historical situation” in which they had been used (Jewett 1971, 6). To frame this project in a Nietzschean terminology, what was being called for was a genealogy of Pauline anthropology. The example of sarx (σάρξ), which was so important for Lüdemann and (as a concept) for Nietzsche, is a case in point. In his survey of the Stand der Forschung in 1855, August Tholuck (1799–1877) painted a picture of the predominant Catholic and Reformation position as being challenged by the resurgence of an older Platonic view of the concept. Tholuck aligned himself with the Augustinian view that located evil in self desire rather than in sensual flesh, arguing that “turning away from God, έχθρα τοῦ θεού [or being “an enemy of God”; James 4:4] […] lies in turning towards the creature—to the stimulus that solicits evil” (Tholuck 1855, 483; cf. Jewett 1971, 3). So far, so good (albeit not from a Nietzschean perspective!): sensual flesh is not so much the problem as is the ego, and sarx (σάρξ) cannot be equated to soma (σῶμα) (i.e., the body). Yet when Tholuck nevertheless goes on to argue that “the impulses that solicit evil fall primarily on the bodily side” (Tholuck 1855, 497), the ambiguity or even the confusion of what Jewett describes as the orthodox position is evident. While not accepting the Platonic contrast between sarx (σάρξ) and pneuma (πνεῦμα) (i.e., “flesh” and “spirit”), the nineteenth-century German Protestant theologian Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860) articulated his opposition to this orthodox view by identifying sarx (σάρξ) with soma (σῶμα) as “the principle of sin” (Baur 1864, 161). As sarx (σάρξ), the human being is “a sensual, material, bodily being with the

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drives and forces that are inherent in the material body” (ibid., 144). On this account, the good intentions of nous (νοῦς) are challenged by the sensual sarx (σάρξ), yet this opposition between flesh and spirit is not so much internal to the individual person as cosmic, “two powers that stand above the human being” (as in Galatians 5) (ibid., 147). Because cosmic, such a conflict could not be satisfactorily resolved in theological terms, and in the end Baur has recourse to the traditional view that our inability to accomplish the Law can only be overcome through our acceptance of justification by faith (Jewett 1971: 51). Following Baur’s interpretation, Karl Holsten (1825–1897) argued that divine pneuma (πνεῦμα) and human nous (νοῦς) had nothing in common: hence spirit (on this reading of Paul) is always divine spirit. Similarly, sarx (σάρξ) is the bodily centre of sensuality: the “material of the body” and “the category of the finite” (Holsten 1868, 370–371). According to Holsten, the new self-consciousness of Christianity sought to establish itself in the mutually incompatible categories of Judaism and Hellenism, driven by Paul’s own conclusions from his conversion and experience of the tension between sarx (σάρξ) and pneuma (πνεῦμα). On this account, Paul’s own inability to accomplish the Law drove him to oppose the infinite spirit to the finite flesh in order to eradicate weakness and sin—and this view came to be a basic assumption, accepted by both liberals and conservatives, of nineteenth-century interpretation (Jewett 1971, 51–52)—including, one might add, Nietzsche. This thesis that differing, even contradictory, positions can be found within the Pauline corpus presented a challenge with which, over the course of the nineteenth century, a generation of scholars was to grapple. The contribution to this debate of Hermann Lüdemann is discussed in more detail below, but he was by no means the only New Testament scholar who sought to answer the questions raised by Holsten. Jewett tracks the shifts between the first and second editions of Otto Pfleiderer’s Der Paulinismus (1873 and 1890 respectively): whereas, in the first edition, Pfleiderer argued that “if pneuma no longer has merely the imperishability and power of a heavenly substance, so its opposite, the sarx is no longer merely an earthly and perishable substance but it also possesses an ethical spontaneity” (Pfleiderer 1873, 53), or in other words, the flesh has become an independent power, capable of acting against the spirit, in

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the second edition the emphasis is somewhat different. Now Pfleiderer explains this fleshly independence of action and the location of evil in our physical nature by having recourse to the idea, current in Jewish thinking in the time of Paul, of an “evil urge”—ein positiver Hinderungsgrund des Guten oder ein Reiz und Antrieb zum Bösen (Pfleiderer 21890). Yet why Paul identifies this urge with sarx (σάρξ) is never satisfactorily answered by Pfleiderer, Jewett concludes (1971: 54–55). The liberal consensus is clearly stated by Heinrich Julius Holtzmann (1832–1910) when he wrote that “this whole doctrine of the impotence of the Law can be understood simply as way of systematizing an experience that Paul had had in relation to life under the Law in contrast to the usual presupposition that the Law could be fulfilled” (Holtzmann 1911, vol. 2, 30). At the core of the liberal consensus—which, for his part, Nietzsche seems to have shared—lies the idea that Paul’s experience, prior to his conversion, of his own weakness when seeking obedience to the Law (or the Torah) had been reconceptualized as a battle of the flesh against the spirit (Jewett 1971, 56). Pauline theology was thus an amalgamation of Jewish and Hellenistic notions. Not everyone was persuaded. In his history of Pauline interpretation, Albert Schweitzer conceded that “never was Holtzmann so impressive— this was to be observed even in his lectures—as in his treatment of Paulinism,” but there was one major caveat: “The system as modelled by him lives because he has breathed his own life into it. But it is not historic” (Schweitzer 1912, 114; my emphasis). In fact, a theological critique of the liberal consensus and the attempt of Baur, Holsten, Lüdemann, Pfleiderer, and Holtzmann to translate New Testament anthropology into categories derived from German Idealism was underway in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. As early as 1860, Albrecht Ritschl (1822–1889) was opposing the identification of sarx (σάρξ) with the so-called outer man or the material form of some cosmic, evil principle. On his account, flesh is not itself a source of evil, but rather a consequence of humankind’s alienation, its sinfulness in the face of God’s law (Ritschl 1850; 21857; cf. Jewett 1971, 57). Following Ritschl, such theologians as Bernhard Weiss (1827–1918), Richard Schmidt (the author of Die Paulinische Christologie in ihrem Zusammenhange mit der Heilslehre des Apostels, Göttingen 1870), and

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Hans Hinrich Wendt (1853–1928) took this critique further, while another group of scholars, more pietistically inclined, challenged the liberal consensus from another angle. For Paul Feine (1859–1933), Alfred Juncker (1865–1945), Johannes Gloël (1891–1959), and Emil Sokolowski (1860–1934), the question of the relative importance of Judaism and Hellenism was less significant than presenting a more religious interpretation of the categories of flesh and spirit in terms of Paul’s own experience, and thereby keeping alive the task of understanding Paul in relation to, as Jewett puts it, the “totality of his life experience and struggles” rather than simply expounding Lehrbegriffe based solely on rationalistic principles (1971, 58–59). Jewett also highlights the contribution made by scholars of oriental religions—this was, after all, the age of investigation into the figure of Zoroaster that was building on the work of the early modern period15— to the nineteenth-century discussion of the categories of flesh and spirit. In his attempt to explain the origins of Christianity as arising from second-­century Hellenistic forces, Wilhelm Bousset argued in Kyrios Christos that while “the personal Christ piety of the apostle Paul arose on this foundation of the Kyrios faith and the Kyrios cultus in the Hellenistic primitive Christian communities,” there now sounded “one entirely new note, and it becomes the dominant: the intense feeling of personal belonging and of spiritual relationship with the exalted Lord” (Bousset 1970, 153). Bousset plays down the importance of what may or may not have happened on the road to Damascus: if “the attempt to derive Paul’s Christ mysticism from his conversion experience at Damascus is very widespread,” he points out that “over against this we should recall that Paul himself spoke of his experience only in a few brief allusions, and always only when it was a matter of establishing his right and his authority as an apostle” (ibid., 155). Bousset places the concept of sarx (σάρξ) in the context of Paul’s doctrine of pneuma (πνεῦμα), two aspects of which Bousset emphasizes: first, its “stark, supernatural basic outlook,” and second, “the strong natural trait with its intermingling of the spiritual and the sensual” (ibid., 172; cf. 173). In turn, the doctrine of pneuma (πνεῦμα) stands “in a broad context,” and “in his gloomy amthropological pessimism, in the dualistic-­supernatural development of the doctrine of redemption, Paul follows a contemporary mood which had already at

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that time seized many minds” (ibid., 187). And Bousset notes the intersection of Pauline thinking with Gnosticism as “a pre-Christian phenomenon,” to the foundations of which “belongs, as the agreement of their Hellenistic and their Christian aspects shows, this radical dualism of anthropology and its related stark supernaturalism in a belief in redemption” (ibid., 187). In turn, Richard August Reitzenstein (1861–1931) placed his analysis of Paul’s view of spirit in the context of a study of the mystery religions and Gnosticism. On this account, spirit for Paul was identical to divine νοῦς (nous) in the sense of πνεῦμα (pneuma), a sort of “divine fluid that is given to the chosen individual as a gift of grace, as a χάρισμα (charisma)” (Reitzenstein 21920, 65)—the effect of which is, as in the mystery religions, to transform totally the individual. Or in terms of the categories used by Paul, “the ψυχικός (psychikós) is entirely human, the πνευματικός (pneumatikós) is no longer human at all” (ibid., 193). Jewett praises Reitenstein’s work for its “suggestive incompleteness,” which encouraged others to try to make sense of the categories of flesh and spirit in Paul (1971, 63). For instance, in his study of primitive Christianity (das Urchristentum) Johannes Weiss (1863–1914) argued on the basis of such passages as Romans 8:1–13 and Galatians 5:13–26 that sarx appears less as the bodiliness of the individual and more as “a unitary, self-­ contained being in which the individual participates almost like limbs of a body” (Weiss 1917, 474).16 What we are really dealing with here is “a metaphysical, almost mythological way of thinking,” in which the flesh is “a part of the cosmos which has fallen away from God and stand in opposition to him; through the flesh the individual stands in a relation to this cosmos; putting aside the fleshly body also means salvation from the worldly elements” (ibid., 474). Weiss never finished this work on the history of primitive Christianity; he died on 2 August 1914, a few days after the outbreak of the First World War. But thanks to his students Hans Windisch (1881–1935) and in particular Rudolf Bultmann, the interpretation of Paul’s writings took another—this time, less philological, more existential—turn in the twentieth century, as categories that had, ironically enough, been derived (at least in part) from Nietzsche began to be applied to the Pauline corpus.17

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Hermann Lüdemann on Paul Just as he engaged with the work of such biblical scholars as Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918) and his Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels (1883) or Ernest Renan (1823–1892) and his Histoire des Origines du Christianisme (7 vols, 1863–1883) who examined the histories of the Old Testament and the New Testament in general, so Nietzsche engaged with contemporary scholarship on the writings of Paul. In this regard it is worth noting in particular his interest in a work by the Protestant theologian Hermann Lüdemann entitled Die Anthropologie des Apostels Paulus und ihre Stellung innerhalb seiner Heilslehre (1872). The son of the theologian Carl Peter Matthias Lüdemann (1805–1889), Lüdemann had studied theology in Kiel, Heidelberg, and Berlin. After working as a Privatdozent and as an außerordentlicher Professor for New Testament theology from 1872 and 1878 respectively, Lüdemann had been appointed Professor of Church and Dogmatic History in 1884 and then also Professor of Systematic Theology and the History of Philosophy in 1891 at the University of Berne, as whose Rektor he also served from 1900 to 1901. As his entry in the Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz recognizes, Lüdemann was a leading systematic theologian in the tradition of liberal theology, that is, the tradition to which such leading figures in the Tübinger Schule as F.C. Baur and D. F. Strauß, but also Albrecht Ritschl and the German Lutheran theologian Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930) belonged and which was reaching its peak in the last third of the nineteenth century—in other words, exactly at the time when Nietzsche was writing. From his correspondence with the theologian Franz Overbeck (1837–1905), we know that Nietzsche borrowed this book from his friend and read it in July 1880, along with a study of the early Christian apologist Justin Martyr, entitled Das Christentum Justins des Märtyrers (1878), by Moritz von Engelhardt (1828–1881) (see KSB 6, 23 and 26; cf. Salaquarda 1974, 101–102). In his letter to Overbeck of 19 July 1880, Nietzsche praised both books as “very fine things,” because “there is such a good philosophical atmosphere about them that I have really become quite serious” (KSB 6, 30). In fact, Nietzsche read Lüdemann’s

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Anthropologie straight through twice, making extensive excerpts in his notebook as he did so (see KSA 9, 4[157] to 4[272], 141–167). Daniel Havemann suggests that whereas on his first reading Nietzsche was interested in the topic of Paul’s “anthropology,” on his second he was concerned with the question in Paul’s thought of the Law and its abolition (Havemann 2001, 180). As it turns out, this second topic became central to Nietzsche’s presentation of Paul in Daybreak. Two aspects of Lüdemann’s work proved to be of significance for Nietzsche. Although Lüdemann was, unlike Renan, relatively uninterested in Paul’s personal character, Nietzsche derived a significant amount of material about Paul by applying to the apostle himself a number of statements made by Paul about human nature or the fleshly body (σάρξ, i.e., sarx) based on Lüdemann’s survey of these remarks. In his Anthropologie Lüdemann placed an analysis of the meaning of σάρξ at the centre of his study of the physical anthropology (above all, the relation between σάρξ and ψυχή, i.e., psyché = “soul” or “spirit”; and the distinction between σάρξ (sarx) and σῶμα (soma, i.e., body) as well as of the ethical anthropology of Paul (Lüdemann 1872, 1–11 and 51–107). In his notebook, Nietzsche synthesized all these passages into a single devastatingly anti-­ Pauline portrait: “Fanaticism,” Nietzsche wrote, is “a means against disgust itself. What did Paul have on his conscience? σάρξ [that is, the flesh] had led him astray to impurity[,] idolatry[,] and magic (φαρμακεῖα [that is, pharmakeíā = “sorcery,” “witchcraft”]) enmity and death, drunkenness and feasting (κῶμοι) all means for the feeling of power” (KSA 9, 4[170], 144). Here lies the core of the argument that Nietzsche makes against Paul in section 68 of Daybreak. Second, Nietzsche places great emphasis in his critique of Paul on the theme of the Law. As Havemann points out, in this respect Nietzsche engaged with the exegetical discussion at a particularly agenda-setting moment, inasmuch as Lüdemann was the first biblical exegete who interpreted Paul’s Damascus conversion as a consequence of his failure to fulfil the Jewish Law (Lüdemann 1872, 109–124). Although Lüdemann does not make a direct link between this failure to fulfil the Law and Paul’s character as Nietzsche does in section 68 of Daybreak when he interprets Paul’s abolition of the Law as an expression of ressentiment (i.e., because

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Paul could not fulfil the Law, he therefore hated it), he does write in relation to the question of how and in what form the Spirit (or πνεῦμα = pneuma) intervenes in the history of humankind: With this question we find ourselves at the nerve centre of Paul’s Christian consciousness. After having hopelessly failed with his heated striving through fulfilling the Law, something which appeared to him to be at first empirically and later in principle impossible, to attain salvation and consciousness of divine approval, frightened to death by the despair that covered his religious consciousness with darkness (Romans 7:10), he is aware, by means of immediate divine inspiration to have recognized the first way out of this darkness and to have realized God’s saving intention, in the first instance because ‘God […] hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God, in the face of Christ Jesus’ (2 Cor. 4:6). This passage is unmistakably quite definitely thinking of the process of passionate inner struggle which found its provisionally decisive conclusion with the sudden catastrophe of the Damacene epiphany. Just as in this way the Messiah-character of Jesus of Nazareth, whose pretended Messianic status was because of his crucifixion in conflict with the primary axioms of Jewish consciousness, received an undeniable divine confirmation, so in Paul’s consciousness the dialectical powers that lay within this contradiction were released, and from their working against each other the fundamental axioms of the gospel of the Apostle emerged. (Lüdemann 1872, 110)

(In his letter to Overbeck, Nietzsche praised Lüdemann’s books as “a masterpiece in a very difficult field,” but regretted that he was “not a writer” (KSB 6, 31); by contrast, in Daybreak and The Anti-Christ Nietzsche would display his own skills as an accomplished writer at their vituperative best.) According to Robert Jewett, the originality and significance of Lüdemann’s work resides in having been the first critic who clearly demonstrated “the existence of differing strands within Paul’s anthropology” (Jewett 1971, 93, cf. 52–54). For Lüdemann, Paul’s concept of σάρξ (sarx) exemplifies how “the speculative categories of Hellenism” with its “metaphysical-dualistic conceptual opposition” and its corresponding “anthropological dualism” exploded “the religious categories of Jewish consciousness” (Lüdemann 1872, 29). Pointing to the contrast between

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the Pauline concepts of πνεῦμα (pneuma) and σάρξ (sarx), Lüdemann suggests that πνεῦμα (pneuma), as “a substantial divine spirit consisting of a higher materiality,” remains on Jewish territory, whereas “the relation of σάρξ [that is, sarx] to the former […] presents it in part as the Jewish-­ religious opposition of the infinite and the finite, in part as the opposition of the divine spirit and the earthly matter of the human body, and thus as incorporating a Hellenistic-dualistic moment into his thought” (Lüdemann 1872, 38). At the core, then, of Lüdemann’s analysis lies an argument about the kind of dualism that underpins Pauline thought. What does the opposition of σάρξ (sarx) and πνεῦμα (pneuma) really mean? Rather than the (Jewish-religious) opposition of “humankind and God” or the (Hellenistic-dualistic) opposition of “material and spiritual substance,” Lüdemann argued that the true dualism was not so much one of “humankind and God” as one of the opposition of πνεῦμα (pneuma) and σάρξ (sarx) within the human being; as such this opposition was not typically Jewish-religious, inasmuch as σάρξ (sarx) is not the human being in its entirety, but rather the physical material of the human body—not the individual human being, but an aspect of the individual (Lüdemann 1872, 48). Instead of combining and confusing the concept of σάρξ (sarx) in its Jewish sense of the “human being” with its Hellenistic sense of “bodily matter,” Lüdemann sought to maintain a clear distinction between them and to highlight the Hellenistic-dualistic sense of the concept: “Thus we found σάρξ (‘sarx’) as the manifestation of an independent material principle, σῶμα σαρχός as a principle that is separable from the human being, and thus the ἔξω ἄνθρωπος [that is, the external person]. At this point we tried to determine more precisely the ἔσω ἄνθρωπος [that is, the inner person], and this we now believe to have found in the πνεῦμα τοῦ ἀνθρώπου [that is, the ‘spirit’ or ‘soul of the human’], which is the real subject of being human” (Lüdemann 1872, 48). In other words, the contrast between human σάρξ (sarx) and divine πνεῦμα (pneuma) has been rendered internal to the human being, since the human being itself contains a fundamental dichotomy: on the one hand, πνεῦμα ἄνθρωπος (or ἔξω ἄνθρωπος [that is, the external person]), which itself consists of νοῦς (nous = “mind,” “reason,” “understanding,” “intellect”) and καρδία (kardia = “heart”), and, on the other,

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σῶμα σαρχός (or ἔσω ἄνθρωπος [that is, the inner person]), which itself consists of σάρξ (sarx), ψυχή (psyche), and σῶμα (soma) (Jewett 1971, 52). This anthropological conception of being both in need of and capable of redemption was dichotomous and not monistic (and thus not Jewish) as well not dualistic (and thus not Hellenistic): it was, Lüdemann concludes, “the first Christian anthropology” (Lüdemann 1872, 49). In short, Lüdemann was arguing that “the inner struggle between these two sets of principles came to be described by Paul by means of a Jewish set of categories on the one side and a Hellenistic set on the other,” so that “the inner man was thought of as neutral terrain which could either be taken over by the flesh or freed from the flesh” (Jewett 1971, 52). In sum, it is likely that the attraction for Nietzsche of Lüdemann’s work was threefold: first, its analysis of Paul’s anthropology, inasmuch as Nietzsche himself worked out a philosophical anthropology18; second, its interest in matters of philology relevant for understanding Paul’s letters, such as the fact that a central term in Hellenistic anthropology, νοῦς (i.e., nous, meaning “thinking,” “reason,” “mind,” “understanding”), has no direct equivalent in the Hebrew language (Schnelle 2009, 316)19; and finally its emphasis on the dualism underpinning Pauline thought, especially the distinction between the ἔσω ἄνθρωπος (i.e., the inner person) and the ἔξω ἄνθρωπος (i.e., the external person).20 Tracing this imagery through its tradition-historical derivation leads us back to Plato, whose Socrates asks Glaucon in The Republic, “wouldn’t the one who says just things are profitable affirm that it is necessary to do and say those things from which the human being within will most be in control of the human being […]?” (589a, trans. Bloom). Subsequently the idea came to the fore in Hellenistic philosophy in the first century CE, as reflected in Philo (That the Worse is Wont to Attack the Better, §23; On Mating with the Preliminary Studies, §97; On Planting, §42) or in Seneca (Epistles, 41.4–5), that the authentic human being would lead a life free from the passions and independent from external circumstances (Schnelle 2009, 318). If we follow Lüdemann’s reading,21 we can see that Paul does not regard the distinction between “inner” and “outer” person so much in terms of a metaphysical as in terms of an anthropological dualism, which is a

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dualism nonetheless. In his Second Letter to the Corinthians, Paul writes, in the context of a catalogue of vicissitudes (2 Cor. 4:8–9),22 that “we do not waver: indeed, though this outer human nature of ours may be falling into decay, at the same time our inner human nature is renewed day by day” (2 Cor. 4:16). Likewise, in the Letters to the Romans, Paul writes that “in my inmost self I dearly love God’s law, but I see that acting on my body there is a different law which battles against the law in my mind” (Rom. 7:22–23), thus aligning the ἔσω ἄνθρωπος (i.e., the inner person) with the will of God, while the power of sin seeks to undermine believers living in peace with themselves from without: “So I am brought to be a prisoner of that law of sin which lives inside my body” (Rom. 7:23). On the question of the relation between σάρξ (sarx) and πνεῦμα (pneuma), Lüdemann opposed such theologians as Johann August Ernesti (1707–1781) and Julius Müller (1801–1878) who, following Augustine’s view of the flesh as an expression of humankind’s revolt against God, understood σάρξ (sarx) as a kind of Lebensrichtung (to use a phrase Lüdemann adopts from Ernesti’s Vom Ursprung der Sünde nach paulinischem Lehrgehalte, 2 vols, 1855–1862; cf. Lüdemann 1871, 55), and agreed with such Greek Fathers as St John Chrysostomos, Cyril of Alexandria, and Theodore of Mopsuestia, who identified σάρξ (sarx) with σῶμα (soma) as a “material sensuality which solicited or directly induced sin”; with such rationalist theologians as Johann Salomo Semler (1725–1791), Johann David Michaelis (1717–1791), Leonhard Usteri (1799–1833), and Leopold Immanuel Rückert (1797–1871) who had “revived” this view; and with the contemporary Protestant theologian Karl Holsten in his study Zum Evangelium des Paulus und des Petrus (1867), that “for Paul σάρξ (‘sarx’) as the living material of the human body the seat and the source of sin” (Lüdemann 1872, 54; cf. Jewett 1971, 52). For Lüdemann, the root of sin was not to be located in the materiality of the flesh, but rather in its “peculiar, uncanny energy,” thanks to which even the inner individual and its πνεῦμα (pneuma) remained “a being so lacking in independence, easily determined” (Lüdemann 1872, 71). On this account, Paul’s amalgamation of Jewish and Hellenistic ideas so that “flesh” could determine the nature of the “inner person” was presented by Lüdemann as Paul’s great insight, or as Lüdemann himself put

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it, “passive weakness as the characteristic of Old Testament σάρξ, frailty in the face of divine omnipotence” and “sinful energy as the characteristic of Hellenistic-dualistic σάρξ” were combined in this view of what could determine the inner person, or the heart and mind of the individual (Lüdemann 1872, 53; Jewett 1971, 53). Yet Lüdemann also argued that this inner, personal conflict was presented in the Pauline corpus in different ways or systems. In chapters 1 to 4 of the Letter to the Romans, for example, flesh is presented in an Old Testament sense in that the human predicament arises from its weakness in not obeying the Law, so that salvation is achieved through an ideal righteousness through faith; whereas, in chapters 5 to 8, flesh is understood in a more Hellenistic sense as something that can be stimulated by the Law and thereby enslaving humankind, so that righteousness can only be achieved when that flesh itself is destroyed through the intervention of the spirit in baptism. In the former chapters (written from a Jewish point of view), flesh is understood in terms of a “religious or subjective-ideal” approach; in the latter ones (from a Hellenistic perspective), in terms of an “ethical or objective-real” approach (Lüdemann 1872, 171; cf. Jewett 1971, 53). For later critics, of course, these varying approaches could be seen as evidence that the Pauline corpus might not have been written by one man (or that they were not written by someone called Paul; or indeed that Paul himself as a single individual had never actually existed). For Lüdemann, however, this distinction was a way of resolving an apparent logical contradiction in Paul’s thought, and of explaining a development across his four main letters (Romans, Galatians, 1 Corinthians, and 2 Corinthians) (see below), so that Paul moved gradually away from Jewish categories to Hellenistic ones. In Galatians and in the two Corinthians, Lüdemann detected a mixture of the two approaches, each co-existing with the other. In Romans, however, the two approaches became quite distinct and separated out from each other (Jewett 1971, 53). In short (although not that short, because Lüdemann was not a particularly snappy writer), Paul’s anthropology in his letters was being reshaped into a soteriology:

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Thus we can gain insight into the process that led the Apostle to seize the σάρξ-­ concept in its full meaning and to elevate it into the centre of his dogmatic discussion; and after he had already in the Letter to the Galatians turned it to ethical and parenthetical use, then in the Letters to the Corinthians developed its physical aspect in a dogmatic-didactic way, he now brings its physical and ethical moments together and brings the teaching of a real redemption of the human being from σάρξ, ᾰ̔μᾰρτίᾱ [that is, hamartíā = “error,” “mistake,” “fault,” “failure,” or even “guilt” and “sin”], and ϑᾰ́νᾰτος [that is, thánatos = “death”] to its full dogmatic shape. Thus it finally also becomes clear that it was soteriological reflection that moved the Apostle to collect all moments of his anthropology, as they can be found scattered in his earlier writings, into a focal point, in this way round off his doctrine of the human being with systematic completeness, and provide his soteriology with a broad, secure foundation. (Lüdemann 1872, 210–211)

For Robert Jewett, Lüdemann’s interpretation of σάρξ (sarx) and πνεῦμα (pneuma) as both “inner- and extra-personal forces, which struggle within man at the instigation of an externally experienced spirit and the flesh” is “an enduring contribution to our understanding of these terms” (Jewett 1971, 54). While, in the longer term, the Jewish and the Hellenistic backgrounds to the category of “flesh” have, in his words, “received correction,” the notion of these two strands in Pauline thought has “dominated the discussion”—albeit, he adds, with “questionable results” (ibid.). None of the complexity of Lüdemann’s analysis seems to feed, however, into Nietzsche’s strange and dark picture of Paul, except perhaps for one point about Lüdemann’s work that Jewett mentions, namely, that because Lüdemann rightly “sought to discern the development of Paul’s thought” but “conceived it as moving between two theories of flesh-spirit” in the first century, “the view of the apostle as a philosopher was thus brought into vogue” (ibid., 54). And it is as a philosopher that Nietzsche wants to attack Paul because of his anthropology (which Nietzsche sees as a simple reflection of Paul’s own psychology), assuming without actually exploring the kind of philological detail that he would have found (and seems to have appreciated) in Lüdemann’s study.

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The Quest for the Historical Paul Just as Albert Schweitzer produced an account of the “quest for the historical Jesus” (see Chaps. 3 and 4), so he wrote a work that might well be called the “quest for the historical Paul.” In Paul and his Interpreters: A Critical History (1911), Schweitzer set out the fundamental question for historians of early Christianity to answer: how did Jesus’s teaching develop into the form of early Greek theology as found in the writings of Ignatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Irenaeus of Lyon? More specifically, as Schweitzer went on to break this question down into two halves: How did Paul’s doctrinal system emerge from the life and work of Jesus and the beliefs of the primitive Jesus community? And how did early Greek theology arise on the basis of Paulinism (Schweitzer 1912, v)?23 Of course, Schweitzer recognized that, prior to him, David Friedrich Strauß and Ernest Renan had tried, each in his own way, to answer these questions, but he remained highly critical of the way that the history of dogma had typically regarded the teaching of Jesus, like that of Paul, as outside its investigative scope, and had taken Hellenization of Christianity as its starting-point. Using a scaffolding metaphor, Schweitzer argued that “the solid mason-work” in Adolf von Harnack’s Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte (1886; 4th edn 1909/1910) began only in the Greek period, leaving the preceding period “not placed on firm foundations but only supported on piles” (ibid., vi). By contrast, Schweitzer insisted that Paulinism had been “an integral part of the history of dogma; for the history of dogma begins immediately upon the death of Jesus” (ibid., vi). Schweitzer shrewdly intuited where the root of the problem lay, namely, in theology’s habit of dividing the history of primitive Christianity up into different areas and in clinging to this division “as if it were something more than a mere convention of the academic syllabus” (Schweitzer 1912, vi). In this respect, it seems that Schweitzer, like Nietzsche, was aware of the damage that could be done by the compartmentalizing approach one so often encounters in academic study. Treating the life of Jesus, the Apostolic Age, and the history of dogma as separate, unconnected disciplines had, Schweitzer contended, opened each of these areas up to “all kinds of confusions and errors,” and he pointed to “the

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downfall of the edifice” that had been elaborately constructed by F.C. Baur in his multi-volume (and certainly voluminous) studies as the last example of someone daring “to conceive, and to deal with, the history of dogma in the large and general sense as the scientific study of the development of the teaching of Jesus into the early Greek theology” (ibid., vi). But thereafter—things fall apart. Schweitzer argued that the narrowing of the conception of the history of dogma, and its separation into the separate research areas of the life of Jesus, primitive Christianity, and Paulinism, had begun with Albrecht Ritschl. While Ritschl himself may have still included, at least formally, the teachings of Jesus, of Paul, and of primitive Christianity in the history of dogma, his tendency to gloss over the differences between different types of belief and doctrine in effect makes it impossible for “a really scientific study” of the teaching of Jesus and Paulinism to “fit into the ready-­ made frame” which Ritschl provides (ibid., vi–vii). For Ritschl, like Baur, presupposes that primitive dogma emerged from the teaching of Jesus “by an organic and logical process,” whereas all these separately established disciplines have shown this assumption to be “false.” For, according to Schweitzer, no natural lines have been discovered linking Jesus’s teaching and primitive dogma; instead, what we are left with are “unintelligible gaps,” and hence the disconnect between these different areas of study: The system of the Apostle of the Gentiles stands over against the teaching of Jesus as something of an entirely different character, and does not create the impression of having arisen out of it. But how is such a new creation of Christian ideas and that within a bare two or three decades after the death of Jesus at all conceivable? From Paulinism, again, there are no visible lines of connexion leading to early Greek theology. Ignatius and Justin do not take over his ideas, but create, in their turn, something new. (Schweitzer 1912, vii)

Again Schweitzer offers a striking image to underscore his argument: rather than a mountain-mass (the teaching of Jesus) continued by lofty summits (the Pauline range) that fall away to lower levels (early Catholic theology), what one discovers are two separate ranges of hills (the

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teachings of Jesus and of Paul), lying “irregularly disposed” in front of the later “Gospel” (ibid., vii–viii). Hence the task for historical science is to understand why these two systems of teaching are “necessarily independent,” by pointing out the geological fault lines and the different strata, as well as where these formations are connected. So while the edifice constructed by Baur is said to have “fallen,” Schweitzer urges that we ought not entirely to give up his “large and comprehensive conception of the history of dogma”; there is, Schweitzer insists, a genuine problem here to be solved. “Present day criticism,” he concluded, “is far from having explained how Paulinism and Greek theology have arisen out of the teaching of Jesus,” for “all it has really done is to have gained some insight into the difficulties, and to have made it increasingly evident that the question of the Hellenisation of Christianity is the fundamental problem of the history of dogma” (ibid., viii; my emphasis). In order to address this question, Schweitzer argues, criticism has to address another: the question of what the Gospel looked like prior to its Hellenization, and the problem of explaining “how the Gospel, which was originally purely Jewish and eschatalogical”—that is, concerned with discussion of the last things—“became Greek in form and content” (ibid., viii). Yet this, and the question of the relation between the Christian, the Hellenic, and the Rabbinic strata in Paul’s teaching, present-day criticism has been keen to avoid: Theological science has in fact been dominated by the desire to minimise as much as possible the element of Jewish Apocalyptic in Jesus and Paul, and so far as possible to represent the Hellenisation of the Gospel as having been prepared for by them. It thinks it has gained something when in formulating the problem it has done its best to soften down the antitheses to the utmost with a view to providing every facility for conceiving the transition of the Gospel from one world of thought to the other. (Schweitzer 1912, ix)

Although this method, used by Baur and Renan, can no longer be used “with a simple confidence,” it remains the main method in use because the “old presuppositions” remain.

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Instead, Schweitzer proposed to apply in the case of Paul the same view he had taken in his Quest of the Historical Jesus, namely, that “the teaching of Jesus does not in any of its aspects go outside the Jewish world of thought and project itself into a non-Jewish world, but represents a deeply ethical and perfected version of the contemporary Apocalyptic” (ibid., ix). Correspondingly, in relation to the position of Paul, Schweitzer asks whether Paul represents “the first stage of the Hellenisation process, or is his system of thought, like that of primitive Christianity, to be conceived as purely Jewish-eschatological?”. Whereas the former has usually been taken for granted, out of a fear that, “if the teaching of the Apostle of the Gentiles, as well as primitive Christianity, were regarded as purely Jewish-­eschatological, the problem of the Hellenisation of the Gospel would become so acute as to make the possibility of solving it more remote than ever,” and so the theological study of history has sought to discern in Paul’s teaching “as much as possible that ‘transcends Judaism,’ that has the character of ‘universal religion’ and ‘essential Christianity’” (ibid., x). Indeed, Schweitzer goes so far as to say that theology is “haunted by the apprehension that the significance of Christianity, and its adaptation to our times, is dependent on justifying the modernisation of it on the lines hitherto followed and in accordance with the historical views hitherto current” (ibid., x). Instead, Schweitzer decided to make the case for “a new formulation of the problem of Paulinism.” This new approach, he suggested, will try to find out “how far the exclusively eschatological conception of the Gospel manifests its influence in the thoughts of the Apostle of the Gentiles” and to “take into account the possibility that his system, strange as this may at first sight appear, may have developed wholly and solely out of that conception” (ibid., x–xi). Schweitzer’s Paul, in other words, is an essentially eschatalogical Paul, and Schweitzer suggests that the task for historical theology is to understand “how far the exclusively eschatological conception of the Gospel manifests its influence in the thoughts of the Apostle of the Gentiles’ and to take into account the possibility that [Paul’s] system, strange as this may at first sight appear, may have developed wholly and solely out of that conception” (ibid., x-xi).

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In a separate, but related study entitled The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle (Die Mystik des Apostels Paulus) and first published in 1930, Schweitzer expounded his own view of Christ. In Paul and his Interpreters, Schweitzer emphasized what he saw as the contradictoriness of Paul’s thinking, writing of previous critics that “the odd thing is they write as if they understand what they were talking about”: They do not feel compelled to admit that Paul’s statements taken by themselves are unintelligible, consist of pure paradoxes, and that the point that calls for examination is how far they are thought of by their author as having a real meaning, and could be understood in this light by his readers. They never call attention to the fact that the Apostle always becomes unintelligible just at the moment when he begins to explain something; never give a hint that while we hear the sound of his words the tune of his logic escapes us. (Schweitzer 1912, 37)

In this later work, Schweitzer goes beyond this affirmation of Paul’s contradictoriness and suggests that it is governed by two key principles. First, there is the historico-cosmic principle of “Christ-mysticism.” “The fundamental thought of Pauline mysticism runs thus,” Schweitzer explains: “I am in Christ; in Him I know myself as a being who is raised above this sensuous, sinful, and transient world and already belongs to the transcendent; in Him I am assured of resurrection; in Him I am a child of God” (Schweitzer 1968, 3). This “being-in-Christ” is described by Schweitzer as “the prime enigma of Pauline teaching” (ibid.). The second principle, however, is the source of the first and is primarily eschatological: “This mystical element is actually derived from the eschatological concept of the Community of God in which the Elect are closely bound up with one another and with the Messiah” (ibid., 216). As a result, Schweitzer argues that the motif of being “in Christ”—an expression that figures prominently in the Pauline corpus (e.g., Galatians 1:22 and 2:20; Romans 16:3 and 16:9–10; 1 Corinthians 4:10)—takes precedence over the doctrine, traditionally associated with Paul, of righteousness by faith; as Schweitzer puts it,

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Paul is […] forced by his mysticism to recast the doctrine of the atoning death of Jesus, in the sense of inserting it into the doctrine of freedom from the Law. This is not possible by straight-forward logic, because there is no argument against the validity of the Law to be derived directly from the atoning death of Jesus. All that can be done therefore is to bring the doctrine of the freedom from the Law into close connection with the doctrine of the atoning death of Jesus by means of logical ingenuities. This Paul does by showing by the argument from Prophecy that the only valid righteousness is that which comes from faith alone, and that works righteousness is incompatible with faith-righteousness. It is possible for the idea of righteousness apart from the works of the Law to be expounded by means of this ingenious reasoning; but it could never have arisen out of it. The doctrine of righteousness by faith is therefore a subsidiary crater, which has formed within the rim of the main crater—the mystical doctrine of redemption through the being-in-Christ. (Schweitzer 1968, 224–225)

For Celia Kourie, the motif of being “in Christ” serves as “a crucial hermeneutical principle,” around which such other Pauline concepts as reconciliation, salvation, eschatology, ecclesiology, and so on can be constellated and understood (Kourie 2001, 74). In line with his strong emphasis on eschatology, Schweitzer argues that Jesus’s resurrection initiated the “last age” and that the predestined identity of the elect with the Messiah was already bringing them into this resurrection by virtue of their “being-in-Christ,” so that while “the outward appearance is still of the transient world […] the reality is already that of the eternal world” (Schweitzer 1968, 99). Where Schweitzer saw Paul’s “being-in-Christ” as essentially mystical, subsequent interpreters such as the American New Testament scholar E.P. Sanders (b. 1937) regarded it instead as a theology of salvation. On this account, the conventional understanding of Second Temple Judaism, that is, the cult practised between 516 BCE and 70 CE in the holy temple that had been constructed on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem by returning Jewish exile groups under Zerubbabel to replace Solomon’s Temple until its destruction by the Romans, had been mistaken in opposing “faith” and “works,” and in transposing this opposition onto Pauline

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thought. Rather, Paul’s emphasis on faith was entirely consistent with Second Temple practice, in which the observance of the Law (or “works”) had been imposed by God on his people as an act of faith. But how could Gentile (i.e., non-Jewish) observers of the Torah (i.e., the Law) be integrated into the covenant? Paul’s Christology of the crucified and risen Jesus was intended to solve this problem by allowing Gentiles to participate in the covenant (and hence be saved) not by observation of the Law but through faith (belief in Jesus). This approach is said to have opened a “New Perspective on Paul,” as the resultant shift in biblical studies in the 1970s and 1980s styled itself. In the wake of Sanders’s two studies, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977) and Jesus and Judaism (1985), the avowed novelty of this perspective lay in moving away from the debate marking the Protestant Reformation between Lutheran and Reformed theology on the one hand and Roman Catholicism on the other about justification by faith alone (sola fide) and placing the Pauline corpus in the context of a first-century Judaism in general and the tradition of apocalyptic prophecy in particular (Sanders 1977, 1985). At the same time, however, one might wonder: How really “new” is this “New Perspective”? After all, in his study (published in German as Paulus 1904 and 1907 and in English as Paul in 1907), the German Lutheran theologian William Wrede (1859–1906)—who shared with Nietzsche an appreciation of the importance of method (see Wrede 1897; translated 1973)—had argued that “the framework of the whole Pauline teaching is formed by the Jewish idea of a contrast between two worlds (aeons), one of which is present and earthly, the other future and heavenly”: Here we have the foundation of the Pauline way of regarding history. Here too is the Pauline conception of salvation and bliss. The doctrine that salvation is unattainable in this world, because in its very nature it is a negation of earth; that it is ‘life,’ permanency, glory—betokens no change in the Jewish idea. To these must be added the whole wealth of thoughts about the future. All is Jewish, from the judgment with its wrath and retribution to the great ‘oppression’ before the end, to the ‘blast of the last trumpet,’ to the victory of Messiah over the hostile spirits. (Wrede 1907, 149–150)

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Wrede’s Paul is thus an expression of Jewish apocalypticism, just as in The Mystery of the Kingdom of God: The Secret of Jesus’ Messiahship and Passion (Das Messianitäts und Leidensgeheimnis, 1901) and in The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906) Albert Schweitzer praises the work of Reimarus as “one of the greatest events in the history of criticism” because of its understanding of Jesus as an apocalyptist, and hails D.F. Strauß’s Life of Jesus for its “positive historical impact” as “the historical personality which emerges from the mist of myth is a Jewish claimant to the messiahship whose world of thought is purely eschatological” (Schweitzer 1910, 15 and 95). In his Quest, Schweitzer presents the relation between John the Baptist and Christ as fundamentally one between two apocalyptic prophets: There is silence all around. The Baptist appears, and cries: ‘Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.’ Soon after that comes Jesus, and in the knowledge that He is the coming Son of Man lays hold of the wheel of the world to set it moving on that last revolution which is to bring all ordinary history to a close. It refuses to turn, and He throws Himself upon it. Then it does turn; and crushes Him. Instead of bringing in the eschatological conditions, He has destroyed them. The wheel rolls onward, and the mangled body of the one immeasurably great Man, who was strong enough to think of Himself as the spiritual ruler of mankind and to bend history to His purpose, is hanging upon it still. That is His victory and His reign. (Schweitzer 1910, 368–369)

And in The Mystery of the Kingdom of God, Jesus is presented as an essentially tragic (because deluded) figure whose own sacrifice of himself can alone bring about the Messianic feat: “With his death [Jesus] destroyed the form of his ‘Weltanschauung,’ rendering his own eschatology impossible” but also “giv[ing] to all peoples and to all times the right to apprehend him in terms of their thoughts and conceptions, in order that his spirit may pervade their ‘Weltanschauung’ as it quickened and transfigured Jewish eschatology” (Schweitzer 1925, 251; cf. Farnell 2005, 236–241). This reading of Jesus is not so far removed from Nietzsche’s in The Anti-Christ, when he writes that “this ‘bearer of glad tidings’ died as he lived and taught—not to ‘save mankind,’ but to show mankind how to

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live. It was a way of life that he bequeathed to man […]” (AC §35). But whereas Schweitzer could fit the figure of Paul into this apocalyptic, eschatological, or mystical scheme, Nietzsche could find no such way into an appreciation of the man he described as a “dysangelist” and as a “genius in hatred” (AC §42).

Onfray’s Portrait of Paul All in all, Nietzsche’s charge against Paul is essentially philological—and it is significant that there are any other possible charges against him that Nietzsche chooses not to make. After all, there is plenty of material in the life and thought of Paul that would make him a fit subject for the kind that Nietzsche endorses, that is, a psychological one (cf. AC §42). In France, the popular philosopher Michel Onfray has, for example, contrasted the radically anti-hedonist stance found in the writings of Paul—a hatred of the body, of life, of women, and of sexuality—with the surprising absence of such an anti-hedonist stance in the sayings of Jesus, who does not express opposition to marriage, does not embrace the ascetic ideal, does not offer prescriptions about sexuality or food, and in fact sings the praises of being meek, mild, and gentle.24 Indeed, Onfray describes Paul as certifiably hysterical, someone who persecutes the Church to the extent of being involved with the stoning of Stephen, and whose conversion on the road to Damascus hints significant hysterical traits or disorders. First, he demonstrates a histrionic personality disorder (he falls down in public); second, he suffers a temporary amaurosis fugax (blinded by a light, he loses his sight for three days); third, he suffers from sensory hallucinations coupled with a tendency to mythomaniac or pathological lying (he claims to have heard the voice of Jesus, speaking to him); fourth, he suffers from agueusia and anamosia, the loss of taste and loss of sense of smell (he goes for three days without eating or drinking anything); his mythomania, pseudologia fantastica or pathological lying is demonstrated once again when he recovers his sight after the imposition of hands in the house of Judas by Ananias, a Christian believer whom God has sent; and finally, he evinces moral exhibitionism

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when he subsequently recovers, sits down to eat, regains his strength, and sets off to preach the gospel across the Roman world. In terms of his physical appearance, Paul is said to have been small, bald, thin, and bearded,25 and tormented by a mysterious affliction that he describes in the Second Letter to the Corinthians: “There was given me a string of my flesh, an angel of Satan, to buffet me” (2 Cor. 12:7). Various interpretations of this “thorn in the flesh” have been suggested, from the resistance of Paul’s Jewish brothers to the Christian faith to some kind of a disease that led to severe, unforeseeable attacks (NJB, NT, 1923). The Catholic biblical commentator George Leo Haydock suggests a whole variety of interpretations: a violent headache or pain, or some kind of distemper of the body, as Augustine suggests in his commentaries on Psalm 98 [99] and on Psalm 130[131]; the opposition Paul met from his enemies and the enemies of the gospel, as St John Chrysostom believes; or “troublesome temptations of the flesh, immodest thoughts, and representations suggested by the devil, and permitted by Almighty God for [Paul’s] greater good” (H, 1533). To the extent that there was a sexual dimension to this “thorn in the flesh,” then it would be consistent with the diagnosis of Paul as a hysteric to conclude that he suffered from a weak or absent libido, or from excessive libido, leading him to see sexual matters everywhere. In fact, hysteria is said to result from a struggle with repressed anxieties arising from one’s sexuality, and it might involve a partial realization of these anxieties under the narrative of the conversion experience. Onfray suggests that the psychology behind Paul’s thinking was very simple, in that Paul solved the problem of how to live with a neurosis by the device of turning the whole world itself into a neurosis. Because Paul was born with a body he detested—in his first Letter to the Corinthians, he famously describes himself as “one born out of due time” or an abortion (1 Cor. 15:8)—he sought to rid himself of this self-hatred or selfloathing by pretending to want how he was, and anathematizing everything to do with sexuality, both his own and everyone else’s. So when Paul tells the Corinthians, “But I chastise my body, and bring it into subjection” (1 Cor. 9: 27), this self-mortification and self-denial are offered as a model for others to follow.

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Onfray sees a connection between the portrait of Paul as he finds it in the New Testament—as someone who is a fanatic, as someone who is sick, misogynist, and masochistic, someone dominated by the death drive—and the kind of world to which this belief-system has given rise: its ideological brutality, its intellectual intolerance, its cult of ill health, its hatred of the body and its ecstasies, its disdain for women, its pleasure in inflicting pain, and its devalorization of this world in relation to the putative next. All these characteristics and qualities can be found in the celebrated passage in the Second Letter to the Corinthians where Paul declares, “Therefore I take pleasure in my infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ’s sake. For when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor. 12:10). Although Haydock notes its proximity to a pagan outlook, as found in Seneca’s calamitas virtutis occasio est, or Pliny’s Optimos nos esse, dum infirmi sumus,26 for Onfray, this is a quintessentially Christian, that is, Pauline, sentiment—it is an expression of an essentially masochistic outlook. In this Second Letter to the Corinthians, Paul lists the physical abuse he has suffered: flagellated five times (thirty-nine lashes on each occasion); beaten with sticks three times; even stoned on one occasion (in Lystra in Anatolia); shipwrecked three times, once spending an entire night and a day in the open sea; in addition to which, he spent two years in prison (2 Cor. 11:23–25). He vividly evokes the dangers of his travels: in danger from rivers, in danger from brigands, in danger from his fellow Jews and in danger from the gentiles, in danger in the towns and in danger in the open country, in danger at sea and in danger from people pretending to help him. He tells of how he has worked with unsparing energy, often without sleep, without food or drink, without clothing— tired, cold, hungry, and thirsty (2 Cor. 11:26–27). After all this, for Paul to be imprisoned, and finally decapitated, in Rome, forms the culmination of a masochist’s life. Like Nietzsche, Onfray sees Paul’s thought as a thought informed by hatred, a hatred of himself that becomes projected into three other areas—a hatred of women, a hatred of freedom, and a hatred of intelligence. On this account, Pauline thought recycles the Jewish misogyny of the Hebrew scriptures, as reflected in the story of the Garden of Eden in which Eve is responsible for the original sin. The misogynistic view of

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women as being a weaker sex, representing a danger of temptation or seduction for men, is reflected in Paul’s injunctions to women to obey men in silent submission, to fear their husbands, and not to teach or make laws. The route to salvation for women from this perspective lies solely in maternity—with all the social implications that flow from this belief. A second worrying aspect of Pauline thought for Onfay is its supposed hatred of freedom. On this account, Paul is responsible for implicitly supporting the institution of slavery, through his celebration of cultivating a submissive and obedient attitude. More generally, Paul is said to be responsible for valorizing submission to those in political authority. On the basis that to disobey those in authority means to disobey God, divine approval is thus given to poverty, misery, and unjust inequality. Paul seems to have gone out of his way to flatter the Romans, and to offer no resistance whatsoever to the imperial authorities. The passage on civil obedience in Paul’s letter to the Romans (13:1–7) equates submission to civil authority with submission to God, and can be used as a justification for paying taxes to tax collectors, obeying the army and the police, and respecting, regardless of whether they deserve it or not, all magistrates, ministers, and kings. The third area where Paul is said to expresses his hatred has to do with his hatred of intelligence. This is part of his cultural inheritance from the Book of Genesis, with its opposition between the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge (of Good and Evil).27 As a Jew, Paul would have known the Hebrew scriptures (albeit in their Greek form), but he would not have made an in-depth study of them. According to the Acts of the Apostles, Paul’s professional occupation was as a tent-maker (Acts 18:1–3), and the literary style of his Greek is generally considered to be rough and comparatively unsophisticated; as the introduction to the writings of Paul in the NJB puts it, he “never attempted Attic elegance” (NJB, NT, 1852). Sometimes his grammar is wrong and his sentences unfinished; sometimes his thought is too fast, too emotional; and often he did not write letters but (as was common practice at the time) he dictated them.28 While the commentary in the NJB sees in these stylistic infelicities a reflection of Paul’s deliberate avoidance of rhetoric so as to convince his

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audience not by the form but by the content of his religious message (NJB, NT, 1852), Onfray sees them as evidence of Paul’s lack of culture and learning. This very lack of education becomes, however, an integral part of his message: in his letters to the Corinthians and to Timothy, his readers are invited to reject philosophy outright. The members of his audience would have been equally uneducated, even illiterate: weavers, dyers, craft workers, carpenters. To these people Paul’s message would have been: turn away from intelligence—turn away from yourselves, from the world, from women, from freedom, from education, from culture! Although Onfray may share Nietzsche’s rejection of Christianity, it is clear from this portrait he paints of Paul that his critique of Pauline thought is far more wide-ranging than Nietzsche’s. At the same time, consideration of his critique exposes some of the possible flaws not just in Onfray’s own critique of Paul, but in Nietzsche’s critique of Paul as well.

Problems in Nietzsche’s Critique of Paul To begin with, the earliest extant Christian texts are, in fact, the epistles of Paul (Armstrong 1983, 25). Although they are all written after 50 CE, they are nevertheless considerably earlier than the gospels, the earliest of which, Mark, was written probably around 70 CE, while Matthew and Luke are usually dated around 75–85 CE, and John is by the far the latest and was probably written in stages between around 90 and 110 CE. So if the date of the Crucifixion is reckoned at around 30 CE, it is clear that the epistles of Paul enjoy a much greater chronological proximity to the time of Christ. In terms of textual genesis, the gospels spring out of the churches that Paul had helped establish on his missionary journeys. To contrast the epistles of Paul with the gospels and to argue that the former is a perversion of the latter is to misunderstand the textual chronologies involved.29 Yet this misunderstanding is a widespread one. In the second half of the second century, Irenaeus, bishop of Lyon, criticized a sect called the Ebionites for rejecting Paul as an apostate from the law, adopting for their use a version of the Gospel according to Matthew known as the Gospel of the Ebionites. Meanwhile, in Nietzsche’s own time such Christian

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anarchists as Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) or, in our own time, Ammon Hennacy (1893–1970) have argued that Paul was responsible for the way in which the Church “deviated” from the original teachings of Christ.30 In his critique of Paul, however, Nietzsche never addresses the chronological priority of the Pauline corpus. Second, the use of psychology to understand St Paul is fraught with difficulty, given that the only access we have to Paul is through his texts. The difficulties that arise when an analysis is carried out only on texts is demonstrated by Freud’s case-study, “Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides),” otherwise known as the Schreber case. Based on Freud’s reading of Memoirs of My Nervous Illness by Daniel Paul Schreber (1842–1911), Freud’s analysis inadvertently exposes the risks and dangers of analysing someone without being able to interview or analyse them directly. When Nietzsche talks about a “psychological” approach, what he tends to mean is a critique ad hominem, from his view, perfectly justifiable, given his identification of the philosophy of an individual with that actual individual. (One thinks, for instance, of the principle adopted by Nietzsche and enunciated in his letter of 16 September 1882 to Lou von Salomé [1861–1937]: “Your idea of reducing philosophical systems to the personal deeds of their originators is truly an idea from a ‘kindred mind’: I myself in Basel related the history of ancient philosophy in this way and I used to like to tell my audience: ‘This system is refuted and dead—but the person behind it is irrefutable, the person always remains immortal’— for instance, Plato” [KSB 6, 259].) Third, Nietzsche is obviously a pre-Freudian psychologist, and when he declares that “psychology is now again the path to the fundamental problem” (BGE §23), it is clear that he cannot be referring to the approach developed by Freud as psychoanalysis. To the extent that Freud drew on Nietzsche, however, in the formulation of his theories,31 one might argue that Nietzsche’s approach to analysing is also proto-Freudian. It is highly ironic, therefore, to find a Nietzsche-inspired commentator such as Michel Onfray drawing on such Freudian notions as repression and the determining effect of sexual neurosis, given Onfray’s own subsequent wholescale rejection of the validity of psychoanalysis!32

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By the same token, different schools of psychoanalysis would offer different interpretations of Paul’s version; for C.G. Jung (1875–1961), for instance, Paul’s conversion is an example of what he called enantiodromia, a term meaning “running counter to,” which Jung claimed to derive from the philosophy of Heraclitus (Jung 1971, §708). For Jung, enantiodromia designates “the emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time,” and among the examples of this phenomenon he cites is the conversion of St Paul, alongside the conversion of Ramon Lull (1234–1315), the self-identification of the sick Nietzsche with Christ, Nietzsche’s deification of and subsequent turn against Richard Wagner, and the shift in Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) from the life of an erudite scholar to that of a prophet or seer (ibid., §709). The vision of St Paul on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:3–9) indicates, Jung suggests, that “unconsciously [Paul] was already a Christian, though this fact had escaped his conscious insight” (ibid., §712). Finally, both Nietzsche and Onfray assume that there is a single, unitary figure called St Paul, and that the texts attributed to him in the New Testament give us unproblematic access to the thought of a concrete historical figure. This is, however, far from being the case. While seven out of the thirteen letters attributed to Paul—the letters to the Romans, the Corinthians (1 and 2), the Galatians, the Philippians, the first letter to the Thessalonians, and the letter to Philemon—are by near universal consent considered to be authentic (i.e., to have been dictated by Paul himself ), the authorship of such other letters as those to the Ephesians, the first and second letters to Timothy, and the letter to Titus is disputed, with authenticity of Pauline authorship being particularly contentious in regard to the letter to the Colossians and the second letter to the Thessalonians. As far as the Letter to the Hebrews is concerned, its authorship has long been a matter of dispute from the earliest times; Origen of Alexandria, for example, rejected Pauline authorship of this work. As the American biblical scholar Robert M.  Price has written in his book entitled The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul (2012), the Pauline epistles “reveal themselves to the discerning reader to have exactly the same sort of limitation as the Gospels do: both are collections of fragments and pericopae contributed and fabricated by authors and

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communities of very different theological leanings” (Price 2012, viii). So one might even argue, in line with Prosper Alfaric’s claim of 1959 that Jesus as a historical person is, in fact, an invented figure (Alfaric 2005), that we should think about Paul of Tarsus not as a historical person who can be psychoanalysed, but as a personnage conceptuel. As to his influence, there are considerable differences of scholarly opinion concerning how far Paul did in fact influence Christian doctrine. Among the most radical is G.A.  Wells (1926–2017), a professor of German with scholarly interests including theology and history, whose view was that Jesus was a mythical figure and that Christianity was in good part invented by Paul. More widely influential, however, is the view of F.C. Baur as the founder and a leading member of the Tübingen School of theology. Basing himself on the Hegelian theory of the dialectic, Baur argued that second-century Christianity should be understood as a synthesis of Petrine (or Jewish) Christianity and Pauline (or gentile) Christianity. More specifically, he suggested that Paul had in fact been utterly opposed to the disciples, arguing that the Acts of the Apostles was a late and hence unreliable work, and that the form of Christianity that emerged in Catholicism was, in effect, a synthesis of the theological views of Paul and those of the Judaizing church in Jerusalem. Since the work of Adolf von Harnack, this position taken by the Tübingen School has largely been abandoned, yet the view that Paul was responsible for taking the teachings of a Jewish preacher and converting them into a theological doctrine and him into the Son of God remains widespread. In 1969 the German New Testament scholar Günther Bornkamm (1905–1990) published a major study of Paul. Following Albert Schweitzer’s critique in 1906 of the quest for the historical Jesus in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the textual analysis of biblical sources entered a fallow phase before beginning a second phase of activity in the 1950s and a third phase in the 1980s. Bornkamm belonged to this second phase, admitting in Jesus von Nazareth (1956) that the search for the historical Jesus involved profound difficulties, but suggesting that the relationship between the putative historical Jesus was closer than that proposed by such scholars as Rudolf Bultmann. In Paul, Bornkamm reflected on the “amazing state of affairs” that Paul nowhere speaks of “the Rabbi from Nazareth, the prophet and miracle-worker who ate with

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tax-­collectors and sinners, or of his Sermon on the Mount, his parables of the kingdom of God, and his encounters with the Pharisees and Scribes” (Bornkamm 1971, 110). And in The Jesus Dynasty (2006), for example, James Tabor has argued that it was Paul’s intervention that led the Church to break with the Ebionites (the sect condemned by Irenaeus), and hence with the authentic teachings of Christ himself (Tabor 2006). In effect, Tabor is restating the claims of such thinkers as E.W.  Bullinger (1837–1913) in the tradition of the conservative Protestant evangelical movement known as “ultradispensationalism” that identifies the Paul in ministry with the loss of the basic truths held by the early Church. In The Fabricated Paul: Early Christianity in the Twilight (1995), the German theologian Hermann Detering (1953–2018) propounded the view that Jesus was not a historical figure, but the product of a Jesus-myth fabricated by the early Christians, and that the letters attributed to Paul are, in fact, pseudepigrapha (or falsely attributed works).33 Following the nineteenth-century work of F.C.  Baur, it has been suggested that the attacks in the Pseudo-Clementine writings (i.e., those writings attributed to Saint Clement of Rome or Pope Clement I, the first Apostolic Father of the Church) on the figure of Simon Magus, the first heretic whose confrontation with Peter is recorded in the Acts of the Apostles (8:9–24), are really attacks on Paul.34 For Detering, the Pseudo-Clementine documents are correct in identifying Paul as “Simon Magus,” arguing that the early Church never forgot Paul’s persecution of Christianity, and that Paul could only be rehabilitated when forged letters were written to replace and correct his authentic writings. Over and above such Pseudo-Clementine writings as the Recognitions and the Homilies, Detering reads other apocryphal works as confirming the real identity of Simon Magus as Paul. The source of this anti-Pauline rhetoric was the Judaizing church in Jerusalem, and the function of the Pseudo-Clementine account of Simon Magus’s visit to Rome was to establish the presence of Paul in that city. Hence arose the legend of Peter’s residence in Rome, in order to counter this anti-Christian presence, and thus a tradition originally found with the Ebionites became adopted by the Catholic Church. For Detering, the investigation of the Pauline letters becomes a history of the discovery of their inauthenticity (as the title of chapter 1 of Der gefälschte Paulus puts it).

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Detering confesses: “Even during my theological studies it was difficult for me to feel comfortable with the man from Tarsus,” since he stood “entirely in the shadow of that other man from Galilee,” but that “even while I was a student the luster that surrounded the radiant figure of Jesus began to diminish” (Detering 1995, 14). Hence the gospels as a whole turn out to be “not reliable eyewitness accounts but kerygma, i.e., proclamation, affirmations of faith”—or, in Detering’s words, “pious fantasy,” and “the historical arguments that our teachers brought forth against the authenticity of certain teachings and stories of Jesus were immediately illuminating for me and […] after a few days I was already overcome”— there could be “no doubt that the historical contours of the man from Nazareth had been wiped out by later tradition so as to be unknowable” (ibid., 14–15). These textual investigations led Detering to the following conclusion: The adherence of the Christian church to particular historical facts, so-­ called facts of salvation, seems to me, until today, to be intellectual and human impudence, since, on the one hand, no person is really in a situation to totally investigate the historical truth-content in these statements and since, on the other hand, the nature of faith becomes completely falsified if it is degraded to maintaining the likelihood of historical data. (Detering 1995, 16)

Paul’s account of the life of Christ is surprisingly schematic: he tells us that Jesus was “made of a woman, made under the law” (Gal. 4:4), as the seed of Abraham (Gal. 3:16) and a descendant of David (Rom. 1:4); that he belonged to the people of Israel (Rom. 9:4), suffered (Rom. 8:17), and died (Rom. 5:6, 8 and 15) on the cross (Rom. 6:6); that he was buried (Rom. 6:4) and rose again (Rom. 4:24 and 6:4). But how, when, and where this all took place—on all this there is silence. As Detering observes, “basically, the fact that Paul says nothing at all about the historical Jesus was very curious—just as strange as the related fact that immediately after receiving the revelation calling him to be an apostle he went to Arabia for three years instead of visiting the Jerusalem community” (Detering 1995, 17).

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For Detering, the main theological arguments put forward by most scholars, that is, that Paul’s interest was in the exalted Christ, or that Paul was employing Jesus as a pattern for his own theological conceptions, were “rationally illuminating,” but “too theoretical” (Detering 1995, 17–18). They might have been satisfactory to an academic theologian, but not for someone who perceived Paul as a man of flesh and blood—or was Paul actually “not a flesh and blood being, but the product of an academic theologian?” (ibid., 18). Now the only historical data we have about Paul derives from his letters, from contemporary testimonies regarding him, and from the Acts of the Apostles ascribed to Luke.35 Yet to what extent can Acts be said to be a reliable historical source? Far from being an eye-witness account, Acts and its authorial focus on miracles, wonders, and “personal legends” suggests it is concerned not so much with historical presentation as with the transmission of legendary tradition. Detering argues that hitherto scholars have followed these basic methodological principles: first, that everything miraculous or imaginary is unhistorical; and second, that everything that proceeds rationally and naturally (and agrees with the letters) is historical. Yet this approach, he says, is a bit like someone wanting to preserve a historical kernel in the story of Little Red Riding Hood who removes all the mythic components (the talking wolf, Red Riding Hood and her grandmother in the wolf ’s belly) in order to hold on to the historical existence of a little girl wearing a red riding hood who visited her grandmother in the forest and on the way encountered a wolf! Are the statements made in Acts about the life and person of Paul therefore really only “fairy-tales,” as the German feminist theologian Ute Ranke-Heinemann has recently suggested…? After all, Ranke-Heinemann notes the proximity between a line in Luke’s account in Acts of Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus (Acts 26:14) and a passage found in a drama by Euripides. In Acts, the voice from heaven says to Paul, “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? It is hard for thee to kick against the goad”; in the Bacchae, Dionysos says to Pentheus, the king of Thebes, “You turn a deaf ear to my words […] Instead of kicking against God’s goads as a mortal, you should rather offer sacrifices” (ll. 787 ff.; cf. Ranke-Heinemann 2002, 232). As Ranke-­ Heinemann concludes, “this Dionysos episode has obviously been taken

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over into the Damascus scenery,” so that “an ancient persecution-saying is taken up in a Christian persecution-saying” (ibid., 232–233) (for further discussion, see below). Detering tells us how working closely on Acts revealed that the biographical information it contained about Paul was, in fact, mostly legendary: “Against this background, the closer I came, the contours of the figure of the apostle, which to begin with had been sharply profiled and stood before my eyes almost as if they were carved in stone (like the well-­ known picture of the four apostles by Dürer), began to drift apart like a smokescreen” (Detering 1995, 34). (This remarkable painting by the German Renaissance master, Albrecht Dürer [1471–1528], depicts the four apostles in larger-than-life size and in extraordinary—and fictitious—detail; the two panels are on display in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich.) And so Detering turned to the Pauline Epistles, in the belief that “the figure of the apostle as well as the history of the early Christian community, that had just dissolved before my eyes into a fog of fanciful and phantom-like figures, must necessarily take on clearer, firmer contours,” since “for the first time we had here written documents which reflected the life of the early Christian church first hand, so to speak, not in legendary, transfigured retrospect, and in which one could sense the living breath of a real personality in every line” (Detering 2003, 24). Yet it turned out that one after another of the three letters in the New Testament canon attributed to Paul proved to be “inauthentic,” that is, not written (or dictated) by the first-century apostle (or, in Nietzschean terms, a fraud); and the once-reliable Pauline corpus shrank to a small, hard core, consisting of Galatians and the Corinthian letters, until finally even these had to be given up. In a way, this is hardly surprising, since the production of pseudepigraphic writings is in no way unique to Christian literature, and it is something that is commonly encountered in antiquity. To give just one example, in Jewish literature there is a text called the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, which is allegedly the address of Jacob’s twelve sons to their descendants (Detering 2003, 28). Some critics have gone much further: for instance, the German historian Karlheinz Deschner (1924–2014) saw the history of literary falsification as part of a much larger problem in Christianity. In his ten-volume work, Criminal History of the Church (Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums,

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1986–2013), Deschner presented a list of all sorts of charges against the Church in its existence from its origin nearly two millennia ago into the eighteenth century. More concisely, the German philosopher Herbert Schnädelbach provoked a passionate debate when, in an article published in Die Zeit on 11 May 2000 under the Nietzschean-sounding title “The Curse of Christianity” (Der Fluch des Christentums), he listed seven “congenital defects” inherent in Christian belief: the doctrine of Original Sin, the doctrine of justification as a sacrifice of blood, the Great Commission as an impulse to global missionary work, its anti-Jewish outlook, its eschatalogical beliefs, its import of Platonism, and its shortcomings when dealing with historical truth (Schnädelbach 2000). The defence subsequently undertaken by Manfred Lutz in Der Skandal der Skandale (2018), itself in large part a popularization of counter-arguments found in Arnold Angenendt’s Toleranz und Gewalt: Das Christentum zwischen Bibel und Schwert (2006), fails to convince on a number of points …. In the introduction to his 2012 study of Paul, The Amazing Colossal Apostle, Robert M.  Price makes the Derridean manoeuvre of “deconstructing” Paul, arguing that “the epistles present us with many of the same challenges the Gospels did,” in that they appear to be “filled with the same variety of redactional seams, non-sequiturs, and double-­ audience rhetorical tricks we find in the Gospels”; in short, “the historical Jesus problem replicates itself in the case of Paul” (Price 2012, viii). For inasmuch as “the epistles reveal themselves to the discerning reader to have exactly the same sort of limitations as the Gospels do,” that is, “both are collections of fragments and pericopae contributed and fabricated by authors and communities of very different theological leanings” (ibid., viii), Price undertakes—albeit without reference to Nietzsche—to survey more recent responses to Paul “in the wake of the Protestant Reformation,” when “the so-called magisterial reformers made Paul their figurehead and the source of their theology” (ibid., ix). Three centuries after the Reformation, such liberal Protestants as Adolf von Harnack and those who thought like him made the decision to discard Paul for Jesus. In this ostensible historical Jesus (of the kind that, or so Albert Schweitzer was to conclude, it would prove impossible to find), they looked for a substitute for Paul as a figure of Protestant orthodoxy. Rejecting Paul in quasi-Nietzschean terms as “the second founder of

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Christianity,” as William Wrede called him (Wrede 1907, 179), they wanted instead a religion of individual piety and a social gospel. When confronted with the apparent failure of the historical Jesus enterprise, as reflected in Schweitzer’s conclusion that most of the scholarly historical models of Jesus simply reflected the biases of those who proposed them, post-First World War neo-orthodox theology returned to Reformation-­ era Paulinism. “One receives the impression that Protestants, however liberal, have retreated from the perimeter wall—Jesus Christ—and taken refuge in the castle keep—namely Paul,” Price argues: “The same moves made in the case of Jesus (refitting him as a post-colonialist, a feminist, an Orthodox Jew, and a green activist) have been made in the case of Paul,” but “after this, there is nowhere to run” (Price 2012, x). Such biblical scholars as Darrell J. Doughty (1936–2009) have pointed out that many commentaries on Paul’s epistles were essentially exercises in harmonization. In the case of the gospels, scholars had argued that, if a chapter jumped around various topics with no real connections, one should read it as a collection of sayings and stories that had originally been separate. Surely the same solution applies to the rough edges and argumentational contortions of the epistles? Rather than asking, “what would the text have to mean if it were a unitary discourse,” one should accept the fact that it isn’t one (Doughty 1994). In this respect one might compare Doughty’s conclusions to the work of the Dutch Radical Critics (see below), who denied that a historical Paul had written any of the letters ascribed to him. In Gnosticism in Corinth (1956; in translation, 1971) Walter Schmithals seeks to explain puzzles in the First Letter to the Corinthians in terms of Gnostic trends not of the first, but of the second, century. Why, for instance, did Tertullian in his treatise Against Marcion call Paul “the apostle of Marcion and the apostle of the heretics”? And in her study of The Gnostic Paul (1975), the religious historian Elaine Pagels argues that inserting Pauline texts into a Gnostic framework can help make sense of texts that otherwise look very strange. Given this body of existing scholarship, Price began to ask himself the question: What if there had been no Pauline communities and no Paulinists until the late first and early second centuries? Correspondingly, such critics and scholars as Arthur J. Dewey, Chris Shea, Joseph B. Tyson, Dennis Smith, Richard I. Pervo, and Gerd Lüdemann all agree that the

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Acts of the Apostles has no historical value but is rather a historical novel, much like the so-called apocryphal Acts of the apostles that describe journeys of the eleven apostles and Paul, subsequent to the Gospel accounts of Christ. For as close textual analysis reveals, the author of the canonical Acts extensively rewrites such sources as Homer, Virgil, Euripedes, Josephus, and the Septuagint. Why? One reason would be in order to create a revisionist vision of early Christianity as a kind of golden age. As F.C. Baur argued, the strategic aim of the canonical Acts had been to reconcile two factions: on the one hand, those Jewish-Torah Christians who were led by Peter, and, on the other, the Law-free gentile and Hellenistic Jewish believers led by Paul. Equally, Price suggests, one could read this work as seeking to reconcile those Christians who wished to retain the Old Testament, symbolized by Peter, with those who, led by Paul, were Marcionites and wished to abandon it. In the chapter entitled “The Legend of Paul’s Conversion,” Price examines the literary sources of Luke’s account of the conversion of Paul (Price 2012, 1–24). In line with an argument pursued by Hermann Detering (2003), Price considers the possibility that Paul was actually the same person who is known as Simon Magus—a figure described by some as the founder of Gnosticism. And could other people have written the epistles attributed to Paul; for instance, did another heretical figure, Marcion of Sinope, write at least parts of Galatians and Ephesians? In line with what the literary theorist Paul de Man calls the “dialectic of blindness and insight” (1983, 111), Price proposes that, as he puts it, there are many big things one can never see, until one has seen all of the little ones first. This is the case, he claims, with the “legend” of Paul’s conversion, as it has been analysed in earlier discussions by such critics as F.C. Baur, Eduard Zeller (1814–1908), and Ernst Haenchen (1894–1975), who all reject the historical basis of story of his conversion. Following them, other scholars have noted a series of contradictions and implausibilities linking the three episodes of Paul’s persecution after the stoning of Stephen (Acts 7:55–8:3), the vision of the risen Christ on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:1–9), and his catechism and baptism by Ananias (Acts 9:10–19). As Hans-Joachim Schoeps and Robert Eisenman have suggested, the story of the martyrdom of Stephen can be read as a fictionalized version of the martyrdom of James (known as James the Just), the brother of

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Jesus and an early leader of the Jerusalem Church; in fact, in Acts 7:52 a reference is made to “the Just One: of whom you have been now the betrayers and murders.”36 According to the Law, the clothes of the person to be executed are to be cast aside, not those of the executioners, but according to Acts, Saul looks after the clothes of the latter (Acts 7:54). As Saul becomes not so much the spearhead as the personification of the persecution of the early Christians, we are dealing, as Haenchen notes, with a kind of “darkness before the dawn” hagiography, intended as an anticipation of his impending conversion into Paul (Haenchen 1971, 298). As far as the Christophany on the Damascus road is concerned, the details given by Luke in Acts vary between his three accounts (Acts 9:1–19; 22:4–16; and 26:9–18), just as they do in his two accounts (one in his Gospel, one in Acts) of Christ’s Ascension (Luke 24:50–53; Acts 1:6–11). Whatever the artistic or stylistic reasons for such variations might be, they do not reflect an intention to strive for historical accuracy (Barr 1978, 57). As Gerhard Lohfink points out, Luke’s narratives work with standard scriptural type-scenes, which serves to emphasize the biblical prototypes (1976: 80–82; 1979: 123–124). Price notes that the mechanism identified by Lohfink as a “double vision,” in which a revelation is accompanied by a promise of an encounter with someone who will help (1976, 73–77) is also found in Lucius Apuleius’s picaresque novel Metamorphoses (also known as The Golden Ass). In this work, Lucius is granted an epiphany of Isis, who tells him to appear next day in Rome before Mithras, her priest, who is charged with changing Lucius back from his animal form as an ass to his original human form, as a preparation for Lucius’s initiation into the mysteries of Isis. In fact, precisely the same rhetorical prompt, “Why do you wait?”, is found in both accounts (cf. Acts 22:16). So for Price, Paul’s “conversion” is really a “con-version” (Price 2012, 3). And, after all, the letters of Paul himself do little to confirm what, if anything, happened in the incident on the road to Damascus. In the First Letter to the Corinthians, he says, “Have not I seen Christ Jesus, our Lord?” (1 Cor. 9:1), and he reminds his readers, “And last of all, he was seen also by me, as by one born out of due time” (15:8), but makes no reference to the circumstances of this “seeing.” Indeed, Paul tells the Galatians, “it pleased [God], who separated me from my mother’s womb,

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and called me by his grace, to reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the Gentiles” (1:15–16), without any hint or echo whatsoever of the Damascus road story. Yet there are, as Price suggests, illuminating parallels between the story of Paul and the legend of Gautama Buddha, the tale of the great renunciation of Prince Siddhartha,37 or with the “first vision” (or grove experience) of the founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, to whom Jesus and his heavenly Father are said to have appeared in the Sacred Grove, a wooded area near Manchester, NY, in the spring of 1820 (Price 2012, 5–6 and 8). Price points out that Luke’s story of Paul’s conversion draws on two literary sources: first, the story of the conversion of Heliodorus in the Second Book of Maccabees; and second, Euripedes’s Bacchae. From the Second Book of Maccabees, Luke borrows from the story of Heliodorus how a heavenly apparition stops a persecutor of the people of God in his tracks (2 Macc. 3:24–26), how he is thrown to the ground and “covered with great darkness” or blinded (3:27), and cared for by companions who pray for his recovery (3:31–33). As a consequence, the former persecutor now converts to the faith he had previously tried to destroy (3:35), and bears public testimony to its truth (3:36) (Price 2012, 10). From the Bacchae, Luke derives both the core of the Damascus road story—the conversion of a persecutor despite himself, following a direct intervention from the god whose worshippers he has been persecuting— as well as numerous points of linguistic detail.38 Against the advice of Cadmus, Teiresias, and others who have warned him not to fight against a god, Pentheus has tried to expel the maenads of Dionysos from Thebes. So there is a parallel between the warnings issued by Gamaliel in his intervention before the Sanhedrin, “And now, therefore, I say to you, refrain from these men, and let them alone: for if this counsel, or work be of men, it will come to nothing: but if it be of God, you cannot overthrow it: lest perhaps you be found even to fight against God” (Acts 5:38–39), and the words of Teiresias, “Reckless fool, you do not know the consequences of your words. You talked madness before, but this is raving lunacy!” (ll. 357–360), and the warnings issued by Dionysos: “A man, a man, and nothing more, yet he presumed to wage war with a god. […] I warn you once again: do not take arms against a god” (ll. 636–637, 788–789) (Price 2012, 11–12).

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At Pentecost, the apostles are described as filled with the Holy Spirit and as beginning to speak in different tongues, although they are not drunk (Acts 2:4 and 15). As men and women, young and old, all prophesy (Acts 2:17–18), there is a parallel with the prophetic maenads, “all as one, the old women and the young and the unmarried girls” (ll. 693–694). Tongues of fire come to rest on the heads of the apostles (Acts 2:3), so there is a parallel to the way in which “flames flickered in their curls and did not burn them” in the Bacchae (ll. 623–624). Just as Paul persists in his persecution, so Pentheus remains stubborn, and arrests the latest recruit to the cult—Dionysos himself, in mortal disguise. On Paul’s mission to Philippi, he and Silas are miraculously delivered from prison by an earthquake (Acts 16:25–40), so there is a parallel to the way an earthquake frees the disguised Dionysos from Pentheus’s prison (ll. 585–603). In the vision on the road to Damascus, the voice from heaven addresses Paul, “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? It is hard for thee to kick against the goad” (Acts 26:14; cf. 9:5), and there is a remarkable parallel in the words spoken to Pentheus by Dionysos, “If I were you, I would […] not rage and kick against necessity, a man defying god” (ll. 793–796; see above). In the words of God reported by Ananias to Paul after his conversion, “For I will shew him how great things he just suffer for my name” (Acts 9:16), there is yet another parallel to the Bacchae and the words spoken to Pentheus by Dionysos, “You and you alone shall suffer for your city. A great ordeal awaits you. But you are worthy of your fate” (ll. 963–964) (Price 2012, 12). If these are external sources for Luke’s account, then a philological approach can help us appreciate its function within Luke’s writing as a whole as well. On Price’s account, the story of the Damascus conversion is intended to create a point of correspondence with the baptism of Christ by John at the beginning of his ministry (Luke 3:21–22), hence the baptism received at the hands of Ananias. (And there are further parallels within the Lucan corpus: the idea of Paul meeting the risen Christ while travelling on a road has a parallel in the story of the road to Emmaus [Luke 24:13–35]). Equally, the encounter with “the Just One” (Acts 22:14), whom he is persecuting, is likely to derive from an old story, found in the Recognitions, a text attributed to Clement of Rome, written in the form of a letter to James, Bishop of Jerusalem, and quoted by

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Origen. At one point, Saul raises a tumult in the temple, inciting the mob to attack James the Just. The intertextual allusions and parallels mount up….39 In the detail that Paul was said to be living in a house on “the street, that is called Strait” (Acts 9:11), one can read a sly allusion to John the Baptist’s echo of the prophet Isaiah, “make his paths strait” (Luke 3:4; cf. Isaiah 40:3). The vision of Jesus recalls Jesus’s own vision of the Holy Spirit as it descends (Luke 3:22), so that Jesus receives the Spirit at his baptism just as Paul does at the hands of Ananias. The baptismal rite administered by Ananias achieves a washing-away of sins (Act 22: 16), just as John’s does (Luke 3:3). And even the name of Ananias— Hananiah, Hanan-yahu—seems like a thinly disguised allusion to the name of John (Yah-hannon), replacing the identical prefix with the theophoric suffix (Price 2012, 12–13). Can any of these people be said to have existed in any way other than as linguistic signifiers in a complex chain of intertextual reference? In essence, is this really a philological issue? In his later chapters in The Amazing Colossal Apostle, Price discusses the contribution made by the Tübingen School associated with F.C. Baur to answering the question: Who wrote the Pauline letters? Here Price draws extensively on the work of the Dutch Radical Critics, such as Willem C. van Manen (1842–1905). In terms of their form and their contents, he makes a case for regarding the entire Pauline corpus as pseudepigraphical. It seems that Nietzsche’s philological intuition may well have been right, but it is also important to recognize that these critics went on to develop a philological critique on a much larger scale than he ever did (see below).

A Philological Defence of Paul? In his work on St Paul and the first three centuries of Church history, F.C. Baur reduced the authentic Pauline corpus to just four works (viz., Romans, Galatians, 1 Corinthians, and 2 Corinthians), known as the Hauptbriefe or the “Tübingen Four.”40 In response to the question of “how the apostle Paul appears in his Epistles to be so indifferent to the historical facts of the life of Jesus,” Baur replied that Paul’s “whole Christian consciousness is transformed into a view of the person of Jesus

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which stands in need of no history to elucidate it.”41 This reduction leaves aside a good number of Epistles, notably the so-called Pastoral Epistles (1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus), as being “Deutero-Pauline” works.42 In the 1960s, a computer analysis by A.Q.  Morton—a Scottish Presbyterian minister—appeared to confirm Baur’s argument. Applying to the Greek of the New Testament “stylometry,” a method of using a computer to analyse stylistic aspects of a text in order to establish a writer’s “stylistic fingerprint,” Morton concluded that no fewer than six different authors had produced the Pauline corpus, and that the “Tübingen Four” constituted a stylistic group on their own.43 Yet this kind of computer analysis can cut both ways. If applied to the works of James Joyce, for instance, stylometric methods have suggested that his novel Ulysses had also been written by five different individuals, none of whom was identical to the author of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—written by Joyce!44 And in turn, a stylometric analysis of the New Testament by Anthony Kenny, a Roman Catholic priest turned philosopher (and subsequently Fellow, then Master of Balliol College in Oxford), produced entirely different results from those obtained by Morton. On the basis that “the better method is surely to start with the corpus of Pauline writings handed on by tradition, and ask whether within that corpus there is any Epistle, or group of Epistles, which is marked out as different from the body as a whole” (Kenny 1986, 95),45 and on the basis of his analysis of ninety-six stylistic features, Kenny arrived at two insights. First, he noted that there is “a great deal of diversity between the Epistles,” citing the stylistic distance between Romans and 1 Thessalonians as being “greater than that between any two Gospels in respect of the same features,” which implies that, “if the Epistles are all by the same author, that author displayed a great deal of versatility in respect of the quantifiable features” that had been studied (ibid., 95). And second, he noted that the Epistle to Titus stands “at a greater distance” from every other Epistle except for the Pastorals, being even as far from 2 Timothy as the Acts of the Apostles is from the Pauline corpus (ibid., 95).46 Yet Kenny’s results do not confirm the hypothesis that the “Tübingen Four” stand out as being “uniquely comfortable with one another” or that the Pastorals stand out as being “uniquely diverse from the surrounding context” (Kenny 1986, 100). Overall, the order in which the Epistles

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are said to conform to the whole is as follows: Rome, Philippians, 2 Timothy, 2 Corinthians, Galatians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 Thessalonians, Colossians, Ephesians, 1 Timothy, Philemon, 1 Corinthians, and Titus. (Even the Epistle to the Hebrews, which Kenny does not think belongs to the Pauline corpus [ibid., 4], is linguistically consistent with the other writings in the New Testament to an extremely high degree [ibid., 35–36, 38, 41–42, 50–51]. In fact, one of the “most commonly rejected” Pastoral Epistles, that is, 2 Timothy, is “as near the centre of the constellations as 2 Corinthians, which belongs to the group most widely accepted as authentic” (ibid., 100). So both Morton and Kenny agree about Titus, which Kenny also regards as “deserving the suspicion cast on the Pastorals” (ibid., 100). Overall, Kenny comes to the conclusion that “on the basis of the evidence […] for my part I see no reason to reject the hypothesis that twelve of the Pauline Epistles are the work of a single, unusually versatile author” (ibid., 100). Kenny insists that, in the end, what is to be said about the authorship of the Pauline Epistles is “a matter for the Scripture scholar, not the stylometrist” (Kenny 1986, 100). Yet is it also a matter for the literary scholar? In a paper given in 1959 to Westcott House (a Church of England theological college in Cambridge) entitled “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism,” the English literature scholar and novelist C.S.  Lewis (1898–1963)—the author of The Screwtape Letters (1942), Surprised by Joy (1955), the Narnia Chronicles, and some remarkable science fiction writing—tackled head-on the consequences of “the undermining of the old orthodoxy” that had been “mainly the work of divines engaged in New Testament criticism” (Lewis 1969, 35).47 How could, Lewis asked, people with such liberal theological views as those of Loisy, Schweitzer, Bultmann, Tillich, or the Anglican priest, theologian, and ecclesiastical historian Alec Vidler (1899–1991) deal with the vast majority of people—or “the uneducated”? For a theology which “denies the historicity of nearly everything in the Gospels to which Christian life and affections and thought have been fastened for nearly two millennia,” whether the Resurrection or the feeding of the 5000, can have, Lewis predicted, only two effects: it will turn people into Roman Catholics or into atheists (ibid., 34). And he went on to raise a series of objections about the leading biblical scholars of his day.

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First, their lack of literary judgement, as reflected in the work of, say, Bultmann. In response to Bultmann’s claim in his Theology of the Old Testament (1952) that “the personality of Jesus has no importance for the kerygma either of Paul or of John” and that “indeed the tradition of the earliest Church did not even unconsciously preserve a picture of his personality,” so that “every attempt to reconstruct one remains a play of subjective imagination” (Bultmann 1952, 35), Lewis asks (with an acerbity that would not be alien to Nietzsche): “Through what strange process has this learned German gone in order to make himself blind to what all men except him see? What evidence have we that we would recognize a personality if it were there? For it is Bultmann contra mundum” (Lewis 1969, 37). Second, Lewis complained that liberal theologians were usually involved with the claim—made, in fact, explicitly by Nietzsche in The Anti-Christ—that “the real behaviour and purpose and teaching of Christ came very rapidly to be misunderstood and misrepresented by His followers, and has been recovered or exhumed only by modern scholars” (ibid., 38–39). Lewis claimed to have met this theory elsewhere: in Plato studies, for instance, or in Shakespeare criticism. Third, Lewis castigated liberal theologians for their rejection of the miraculous as reflected in the principle “if miraculous, unhistorical” (ibid., 40). And fourth, Lewis questioned the value of theoretical reconstruction—the erudition and the ingenuity of the Sitz im Leben (to use the German phrase) of the text. But however convincing “the reconstruction of the history of a text, when the text is ancient,” may be, nevertheless one is “after all sailing by dead reckoning; the results cannot be checked by fact” (ibid., 42). Lewis pointed to incorrect statements that had been made about his literary works, as well as in academic work on Piers Plowman or The Faerie Queen. As Lewis reminded his audience: whatever reconstructions biblical critics devise, they “can never be crudely proved wrong” (ibid., 43). Using Bultmann as a foil (in much the same way that, in his first Untimely Observation, Nietzsche had used D.F.  Strauß), Lewis asked: “Has the experience of his learned, specialized, and no doubt meritorious, life really given him any power of seeing into the minds of those long dead men who were caught up into what, on any view, must be regarded as the central religious experience of the whole human race?” (ibid., 43).

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In this paper, Lewis was in effect calling into question the transitoriness of the results of modern scholarship. The authorship of Henry VI used to be questioned, but no longer; Homer “seems to be creeping back”; the Idealist philosophy of McTaggart, Green, Bosanquet, and Bradley, so dominant in Lewis’s own youth and seemingly “enthroned forever,” had in the meantime gone down “as suddenly as the Bastille” (Lewis 1969, 44). Everywhere, Lewis noted, there had been “a vigorous growth of scepticism about scepticism”—everywhere, that is, except in theology (ibid., 44). In other words, scepticism should not be reserved exclusively for the New Testament and the Creeds, and Lewis advised: “Try doubting something else” (ibid., 46). And Lewis uncovered in a statement by George Tyrrell (1861–1909), a Modernist theologian, scholar, and (until he was expelled from the Society in 1906) a Jesuit, the fundamental thought underlying the whole enterprise of demythologizing. (The views of Tyrrell and other modernists were condemned by Pope Pius X in his decree Lamentabili sane exitu of July 1907 and in his encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis of September 1907; Tyrrell himself was not only expelled from the Society of Jesus, he was suspended from the sacraments in 1907 and finally excommunicated in 1908.) “In the tangle and contradiction of the world of our present experience goodness, beauty, truth and happiness are at discord,” Tyrrell wrote, and “against this discord our whole spiritual nature revolts”: As man progresses mentally and morally, he is likely to find the discord increased rather than diminished. The deepest demand of his nature is the last to rise to the surface of explicit consciousness. As he grows spiritually, he asks more and not less, and seems to receive less and not more. And to this his revolt against earlier and inadequate expressions of the religious idea is due in a great measure. Taken literally, and not symbolically, they do not meet his need. And as long as he demands to picture to himself distinctly the term and satisfaction of that need he is doomed to doubt, for his picturings will necessarily be drawn from the world of his present experience. (Tyrrell 1910, 124–125)

While conceding that in some ways Tyrrell was saying nothing new and that in his “negative theology” Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite had

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already said much the same, Lewis suggested that the older tradition had found our conceptions “inadequate to God,” whereas Tyrell found them “inadequate to the religious idea”: a crucial difference. Does this mean our conceptions are inadequate to God’s idea? Or to humankind’s? Lewis suspects the latter: but (he asks) supposing the doctrines of the Resurrection, the Ascension, and the Second Coming, while “inadequate to our thoughts,” are nevertheless “expressions of God’s thought” (Lewis 1969, 46)? Now it might nevertheless be true that such doctrines, “taken literally and not symbolically,” are inadequate. Yet does this necessarily lead to the conclusion that as a result they must not be taken literally at all, but only or wholly symbolically? And that all their details are equally “symbolical and analogical” (Lewis 1969, 46)? Lewis reasoned as follows and tried to expose what he regarded as the flaw of this argument: The argument runs like this. All the details are derived from our present experience; but the reality transcends our experience: therefore all the details are wholly and equally symbolical. [But] you cannot know that everything in the representation of a thing is symbolical unless you have independent access to the thing and can compare it with the representation. (Lewis 1969, 46–47)

Lewis provided the following example. Suppose a dog were to try to form a conception of human life48: all the details of its picture would be derived from canine experience, but it would be wrong to conclude that everything the dog imagined would, if true, be only analogically true, for instance, eating. “If,” Lewis startlingly argued, “a dog could […] be plunged for a day into human life, it would be hardly more surprised by hitherto unimagined differences than by hitherto unsuspected similarities,” so that “a reverent dog would be shocked,” while “a modernist dog, distrusting the whole experience, would ask to be taken to the vet” (ibid., 47)! Similarly, if a Modernist, liberal theologian such as Tyrrell can judge the story of the Ascension to be inadequate to his religious idea, it is because he knows his own ideas—and can compare them with the story. But what if we are asking about a transcendent, objective reality to which the story is our sole access? This is surely the crux: Lewis believes in a

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transcendent, objective reality, whereas Nietzsche does not. (So where does that leave Bultmann, Tyrrell, and liberal theologians?) “When I am known as I am known,” Lewis somewhat mystically concludes, “I shall be able to tell which parts of the story were purely symbolical and which, if any, were not; shall see how the transcendent reality either excludes and repels locality, or how unimaginably it assimilates and loads it with significance” (Lewis 1969, 47–48). Whatever one makes of Lewis’s self-confessed “bleating” from himself, a self-confessed sheep, to the shepherds or pastors in his audience at Westcott House, the history of theology after Nietzsche in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries might confirm his thesis—one with which Eduard Mörike might have agreed— that “once the layman was anxious to hide the fact that he believed so much less than the Vicar: now he tends to hide the fact that he believes so much more” (ibid., 48). Perhaps Paul and Nietzsche have this much in common: that, as textual entities, they continue to fascinate as much as they provoke. As the translator of a new English version of the New Testament,49 the American philosopher and theologian David Bentley Hart (b. 1965), once put it, “everything you know about the Gospel of Paul is likely wrong.”50 Rather than involving the guilt of original sin or imputed righteousness, the irrelevance of good deeds for salvation or the concept of an eternal hell, or an emphasis on pistis (“faith”) rather than erga (“works”), Paul’s actual teachings (or so Hart contends) emphasize “the overthrow of bad angels,” and “a certain long history of misreadings—especially of the Letter to the Romans—has created an impression of Paul’s theological concerns so entirely alien to his conceptual world that the real Paul occupies scarcely any place at all in Christian memory.” So what, on this account, does Pauline theology look like? According to Hart, any concerns about law and righteousness are entirely secondary to something “far stranger” that “unfolds on a far vaster scale”: For Paul, the present world-age is rapidly passing, while another world-age differing from the former in every dimension—heavenly or terrestrial, spiritual or physical—is already dawning. The story of salvation concerns the entire cosmos; and it is a story of invasion, conquest, spoliation and triumph. For Paul, the cosmos has been enslaved to death, both by our sin

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and by the malign governance of those ‘angelic’ or ‘daemonian’ agencies who reign over the earth from the heavens, and who hold spirits in thrall below the earth. These angelic beings, these Archons, whom Paul calls Thrones and Powers and Dominations and Spiritual Forces of Evil in the High Places, are the gods of the nations. In the Letter to the Galatians, he even hints that the angel of the Lord who rules over Israel might be one of their number. Whether fallen, or mutinous, or merely incompetent, these beings stand intractably between us and God. But Christ has conquered them all. (Hart 2018)

Whether or not one is persuaded by this very Gnostic-sounding version of Paul, Hart’s disenchantment with modern versions produced by committees of scholars chimes well with Nietzsche’s suspicion of the academy. On two counts, Hart’s views and Nietzsche’s coincide: first, that too many scholars have become “predisposed by inherited theological habits to see things in the text they are not really there”—yet also to “fail to notice other things that most definitely are.” And second, that “the world of late antiquity is so remote from our own that it is almost never what we expect.”

St Paul and Nietzsche “I profit from a philosopher,” Nietzsche wrote in the third of his Untimelies on Schopenhauer, “only insofar as he can be an example” (UM III §3). And the same principles surely also apply, mutatis mutandis, to those figures who came to serve Nietzsche as anti-examples, or examples of what his philosophy was not about, such as his former heroes, including Schopenhauer (and Wagner), but also D.F.  Strauß, Renan, and by the same token St Paul. But does the fact that Nietzsche felt a great affinity with such figures as Schopenhauer or Wagner, only to revise entirely his opinion, to reverse his position, and to turn decisively against them, suggest that there, behind the vituperative attacks on Paul, may also lie a secret affinity? After all, as we have seen, in Psychological Types Jung cites Paul’s conversion as an example of what he called enantiodromia, and he also diagnoses

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as enantiodromian two key moments in Nietzsche’s life: first, his deification of, then turn against, Richard Wagner; and second, the sick Nietzsche’s self-identification with Christ. For Jung, the vision of St Paul on the road to Damascus indicates that “unconsciously [Paul] was already a Christian, though this fact had escaped his conscious insight” (Jung 1971, §712). Could it be that Nietzsche was unconsciously a disciple of Paul? Even though this fact escaped his conscious insight? Inasmuch as the lives of both men contain an enantiodromian moment, one surely can talk about an affinity between them, so we should in the conclusion of this chapter pause and consider what the nature of their respective experiences of enantiodromia were. In the case of Paul, this moment is the experience referred to as his Damascene conversion and related on no fewer than three occasions in the Acts of the Apostles (9:1–19; 22:3–21; 26:4–23). The discrepancies in detail between these three accounts may be explained, the NJB suggests, by their differing literary forms, but more important are the echoes in all three accounts of vocation narratives found in the Hebrew Bible, in the account of the theophany on Sinai, and in the account of the conversion of an earlier persecutor of God’s people—the punishment and subsequent conversion of Helidorus (2 Maccabees 3:24–40) (NJB, NT, 1813). While Paul never speaks of this event in detail in his extant letters, he does allude to it in his account in Galatians of being called by God (1:11–24); in his reference in 1 Corinthians to Christ’s post-resurrection appearances to the apostles and disciples, including—“last of all”—Paul himself, “as by one born out of due time” (1 Cor. 15:6–11); and elsewhere (1 Cor. 9:1; and Romans 1:4–5). Such famous paintings of Paul’s conversion as those by the Baroque Italian painter Caravaggio (1571–1610)51 encourage us to think about such details as the light from heaven, Paul falling to the ground, the voice speaking to him, his temporary blindness, his fasting, and the miraculous restoration of his sight through Ananias. Yet in his Jubilee catecheses on Paul, Benedict XVI reminds us that, in the early Church, baptism was also called “illumination.” He argues that it is a mistake to describe what happens to Paul as an event of conversion: “This turning point in his life, this transformation of his whole being was not the fruit of a psychological process, of a maturation or intellectual and moral development […] not

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simply a conversion, a development of his ‘ego’ […]. None of the psychological analyses can clarify or solve the problem” (Benedict XVI 2009, 22 and 24). Rather, he claims, the experience speaks of a moment of encounter, of “a real renewal that changed all his parameters” (ibid.). Whatever parallels may exist between the account of Paul’s conversion and the Old Testament prototypes of vocation narratives, theophanies, and the conversion of persecutors, there is also a parallel with the account given by Nietzsche himself of his discovery of the idea that underpins Thus Spoke Zarathustra, that is, the idea of eternal recurrence. In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche writes: The fundamental idea of the work, the Eternal Recurrence, the highest formula of a Yea-saying to life that can ever be attained, was first conceived in the month of August 1881. I made a note of the idea on a sheet of paper, with the postscript: ‘Six thousand feet beyond man and time.’ That day I happened to be wandering through the woods alongside of the Lake of Silvaplana, and I halted not far from Surlei, beside a huge rock that towered aloft like a pyramid. It was then that the thought struck me. (EH Z §1)

This note to which Nietzsche refers can be found in his Nachlass for Spring to Autumn 1881 with the title “The Recurrence of the Same: A Draft” and dated the beginning of August of that year (see KSA 9, 11[141], 494–496), while in a letter of 14 August 1881 Nietzsche described his ecstatic-euphoric experience in a letter to Heinrich Köselitz in which he recorded the intensity of his feelings, his laughter, and his tears—tears, not of sorrow, but of joy (KSB 6, 112). In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche does not shy away from describing this experience in terms of the category of “rebirth,” writing that “the whole of Zarathustra might perhaps be classified under the rubric music”: “At all events, the essential condition of its production was a second birth within me of the art of hearing. […] Peter Gast—who was also one who had been born again, discovered that the phœnix music hovered over us, in lighter and brighter plumage than it had ever worn before” (EH Z §1). Nietzsche explicitly uses the language of gestation, writing of the period between this moment and the composition of the first part of Zarathustra in February 1883, completed at precisely the moment when Richard

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Wagner died in Venice, that “the pregnancy is seen to have lasted eighteen months” (EH Z §1). The symbolically significant figure of eighteen months for this “pregnancy,” equivalent (according to Strabo in his Geographica, book 15, §43) to the gestation period of the elephant, allows Nietzsche to align himself with the Buddha: according to legend, the Buddha chose to leave his residence as a bodhisattva in the Tuṣita heaven and descend in the shape of a white elephant to be reborn on earth; the night of Siddhārtha’s conception, Queen Maya had a dream in which a white elephant with six white tusks entered her right side, and ten months later Siddhārtha is said to have emerged from her right side. (The clear implication is that Nietzsche has produced a work that is equal in its importance to the achievements of the Buddha.)52 And Nietzsche uses the same language of gestation in his letter to Hans von Bülow at the beginning of December 1882 when he commented: “Enough, I am a hermit again, and more so than ever; and I am—as a result—planning something new. It seems to me that only the condition of pregnancy binds us to life again” (KSB 6, 290).53 And Nietzsche also relates this experience at Surlei to another, said to have occurred the following winter, which Nietzsche spent in Rapallo, a town on the Italian Riviera coastline. Not far from Rapallo lies the small fishing village of Portofino, and in the Autumn of 1882 Nietzsche gave the name of this village to a short poem entitled “Portofino,” which he subsequently revised and retitled as “Sils Maria.”54 So when in Ecce Homo Nietzsche claims that it was his walks from Rapallo to Zoagli and from Santa Margherita to Portofino that “the whole of the first Zarathustra came to me, above all Zarathustra himself, as a type: more accurately, he stole up on me … [richtiger, er überfiel mich]” (EH Z §1), he is alluding to this poem which he had included in the “Songs of Prince Vogelfrei” in the second edition of The Gay Science—a text which can be seen to capture the moment of origin when Nietzsche’s most famous book was born: Here sat I waiting, waiting, but for naught Beyond all good and evil—now by light wrought To joy, now by dark shadows—all was leisure, All lake, all noon, all time sans aim, sans measure.

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Then one turned two, sweet friend, to my surprise — And Zarathustra passed before my eyes…55 [Hier sass ich, wartend, wartend,—doch auf Nichts, [Jenseits von Gut und Böse, bald des Lichts Geniessend, bald des Schattens, ganz nur Spiel Ganz See, ganz Mittag, ganz Zeit ohne Ziel. Da, plötzlich, Freundin! wurde Eins zu Zwei— —Und Zarathustra gieng an mir vorbei…]

Leaving aside the question of the transposition of the key experience from the Upper Engadine to the Genovese and Ligurian coast,56 and the ontological status of Zarathustra as a synecdoche for Nietzsche’s work of that name or as an imaginary (or actual?) figure, the identity of the “sweet friend” or Freundin to whom Nietzsche is speaking in the penultimate line is also open to interpretation, although most commentators assume that it is Lou von Salomé. Indeed, Rudolph Binion interprets this line in terms of the end of Nietzsche’s brief relationship (of whatever kind that might have been) with her in 1882, suggesting that Lieder des Prinzen Vogelfrei does not just mean “songs of the outlaw prince” but “songs of the prince free of a bird”—and in this case, “his eagle and gallows bird, Lou” (Binion 1968, 130). Accordingly, the poem expresses “a fantasy memory of 1882, for Zarathustra as distinct from Zarathustra had preceded Nietzsche’s mythic fission into shadow and Lou” (ibid.).57 Yet is this reading, like so many psychological readings of what happened to Paul on the road to Damascus, too reductive? For René Girard (1923–2015), the dynamics of Nietzsche’s entire œuvre and life can be derived from the mysterious encounter described in this short text, which he interpreted as an “expérience du Double,” describing it as “une véritable épiphanie du désir mimétique” (Girard 1976, 23 and 93). And for anyone of a Jungian persuasion, it is hard not to hear an echo of the so-­ called Axiom of Maria, that is, “One becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes the one as the fourth,” attributed to the third-­ century alchemist Maria Prophetissa.58 Whatever echoes may be (un)consciously built into this text and/or inform the experience behind it, the emphasis on the notion of encounter—Und Zarathustra gieng an mir vorbei—is evident.

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Elsewhere in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche invokes the notion of “inspiration,” an expression deriving from the Latin inspirare, that is, “to breathe into,” which, while applying to the artistic or creative sphere, has distinctly biblical connotations, namely to the Greek word θεοπνευστος, that is, theopneustos, literally, “God-breathed” (as found in 2 Timothy 3:16–17): Has any one at the end of the nineteenth century any distinct notion of what poets of a stronger age understood by the word inspiration? If not, I will describe it. If one had the smallest vestige of superstition left in one, it would hardly be possible completely to set aside the idea that one is the mere incarnation, mouthpiece, or medium of an almighty power. The idea of revelation, in the sense that something which profoundly convulses and upsets one becomes suddenly visible and audible with indescribable certainty and accuracy—describes the simple fact. One hears—one does not seek; one takes—one does not ask who gives: a thought suddenly flashes up like lightning, it comes with necessity, without faltering—I have never had any choice in the matter. There is an ecstasy so great that the immense strain of it is sometimes relaxed by a flood of tears, during which one’s steps now involuntarily rush and anon involuntarily lag. There is the feeling that one is utterly out of hand, with the very distinct consciousness of an endless number of fine thrills and titillations descending to one’s very toes;— there is a depth of happiness in which the most painful and gloomy parts do not act as antitheses to the rest, but are produced and required as necessary shades of colour in such an overflow of light. There is an instinct for rhythmic relations which embraces a whole world of forms (length, the need of a wide-embracing rhythm, is almost the measure of the force of an inspiration, a sort of counterpart to its pressure and tension). Everything happens quite involuntarily, as if in a tempestuous outburst of freedom, of absoluteness, of power and divinity. The involuntary nature of the figures and similes is the most remarkable thing; one loses all perception of what is imagery and metaphor; everything seems to present itself as the readiest, the truest, and simplest means of expression. (EH Z §3)

What one finds in this passage coincides on a number of points with the account of Paul’s conversion: the importance of the auditory element; the emphasis on the visual element and, in particular, the effect of light;

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its life-changing, transformative effect; and its utter incommensurability. Indeed, in its emphasis on a unifying vision in which all things are one; on a concrete apprehension of this unity as the subjective interiority of all things; on a sense of breaking through to objectivity or reality; on a sense of blessedness; on a feeling of divinity; on a sense of paradoxicality; and on the ineffability of this experience, Nietzsche’s account would appear to fill the categories of mystical experience as set out by Walter T.  Stace (1886–1967) in his The Teachings of the Mystics (Stace 1960, 15–18). Now the extent to which Nietzsche’s experience is an example of what the Canadian psychiatrist Richard Maurice Bucke (1837–1902) called cosmic consciousness—and exemplified with reference to such historical figures as Gautama Buddha, Jesus, Paul, Plotinus, Mohammed, Dante, Bartolomé de las Casas, St John of the Cross, Francis Bacon, and Jacob Böhme, as well as such contemporaries as Honoré de Balzac, Walt Whitman, and Edward Carpenter (Bucke 1901)—lies outside the scope of this study. Yet we might well want to ask the same question of Nietzsche’s brief but powerful account in Ecce Homo of his epiphanic experience of the doctrine of eternal recurrence that has been posed by Peter Kingsley (using the terms of the Swiss classicist, Maria Laura Gemelli Marciano) about the truly epic depiction of “the confrontation with the unconscious” in the Red Book of C.G.  Jung: Are we talking about “literary concepts” or “attitudes,” or about “hard inner experience”?59 Or is this itself a false binary?

 istorical Criticism and the Dutch H Radical School Earlier in this chapter we saw how, when discussing the question of the authorship of the Pauline corpus, a contemporary commentator such as Robert M. Price still draws on the work of the Tübingen School in general and on F.C. Baur in particular. Price also uses the work of such other scholars as Willem C. van Manen and other critics of the Dutch Radical School in order to make a case for regarding the entire Pauline corpus as

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pseudepigraphical—a far more radical case than Nietzsche himself ever advances. And yet on another (and deeper) level there is a connection with Nietzsche, and it is a significant one. For the popular work of Price, Detering, and others draws on and points to the body of scholarly work known as higher criticism, historical criticism, or the historical-critical method. This school of interpretation approaches ancient texts as literary artefacts, using techniques of literary criticism to uncover and explore “the world behind the text” (Soulen and Soulen 2001, 78), that is, the intellectual-historical and cultural context in which the text originated and in the context of which its primary or literal meaning (sensus literalis historicus) can be reconstructed. As a method of reading, it is thus (in Nietzschean) terms genealogical in its approach, and a religious text can be interpreted just as any other historical text would be. Now this style of criticism became a key method in eighteenth-century biblical criticism, notably in the work of F.C.  Baur and the Tübingen School of theology (see above). Drawing on historical-critical work undertaken in the previous century, it was to become, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the dominant approach in biblical criticism. It became particularly influential in Protestant circles, in large part because Protestant scholars enjoyed a freedom of approach not available to their Catholic counterparts, as a study of some papal encyclicals from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries makes clear. For instance, in the encyclical Providentissimus Deus (or “The most provident God”), subtitled “On the Study of Holy Scripture” and released in 1893, Pope Leo XIII spoke out against the influence of Rationalism on biblical scholarship—condemning “the sophisms and laboured erudition of the Rationalists,” and describing them as “true children and inheritors of the older heretics, who, trusting in their turn to their own way of thinking, have rejected even the scraps and remnants of Christian belief which had been handed down to them” (Leo XIII 1893, §16 and §10). Leo XIII singled out for disapproval “an inept method, dignified by the name of the ‘higher criticism,’ which pretends to judge of the origin, integrity and authority of each Book from internal indications alone,” arguing that, while “in historical questions […] the witness of history is of primary importance,” in biblical matters “internal evidence is seldom of great

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value, except as confirmation”; warning that it would “make the enemies of religion much more bold and confident in attacking and mangling the Sacred Scriptures”; and speculating that “this vaunted ‘higher criticism’ will resolve itself into the reflection of the bias and the prejudice of the critics” (ibid., §17). And in the encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis (or “Feeding the Lord’s Flock”), subtitled “On the Doctrines of the Modernists” and promulgated in 1907, Pope Pius X launched a broadside against Modernism, which he saw as an expression within the Church of such dangers lying outside it as rationalism, materialism, liberalism, and anti-clericalism. According to the principles of the Modernists, Pius wrote, “the Sacred Books […] may be rightly described as a collection of experiences, not indeed of the kind that may come to anybody, but those extraordinary and striking ones which have happened in any religion,” and this was precisely what they taught about the Old and New Testament (Pius X 1907, §22). Pius had strong words for Modernists in the role of historians and critics, lamenting how they “call to their assistance that branch of criticism which they call textual, and labour to show that such a fact or such a phrase is not in its right place, and adducing other arguments of the same kind” (ibid., §34). Indeed, he thundered, “to hear them talk about their works on the Sacred Scripture […], one would imagine that before them nobody ever even glanced through the pages of Scripture, whereas the truth is”—and here he let rip—“that a whole multitude of Doctors, infinitely superior to them in genius, in erudition, in sanctity, have sifted the Sacred Books in every way, and so far from finding imperfections in them, have thanked God more and more the deeper they have gone into them, for His divine bounty in having vouchsafed to speak thus to men” (ibid., §34). Thinking of David Friedrich Strauß’s The Life of Jesus (1846) and Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1854), as well as Renan’s seminal continuation of the tradition of Strauß and Feuerbach in his Vie de Jésus (1863) or Alfred Loisy’s engagement with Harnack’s The Essence of Christianity (Das Wesen des Christentums) (1900; 31902; 51902; 2012) in L’Évangile et l’Église (1902), and the many other works that had ignited and fuelled the Modernist crisis, Pius had recourse to sarcasm when he reached the polemical conclusion: “Unfortunately, these great Doctors

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did not enjoy the same aids to study that are possessed by the Modernists for their guide and rule,—a philosophy borrowed from the negation of God, and a criterion which consists of themselves” (ibid., §35). (Ouch!) Not until nearly half a century later, in the encyclical Divino afflante spiritu (“Inspired by the Holy Spirit”) issued in 1943 by Pope Pius XII, was historical-criticism officially permitted to Roman Catholic scholars and the production of new biblical translations (instead of reliance on Jerome’s Latin Vulgate) welcomed—acknowledging that “the conditions of biblical studies and their subsidiary sciences have greatly changed within the last fifty years” and encouraging Catholic scholars to “diligently apply [themselves] so as to acquire daily a greater facility in biblical as well as in other oriental languages and to support [their] interpretation by the aids which all branches of philology supply” (Pius XII 1943, §16). A ressourcement or, in other words, a “return to the sources” was undertaken in the 1940s by a circle of French scholars and theologians including Henri de Lubac (1896–1991), Jean Daniélou (1905–1974), Yves Congar (1904–1995), and Marie-Dominique Chenu (1895–1990). This project saw itself as one of retrieval and renewal, and has had a profound impact on late twentieth-century theology. Sometimes called nouvelle théologie (or “New Theology”), ressourcement set itself the task of rescuing (as it saw it) Catholic theology from the dominance of neo-Scholasticism, the nineteenth-century revival of the thought of St Thomas Aquinas, reflected in the Church’s reliance on scholastically influenced manuals, a rejection of Modernism, and a defensive attitude towards non-Catholic faiths (whether Christian or not). The influence of the movement was clearly in evidence in the reforms initiated at the Second Vatican Council, convoked in 1962, which re-examined the entire question of the inspiration and interpretation of “sacred scripture” in Dei Verbum, its “Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation,” promulgated by Pope Paul VI in 1965. Here, in the completely different language of these later conciliar texts, Paul VI strongly encouraged “Catholic exegetes […] and other students of sacred theology, working diligently together and using appropriate means,” to “devote their energies […] to an exploration and exposition of the divine writings”—albeit “under the watchful care of the sacred teaching office of the Church” (Paul VI 1965, §23).

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In some respects, however, this was too little, too late, and anyway the Catholic Church tried to row back from the consequences of this recognition of historical criticism in the post-synodal apostolic exhortation Verbum Domini (“The Word of the Lord”) issued by Pope Benedict XVI in 2010—significantly released on 30 September 2010, that is, on the feast day of St Jerome, the patron saint of translators. While recognizing the need to acknowledge “the benefits that historical-critical exegesis and other recently-developed methods of textual analysis have brought to the life of the Church,” Benedict warned against “a positivistic and secularized hermeneutic ultimately based on the conviction that the Divine does not intervene in human history” (Benedict XVI 2010, §32 and §35). According to this hermeneutic (which one could also call a Nietzschean hermeneutic), “whenever a divine element seems present, it has to be explained in some other way, reducing everything to the human element,” leading to “interpretations that deny the historicity of the divine elements,” whereas Benedict argued—drawing on the encyclical Fides et Ratio (1998) of his predecessor, Pope John Paul II—that “a hermeneutical approach to sacred Scripture inevitably brings into play the proper relationship between faith and reason” (ibid., §35 and §36). But in the intervening century or so biblical criticism had entirely escaped the orbit of the Church and now moved in an entirely different direction. Such is the case with the Dutch School of radical criticism, which had its founding moment in a book by the Dutch theologian Allard Pierson (1831–1896) in which he pointed to the connections between the sayings of Jesus and the tradition of Greek wisdom literature and denied the authenticity of the Letter to the Galatians. Initially a critic of Pierson’s work, his fellow theologian Abraham Dirk Loman (1823–1897) subsequently embraced the position that  questioned the historicity of Paul. And whereas a third theologian, W.C. van Manen, had originally defended the Pauline authorship of the First Letter to the Corinthians, in time he came to the same conclusions as Pierson and Loman. Subsequent figures in this scholarly tradition included the philosopher Gerard (or G.J.P.J.) Bolland (1854–1922), the Hegelian revivalist and a commentator on German Idealism in general and on Eduard von Hartmann in particular; and the theologian Gustaaf Adolf van den Bergh van Eysinga (1874–1957).

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Identifying themselves as radical in the sense that Loman used the term in his 1887 review of Edwin Johnson’s Antiqua Mater: A Study of Christian Origins (1887) (Loman 1887), the Dutch Radicals—in their rejection of the authenticity of the entire corpus of Pauline Epistles and, indeed, of the historicity of Jesus—do make Nietzsche seem, in comparison, quite tame. Emerging (but writing in Dutch) around the time when Nietzsche was working on The Anti-Christ, the Dutch Radicals could not be said to have influenced Nietzsche, although they did exercise an influence on such scholars as the Swiss reformed theologian Rudolf Steck (1842–1924) and the German writer Arthur Drews (1865–1935), both proponents of the Christ myth theory. Within the German tradition, however, the work of Adolf von Harnack proved to be more significant, especially its emphasis on the Hellenistic influence on early Christian thought. Ironically (from a Nietzschean perspective), Harnack’s rejection of the historicity of the Gospel of John (while accepting the Synoptics…) and the a-historical dogmatism of the statements contained in the Apostles’ Creed (never mind the Nicene Creed…), and his embrace of philology (i.e., a historical-critical method) for interpreting biblical texts, went hand-in-hand with an embrace of the so-called Social Gospel, a focus on social issues that would have been—to use a religious term—anathema to Nietzsche. In conclusion, it is perhaps significant that, despite Nietzsche’s (and, subsequently, Price’s and Onfray’s) attempts at a deconstruction of Paul’s personality, he remains a figure of considerable philosophical significance. In 1997, the French Marxist philosopher Alain Badiou (b. 1937) published a book entitled Saint Paul: La fondation de l’universalisme. In this study, Badiou rejected both the conventional Christian interpretation of Paul as a saintly figure and his execration à la Nietzsche, arguing for the revolutionary significance of Paul as a figure whose integration of truth and subjectivity made him just as relevant for the postmodern world (Badiou 2015). On this account, Paul’s conception of the subject as a bearer of universal truth over and against the (Judaic) Law and the conventional Greek understanding of logos makes him the quintessentially modern, even postmodern, thinker. Coming from a more conservative intellectual tradition, in 2002 the eminent French historian Alain Decaux (1925–2016) published L’avorton

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de Dieu: Une vie de Saint Paul, a biography of Paul that borrowed its title from the passage in the First Letter to the Corinthians where Paul, summarizing his doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, describes himself as “the least of the apostles” and as “one born out of due time” (1 Cor. 15:8–9) (Decaux 2002). Whereas Haydock somewhat uncharitably glosses Paul’s self-description as an expression of humility, “abortives being commonly imperfect and less than others” (H, 1518), the commentary in the NJB sees in the choice of phrase “an allusion to the abnormal, sudden and surgical nature of Paul’s birth into the apostolic family” (NJB, NT, 1909). Thus the figure of Paul presents us with a paradox: while, on the one hand, a tradition of theological commentary has developed that doubts the authenticity of Paul’s letters, indeed the very fact of his existence, on the other the Pauline writings seem to continue to offer a resource for philosophical and theological reflection. From the time that Nietzsche was working on The Anti-Christ (i.e., 1887–1888), there are notes that were included in the selection of Nachlass material known as The Will to Power. In one of these sections, which in the estimation of their editor, Walter Kaufmann, contains formulations that “seem better than any of the parallel passages in Nietzsche’s works” (Nietzsche 1968, 103), Nietzsche offers “a psychology of Paul,” emphasizing that his approach is an essentially psychological one (WP §171 = KSA 13, 14[57], 244–245). (This approach was later turned against Nietzsche himself by Ludwig Klages [1872–1956] in his own study in 1926 of the “psychological achievements” of Nietzsche.)60 This psychological approach is, however, just one side of the coin of Nietzsche’s critique of Paul in particular and Christianity in general, the other of which is philological. So in the next chapter we must turn to the role played by philology in Nietzsche’s approach to Christianity in general and in The Anti-Christ in particular.

Notes 1. For a compact edition of the writings attributed to Paul with a critical apparatus, see Meeks and Fitzgerald 2007. And for a helpful survey of the chief concepts of Pauline thought, see Côté 2000.

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2. See NJB, New Testament, 1909. 3. On the liturgical significance of the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul, see Guéranger 2000, 311. In the Orthodox tradition, the Troparion (Tone 4) for the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul runs: “First-enthroned of the apostles, / teachers of the universe: / Entreat the Master of all / to grant peace to the world, and to our souls great mercy!”. 4. Nietzsche notes the appropriation by Calvin of the Pauline notion of predestination in one of his earliest discussions of Paul (see HA II WS §85). 5. See the General Audience given on 21 March 2007, focusing on the figure of Justin Martyr (c.100–165) (Benedict XVI 2008, 20–21). 6. For further discussion of the Septuagint in the liturgy of the Church and in the traditional interpretation of biblical texts, see Andersen 2017. 7. For further discussion of Nietzsche’s depiction of Paul, see Salaquarda 1974; Havemann 2001 and 2002; Azzam 2015; and, most recently, Duff 2020. 8. See Goethe’s letter to Johann Heinrich Meyer of 8 February 1796 (in Goethe 1964, 215). 9. See, in the sermons as translated by Walshe, sermon 8 (= Pfeiffer 8; Quint, Deutsche Werke, 2; Quint, 1955, 2) and sermon 9 (= Pfeiffer 9; Quint, Deutsche Werke, 86; Quint, 1955, 28; Evans, II.2). For further discussion of Nietzsche and Meister Eckhart, see Schoeller-Reisch 1998. 10. For further discussion of Nietzsche’s use of biblical language, see Large 2001. 11. On the confusion of names, see NK 6/2, 216–217. 12. See NK 6/2, 223–224. 13. For an overview of Paul’s theological vocabulary as a whole, see Côté 2000. 14. See Pfleiderer 1873/21890; Bousset 1913; Reitzenstein 1910/31927; Deißmann 1911; Schlatter 1918. 15. For further discussion, see the Standardwerk on early modern European reception of Zoroaster (Stausberg 1998). 16. For translations, see Weiss 1937, 1959. 17. Jewett 1971, 63; Betz 1994, 130. For further discussion of existentialism in relation to theology, see Macquarrie 1973. 18. See “Nietzsche’s Philosophical Anthropology” (in Howey 1973, 107–166); and Löw 1995.

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19. For the classical Greek emphasis on νοῦς (i.e., “nous”), see Plato’s Phaedrus, where nous is referred to as the “pilot of the soul” (ψυχῆς κυβερνήτῃ) (247c); Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, book 10, where “not only is intellect the best thing in us, but the objects of intellect are the best of knowable objects” (1177a); Diogenes Laërtius’s Lives and Opinions of the Philosophers, book 7, §54 (where the view is attributed to Zeno that reason is the primary criterion of truth); and Epictetus, Discourses, 2.8.1–2, where the essence of divine being is νοῦς (i.e., “nous”) (cited in Schnelle 2009, 316–317). 20. For further discussion aside from the work of Jewett, see Heckel 1993, 4–9; Markschies 1995; and Betz 2000. For further discussion of the notion of the “inner man” or “individual within,” found frequently in the thought of St Augustine, see Matthews 1967; Markschies 1995; and Cary 2000. 21. Rather than Udo Schnelle’s reading, that is (see Schnelle 2009, 318). 22. That is, in a form of the peristalsis catalogue that lists favourable and unfavourable circumstances in life and how the individual should respond to drastically different situations and to fluctuating changes of fortune (Fitzgerald 2003, 333). 23. For further discussion, see Thiselton 1979; Farnell 2005; and Claußen 2013. 24. See Onfray 2006, 11–45; 2007, 131–139; and 2017, 65–82. 25. While the New Testament offers no information about Paul’s physical appearance, several descriptions can be found in apocryphal texts. In the Acts of Paul and Thecla, for instance, Paul is described (in §3) as “a man small in size, bald-headed, bandy-legged, of noble mien, with eyebrows meeting, rather hook-nosed, full of grace”—“sometimes he seemed like a man, and sometimes he had the face of an angel” (in Elliott 1993, 364). An Ethiopian text, the History of the Contending of St Paul, describes him (in chapter 2) as “a vigorous man of fine, upright stature, and his countenance was ruddy with the ruddiness of the skin of the pomegranate, his complexion was clear, and his cheeks were full, and bearded, and of the colour of a rose” (in Budge 1901, 531). An account of The Martyrdom of the Holy Apostle Paul notes (§5) that “when the executioner cut off his head milk splashed on the tunic of the soldier” (in Elliott 1993, 387).

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26. “Calamity is virtue’s opportunity” (Seneca, De providentia, chapter 4, §6); and “We are most virtuous when we are in bad health” (Pliny, Epistles, book 7, letter 26); see H, 1533. 27. For discussion of Nietzsche’s interest in the biblical story of the Fall, see Gericke 2019. 28. For discussion of Christine Mohrmann’s reminder that, during the first centuries of the Christian era, educated Latins found the form of the earliest Bible translations “a source of embarrassment and an obstacle to the propagation of Christianity among the higher classes” (Mohrmann 1957, 2), see Chap. 3. 29. Indeed, the whole question of chronology questions some commonly held assumptions about the biblical texts, for the fact that the traditional Christian ordering of books in the “Old” Testament, or even their ordering as the Hebrew scriptures known as the Tanakh (‫ )תנ”ך‬into a threefold division of Torah (“Teaching”), Nevi’im (“Prophets”), and Ketuvim (“Writings”), in no way reflects the date of their composition. It often comes as a surprise, for example, to learn that the prophet Isaiah—who is reckoned to have been born around 765 BCE, received his prophetic call in the year of King Uzziah’s death in 740 BCE and exercised his ministry in four periods beginning with the years between his prophetic vocation and the accession of Ahaz in 736 BCE and ending with a period between Hezekiah’s rebellion against Assyria in 705  BCE and Sennacherib’s invasion of Judaea in 701 BCE—thus predates (or at least coincides with) editorial work on the Pentateuch. This probably did not exist in its final form until the “Law of Moses” brought back from exile in Babylon by Ezra on his mission, unified, and sanctioned as legislation on pain of death by Artaxerxes—a development dated variously as 458, 428, or 398 BCE (depending on whether one reads Ezra 7:7 as referring to Artaxerxes I, the reference to the seventh year of his reign as in fact to the thirty-seventh, or as referring to Artaxerxes II). While traditionally ascribed to Moses, biblical critics now believe that the five books of the Pentateuch in fact underwent a long and complex process of compilation and development; in the nineteenth century, such critics as Julius Wellhausen and Karl Heinrich Graf (1815–1869) argued in favour of the documentary hypothesis, according to which the biblical texts as we have them are an amalgam of four different sources, known as the Yahwistic, the Elohistic, the Deuteronomic, and the Priestly Code. Similarly, the call of Jeremiah in 627 BCE predated by some five years or

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so the discovery of the “Book of the Law” in 622 BCE (as recounted in 2 Kings 23:25), which coincided with the spreading of religious reform to Samaria and the editing of historical documents in the spirit of the Deuteronomic tradition. See NJB, Old Testament, 7–11 (“How the Pentateuch came to be written”) and NJB, 2055–2074 (“Chronological Table”). 30. See Leo Tolstoy, Church and State (1882): “This deviation begins from the times of the Apostles and especially from that hankerer after mastership Paul” (Tolstoy 1934, 336). 31. On Freud’s reception of Nietzsche, see Assoun 1980; Lehrer 1995; Gasser 1997; and Vartzbed 2003. 32. See Onfray 2010a, 2010b, and 2013. 33. See Detering 1995 and 2003. 34. For recent reappraisals of the figure of Simon Magus, see Onfray 2006, 47–53; and Haar 2003. 35. Of course, the same arguments about the historicity or otherwise of Jesus and Paul also apply, mutatis mutandis, to the authorial figure called Luke, traditionally regarded as a Greek physician or a Hellenic Jew who was a disciple of Paul, going with him to Rome. Taken together, his Gospel and Acts constitute roughly a third of the New Testament. 36. See Schoeps 1949, 408–445; Eisenman 1996a: 242–243; and 1996b, 411–466. 37. For an account of the Great Renunciation, see Thomas 1913, 32–36. 38. See the translation by William Arrowsmith (in Grene and Lattimore 1972, vol. 3, 189–260). 39. Recognitions, book 1, chapter 70; see Roberts et al. 1886, 95. 40. See Baur 1875–1876 (translation of Baur 1845; 21866–1867). 41. See Baur 1878 (translation of Baur 1853; 31863) (cited in Furnish 2015, 18). 42. For further discussion, see Harrison 1921; Moule 1965; and van Nes 2013. 43. See Morton and McLeman 1964 and 1966. For further discussion, see O’Donnell 1999, 216–220; and Smith 1985. 44. See Schoenbaum 1966, 196. 45. Kenny 1986; for further discussion, see O’Donnell 1999, 220–224. 46. For further discussion, see Prior 1989. 47. For the background to this paper, see Heck 2013.

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48. In so arguing, Lewis is anticipating the premise of Thomas Nagel’s famous paper “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (Nagel 1974; reprinted in Nagel, Mortal Questions [1979]). 49. See Hart 2017. 50. See Hart 2018. 51. This incident is the subject of two paintings by Caravaggio, both in Rome: The Conversion of Saint Paul (in the Odescalchi Balbi Collection) and The Conversion of Saint Paul on the Road to Damascus (in the Cerasi Chapel of Santa Maria del Popolo). 52. See NK 6/2, 537. 53. Rather than the language of gestation, Nietzsche used the discourse of alchemy when writing from Rapallo, on Christmas Day, to Franz Overbeck, “If I cannot pull off the alchemists’ trick of turning this—filth into gold, then I am lost” (KSB 6, 312). For further discussion of alchemical imagery in Nietzsche’s writings, see Perkins 1987; Parkes 1994, 133–134, 141, 158, 166 and 418; and Bishop 2011. 54. KSA 10, 3[3] and 4[122] and 4[145], 107–108 and 150 and 157; cf. KSA 3, 649. For a discussion of the dating, see Grundlehner 1986, 134–36. 55. Nietzsche, Songs of Prince Vogelfrei, “Sils Maria,” translated by Paul V. Cohn and Maude D. Petre in Thomas Common’s translation of The Gay Science (final two lines amended using the translation by Rudolph Binion); see Binion 1968, 130. 56. See NK 6/2, 548. 57. For further discussion, see Hayden 1999, 297–301. 58. For further discussion of this figure, see chapter 5, “Maria the Jewess” (in Patai 1995, 60–91). 59. Kingsley 2018: vol. 2, 493–494; citing Gemelli Marciano 2013: 231–233 and 280. 60. Klages 1926; for further discussion, see Bishop 2002a, 2002b [2003]; and 2018, 20–28.

References Alfaric, Prosper. 2005. Jésus a-t-il existé? et autres textes. Preface by Michael Onfray. Paris: coda.

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Andersen, Benedict Maria. 2017. ‘Fulfilled is All that David Told’: Recovering the Christian Psalter. Sacred Music 144 (4): 9–25. Angenendt, Arnold. 2006. Toleranz und Gewalt: Das Christentum zwischen Bibel und Schwert. Münster: Aschendorff. Armstrong, Karen. 1983. The First Christian: St Paul’s Impact on Christianity. London and Sydney: Pan. Assoun, Paul-Laurent. 1980. Freud et Nietzsche. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Azzam, Abed. 2015. Nietzsche Versus Paul. New York: Columbia University Press. Badiou, Alain. 2015. Saint Paul: La fondation de l’universalisme. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Barr, James. 1978. Fundamentalism. Philadelphia: Westminster. Baur, F.C. 1845 [21866–1867]. Paulus, der Apostel Jesu Christi: Sein Leben und Wirken, seine Briefe und seine Lehre: Ein Beitrag zu einer kritischen Geschichte des Urchristentums. Stuttgart: Becher & Müller. ———. 1853 [31863]. Das Christentum und die christliche Kirche der drei ersten Jahrhunderte, Tübingen: Fues. ———. 1864. Vorlesungen über neutestamentliche Theologie. Leipzig: Fues (L.W. Reisland). ———. 1875–1876 Paul: His Life and Works. Translated by Allan Menzies, 2 vols. London: Williams & Norgate. ———. 1878. The Church History of the First Three Centuries. Translated by Allan Menzies, 2 vols. London: Williams & Norgate. Benedict XVI. 2008. Die Kirchenväter—frühe Lehrer der Christenheit. Regensburg: Pustet. ———. 2009. Saint Paul. Translated by L’Osservatore Romano. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. ———. 2010. Verbum Domini. http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-­xvi/en/ apost_exhortations/documents/hf_ben-­x vi_exh_20100930_verbum-­ domini.html. Betz, Hans Dieter. 1994. Paulinische Studien [Gesammelte Aufsätze, vol. 3]. Tübingen: Mohr (Siebeck). ———. 2000. The Concept of the “Inner Human Being” (όέσω άνθρωποσ) in the Anthropology of Paul. New Testament Studies 46 (3): 317–324. Binion, Rudolph. 1968. Frau Lou: Nietzsche’s Wayward Disciple. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bishop, Paul. 2002a. Ludwig Klages’s Early Reception of Friedrich Nietzsche. Oxford German Studies 31: 129–160.

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———. 2002b [2003]. Ein Kind Zarathustras und eine nicht-metaphysische Auslegung der ewigen Wiederkehr. Hestia: Jahrbuch der Klages-Gesellschaft, 21: 15–37. ———. 2011. The Superman as Salamander: Symbols of Transformation or Transformational Symbols? International Journal of Jungian Studies 3 (March): 4–20. ———. 2018. Ludwig Klages and the Philosophy of Life: A Vitalist Toolkit. London and New York: Routledge. Bornkamm, Günther. 1971. Paul. New York: Harper & Row. Bousset, Wilhelm. 1913. Kyrios Christos: Geschichte des Christusglaubens von dem Anfängen des Christentums bis Irenäus. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. ———. 1970. Kyrios Christos: A History of the Belief in Christ from the Beginnings of Christianity to Irenaeus. Translated by John E.  Steely. Nashville and New York: Abingdon Press. Brandenburger, Egon. 1968. Fleisch und Geist: Paulus und die dualistische Weisheit. Neukirchen: Neukirchener Verlag. Bucke, Richard Maurice. 1901. Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind. Philadelphia: Innes & Sons. Budge, E.A. Wallace. 1901. The Contendings of the Apostles, Being the Histories of the Live and Martyrdoms and Deaths of the Twelve Apostles and Evangelists. Vol. 2. London: Frowde. Bultmann, Rudolf. 1952. Theology of the New Testament. Translated by Kendrick Grobel, vol. 1. London: SCM Press. ———. 1956. Theology of the New Testament. Translated by K. Grobel, 2 vols. London: SCM Press. Burton, Ernest DeWitt. 1918. Spirit, Soul, and Flesh: The Usage of Pneuma, Psyche, and Sarx in Greek Writings and Translated Works from the Earliest Period to 180 A.D., and of Their Equivalents Ruah̥, Nefes̲h and Basar in the Hebrew Old Testament. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Cary, Phillip. 2000. Augustine’s Invention of the Inner Self: The Legacy of the Christian Platonist. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Claußen, Carsten. 2013. Albert Schweitzer’s Understanding of Righteousness by Faith According to Paul’s Letter to the Romans. In Modern Interpretations of Romans: Tracking Their Hermeneutical-Theological Trajectory, ed. Daniel Patte and Cristina Grenholm, 87–107. London: T&T Clark. Côté, Julienne. 2000. Cent mots-clés de la théologie de Paul. Quebec: Novalis; Cerf. Decaux, Alain. 2002. L’avorton de Dieu: Une vie de Saint Paul. Paris: Perrin; Desclée de Brouwer.

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Deißmann, Adolf. 1911. Paulus: Eine kultur- und religionsgeschichtliche Skizze. Tübingen: Mohr (Siebeck). Deschner, Karlheinz. 1986–2013 Kriminalgeschichte der Christentums, 10 vols. Reinbek: Rowohlt. Detering, Hermann. 1995. Der gefälschte Paulus: Das Urchristentum im Zwielicht. Düsseldorf: Patmos. ———. 2003. The Fabricated Paul: Early Christianity in the Twilight. Translated by Darrell Doughty as “The Falsified Paul”. Journal of Higher Criticism 10 (2): 1–84. Doughty, Darrell D. 1994. Pauline Paradigms and Pauline Authenticity. Journal of Higher Criticism 1 (Fall): 95–128. Duff, Joshua. 2020. The Crucified God, the Self reimagined: Mapping the “Death of God” Motif in the Philosophical Anthropologies of Nietzsche and St Paul: A Reappraisal of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Anti-Christianity with Continual Reference to Paul of Tarsus. Doctoral thesis, Bangor University. https://ethos.bl.uk/ OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.809704. Eisenman, Robert. 1996a. Paul as Herodian. In The Dead Sea Scrolls and the First Christians: Essays and Translations, 226–246. Rockport: Element Books. ———. 1996b. James the Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls. New York: Viking Penguin. Elliott, J.K., ed. 1993. The Apocryphal New Testament: A Collection of Apocryphal Christian Literature in an English Translation. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Farnell, F. David. 2005. The New Perspective on Paul: Its Basic Tenets, History, and Presuppositions. The Master’s Seminary Journal 16 (2): 189–243. Fitzgerald, John T. 2003. Paul and Friendship. In Paul and the Greco-Roman World: A Handbook, ed. J. Paul Sampley, 319–343. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International. Fuchs, Ernst. 1932. Christus und der Geist bei Paulus: Eine biblischtheologische Untersuchung. Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs. Furnish, Victor Paul. 2015. The Jesus-Paul Debate: From Baur to Bultmann. In Paul and Jesus: Collected Essays [1989], ed. Alexander J.M.  Wedderburn, 17–50. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Gasser, Reinhard. 1997. Nietzsche und Freud. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter. Gemelli Marciano, M.  Laura. 2013. Parmenide: suoni, immagini, esperienza. Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag. Gericke, Jacobus W. 2019. The Nature and Scope of Nietzsche’s Philosophical Reception of Genesis 2:4b-3:24. Verbum et Ecclesia 40 (1): a1902.

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Girard, René. 1976. Critiques dans un souterrain. Paris: Grasset. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. 1964. Briefe. Ed. Karl Robert Mandelkow. Vol. 2. Hamburg: Wegner. Grant, Frederick Clifton. 1915. St Paul and Stoicism. The Biblical World 45 (5): 268–281. Grene, David, and Richard Lattimore, eds. 1972. Greek Tragedies, 3 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Vol. 3. 189–260. Grundlehner, Philip. 1986. The Poetry of Friedrich Nietzsche. New  York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Guéranger, Prosper. 2000. The Liturgical Year, vol. 12, Time After Pentecost: Book III, trans. Laurence Shepherd. Great Falls. Montana: St. Bonaventura Publications. Gutbrod, Walter. 1934. Die paulinische Anthropologie. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Haar, Stephen. 2003. Simon Magus: The First Gnostic? Berlin and New  York: de Gruyter. Haenchen, Ernst. 1971. The Acts of the Apostles: A Commentary. Translated by Bernard Noble, Gerald Shinn, and Robert McLachlan Wilson. Philadelphia: Westminster. Harrison, P.N. 1921. The Problem of the Pastoral Epistles. Oxford: Oxford. University Press. Hart, David Bentley. 2017. The New Testament: A Translation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ———. 2018. Everything You Know About the Gospel of Paul Is Likely Wrong. Accessed 9 January 2018. https://aeon.co/ideas/the-­gospels-­of-­paul-­dont-­ say-­what-­you-­think-­they-­say. Havemann, Daniel. 2001. Evangelische Polemik: Nietzsches Paulusdeutung. Nietzsche-Studien 30: 175–186. ———. 2002. Der “Apostel der Rache”: Nietzsches Paulusdeutung. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter. Hayden, Deborah. 1999. Nietzsche’s Secrets. In Nietzsche and Depth Psychology, ed. Jacob Golomb, Weaver Santaniello, and Ronald L.  Lehrer, 295–316. New York: State University of New York Press. Heck, Joel D. 2013. ‘Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism’ in Context. Westcott House e-publication. Cambridge: Westcott House. Heckel, Theo K. 1993. Der innere Mensch: Die paulinische Verarbeitung eines platonischen Motivs. Tübingen: Mohr. Holsten, Karl. 1868. Zum Evangelium des Paulus und des Petrus. Rostock: Stiller (H. Schmidt).

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Holtzmann, Heinrich Julius. 1911. Lehrbuch der neutestamentlichen Theologie, 2 vols. Tübingen: Mohr. Howey, Richard Lowell. 1973. Heidegger and Jaspers on Nietzsche: A Critical Examination of Heidegger’s and Jaspers’ Interpretations of Nietzsche. The Hague: Nijhoff. Jewett, Robert. 1971. Paul’s Anthropological Terms: A Study of Their Use in Conflict Settings. Leiden: Brill. Jung, C.G. 1971. Psychological Types. [Collected Works of C.G.  Jung, vol. 6]. Translated by H.G. Baynes, revised by R.F.C. Hull. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kenny, Anthony. 1986. A Stylometric Study of the New Testament. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kingsley, Peter. 2018. Catafalque: Carl Jung and the End of Humanity, 2 vols. London: Catafalque Press. Klages, Ludwig. 1926. Die psychologischen Errungenschaften Nietzsches. Leipzig: Barth. Kourie, Celia. 2001. Christ-Mysticism in Paul. The Way Supplement 102: 71–80. Large, Duncan. 2001. Nietzsche’s Use of Biblical Language. Journal of Nietzsche Studies 22 (Fall): 88–115. Lehrer, Ronald. 1995. Nietzsche’s Presence in Freud’s Life and Thought: On the Origins of a Psychology of Dynamic Unconscious Mental Functioning. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Leitzmann, Hans. 1906 [41933]. An die Römer [Handbuch zum neuen Testament, vol. 8]. Tübingen: Mohr (Siebeck). Leo XIII. 1893. Providentissimus Deus. Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII on the Study of Holy Scripture. Accessed 4 February 2022. https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-­x iii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-­x iii_enc_18111893_ providentissimus-­deus.html. Lewis, C.S. 1969. Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism. Brigham Young University Studies Quarterly 9 (1): 33–48. Lohfink, Gerhard. 1976. The Conversion of St. Paul: Narrative and History in Acts. Translated by Bruce J. Malina, Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press. ———. 1979. The Bible: Now I Get It! A Form-Criticism Handbook. Translated by Daniel Coogan. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Loman, A.D. 1887. Een Engelsche anonymus over den oorsprong des christendoms. Theologisch Tijdschrift 21: 597–653.

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Löw, Reinhard. 1995. Friedrich Nietzsche: Anti-Moral und Vitalismus. In Philosophische Anthropologie der Moderne, ed. René Weiland, 78–85. Weinheim: Beltz Athenäum. Lüdemann, Hermann. 1872. Die Anthropologie des Apostels Paulus und ihre Stellung innerhalb seiner Heilslehre: Nach den vier Hauptbriefen dargestellt. Kiel: Universitäts-Buchhandlung. Lutz, Manfred. 2018. Der Skandal der Skandale: Die geheime Geschichte des Christentums. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder. Macquarrie, John. 1973[1955]. An Existentialist Theology: A Comparison of Heidegger and Bultmann. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Man, Paul de. 1983. The Rhetoric of Blindness: Jacques Derrida’s Reading of Rousseau. In Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed., chapter 7 (102–141). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Markschies, Christoph. 1995. Die Platonische Metapher vom “inneren Menschen”: Eine Brücke zwischen antiker Philosophie und altchristlicher Theologie. International Journal of the Classical Tradition 1 (3): 3–18. Matthews, G.B. 1967. The Inner Man. American Philosophical Quarterly 4 (2): 166–172. Meeks, Wayne A., and John T. Fitzgerald, eds. 2007. The Writings of St. Paul. 2nd ed. New York and London: Norton. Meuzelaar, J.J. 1961. Der Leib des Messias: Eine exegetische Studie über den Gedanken vom Leib Christi in den Paulusbriefen. Assen: Van Gorcum. Mohrmann, Christine. 1957. Liturgical Latin, Its Origins and Character. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Morton, A.Q., and J. McLeman. 1964. Christianity and the Computer. London: Hodder & Stoughton. ———. 1966. Paul, the Man and the Myth. London: Harper & Row. Moule, C.F.D. 1965. The Problem of the Pastoral Epistles: A Reappraisal. Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 47: 430–452. Nagel, Thomas. 1974. What Is It Like to Be a Bat? The Philosophical Review 83 (4): 435–450. Nes, Jermo van. 2013. The Problem of the Pastoral Epistles: An Important Hypothesis Reconsidered. In Paul and Pseudepigraphy, ed. Stanley E. Porter and Gregory S. Fewster, 153–169. Leiden: Brill. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1968. The Will to Power. Edited by Walter Kaufmann, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R.J.  Hollingdale. New  York: Random House.

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NK 6/2 = Sommer, Andreas Urs. 2013. Kommentar zu Nietzsches “Der Antichrist”, Ecce homo, Dionysos-Dithyramben, Nietzsche contra Wagner [Historischer und kritischer Kommentar zu Friedrich Nietzsches Werken, vol. 6/2]. Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter. O’Donnell, Matthew Brook. 1999. Linguistic Fingerprints or Style by Numbers? The Use of Statistics in the Discussion of Authorship of New Testament Documents. In Linguistics and the New Testament: Critical Junctures, ed. Stanley E.  Porter and D.A.  Carson, 206–259. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Onfray, Michel. 2006. Le christianisme hédoniste [Contre-histoire de la philosophie, vol. 2]. Paris: Grasset. ———. 2007. Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Translated by Jeremy Leggatt. New York: Arcade. ———. 2010a. Le Crépuscule d’une idole: L’affabulation freudienne. Paris: Grasset. ———. 2010b. Apostille au “Crépuscule”: Pour une psychanalyse non freudienne. Paris: Grasset. ———. 2013. Les Freudiens hérétiques. [Contre-histoire de la philosophie, vol. 8]. Paris: Grasset. ———. 2017. Décadence: Vie et mort du judéo-christianisme [Brève encyclopédie du monde, vol. 2]. Paris: Flammarion. Pagels, Elaine. 1975. The Gnostic Paul: Gnostic Exegesis of the Pauline Letters. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. Parkes, Graham. 1994. Composing the Soul: Reaches of Nietzsche’s Psychology. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Patai, Raphael. 1995. The Jewish Alchemists: A History and Source Book. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Paul VI. 1965. Dei Verbum. Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation. Accessed 4 February 2022. https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_ vatican_council/documents/vat-­ii_const_19651118_dei-­verbum_en.html. Perkins, Richard. 1987. Nietzsche’s opus alchymicum. Seminar 23: 216–226. Pfleiderer, Otto. 1873 [21890]. Der Paulinismus: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der urchristlichen Theologie, 2nd ed. Leipzig: O.R. Reisland. Pierce, C.A. 1955. Conscience in the New Testament. London: SCM Press. Pius X. 1907. Pascendi Dominici Gregis. Encyclical of Pope Pius X on the Doctrines of the Modernists. Accessed 4 February 2022. https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-­x/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-­x_enc_19070908_ pascendi-­dominici-­gregis.html.

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Pius XII. 1943. Divino afflante spiritu. Encyclical of Pope Pius XII on Promoting Biblical Studies, Commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of Providentissimus deus. Accessed 4 February 2022. https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-­xii/en/ encyclicals/documents/hf_p-­x ii_enc_30091943_divino-­a fflante-­ spiritu.html. Price, Robert M. 2012. The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul. Salt Lake City: Signature Books. Prior, Michael. 1989. Paul the Letter-Writer and the Second Letter to Timothy. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Ranke-Heinemann, Ute. 2002. Nein und Amen: Mein Abschied vom traditionellen Christentum. Munich: Heyne. Reitzenstein, Richard August. 1910 [21920; 31927]. Die hellenistischen Mysterienreligionen: ihre Grundgedanken und Wirkungen. 3rd enlarged ed. Leipzig: Teubner Ritschl, Albrecht. 1850 [21857]. Die Entstehung der altkatholischen Kirche: Eine kirchen- und dogmengeschichtliche Monographie. 2nd, revised ed. Bonn: Marcus. Roberts, Alexander, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, eds. 1886. Ante-­ Nicene Fathers, volume 8: Fathers of the Third and Fourth Centuries: The Twelve Patriarchs, Excerpts and Epistles, The Clementina, Apocrypha, Decretals, Memoirs of Edessa and Syriac Documents, Remains of the First Ages. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Company. Salaquarda, Jörg. 1974. Dionysos gegen den Gekreuzigten: Nietzsches Verständnis des Apostels Paulus. Zeitschrift für Religionsgeschichte 26: 97–124. Sanders, E.P. 1977. Paul and Palestinian Judaism. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. ———. 1985. Jesus and Judaism. London: SCM Press. Schlatter, Adolf. 1918. Herz und Gehirn im ersten Jahrhundert. In Studien zur Systematischen Theologie: Festschrift für Theodor Haering zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Friedrich Traub, 86–94. Tübingen: Mohr (Siebeck). Schmithals, Walter. 1971 [1956]. Gnosticism in Corinth: An Investigation of the Letters to the Corinthians. Translated by John E.  Steely. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press. Schnädelbach, Herbert. 2000. Der Fluch der Christentums: Die sieben Geburtsfehler einer altgewordenen Weltreligion. Eine kulturelle Bilanz nach zweitausend Jahren. Die Zeit, 11 March 2000. Accessed 4 February 2022. https://www.zeit.de/2000/20/200020.christentum_.xml. Schnelle, Udo. 2009 [2007]. Theology of the New Testament. Grand Rapids, MI: BakerAcademic.

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Schoeller-Reisch, Donata. 1998. Die Demut Zarathustras: Ein Versuch zu Nietzsche mit Meister Eckhart. Nietzsche-Studien 27: 420–439. Schoenbaum, Samuel. 1966. Internal Evidence and Elizabethan Dramatic Authorship: An Essay in Literary History and Method. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Schoeps, Hans-Joachim. 1949. Theologie und Geschichte des Judenchristentums. Tübingen: Mohr (Siebeck). Schweitzer, Albert. 1910. The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede, trans. W. Montgomery. London: Black. ———. 1912. Paul and his Interpreters: A Critical History. Translated by W. Montgomery. London: A. and C. Black. ———. 1925. The Mystery of the Kingdom of God: The Secret of Jesus’ Messiahship and Passion. Translated by Walter Lowrie. London: Black. ———. 1968 [1931]. The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle. Translated by W. Montgomery. New York: Seabury Press. Smith, M.W.A. 1985. An Investigation of the Basis of Morton’s Method for the Determination of Authorship. Style 19 (3): 341–368. Soulen, Richard N., and R.  Kendall Soulen. 2001. Handbook of Biblical Criticism. 3rd ed. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Stace, Walter Terence. 1960. The Teachings of the Mystics. New  York: New American Library. Stausberg, Michael. 1998. Faszination Zarathustra: Zoroaster und die Europäische Religionsgeschichte der Frühen Neuzeit. 2 vols. Berlin and New  York: de Gruyter. Stelzenberger, Johannes. 1961. Syneidesis im neuen Testament. Paderborn: Schoningh. Tabor, James D. 2006. The Jesus Dynasty: The Hidden History of Jesus, His Royal Family, and the Birth of Christianity. New York: Simon & Schuster. Thiselton, Anthony C. 1979. Biblical Classics. VI: Schweitzer’s Interpretation of Paul. Expository Times 90 (5): 132–137. Tholuck, A. 1855. Erneute Untersuchung über σάρξ, als Quelle der Sünde. Theologische Studien und Kritiken 28: 477–497. Thomas, E.J. 1913. Buddhist Scriptures: A Selection Translated from the Pāli. London: John Murray. Tolstoy, Leo. 1934. Church and State. In On Life and Essays on Religion, trans. Aylmer Maude, 331–345. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tyrrell, George. 1910. Christianity at the Cross-Roads. London: Longmans, Green.

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6 Methods and Nietzsche’s Portrait of Christ

In section 13 of The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche declares that “the most valuable insights are methods” (AC §13). To understand The Anti-Christ (and, indeed, Nietzsche’s approach after the Untimely Observations to theology as a whole), we have to understand its methodology, so we must review this statement with some care. Its immediate context is Nietzsche’s assertion at the beginning of this section which invokes one of his most characteristic notions, the idea of “free spirit.”1 Here Nietzsche identifies himself entirely with “free spirit,” declaring that “we ourselves, we free spirits, are already a ‘transvaluation of all values,’ a visualized declaration of war and victory against all the old concepts of ‘true’ and ‘not true’” (AC §13). Nietzsche is going to engage on an argumentational battle, and he is going to win this battle, he believes, because of his secret weapon—methods.

Methods (AC §13 and §59) In so writing, Nietzsche was not articulating anything new. Some fifteen years earlier in a letter of 13 July 1885 to the theologian Franz Overbeck, Nietzsche had written:

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If you could see me sitting amid my books! And what sort of books! In fact, it is only in the last ten years that I have acquired knowledge; from philology I basically only learned methods (for the terrible antiquated bits and pieces were something I had to get rid of, or as it were “muck out”). (KSB 7, 67)

In the intervening years, however, Nietzsche had come to appreciate the importance of methods, not least the genealogical method, according to which the meaning of an object may be revealed by tracing its origin, which is uncovered by genealogy. For Nietzsche to have arrived at this insight—that methods are the real insights—is no mean feat, given that, in his words, “all the methods, all the principles of the scientific spirit of today, were the targets for thousands of years of the most profound contempt” (AC §13). Nietzsche returns to the theme of methods towards the end of The Anti-Christ when he explicitly links methodology with the ancient world—a world that, in historical terms, was wiped out with the advent of Christianity. Section 59 begins with a giant sigh: “The whole labour of the ancient world gone for naught: I have no word to describe the feelings that such an enormity arouses in me” (AC §59). What causes Nietzsche such distress is not simply a sense of nostalgia or a love of antiquity: rather, it is because the “labour” of the ancient world was “merely preparatory” and had been laying “the foundations for a work to go on for thousands of years”—in other words, because of the implications for the future. This preparatory work constitutes, in Nietzsche’s view, “the whole meaning of antiquity”—and a meaning that has since disappeared. Hence the deep sense of melancholy with which Nietzsche regards not just the Greeks, but also the Romans.2 The achievements of the ancient world as he sees them are summarized by Nietzsche as follows: All the prerequisites to a learned culture, all the methods of science, were already there; humankind had already perfected the great and incomparable art of reading profitably—the first necessity to the tradition of culture, the unity of the sciences; the natural sciences, in alliance with mathematics and mechanics, were on the right road,—the sense of fact, the last and more valuable of all the senses, had its schools, and its traditions were already centuries old! (AC §59)

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At first sight it would seem that, in this respect, Nietzsche’s thought has been on something of a journey, given his critique in The Birth of Tragedy of Socratism and Alexandrianism. If Socratism sees the triumph of Socrates, the “theoretical man,” then Alexandrianism sees the triumph of this Socratic culture. Here Nietzsche is thinking of the distinction conventionally made between Alexandrinian period (c. 300 to 30 BCE) of Greek culture and the preceding Attic period (fifth and fourth centuries BCE). That earlier period is associated with the great tragic poets (Aeschylus, Sophocles), with Plato, Aristotle, and Thucydides, as well as with such sculptors as Phidias and Praxiteles. By contrast, nothing symbolizes the achievement of Alexandria, the great intellectual capital of the Hellenic world, more than its great library—science and scholarship replaced tragedy, philosophy, and art as the focus of cultural activity. And this Alexandrinian world is, it turns out, our world too: Our whole modern world is entangled in the net of Alexandrian culture. It proposes as its ideal the theoretical individual equipped with the greatest forces of knowledge, and labouring in the service of science, whose archetype and progenitor is Socrates. (BT §18)

Yet it is important to note that, while Nietzsche opposes here the Alexandrian to the Attic as an instance of decadence or degeneration, his real target is not so much the users of the ancient Library of Alexandria in pursuit of intellectual inquiry, but “the Alexandrian man” of today— someone who is “at bottom a librarian and corrector of proofs, and wretchedly goes blind from the dust of books and from printers’ errors” (BT §18). In other words, Nietzsche is not simply equating nineteenth-­ century Germany with Alexandrian civilization; rather, here he is using Alexandrian civilization as a code for the worst aspects of nineteenth-­ century German intellectual or cultural life—whereas in The Anti-Christ he opposes Alexandrian culture to the “theologian instinct” (AC §9), to the theologians’ “unfitness for philology” (AC §52), understood here as “the art of reading well” (for further discussion, see Chap. 7). Here, too, Nietzsche places “the great, incomparable art of reading well” ahead of natural science, mathematics, and mechanics and, last but (so it seems)

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not least, “the factual sense,” or Thatsachen-Sinn (NK 6/2, 292 2013). This “sense of fact” is an aptitude that Nietzsche associates elsewhere with Schopenhauer. In Human, All-Too-Human, vol. 2, “Assorted Opinions and Maxims,” he cites as an example of Schopenhauer’s Thatsachen-Sinn his view in The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics that “insight into the strict necessity of human actions is the boundary-line which separates philosophical minds from the rest” (Schopenhauer 2010, 190). (For Nietzsche, this insight entirely undermines Schopenhauer’s claim elsewhere that “the ultimate and true explanation of the inner essence of the totality of things must closely cohere with the explanation of the ethical significance of human behaviour” [Schopenhauer 2010, 126], whereas in fact, Nietzsche argues, the earlier proposition proves that precisely the reverse is the case. Here is a classic example of the way in which, for Nietzsche, metaphysics has directly moral implications.) And in The Gay Science, Nietzsche wonders whether it was Schopenhauer’s “hard matter-­ of-­fact sense, his inclination to clearness and rationality, which often makes him appear so English, and so unlike Germans?” (GS §99). It is in this more general sense that, in Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche praises Thucydides as “the great summation, the last revelation of that strong, stern, hard matter-of-factness, which was instinctive in the older Hellenes” (TI Ancients §2). In The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche develops this contrast between the past and the present, a methodological querelle des anciens et des modernes, which is also a contrast in values. Again, what Nietzsche writes here is a reprise of what he had also written in Twilight of the Idols, where he had proposed the case that there was “no better corrective” than Thucydides to “the pitiable tendency to beautify the Greeks in the direction of the ideal, a tendency which the youth ‘trained in humanities’ carries away with him into life as the reward of his public-school drilling” (TI Ancients §2) and where he laments that “the psychological tact of the Germans seems to me to be called in question by a whole series of cases” (TI Expeditions §16): Is all this properly understood? Every essential to the beginning of the work was ready;—and the most essential, it cannot be said too often, are methods, and also the most difficult to develop, and the longest opposed by

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habit and laziness. What we have today reconquered, with unspeakable self-discipline, for ourselves—for certain bad instincts, certain Christian instincts, still lurk in our bodies—that is to say, the keen eye for reality, the cautious hand, patience and seriousness in the smallest things, the whole integrity of knowledge—all these things were already there, and had been there for two thousand years! More, there was also a refined and excellent tact and taste! Not as mere brain-drilling! Not as ‘German’ culture, with its loutish manners! But as body, as bearing, as instinct—in short, as reality … All gone for naught! Overnight it became merely a memory! (AC §59)

What has been lost, Nietzsche claims, was something that had been real. For him, as for Friedrich Schiller in his poem “The Gods of Greece” (Die Götter Griechenlands) (1788)—“Beauteous worlds, where are thou gone? O thou, / Nature’s blooming youth, return once more! / Ah, but in song’s fairy region now / Lives thy fabled trace so dear of yore!”—ancient Greece was not some never-never land. Nor was ancient Rome, which had been concretely and historically present, and present as a political fact, as he argued that the case of the Roman Empire demonstrated: The Greeks! The Romans! Instinctive nobility, taste, methodical inquiry, genius for organization and administration, faith in and the will to secure the future of man, a great yes to everything entering into the imperium Romanum and palpable to all the senses, a grand style that was beyond mere art, but had become reality, truth, life. (AC §59)

The notion of the “grand style” is one that had preoccupied Nietzsche for many years. In Human, All-Too-Human, vol. 2, “The Wanderer and His Shadow,” he had (somewhat whimsically, if mysteriously) noted that “the grand style comes into being when the beautiful wins a victory over the monstrous” (HA II WS §96), while in The Gay Science, in an aphorism under the title “One thing is needful” (one of Nietzsche’s favourite biblical quotations), he observed: “To ‘give style’ to one’s character—that is a grand and a rare art!” (GS §290). And in his Nachlass for Spring 1884, Nietzsche defines the grand style as consisting in “contempt for trivial and brief beauty; it is a sense for what is rare and what lasts long” (KSA 11, 25[321], 95). Not surprisingly, the phrase “the grand style” caught the attention of one of Nietzsche’s shrewdest commentators,

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Martin Heidegger, who understood well (and possibly as no other has done) the significance for Nietzsche of this fundamental notion.3 In his lectures on The Will to Power as Art, Heidegger foregrounded two other passages in the Nachlass selection subsequently published as The Will to Power, associating the “grand style” with Nietzsche’s definition of the “classical style” as “a representation of this calm, simplification, abbreviation, concentration—the highest feeling of power,” as being “to react slowly; a great consciousness; no feeling of struggle” (WP §799 = KSA 13, 14[46], 240). In another aphorism cited in this context by Heidegger, Nietzsche talks about an “overpowering of the fullness of life [….]; measure becomes master; at bottom there is that calm of the strong soul that moves slowly and feels repugnance toward what is too lively” and where “the general rule, the law, is honored and emphasized: the exception, conversely, is set aside, the nuance obliterated”—it is a case where “the firm, powerful, solid, the life that reposes broad and majestic and conceals its strength” (WP §819 = KSA 12, 7[7], 289–290). For Heidegger, as for Nietzsche, there is nothing trivial or unreal about aesthetics: rather, as Heidegger notes, the “grand style” involves “the unity of the reciprocal relation of rapture and beauty, of creation, reception, and form”; in the grand style, he concludes, “the essence of art becomes actual” (in ihm wird das Wesen der Kunst wirklich) (Heidegger 1991, vol. 1, 137). Nietzsche would have agreed with the sentiment of loss, irreparable loss, that suffuses Schiller’s poem “The Gods of Greece,” but Nietzsche’s tone in The Anti-Christ becomes much darker and more savage when he identifies the cause of this loss: “All overwhelmed in a night, but not by a convulsion of nature! Not trampled to death by Teutons and others of heavy hoof!”, he writes (AC §59). Now it took the English historian Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) several volumes to explain the demise of Rome in The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire (6 vols, 1776–1788), but his conclusion (in chapter 38, “General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West”) was a simple one: The story of its ruin is simple and obvious; and, instead of inquiring why the Roman empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long. The victorious legions, who, in distant wars, acquired the

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vices of strangers and mercenaries, first oppressed the freedom of the republic, and afterwards violated the majesty of the purple. The emperors, anxious for their personal safety and the public peace, were reduced to the base expedient of corrupting the discipline which rendered them alike formidable to their sovereign and to the enemy; the vigour of the military government was relaxed, and finally dissolved, by the partial institutions of Constantine; and the Roman world was overwhelmed by a deluge of Barbarians. (Gibbon 1840, 442)

One of the reasons usually given for the Barbarian attacks on Rome is the mass migration that had been brought about by an invasion of Europe by the Huns in the late fourth century, which had the effect of driving many of the Germanic tribes to the borders of the Roman Empire. The attempt to defend the border weakened the Empire and when an invading Barbarian army reached the outskirts of Rome, it found the city had been left undefended. Thus in 410 CE, the Visigoths, under the leadership of Alaric I, breached the walls of Rome, entered the capital of the Roman Empire, and sacked it. (Incidentally, this account is not universally accepted by scholars. For instance, the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne (1862–1935) disputed that the Germanic Barbarians had brought the Western Roman Empire to an end, pointing to a continuity of cultural and political power even after those invasions and arguing that the demise of classical civilization should be dated much later, in the eighth century—and attributed to Arab expansion.) Instead of political, strategic military, or economic reasons, however, Nietzsche identifies one cause for Rome’s demise—a change of outlook he characterizes as a shift in focus away from this world and onto the next, and which he associates with Christianity (NK 6/2, 292–293). Not that he can even bring himself to name the Christians, but instead has recourse to an invective of nocturnal vampirism: But brought to shame by crafty, sneaking, invisible, anaemic vampires! Not conquered,—only sucked dry! … Hidden vengefulness, petty envy, became master! Everything wretched, intrinsically ailing, and invaded by bad feelings, the whole ghetto-world of the soul, was at once on top! (AC §59)

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Nietzsche uses this invective rhetoric elsewhere, railing against how “the concept of guilt and punishment, including the doctrines of ‘grace,’ of ‘salvation,’ of ‘forgiveness’—lies through and through, and absolutely without psychological reality—were devised to destroy man’s sense of causality: they are an attack upon the concept of cause and effect!” (AC §49). And he continues: And not an attack with the fist, with the knife, with honesty in hate and love! On the contrary, one inspired by the most cowardly, the most crafty, the most ignoble of instincts! An attack of priests! An attack of parasites! The vampirism of pale, subterranean leeches! (AC §49)

Although this kind of vituperative discourse strikes us as characteristically Nietzschean, it goes back to one of the earliest polemical texts written against Christianity. Against the Galileans was written by the Roman Emperor known as Julian the Apostate, and in the fragments that have survived (largely thanks to the equally polemical response by Cyril of Alexandria, Contra Julianum) we read: And though you would be following a law that is harsh and stern and contains much that is savage and barbarous, instead of our mild and humane laws, and would in other respects be inferior to us, yet you would be more holy and purer than now in your forms of worship. But now it has come to pass that like leeches you have sucked the worst blood from that source and left the purer. (Julian 1923, 375–377)

It is possible that Nietzsche knew this source, but it is more likely that he may have found a source in Renan’s study of Marcus Aurelius (1882), the thirty-second chapter of which on the social and political revolution brought about by Christianity opens with this arresting passage (NK 6/2, 232): Thus, in proportion as the Empire declines, Christianity rises. During the third century Christianity sucks ancient society like a vampire, drains all its strength, and brings to pass that general enervation, against which the patriotic Emperors are to struggle in vain. Christianity has no need to attack actively; it has but to shut itself up in its churches. It takes its revenge

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in not serving the state, for it keeps almost to itself alone certain principles without which the state cannot prosper. (Renan 1904, 291)

Of this alleged vampiric tendency, Nietzsche names in The Anti-Christ just one example, albeit a famous one—the Church Father St Augustine of Hippo (AC §59). However, in a letter written on 31 March 1885 to his friend Franz Overbeck (not just a theologian, but an expert on Patristics), Nietzsche explained his dislike of Augustine (NK 6/2, 293): I have now been reading, as relaxation, the Confessions of St. Augustine, with much regret that you weren’t here. O, what an old rhetorician! How deceptive and eye-rolling! How I laughed! (for instance, about the ‘theft’ in his youth, basically a student prank) [cf. Confessions, book 2, §3-§10]. What psychological deceit! (for instance, when he is talking about the death of his best friend [cf. Confessions, book 4, §4-§6], with whom he was one heart and soul: that ‘he decided to continue to live, so that in this way his friend might not completely die’ [cf. Confessions, book 4, §6]. That kind of thing is sickeningly dishonest.) Its philosophical value is zero. Vulgarized Platonism, or in other words, a way of thinking that was invented for the highest aristocracy of the soul is adjusted to suit slave natures. Incidentally, in this book one can see the guts of Christianity: I look at it with the curiosity of a radical doctor and physiologist. (KSB 7, 34)

What did Overbeck make of this letter? It is hard to say, because no response has survived (Sommer 1998), but the letter certainly demonstrates well, as Laurence Lampert has noted, Nietzsche’s view of the Christian appropriation of philosophy (Lampert 1993, 364). Furthermore, Lampert links section 59 of The Anti-Christ to section 359 in The Gay Science which offers a portrait of the “ill-constituted person” or “a human being who has turned out badly” (ein missrathener Mensch) and who succumbs to “a habitual state of vengeance and inclination for vengeance” (GS §359) and to the chapter in Thus Spoke Zarathustra entitled “Of the Tarantulas,” which pursues this image of the venomous spider with its poisonous substance of revenge (Z II 7). In The Gay Science Nietzsche remarks that “out of such born enemies of the spirit there arises now and then the rare specimen of humanity who is honoured by the people under the name of saint or sage,” and he

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specifically mentions Augustine (GS §359). To these practitioners of revenge Nietzsche elsewhere adds Tertullian, Thomas Aquinas (GM I §15), and Luther4—as well as Rousseau and Pascal (KSA 12, 9[124], 408).5 In fact, in section 59 of The Anti-Christ Nietzsche extended his view of St Augustine into a judgement about the entire Patristic tradition: One needs but read any of the Christian agitators, for example, St Augustine, in order to realize, in order to smell, what filthy fellows came to the top. It would be an error, however, to assume that there was any lack of understanding in the leaders of the Christian movement:—ah, but they were clever, clever to the point of holiness, these fathers of the Church! What they lacked was something quite different. Nature neglected—perhaps forgot—to give them even the most modest endowment of respectable, of upright, of cleanly instincts. … Between ourselves, they are not even men. (AC §59)

This passage exemplifies well Nietzsche’s strategy of frankly ad hominem attack and for his preference for metaphors of cleanliness (or, in other cases, olfactory metaphors). What one finds here in his depiction of St Augustine is, predictably enough, the reverse of the positive example Nietzsche gives us in Ecce Homo: Now, by what signs are Nature’s lucky strokes recognised among men? They are recognised by the fact that any such lucky stroke gladdens our senses; that he is carved from one integral block, which is hard, sweet, and fragrant as well. He enjoys that only which is good for him; his pleasure, his desire, ceases when the limits of that which are good for him are overstepped. He divines remedies for injuries; he knows how to turn serious accidents to his own advantage; that which does not kill him makes him stronger. (EH Wise §2)

And it is a hallmark of the way in which Ecce Homo treads the line between half-serious, half-joking remarks that Nietzsche rounds off the rest of the description of the person who has “turned out well” by observing that he has just described himself. Similarly, The Anti-Christ plays fast and loose with the categories of the subjective and the objective by elevating Nietzsche’s own personal responses into intellectual-­ historical

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evaluations. In this sense, then, The Anti-Christ exemplifies the claim made in section 13 that “the most valuable insights are methods” by turning Nietzsche’s reliance on intuitive insights itself into a method.

Nietzsche’s Portrait of Christ (AC §29 and §32) In section 125 of The Gay Science we find the famous parable of the madman who announces the death of God. As we saw in Chap. 2, we might describe this as the first of the reasons that Nietzsche gives for atheism: the simple fact that, in terms of belief and practice, human beings in the West have “killed” God—that is, as a matter of fact they have ceased to believe. A second kind of argument in favour of atheism is proposed in Human, All-Too-Human, volume 1, and we could describe this as a psychological argument: Nietzsche argues that “a definite false psychology, a certain kind of fantasy in the interpretation of motives and experiences is the necessary presupposition for becoming a Christian and for feeling the need of redemption,” and he concludes that “with the insight into this aberration of reason and imagination one ceases to be a Christian” (HA I §135). Or as he puts it in Daybreak, the “historical refutation” is the “decisive” one: “Formerly it was sought to prove that there was no God— now it is shown how the belief that a God existed could have originated and by what means this belief gained authority and importance: in this way the counterproof that there is no God becomes unnecessary and superfluous” (D §95). This psychological or historical account is extended later by Nietzsche into a genealogical account of morality (see On the Genealogy of Morals): we become aware of the reasons why morality had come into being, and on this basis, we then reject it. For Nietzsche, the killer question is: have we really become more moral? (TI Expeditions §37)—and this question can even bring about the death of the deity. Thus Nietzsche’s case against God is clear: for him, it is not simply a question of whether God exists, it is rather that we no longer believe in Him. So it is interesting to see how in The Anti-Christ Nietzsche approaches the figure of Jesus. For in The Anti-Christ Nietzsche does in fact paint quite a distinct, if idiosyncratic, portrait of Christ. This portrait begins in section 24, where Nietzsche raises the question of “the origin of

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Christianity” (AC §24), a phrase that recalls the vast work by Ernest Renan (1823–1892), Histoire des origines du Christianisme (8 vols, 1863–1883). In respect of its origin, Nietzsche emphasizes that “Christianity is to be understood only by examining the soil from which it sprung—it is not a reaction against Jewish instincts; it is their inevitable product; it is simply one more step in the awe-inspiring logic of the Jews” (AC §24). On one level, Nietzsche is obviously right: in the New Testament Christ is born as a Jew; he is brought up, lives, and dies in the Holy Land; his first followers were all Jews; and, as a text, the New Testament is full of references and allusions to Jewish scripture. On another level, Nietzsche cites the famous passage from the Gospel according to John, where Christ is presented as spending time among Samaritans (a separate ethnoreligious group claiming descent from the tribes of Ephraim and of Manasseh, but presented in 2 Kings 17:24–41 as descended from Assyrian, i.e., non-­ Yahwistic origin, and hence people from whom Jews should distance themselves).6 Speaking with a Samaritan woman at a well, Jesus declares, “salvation is of the Jews” (John 4:22) and, because of this historical background, Christ’s conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well in the Gospel of John would have been, like his parable of the “good Samaritan” (Luke 10), a cause for consternation, even shock, to his fellow Jews. As the commentary in the New Jerusalem Bible points out, meetings at a well were a feature of the patriarchal narratives, and wells and springs played an important part in the life and religion of the patriarchal and Exodus periods (NJB, NT, 1751). So this episode is rich in symbolism, since spring water symbolized life as a divine gift, especially in the future messianic age, as well as the life inspired by divine wisdom and by the Law. The gospel narrative develops this symbolism by equating spring water with the gift of the Spirit; in short, it is an extremely significant episode, at the heart of which stands Christ’s remark, “salvation is of the Jews.” In part, this remark reinforces the distinction between the Samaritans and the Jews, only immediately to undermine it by announcing that the distinction will soon be superseded: “But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true adorers shall adore the Father in spirit and in truth” (John 4:22–23). In part, it captures the essence of an argument

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found in Paul’s Letter to the Romans, where he discusses the privileges of Israel in relation to the history of salvation (Romans 9:4–5).7 Yet for Nietzsche, this remark, which he later cites a second time (AC §58), is to be read in the reductive sense that Christianity is a product of what he calls the logic of Judaism. Nietzsche introduces a second principle when he writes that “the psychological type of the Galilean is still to be recognized, but it was only in its most degenerate form (which is at once maimed and overladen with foreign features) that it could serve in the manner in which it has been used: as a type of the Saviour of humankind” (AC §24). Behind the figure of the Saviour, Nietzsche believes that the original picture of the “Galilean,” one of the expressions used by Renan to refer to the historical Jesus, can be recovered, or at last some if its outlines. Across several sections of The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche thus offers a portrait of Christ as he, Nietzsche, conceives him. In fact, in section 29 Nietzsche goes so far as to say he cares greatly about the “psychological type of the redeemer,” suggesting that this type “might be depicted in the Gospels, in however a mutilated form and however much overladen with extraneous characters—that is, in spite of the Gospels” (AC §29). Nietzsche proposes an analogy with the figure of St Francis of Assisi, which “shows itself in his legends in spite of his legends” (AC §29), a comparison he borrows from Renan’s Vie de Jésus (= Histoire des origines du Christianisme, vol. 1) (NK 6/2, 151). Yet Nietzsche is remarkably ungracious, or even rude, about his source, describing Renan as “this buffoon in psychologicis” and dismissing Renan’s “attempts […] to read the Gospels even as the history of a ‘soul’” as “a hateful sort of psychological thoughtlessness” (AC §29).8 For Nietzsche, Renan and critics like him have missed the point: “It is not a question of mere truthful evidence as to what he did, what he said and how he actually died; the question is, whether his type is still conceivable, whether it has been handed down to us” (AC §29). In other words: are modern human beings in a position to understand who or what Jesus was? Nietzsche is swift to reject two key ways in which Renan understood Christ—with reference to the concepts of the genius (génie) and the hero (héros). These concepts are, in Nietzsche’s view, “the most inappropriate concepts imaginable,” because “if anything is unevangelical, it is the

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concept of a hero” (AC §29). By hero, Nietzsche means the Greek concept of ἥρως (hērōs), a hero or warrior figure, such as Hercules, who enjoys a divine or semi-divine status (Nagy 2013).9 To this extent, it might even seem at first sight a highly appropriate concept, so what are Nietzsche’s objections? First, in the figure of Jesus Nietzsche sees the exact reverse of the hero—indeed, a kind of anti-hero: “What the gospels make instinctive is precisely the reverse of all heroic struggle, of all taste for conflict: the very incapacity for resistance is here converted into something moral: […] to wit, the blessedness of peace, of gentleness, of the inability to be an enemy” (AC §29). To support this reading, Nietzsche turns one of the great passages of the New Testament, the Sermon on the Mount, and the verse where Christ enjoins the listening crowds “not to resist evil” (Matthew 5:39): “‘Resist not evil!’—the most profound sentence in the gospels, perhaps the true key to them,” Nietzsche says (AC §29). Nietzsche couples this emphasis on a Christian version of amor fati (or the love of one’s fate) with the vision captured in the New Testament notion of “glad tidings” (cf. Luke 1:19 and 8:1; Acts 13:32; and Romans 10:15), a notion implicit in the very idea of the gospel itself (cf. Matthew 11:5; Luke 4:18, 7:22, 9:6, and 20:1). Those “glad tidings,” far from being contemptuously dismissed by Nietzsche, are paraphrased by him as follows: “The true life, the life eternal has been found—it is not merely promised, it is here, it is in you; it is the life that lies in love free from all retreats and exclusions, from all keeping of distances” (AC §29). Grasping, rightly, as the implication of these “glad tidings” that “every one is the child of God” and that “as the child of God each man is the equal of every other man,” Nietzsche emphasizes that Jesus “claims nothing for himself alone” and concludes that, as a consequence, it is incorrect to describe Jesus as a “hero,” given this term’s connotations of exclusive divine or semi-divine status. By the same token, Nietzsche dismisses the other terms used by Renan in relation to Jesus, génie. In this context, Nietzsche does not mean “genius” in the sense of the divine element in a human being or a location, such as the genius of the emperor in the ancient Roman Imperial cult or the divine spirit of a place, but rather in the sense of a

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distinguished individual, related to the idea of the grand homme (Currie 1974; Onfray 2011, 13–48). In fact, Nietzsche expounds this sense in the section of Twilight of the Idols entitled “My notion of genius”: Great men, like great periods, are explosive materials in which an immense force is accumulated; it is always pre-requisite for such men, historically and physiologically, that for a long period there has been a collecting, a heaping up, an economising, and a hoarding, with respect to them, that for a long time no explosion has taken place. (TI Expeditions §44)

Interestingly, Nietzsche notes that in the popular imagination there is an intersection between the hero and the genius, but this is, he insists, a mistake: The genius—in work, in deed—is necessarily a squanderer; his greatness is that he expends himself. The instinct of self-preservation is, as it were, out of gear in the genius; the over-powerful pressure of the outflow of his energies forbids all such care and foresight. People call this ‘sacrifice’, they praise the heroism of genius, his indifference to his own welfare, his devotion to an idea, to a great cause, or to his country: it is all misunderstanding, however. (TI Expeditions §44)

On the face of it, there might be good reason to apply the term “genius” in this sense to the figure of Jesus, but Nietzsche rejects this option, on the basis that to do so would reduce the sense of something “other.” “Our whole conception of the ‘spiritual,’ the whole conception of our civilization,” says Nietzsche, “could have had no meaning in the world that Jesus lived in” (AC §29). So what conception would be appropriate for the world in which Jesus lived? Nietzsche suggests a startlingly provocative term—“idiot,” albeit used in the physiological sense. Yet Nietzsche does not mean ἰδιώτης, idiōtēs (a private citizen or individual) in the ancient Greek sense, or in the sense that Renan writes that “it would be a great error to imagine that Jesus was what we would call un ignorant.”10 Rather it is in the sense that, in Dostoevsky’s famous novel that bears this name, Prince Myshkin, is an

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idiot (NK 6/2, 156). After all, Nietzsche understands “idiot” in a specific psychopathological sense: We all know there is a morbid sensibility of the tactile nerves which causes those suffering from it to recoil from every touch, and from every effort to grasp a solid object. Brought to its logical conclusion, such a physiological habitus becomes an instinctive hatred of all reality, a flight into the ‘intangible’, into the ‘incomprehensible’; a distaste for all formulae, for all conceptions of time and space, for everything established—customs, institutions, the Church —; a feeling of being at home in a world in which no sort of reality survives, a merely ‘inner’ world, a ‘true’ world, an ‘eternal’ world. (AC §29)

All of which Nietzsche rounds off with a reference to the famous passage in the Gospel of Luke, “for, lo, the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21). And in the following section Nietzsche goes on to expand this condition of “idiocy” into “the two physiological realities upon and out of which the doctrine of salvation has sprung,” viz.: an “instinctive hatred of reality” which is “the consequence of an extreme susceptibility to pain and irritation—so great that merely to be ‘touched’ becomes unendurable, for every sensation is too profound,” and an “instinctive exclusion of all hostility, all bounds and distances in feeling” which is “the consequence of an extreme susceptibility to pain and irritation” (AC §30). On this account, then, noli me tangere (i.e., “do not touch me”), the famous words spoken by the post-resurrection Christ in the Gospel of John when Mary Magdalene recognizes him (John 20:17), would represent “a sublime super-development of hedonism upon a thoroughly unsalubrious soil”— hence the proximity for Nietzsche of Christianity to Epicureanism or “the theory of salvation of paganism” (AC §30). Nevertheless, there remains something provocative, even bitter, about the term “idiot,” which led Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche to excise it from the editions of The Anti-Christ she published (NK 6/2, 155). It is true that when Petrarch (1304–1374) in his De Sui Ipsius et Multorum Ignorantia (On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others) (1368) denounces those contemporary Venetian intellectuals and

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Averroists—whose “greatest glory is to make some confused and baffling statements which neither they nor anyone else can understand” and who, “puffed up with their outlandish fabrications, […] are particularly pleased with themselves for having learned the art of lecturing and declaiming about everything, when in fact they know nothing”—he does so by suggesting his opponents would accuse Christ of being an idiot (or ignoramus). “Not daring to make overt professions,” Petrarch wrote, “they deny our faith in covert protestations, at times using serious and sophistical blasphemies, and at times using distasteful jests or rank and impious jokes,” and “isn’t this the same […] as seeking what is true while rejecting the truth? Or the same as leaving behind the sun, entering into the profound and obscure abysses of the earth, and hoping to find light in the darkness there?”; in short, “how must a Christian man of letters appear to men who say that our lord and master Christ was an ignoramus?”11 Yet perhaps the best sense of what Nietzsche might have meant by describing Christ as an idiot can be found in a passage from Meta von Salis-Marschlins’s memoir of her friendship with Nietzsche: On our second [walk] we suddenly met all my closest friends from the Alpenrose, lots of young, cheerful girls all dressed up in bright clothes. The contrast between their carefree charm and the very weighty matter that the philosopher had just been discussing could not have been greater. Dostoevsky’s Idiot and the figure of Jesus in the four gospels!12

On this reading, idiocy is a cipher for “carefree charm,” and while these young Alpine girls are said to contrast with the “weightier” matters under discussion, their “carefree charm” expresses exactly what Nietzsche saw as significant about Dostoevsky’s “idiot” and the gospel Jesus. Another term used to describe Jesus but rejected by Nietzsche is the term “fanatic,” on the basis of a contrast he establishes between “the type of the saviour” and Renan’s use of the term impérieux, which “alone is enough to annul the type” (AC §32). In the fifth volume of his History of the Origins of Christianity, entitled The Gospels, Renan describes Christ as “this young Jew, at once gentle and terrible, distinguished and imperious, naïve and profound, full of the disinterested zeal of a sublime morality and the ardour of an exalted personality.”13 For the “glad tidings,” as

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Nietzsche understands them, consist precisely in the absence of this and all other contrasts and contradictions: “[…] the kingdom of heaven belongs to children; the faith that is voiced here is no more an embattled faith—it is at hand, it has been from the beginning, it is a sort of recrudescent childishness of the spirit” (AC §32). In so writing, Nietzsche echoes the words of Christ in the Gospel of Matthew, “Suffer the little children, and forbid them not to come to me: for the kingdom of heaven is for such” (Matthew 19:14). The sense in which St John Chrysostom reads this passage (Homilies, no. 63) is paraphrased by George Leo Haydock as follows: “If we would enter into the kingdom of heaven, we must imitate the virtues of little children. Their souls are free from passion; void of every thought of revenge, they approach those that have grieved them as to their best friends […] They seek not beyond what is necessary, they admire not the beauty of the body, they are not grieved at the loss of wordly wealth, therefore does the Saviour of the world say, that theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (H, 1288). Now the children in the Gospel of Matthew and the children in St John Chrysostom’s homily are very different from the child imagined in Nietzsche’s The Will to Power: “One would make a fit little boy stare if one asked him: ‘Would you like to become virtuous?’—but he will open his eyes wide if asked: ‘Would you like to become stronger than your friends?’” (WP §485 = KSA 13, 15[98], 464). Yet one recalls that the child is the final of the three stages of the metamorphosis of the spirit in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and that in The Will to Power Nietzsche invokes the Heraclitean image of a child at play when he writes: “‘Play,’ the useless—as the ideal of him who is overfull of strength, as ‘childlike.’ The ‘childlikeness’ of God, παῖς παίζων [pais paizon, i.e., a child at play]” (WP §797 = KSA 12, 2[130], 129).14 Nietzsche spells out the implications of what such a childlike faith would look like: A faith of this sort is not furious, it does not denounce, it does not defend itself: it does not come with “the sword” [cf. Matthew 10:34]—it does not realize how it will one day set man against man [cf. Matthew 10:35]. It does not manifest itself either by miracles, or by rewards and promises, or by ‘scriptures’: it is itself, first and last, its own miracle, its own reward, its own promise, its own ‘kingdom of God.’ (AC §32)

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In this passage, Nietzsche alludes to Christ’s own words in the Gospel of Matthew which recognize that he, Jesus, will be a cause of dissension. “Do not think that I am come to send peace upon earth,” Christ warns the Twelve, “I came not to send peace, but the sword” (Matthew 10:34), the sword here being (as Haydock observes) the gospel itself. (In the Letter to the Hebrews, the “word of God,” i.e. the logos or Son of God, is described as being “living and effectual, and more penetrating than any two-edged sword” [Hebrews 4:12].) And the continuation of this passage is again echoed by Nietzsche, “For I am come to set man at variance against man, against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law” (Matthew 10:35), itself an allusion to the prophet Micah (cf. Micah 7:6). Nietzsche bristles at the phrase, “according to the scriptures,” a key idea in the New Testament and found in the Gospels and Pauline epistles alike. In Mark, Jesus answers a question from one of the scribes as to the greatest commandment of them all by citing scriptures (Deut. 6:4–5), to which the scribe replies by picking up these allusions to Deuteronomy and makes further scriptural allusions, to which in turn Jesus responds, “Thou are not far from the kingdom of heaven” (Mark 12:28–34). And when foretelling the denial of Peter, Jesus refers to Zechariah (13:7) and makes explicit that he is doing so: “You will all be scandalized in me this night: for it is written: I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep shall be dispersed” (Mark 14:27). In the Gospel of John, Christ himself cries out, “He that believeth in me, as Scripture saith, out of his belly show flow rivers of living water” (John 7:38) (although which passages of scripture is unclear), and later in one of the great farewell discourses, Jesus prays to the Father and says, “Those whom thou gavest me, I have kept: and none of them hath perished, but the son of perdition, that the Scripture may be fulfilled” (John 17:12) (although, again, the allusion is unclear). Then again, in his discussion of the resurrection of the dead in the First Letter to the Corinthians, Paul reminds the believers in Corinth that “Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures,” and that “he was buried, and that he rose again the third day, according to the Scriptures” (15:3–4). Neither scriptural concordance, nor miracles, rewards, promises are characteristics of this kind of faith as Nietzsche conceives it.

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How does or how would one communicate such a faith? (The problem of communication is, after all, one that is extensively foregrounded in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, with all its parodies of biblical themes and images.) This question is one that Nietzsche addresses head-on: This faith does not formulate itself—it simply lives, and so guards itself against formulae. To be sure, the accident of environment, of educational background gives prominence to concepts of a certain sort: in primitive Christianity one finds only concepts of a Judaeo-Semitic character (— that of eating and drinking at the Last Supper belongs in this category—an idea which, like everything else Jewish, has been badly mauled by the Church). But let us be careful not to see in all this anything more than symbolical language [eine Zeichenrede], semiotics [eine Semiotik], an opportunity to speak in parables [Gleichnissen]. (AC §32)

Nietzsche’s approach here is, curiously enough, akin to the one taken in the twentieth century by the Protestant theologian, Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976), who undertook to “demythologize” Christianity and reduce it to its theological kernel, its kerygma, as he called it.15 In a remark whose significance is easily overlooked, Nietzsche says that “precisely the fact that no word is taken literally is, for this anti-realist, the precondition that he can speak at all” (Gerade, dass kein Wort wörtlich genommen ist, ist diesem Anti-Realisten die Vorbedingung, um überhaupt reden zu können) (AC §32). Had Jesus been an Indian, Nietzsche suggests, Jesus would have used concepts from one of the six āstika schools of Hindu philosophy, known as Samkhya or Sankhya (sāṃ khya); had he been Chinese, he would have used concepts from Taoism, the religious or philosophical tradition said to have been founded by Lao-Tzu, the reputed author of the Tao Te Ching. “In neither case would it have made any difference to him,” Nietzsche adds. Yet does this also mean that this faith as Nietzsche presents it could also be translated into Nietzschean terms? There is good reason to think that it might, because Nietzsche goes on to talk about Jesus as a “free spirit” (in AC §32), a category very obviously associated with Nietzschean thought, and as a “symbolist” (see AC §34). “Using the phrase somewhat loosely,” Nietzsche admits, one could call Jesus a “free spirit,” on the basis

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that “he cares nothing for what is established: the word killeth, anything that is established killeth” (AC §32).16 Instead, repelled by “every sort of word, formula, law, belief and dogma,” Christ “speaks only of inner things,” using the terms “life,” “truth,” or “light” to speak about “the innermost” (AC §32). Such a faith is entirely non-discursive, for it lies entirely beyond discourse; as Nietzsche puts it, “dialectic [die Dialektik] is missing, there is no conception that a belief, a ‘truth,’ could be grounded in reasons,” for “his ‘proofs’ are inner ‘lights,’ inner feelings of pleasure and self-affirmations, pure ‘proofs of strength’” (AC §32). By “proofs of strength” (Beweise der Kraft), Nietzsche is referring to a phrase found in the Pauline epistles and with which he had already engaged on previous occasions.17

 eweise der Kraft or “Proofs of Strength” (AC B §32 and §50) In the opening to the First Letter to the Corinthians, Paul begins by addressing himself to the divisions and scandals in the Corinthian church at the time. He seeks to unite those factions in the church and to resolve the dissensions among the faithful by reminding them of his own preaching, distinguishing in so doing between the true wisdom—and the false. Paul writes: “And I was with you in weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling: and my speech, and my preaching was not in the persuasive words of human wisdom, but in the shewing of the spirit and power: that your faith might not stand on the wisdom of men, but on the power of God” (1 Cor. 2: 3–5). In his commentary, Haydock glosses the phrase the shewing of the spirit and power with reference to “the gifts of the Holy Ghost bestowed on those that believed, and the miracles which God wrought by his apostles” as being “the means God made use of to convert the world, which were of much greater force than human eloquence” (H, 1501–1502). The New Jerusalem Bible translates the phrase as “to demonstrate the convincing power of the Spirit,” and in its commentary it sees in these words an allusion to those miracles and outpourings of the Spirit that had

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accompanied Paul’s preaching (NJB, NT, 1893). In Luther’s translation, the phrase is translated in Beweisung des Geistes und der Kraft, and since the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), this passage had become very popular in theological and homiletical contexts.18 For instance, in his essay “On the Proof of the Spirit and Power” (1777), Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) interprets Jesus’s warning about false prophets at the end of the Sermon on the Mount, “By their fruits shall ye know them” (Matthew 7:16; cf. 7:20), by taking as his starting point Origen’s argument in his treatise Against Celsus, namely: “Because of the prodigious miracles which may be proved to have happened by this argument among many others, that traces of them still remain among those who lives according to the will of the Logos” (Contra Celsum, 1.2; Lessing 1956, 51–56). In the course of his argument that “accidental truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason,” Lessing ponders the effect of pious legends and concludes, “What does it matter to me whether the legend is true or false? The fruits are excellent” (ibid., 53 and 55). In the section of the first volume of Human, All-Too-Human, devoted to the theme of “The Religious Life,” Nietzsche had commented caustically on this doctrine, dubbing it “the testimony of pleasure,” on the basis that “the agreeable opinion is accepted as true” (HA I §120); by implication (and by demonstration in much of the rest of his writing), Nietzsche plainly believes the reverse to be true. He returns to this theme and gives it a much longer treatment in The Gay Science, section 347, entitled “Believers and their Need of Belief.” The starting point of this reflection is his observation that “how much faith one requires in order to flourish, how much ‘fixed opinion’ one requires which one does not wish to have shaken, because one clings to it” is “a measure of the degree of one’s strength (or, speaking more plainly, of one’s weakness)” (GS §347). In this aspect of Christianity, now as in the past, Nietzsche finds evidence of a psychological truth: “For such is man: a theological dogma might be refuted to him a thousand times,—provided, however, that he had need of it, he would again and again accept it as ‘true,’—according to the famous ‘proof of strength’ of which the Bible speaks” (GS §347). Nietzsche goes on to consider the “longing for certainty” that expresses

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itself not simply in the persistence of metaphysics, but in the modern form of scientific positivism. Nietzsche argues that faith of this kind is a reaction and a response to a lack of will; in this respect, he argues, Buddhism and Christianity have much in common (see the later passages in The Anti-Christ comparing Buddhism and Christianity).19 Fanaticism, Nietzsche claims, is “the sole ‘volitional strength’ to which the weak and irresolute can be excited,” so that “when a human being arrives at the fundamental conviction that he must be commanded, he becomes ‘a believer’” (GS §347). By contrast, Nietzsche envisages a will that is so free, so strong, that it can entertain not just doubt, but complete uncertainty, turning this capacity for uncertainty into an index for what he calls “free spirit”: Conversely, one could imagine a delight and a power of self-determining, and a freedom of will, whereby a spirit could bid farewell to every belief, to every wish for certainty, accustomed as it would be to support itself on slender cords and possibilities, and to dance even on the verge of abysses. Such a spirit would be free spirit par excellence. (GS §347)

The theme of the free spirit returns in Twilight of the Idols in the famous encomium of Goethe (TI Expeditions §49), as does the theme of der Beweis der Kraft, which Nietzsche playfully reformulates the phrase as “the excess of strength only is the proof of strength” (TI Foreword). He refers again to the phrase in the context of the psychological explanation he offers for the “error of imaginary causes” (TI Errors §5). And in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche appropriates the phrase for himself when he writes of “the overcoming of pity” that “to remain master here, here to keep the elevation of one’s task clean of the many lower and more shortsighted drives which are active in so-called selfless actions, that is the test, the final test perhaps, which a Zarathustra has to pass—the actual proof of his strength” (EH Wise §4). In a Nachlass note from the period Summer 1872 to early 1873, part of a series of reflections entitled “The Philosopher: Reflections on the Struggle of Art and Knowledge,” Nietzsche analyses the struggle that takes place internal to the philosopher in terms of a contrast—between, on the one hand, the “optimistic metaphysics” of logic, which gradually

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“poisons and falsifies everything,” and, on the other, a “sense of truth” that “derives from love,” itself a “proof of strength” (KSA 7, 19[103], 453; Nietzsche 1995, 36–37). (This expression of “beatifying truth out of love” is based upon knowledge attained by the individual “which he does not need to communicate, but whose ebullient beatitude compels him to do so.” Is Nietzsche talking about religion, or is he talking about himself here…?) And in a further Nachlass note from Spring 1888 entitled “How Virtue comes to Power,” Nietzsche cites Jesus’s warning about false prophets at the end of the Sermon on the Mount, “By their fruits shall ye know them” (Matthew 7:16; cf. 7:20), which he glosses as follows: “‘By their fruits shall ye know them’—namely, our ‘truths’: this is the priestly way of reasoning still today” (KSA 13, 15[71], 452). In so responding, Nietzsche rejects both the biblical passage and its Enlightenment equivalent (along with its postmodern version, “if it feels this good, it must be true”). Following his allusion in section 32 of The Anti-Christ to “proof of strength,” Nietzsche refers to it again (and much more extensively) in section 50, where he provides “a psychology of ‘belief,’ of the ‘believer,’ for the special benefit of ‘believers’” and engages at length with the proposition, “Faith makes blessed: therefore it is true” (AC §50; cf. NK 6/2, 233–235). Nietzsche comes to the conclusion that, in fact, the reverse is the case, and in words that recall his Preface where he calls for readers who have “an inclination, born of strength, for questions that no one has the courage for; the courage for the forbidden; predestination for the labyrinth” (AC Preface), he describes the service of truth as the hardest service: The experience of all disciplined and profound minds teaches the contrary. Man has had to fight for every atom of the truth, and has had to pay for it almost everything that the heart, that human love, that human trust cling to. Greatness of soul is needed for this business: the service of truth is the hardest of all services. (AC §50)

Thus for Nietzsche the meaning of integrity or honesty in all intellectual or spiritual matters involves the following: “That you are strict with your heart, that you look down on ‘beautiful feelings,’ that you make

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every Yes and No a matter of conscience!” (AC §50). Inverting the formulation found in this section, Nietzsche concludes: “Faith makes blessed: therefore, it lies” (AC §50). We are so used to reading Nietzsche (or not reading him) that it is easy to overlook the significant fact that he is insisting here on the criterion of truth. Nietzsche is far from advocating any postmodern relativism or embracing an attitude of “anything goes”—quite the contrary. In the first of his Essays, Civil and Moral, entitled “Of Truth,” Francis Bacon (1561–1626)—whose motif of the idols inspired in part the titular and thematic image of Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols—famously wrote: “‘What is truth?’ said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer,” referring to the exchange between Christ and Pontius Pilate as recorded by John. Leaving aside the tricky question of which language they would have been speaking (Latin or Greek?), Pilate asks Christ, “Art thou a king then?”, to which Christ replies, “Thou sayest that I am a king. For this was I born, and for this I came into the world, that I should give testimony to the truth: everyone that is of the truth, heareth my voice.” To which Pilate responds, “What is truth?” (John 18:37–38). For the British analytic philosopher, J.L. Austin (1911–1960), Bacon’s response to this episode wryly captures the prescience of Pilate’s remark: “‘What is truth?’ said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer. Pilate was in advance of his time. For ‘truth’ itself is an abstract noun, a camel, that is, of a logical construction, which cannot get past the eye even of a grammarian” (Austin 1961, 85). Yet one of Nietzsche’s translators, R.J. Hollingdale, discovers in Bacon’s response a springboard to a meditation on the profundity of Pilate’s original question: ‘What is truth?’ said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer. If he had stayed, what answer would he have received? There cannot be any doubt: Jesus would have said: I am the truth. This too is Zarathustra’s answer to the question ‘what is truth?’. For what, at this level, is truth, ‘the truth’? Isn’t it the discovery that no truth is discoverable except the truth which you yourself are? that there is no truth (sense, meaning) in the world except the truth (sense, meaning) you yourself give it? (Hollingdale 1969, 25)

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Far from dismissing the question, as Pilate does (and so many postmodernists do), Nietzsche is profoundly, even desperately, concerned with the question of (the) truth! Yet there is one aspect of the truth that Nietzsche chooses never directly to address: namely, the question—did Jesus ever exist?

Did Jesus Ever Exist? Precisely this question was famously posed in the title of a lecture, “Jésus a-t-il existé?”, given in March 1932 at the Union Rationaliste in Paris by the French historian of religion, Prosper Alfaric (1876–1955).20 And Alfaric’s answer—in the negative—is echoed in the work of more recent commentators, such as Robert M. Price, who espouse the Christ myth theory (sometimes also known as the Jesus myth, Jesus mythicism, or Jesus ahistoricity theory).21 While Rudolf Bultmann may have quipped that no sane person could doubt that Jesus existed, in fact he himself came surprisingly close to the same opinion, as did Paul Tillich (Price 2011, 16). Others have been more forthright, such as G.A. Wells (1926–2017), a professor of German at Birkbeck, University of London, who turned from writing about Johann Gottfried Herder and Franz Grillparzer to expounding the mythicist position. As an advocate of the Christ myth theory, Wells discounted the gospel story of an historical Jesus, an itinerant teacher and miracle worker, on the grounds of its seeming absence from the Pauline Epistle literature, which is earlier than the gospels.22 Or, if a historical figure had existed, Wells argued, the Gospel figure of Jesus arose by projecting the supernatural traits of the Pauline epistles onto the human preacher of Q, a hypothetical document preserving reminiscences of an itinerant miracle worker and preacher. But could an historical hero have attracted to himself the standard flattering legends and myths to the extent that the original lines of the figure could no longer be discerned (Price 2011, 19)? Price points to the first-century CE figure of Apollonius of Tyana, an itinerant Neo-Pythagorean contemporary of Jesus, with whom ancient writers often compared him, as a case in point (Price 2011, 19). Adopting

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the central axiom of form criticism, that is, “nothing would have been passed down in the tradition unless it was useful to prove some point, to provide some precedent,” as well as the criterion of dissimilarity, that is, “the closer a Jesus-saying seems to match the practice or teaching of the early Church, the greater likelihood that it stems from the latter and has been placed fictively into the speech or life of Jesus merely to secure its authority,” these two principles (in Price’s view) cancel each other out. “All pericopae of the Jesus tradition owe their survival to the fact that they were useful,” he concludes, and “none of it need go back to Jesus” (ibid., 19–20). Indeed, “virtually every story in the gospels and Acts” can be shown, Price argues, to be very likely “a Christian rewrite of material from the Septuagint, Homer, Euripides’ Bacchae, and Josephus” (ibid., 20), and in an earlier study of New Testament narrative as Old Testament midrash, a form of commentary on the Hebrew scriptures using a mode of interpretation found in the Talmud, he proceeds to demonstrate as much (Price 2005). That said, Price concedes that there are strong arguments for an historical Jesus; for instance, one can “very plausibly read certain texts in Acts, Mark, and Galatians as fossils preserving the memory of a succession struggle following the death of Jesus, who, therefore, must have existed,” that is, should it be his disciples or his own relatives (Price 2011, 21–22)? The existence of this struggle implies not just an historical Jesus, but an historical Jesus of a particular type, that is, a latter-day Judah Maccabee, a revolutionary figure. According to S.G.F. Brandon, the originally revolutionary character of Jesus was subsequently sanitized and made politically harmless by Mark in his gospel (Brandon 1967). But the evidence for the Zealot Jesus hypothesis can also be read another way: as Burton L. Mack has suggested, the political element in the Passion probably represents an anachronistic confusion on the part of Mark with events leading to the fall of Jerusalem, and thus the evidence for the Zealot Jesus disintegrates (Mack 1996) (for further discussion, see Chap. 7). Price’s approach is based on a number of methodological presuppositions, chief among which is the principle of analogy, namely, that “when we are looking at an ancient account, we must judge it according to the analogy of our experience and that of our trustworthy contemporaries” (Price

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2011, 24–25). Accordingly, if a text looks more like a legend and less like a verifiable modern experience, one should conclude it involves the former. For example, because the story of Jesus walking on the water bears a strong resemblance to ancient stories in which Hermes, or Pythagoras, or the Buddha walk on water, then one should surely conclude that this is a legend too (ibid., 25). Another methodological presupposition is the principle of dissimilarity (as formulated by Norman Perrin), namely, that “no saying ascribed to Jesus may be counted as probably authentic if it has parallels in Jewish or early Christian sayings” (ibid., 27). And a third presupposition is the central tenet of form criticism (see above), viz., that in order to be transmitted, every gospel pericope must have had some pragmatic use (ibid., 28). Citing the view of F.C. Baur (1792–1860) that, while anything is possible, one has to ask “what is probable?” (Price 2011, 28), Price urges us to remember what an Ideal Type means, as well as to remember the importance for the historical Jesus question of such topics as the Mystery Religions, the theios aner (θεῖος ἀνήρ) (i.e., the perfect or divine man), the dying and rising gods, and Gnosticism.23 For although an Ideal type is “a textbook definition made up of the regularly recurring features common to the phenomena in question,” this type does not, however, preclude distinctiveness or require absolute likeness (ibid., 29). Consequently, consensus is “no criterion,” and scholarly “conclusions” must be tentative, provisional, and always open to revision (ibid., 29–30).

Traditional Christ-Myth Theory In The Christ-Myth Theory and Its Problems, Price surveys the success of the mythicist approach to the question of the historicity of Jesus. To begin with, this approach asks one great question, “why is there no mention of a miracle-working Jesus in secular sources?” (Price 2011, 30). (Remarkably, this is not a question ever posed by Nietzsche.) Then, the theory posits that “the epistles, earlier than the gospels, do not evidence a recent historical Jesus” (Price 2011, 31). (Nor is the question of the relation between the epistles and the gospels ever raised by Nietzsche.) After all, from the epistles alone the reader would not guess than Jesus died in

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any particular historical or political context (unlike from the Creed, which asserts boldly that Christ “suffered under Pontius Pilate”). Rather, a reader contemporary with their composition might assume (on the basis of Colossians 2:15) that the fallen angels, or the archons of this age, had been responsible, unaware that thereby (1 Corinthians 2:6–8) they had been sealing their own doom (Price 2011, 31). Then again, no miracles are mentioned in the Epistles, and the “commands of the Lord” mentioned by Paul himself (1 Cor. 7:10–11; 1 Cor. 9:14; 1 Cor.11: 23–25; 1 Thess. 4:15–17) could be midrashically derived inferences from Old Testament commands of Adonai in the Torah. Equally, the account of the Last Supper (1 Cor. 11:23–26) might not have been written by Paul but, if it was, it can be read (as it has been by Hyam Maccoby) as Paul comparing himself to Moses, someone who receives material directly from Adonai and transmits it to his fellow mortals (Maccoby 1991, 92–93). Thus Paul could have apprehended the Last Supper in a vision, in a similar way to how the nineteenth-century German mystic Anna Katharina Emmerich (1774–1824) is said to have beheld the “dolorous passion” of Christ in a series of visions24—some of which subsequently influenced Mel Gibson’s controversial film, The Passion of the Christ (2004). On the basis of the epistles, all one would know about is “a Jesus Christ, Son of God, who came into the world to die as a sacrifice for human sin and was raised by God and enthroned in heaven” (Price 2011: 33). Some early mythicists, such as G.A. Wells (see above) and the Swedish scholar Alvar Ellegård (1919–2008), suggested that the first Christians envisaged Jesus as someone who had lived as an historical figure, only not in the recent past (much as the Greeks believed Hercules or Achilles had lived in a distant past) (Ellegârd 1999). For Wells and others, it is inexplicable that the epistles never cite the sayings of Jesus attributed to him in the gospels, even though they address similar subjects or situations, such as celibacy (1 Cor. 7:7 and 25–35, cf. Matthew 19: 11–12), tax-evasion (Romans 13: 6, cf. Mark 12:17), dietary laws (Romans 14:1–4; 1 Cor. 8; Colossians 2:20–21, cf. Mark 7:15), or circumcision (Romans 3:1; Galatians 5:1–12, cf. Thomas 53). While the echoes in the gospels of ancient scripture are evident, such recent scholars as John Dominic Crossan, Randel Helms, Dale and Patricia Miller, and Thomas L. Brodie

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have suggested that the whole gospel narrative may be the product of haggadic midrash on the Old Testament.25 For example, as Earl Doherty suggests, the biblical text of Hosea 11: 1, “and I called my son out of Egypt,” may have provided the story of Jesus’s childhood sojourn in Egypt, rather than the story of the flight into Egypt having prompted early Christians to go and look for a scriptural prediction (Doherty 1999, 79–82 and 225–230). On this account, proto-­ Christian exegetes “discovered” what Jesus, the Son of God, had done and said, “according to the scriptures,” by decoding ancient texts available to them. So today, the Christian reader learns about Christ by reading the gospels, but then, believers learned about Jesus by reading Joshua and 1 Kings. A whole series of examples from the Gospel of Mark, discussed by Price (2005, 2011, 36–44), illustrates the extent of this possible midrashic borrowing: • at the baptism of Jesus (Mark 1:9–11), the heavenly voice conflates passages Psalms 2:7, Isaiah 42:1, and Genesis 22:12 (LXX, i.e., in the Greek Septuagint), • in the narrative of the temptation in the desert (Mark 1:12–13), the forty days in the wilderness recalls Moses’s forty years in the desert of Midian and the forty-day retreat of Elijah after the context with the prophets of Baal (1 Kings 19:5–7). Like Elijah, Jesus is ministered to by angels; resisting the Devil by citing texts from Deuteronomy (8:3; 6:16; and 6:13), the link with the trials in the wilderness is reinforced, • the calling of the first disciples (Mark 1:16–20) and the calling of Levi (Mark 2:14) recall Elijah’s calling of Elisha (1 Kings 19:19–21), • the story of the curing of a demoniac at Capernaum recalls the figure of the Zarephath widow (1 Kings 17:18), • the calming of the storm (Mark 4:35–41) recalls the adventure of Jonah (1:4–6 and 15–16), interspersed with additions from the Psalms (107:23–29), • the stories of miraculous feeding (Mark 6:30–44 and 8:1–10) recall the story of Elisha multiplying the twenty barley loaves for a hundred men (2 King 4:42–44),

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• the episode of the Transfiguration (Mark 9:1–13) constitutes Mark’s version of Moses’s ascent of Mount Sinai and his shining visage (Exodus 24 and 34:9), • the parallel stories of the preparations for Jesus’s entry as the Messiah into Jerusalem (Mark 11:1–6) and the preparations for the Passover supper (14:12–16) both derive from 1 Samuel, chapter 9, where young Saul, in search of lost asses, encounters the prophet Samuel, who gives him a special meal and anoints him ruler over Israel; the entry into the holy city on the back of a donkey (Mark 11:7–11) echoes Zechariah (9:9), while the actions and words of the crowd derive from Psalm 118:26–27, • the entire eschatological discourse of Mark, chapter 13, is an amalgam of scriptural allusions and quotations (so for verse 7, cf. Daniel 11:44; for verse 8, cf. Isaiah 19:2 and 2 Chronicles 15:6; for verse 12, cf. Micah 7:6; for verse 14, cf. Daniel 9:27 or 12:11 and Genesis 19:17; for verse 19, cf. Daniel 12:1; for verse 22, cf. Deuteronomy 13:2; for verse 24, cf. Isaiah 13:10; for verse 25, cf. Isaiah 34:4; for verse 26, cf. Daniel 7:13; for verse 27, cf. Zechariah 2:10 and Deuteromomy 30:4), • the basic substructure for the account of the crucifixion in chapter 15 is Psalm 22, the source for all such details as the piercing of hands and feet (verse 12, cf. Psalm 22:16), the dividing of garments and casting of lots (verse 24, cf. Psalm 22:18), the “wagging heads” of the mockers (verse 22, cf. Psalm 22:8), and the cry of dereliction (verse 34, cf. Psalm 22:1), • the figure of Joseph of Arimathea (Mark 15:42–47) is a bricolage of King Priam, who begs for the body of Hector, his son, from the camp of Achilles, and Joseph, who asked permission from Pharaoh to bury the body of Jacob in the cave-tomb (Genesis 50:4–5), • the narrative of the empty tomb constitutes a reprise of the story of the five kings at Makkedah in Joshua (10:18, 22, 26–27), • the vigil of the mourning women recalls the tradition of women mourning in the cult of the dying and rising god, familiar in Israel (cf. Ezekiel 8:14; Zechariah 12:11; and Canticles 3:1–4). Indeed, much of the story of Jesus demonstrates strong parallels to the myths of the dying and rising gods found in various Middle Eastern

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religions. What had previously been a cult celebrating the seasonal cycle of the death and return of vegetation evolved in the urban settings of the Roman Empire into symbols of the personal rite of passage of an individual initiate, that is, his rebirth (Price 2011, 43).26 These parallels had given Bultmann reason to argue that the resurrection faith, although based on authentic visions on Easter morning, was nevertheless articulated in terms of the myths of mystery religions, such as the resurrection of Attis, Adonis, and Dumuzi/Tammuz (Vermaseren 1977; Mettinger 2001).27 Price points to no fewer than twenty-two recurrent features in Indo-European and Semitic myths and in the gospel story of Jesus (Price 2011, 45–46). At the same time, there are numerous alternative traditions about when Jesus lived and died. For instance, Irenaeus thought that Jesus had been martyred under Claudius Caesar (Demonstration, §74); the Talmud makes Jesus the disciple of Rabbi Jeschua ben Perechiah and crucified in the year 83 BCE; the Gospel of Peter makes Herod Antipas responsible for the condemnation of Jesus, and for some critics (such as the French Catholic theologian, already discussed in Chap. 3, Alfred F. Loisy), this explains the to-ing and fro-ing between Herod and Pilate in Luke’s account of the Passion (Loisy 1950,167). These and other variations in Jesus’s dates can be explained by Price as being “the residue of various attempts to anchor an originally mythic or legendary Jesus in more or less recent history,” reflecting an ancient tendency towards euhemerism.28 For instance, Herodotus tried to calculate the dates of Hercules as a hypothetically historical figure (Veyne 1988, 32), while Plutarch tried to identify Osiris as an ancient Egyptian king (Plutarch, Isis and Osiris, §13). Even Eusebius (in his Chronicle) assumed that Jason and Medea had really existed, dating them around eight centuries after Abraham, the patriarch; likewise, Ganymede and Perseus were historical figures, having lived some six centuries after Abraham. As the German historian and philosopher Arthur Drews (1865–1935) had argued, these attempts to try and historicize Jesus arose from the urgent need of a consolidating institution to create an authoritative figure-head who had appointed successors and established specific policies (Drews 1998, 272–272). More recently, the theologian Margaret Barker has developed an approach to biblical studies known as “Temple theology,” proposing in

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The Great High Priest (2003) and Temple Theology (2004) that the earliest worshippers of Jesus recognized him as Yahweh, the God of Israel and the Son of God Most High, or El Elyon, head of the Israelite pantheon (Baker 1992). As Geo Widengren has argued, this ancient Yahweh was celebrated by his worshippers as a dying and rising god; hence the Easter acclamation of the early Christians, “The Lord is risen!”, is no more than a restatement of an ancient cry, “Yahweh lives!” (Psalm 18:46) (Widengren 1958). In his most recent work, Robert M.  Price has highlighted what he regards as Christianity’s moral deficit in a way that is consistent with Nietzsche’s critique in The Anti-Christ. In her foreword to Price’s Blaming Jesus for Jehovah: Rethinking the Righteousness of Christianity (2016), Valerie Tarico cites so-called New Atheist Richard Dawkins’s characterization in The God Delusion of the biblical Yahweh or “the God of the Old Testament” as “arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully” (cited in Price 2016, 5). For Tarico, the concept of “an eternal, individually conscious soul” which emerged during the intertestamental period has led over time to Christianity’s “most abominable teaching,” viz. the notion that “eternal torture is the fate of unbelievers and a proportional punishment for finite, transitory sins as banal as consensual sex” (cited in Price 2016, 8). In his introduction, Price argues that “there lies buried (not very deeply) under the benign and placid surface of Christian theology a ticking moral time bomb” (Price 2016, 13). In a complete inversion of the usual position proposed by believers, Price suggests that “to begin with an unshakable assumption that Christianity is true is already to sacrifice its virtue, to commit the sin of faith” (ibid., 14). Price highlights what he regards as “the sheer logical impossibility” that “God and Jesus, as defined by the Christian creeds, could have commanded and taught the hateful things the Bible says they commanded and taught, and still be loving, just, forgiving, and merciful” (ibid., 19). Instead, Price proposes a historicist, humanist, and hence anti-religious perspective on how to appreciate the Bible:

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Once you drop the notion that the Bible is an infallible revelation from God, the Bible falls into place as an altogether human creation. […] What’s more, you will experience a flood of new light on the text. Long-standing problems become clues to solve biblical puzzles. You get what you always wanted: a convincing and natural reading of your favorite book. (Price 2016, 26)

Or in the impassioned words of Stephen Fry when interviewed on Irish television (2015), “the moment you banish [God] your life becomes simpler, purer, cleaner—more worth living, in my opinion.”

 edonism and Anti-Christianity in Michel H Onfray This traditional mythicist approach to the figure of Jesus has been given a specific philosophical twist in France by the popular philosopher Michel Onfray, the reviver of the ancient tradition of hedonism, the proponent of a “counter-history of philosophy,” and a self-confessed nietzschéen. In the second volume of his contre-histoire dedicated to what he dubs “Christian hedonism” as well as in his “atheist manifesto,” Onfray devotes a number of pages to the question of “the invention of Jesus” (Onfray 2006, 11–45; Onfray 2007, 115–130). Onfray’s core thesis is that Jesus exists, not as an historical figure, but as a personnage conceptuel (to use the term he borrows from two French postmodernists, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari). He points to the fact that there is no historical evidence: no contemporary documents, no archaeological evidence, no artefacts (not even the Shroud of Turin, which has been dated to the thirteenth century), not even a tomb (the alleged tomb was not “discovered” until 325 by St Helen, the wife of the Emperor Constantine). Nor is there any textual evidence for his existence, since all the occasions when he is mentioned—by Flavius Josephus in his Antiquities of the Jews, by Suetonius in his The Twelve Caesars, and by Tacitus in his Annals—are later additions to these texts. Rather, the existence of Jesus is akin to the kind of conceptual existences posited by

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such philosophers as Heraclitus (Fire), Plato (the Ideas), or Empedocles (Love and Strife). The creation of Jesus, Onfray argues, depends on a number of historical preconditions: human catastrophes (such as repeated sieges and sackings, acts of vandalism, and auto-da-fés), natural catastrophes (such as earthquakes, the fragility of cultural media), a revolution in those media (the switch from papyrus to parchment), and the mentality of the epoch. Zealous copiers added and removed material as they saw fit, since the conception of truth at this time did not recognize authorial rights or the respect for textual integrity. And more broadly there was a millenarian climate: hundreds of prophets announced an imminent apocalypse, among them Gnostics and Christians. In this time of fear and anxiety, numerous prophetic figures emerged from what is now called the Holy Land, some of them wanting to overthrow the Romans and install a terrestrial kingdom of heaven. Most of the time, these figures were simply executed, others tried to undermine the Roman empire with magic spells and incantations. And many turned to the prophecies of the Hebrew scriptures for comfort—and for inspiration. This collective hysteria crystallized and found definitive form in the figure of Jesus: he gave a face and, crucially, a name to the Jewish rejection of domination by the Romans, not least because, etymologically, his name Yeshua, a variant of Yehoshua (or Joshua), means “God saves” or “Yahweh is salvation.” To the extent that his history already existed in some written form or other, the figure of Jesus became the realization of this history. In other words, there is no “historical Jesus,” but there is a Jesus who emerges through history. That said, the religious figure of Jesus occupies a place in the dimension of the marvellous and the miraculous, and Onfray invites his readers (much as Price does in Blaming Jesus for Jehovah) to set aside their usual expectations and to consider sacred texts in the same way they would pagan ones. (Rather than in the grey-bound volumes reserved for religious texts, imagine them bound in green, blue, red, or one of the other coded colours used in the Pléiade editions.) All the ancient motifs used to express the marvellous and the miraculous can be found in the texts of the New Testament, and the figure of Jesus confirms to the same rules of writing as do Homer’s Odysseus, Philostratus’s life of Apollonius of

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Tyana, or Petronius’s Encolpius (in the Satyricon). On this account, Jesus is nothing less than an ancient epic hero. (Similarly, parallels between the Gospel of Mark and the works of Homer (the Odyssey and the Iliad) have been highlighted by Dennis R. MacDonald, who reads Mark’s gospel as a “prose epic” in which Jesus was modelled after the heroes of Homer (MacDonald 2000). After all, the author of Mark, whoever he was—tradition identifies him as John Mark, a disciple from Jerusalem (Acts 12:12) who, with his cousin, Barnabas, assisted Paul in his apostolic work and recorded the sermons of Peter in Rome (NJB, NT, 1599)29—did not actually know Jesus himself. Rather the aim of his gospel was chiefly to convert the masses to Christianity; as such, it is not an historical document, but a missionary tool, or (to put it unkindly) a piece of propaganda.) Onfray uses the famous Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laërtius, the celebrated Greek biographer who was, of course, well known to Nietzsche (Barnes 1986) and on whom he published three studies in 1869 and 1870 (see KGW, vol. II.1; BAW, vols 4 and 5), to offer a comparative reading of the gospels and these philosophical vitae. After all, the function of these narratives was, in part, to inspire admiration for these philosophers and in this sense to bring about conversion to the lifestyles proposed by their respective philosophies. As a consequence, Onfray underlines how these individuals had often been born, lived, and died in extraordinary ways that demonstrate startling parallels with the life of Christ. First, the gospel account of the virgin conception and birth of Jesus corresponds to the legend recorded by Diogenes Laërtius in his Lives and Opinions that Plato’s mother, Perictione, was old, but a virgin, when she conceived Plato (book 3, chapter 2). Second, the annunciation made by Gabriel to Mary corresponds to the vision of Apollo that appeared to Plato’s father, Ariston. Third, just as Joseph is warned about the danger to the new-born Christ-child in a dream (Matthew 2:13), so the night before Socrates meets Plato he had a dream, in which he dreamed that held in his lap a cygnet which turned into a swan and flew away (book 3, §4). Fourth, the fact that Jesus is the Son of God corresponds to the divine status accorded to Pythagoras, regarded by his disciples as Apollo

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descended from his residence with the Hyperboreans, the race invoked by Nietzsche at the beginning of The Anti-Christ (Diogenes Laërtius, Lives and Opinions, book 7, §11).30 Fifth, the miracles attributed to Jesus correspond to accounts that, for example, Empedocles once revived a dead woman (book 8, §69; cf. book 8, §60-§61). Sixth, just as Jesus speaks under divine inspiration, so Socrates had his daimon, which used to predict the future for him (book 2, §32).31 Seventh, the discourse of Jesus and subsequently his apostles was sufficient to persuade those who listened to them to convert and discover God; similarly, Diogenes attributes to Socrates an ability to persuade (and dissuade) through his discourse (book 2, §29); in fact, this is a quality common to many of the philosophers Diogenes discusses. Eight, just as Simon Peter was a favoured disciple and chosen to be a leader among the twelve disciples, so Metrodorus was the favourite follower of Epicurus, who wrote on his deathbed to Idomeneus, asking him to take care of the children of Metrodorus (book 10, §22-§23). Nine, the biblical Jesus is recorded as speaking in metaphors or parables, eating symbols (e.g., bread, wine, fish), and behaving in an enigmatic manner (e.g., swearing his disciples to secrecy about his identity), and much the same is true of, for instance, Pythagoras (book 8, §1-§50). Ten, apart from inscribing a sign on the sand (see John 8:6), Jesus never wrote anything and his teaching was entirely oral; nor did the Buddha and nor did Socrates. Eleven, Jesus would not turn away from his destiny and he died as a witness to the truth, and Socrates, too, was condemned to death for his philosophical teachings. Twelve, the night spent on Gethsemane (Matthew 26:36–46; Mark 14:32–42) corresponds to the story told by Alcibiades about Socrates’s remarkable activity while on campaign in Potidaea.32 Thirteen, the body of Jesus is in some ways a strangely incorporeal body, since he hardly ever eats, or drinks, or presumably excretes; in his Apology (or the epilogue to the Symposium), we are told about how Socrates was impervious to lack of sleep, to alcohol, and to exhaustion. Fourteen, from Jesus’s remarks about the resurrection of the dead and his warnings in his eschatological discourses, we can discern a belief in a life after death, in an immaterial and immortal soul; believes shared by Plato (as the Phaedo, the dialogue that relates the death of Socrates and his final words makes clear).

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Finally, on the third day Jesus is said to have been resurrected from the dead, and this doctrine has various counterparts in the ancient Greek world. Pythagoras, for instance, claimed to have spent 207 years in Hades before returning to human life (book 8, §14).33 According to Heraclides Ponticus, Pythagoras taught the immortality and transmigration of the soul in general (book 8, §4-§5); in his work On Diseases, Heraclides mentions the case of a woman who had been dead for thirty days before Empedocles resurrected her (cf. book 8, §60); and of course there is the myth of Er in Plato’s Republic, book 10 (614c-615c).34 Nor are these the only parallels in the ancient world. For example, Onfray might also have mentioned that we encounter similar elements in Suetonius’s biography of the Emperor Augustus. In his Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Suetonius suggests that Augustus was conceived in the Temple of Apollo. Citing as his source the Theologumena of Asclepias of Mendes, Suetonius recounts how Augustus’s mother, Atia, had fallen asleep in the temple in the middle of a nocturnal service in the cult of Apollo when a serpent—a representation of a genius or familiar spirit—glided up to her and then left again; on awakening, Atia purified herself as if she had had intercourse with her husband, a strange serpent-coloured mark appeared on her body, and ten months later Augustus was born and was regarded as the son of Apollo (see Augustus, chapter 94, §4). In fact, a few months before Augustus was born—so Suetonius reports, drawing on Julius Marathus—a portent observed in Rome indicated that nature was about to give birth to a king for the Roman people, whereupon the Senate decreed that no male child born that year should be reared (although those Senate members whose wives were pregnant prevented the decree being enacted by ensuring it was not filed in the treasury, without which no decree was complete; see Augustus, chapter 94, §3); the entire episode is reminiscent of the story of the visit of the Magi and Herod’s massacre of the Innocents (Matthew 2:1–18). And the story, recorded by Gaius Drusus and reported by Suetonius, of how Augustus, as an infant, was placed by his nurse one evening in his cradle on the ground floor, but the next morning had disappeared, only to be found after long search on a tower with his face towards the rising sun, recalls some of the infancy narratives in the apocryphal gospels and the episode in Luke known as the finding in the temple [Luke 2: 41–50].)35

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By the same token, Philo depicts Augustus in On the Embassy to Gaius (De Legatione Ad Gaium) as no less than “the adverter of evil” and as the emperor who “calmed the storms which were raging in every direction, who healed the common diseases which were affecting both Greeks and barbarians” (§144–§145), while in one of his Eclogues the Roman bucolic poet Calpurnius Siculus credits Nero with stilling a storm: “I remember how, despite the swoop of a storm, the grove, even as now, sank sudden into peace with boughs at rest. And I said: ‘A god, surely a god has driven the east winds hence’” (Eclogue 4, ll. 97–100).36 Thus Onfray and other critics go well beyond Nietzsche’s critique of Jesus in relation to the ideals of classicism, making that critique seem, in comparison, almost tame. Furthermore, Onfray makes the point that miracles cannot be fit into an historical framework, and he argues that rational discussion about plagues of frogs, resurrections from the dead, and miraculous healing is simply not possible. Instead, he suggests, to discussion religion in rational terms, we have to consider it symbolically and pay attention to its allegorical, rhetorical, and metaphorical dimensions. (To do so, of course, might also be to invite readings of the Gospels or the Epistles that run counter to Onfray’s own ones.) The function of the New Testament, Onfray argues, is to prove that Jesus is an extraordinary (indeed, divine) figure, and to this extent it is, in terms of the speech acts theory proposed by J.L. Austin, a collection of performative utterances. Inasmuch as they are enunciated, such sentences or texts bring about the very reality they seek to express. So it is no surprise that the New Testament, like other ancient texts (such as Homer’s Illiad and Odyssey), flagrantly flouts the laws of what is probable or possible and instead aims to use literary techniques to convert the listener or reader. It does not want a neutral reading; instead, it aims to persuade. On this account, the evangelists are not deliberately lying (although this is what Nietzsche accuses them of; cf. AC §45), rather they are truthfully stating what they believe, then believing what they say to be true. After all, since none of them had ever physically met Jesus (and part of Onfray’s argument is to suggest that, in fact, Jesus in this sense never actually physically existed), they confected a system of belief—and so entered into a dynamic whereby the more repeated what they had invented, the more they believed it. On this account, the creation of the New Testament and

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the rise of Christianity becomes an instantiation of the sinister principle attributed to Goebbels, that if one repeats a lie often enough, it becomes the truth. Precisely this grim, dark view is, however, Nietzsche’s, as it is unsparingly expressed in Ecce Homo: “Good men never tell the truth. The good taught you false shores and false securities: you were born and kept in the lies of the good. Everything has been distorted and twisted down to the very bottom through the good” (EH Destiny §4). Onfray spells out, in a level of detail one cannot find anywhere in Nietzsche, how Christianity might actually have come into being as a forgery. Onfray describes Christianity as a tissue of contradictions, woven by hundreds of thousands of writers over the centuries. Copyists changed texts, made additions, reordered, and restructured, leading to the production of a corpus of contradictory texts. In the Ecumenical Councils from the fourth century CE onwards, the official corpus of the Church took on definitive form, creating a distinction between canonical texts, deuterocanonical texts, and apocryphal texts. The latter, collectively referred to as the New Testament apocrypha, present a remarkably different figure of Jesus from the one familiar to us.37 According to the Gospel of the Ebionites, for instance, Jesus was a vegetarian (as was John the Baptist). In the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, Jesus can direct running water with a spoken command (2:1). At the age of five, he makes twelve sparrows out of clay, then clapped his hands, and they fly away (Thomas 2:1–5). He also heals James, the son of Joseph, when he had been bitten by a viper (Thomas 16:1–2). Above all, we find a Jesus who laughs (Thomas 8: 1), something that never happens in the entirety of the canonical New Testament. An apocryphal work from Ethiopia tells of how Simon Peter’s wife, Akrosennā, prepares a rooster for the Passover meal to be eaten by Jesus and his disciples. But Jesus brings the cooked fowl back to life, giving it the ability to speak and instructing it to spy on Judas Isacariot (Burke 2013: 78–80). In fact, there are hundreds of apocryphal texts—and these are just the ones that have survived! The New Testament itself is said to be replete with improbabilities and contradictions of all kinds. For instance, there is the question of the titulus, the piece of wood with an inscription attached to the cross during the Crucifixion. In this respect (as in others), there is disagreement between

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the four canonical gospels, consisting of the Synoptic Gospels (so-called because they are so alike, they can be set side by side and viewed “at a glance”), that is, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, together with the Gospel of John. The text of the titulus varies across all four gospels (and, according to Onfray, so does its position, although this is not the case). Then again, who helped Jesus to carry his cross? According to John, Jesus carried it alone, whereas the synoptic evangelists say he was helped by Simon of Cyrene. And after the resurrection, to whom did Jesus appear? To a single person, to a group, or to how many exactly? And where did he appear? For instance, how many women went on Easter morning to the tomb? Was it Mary Magdalene by herself, or with the other Mary, or with other Mary and Salome, or with the other Mary, Joanna, and the “rest of the women”? Was the stone already rolled away, or did an angel come down and remove it in front of them? And how many angels were there—one or two? Were they in the tomb, or sitting on the stone, or did they descend from the heavens? Arguably these are trivial details, and perhaps a more significant one to consider, bearing in mind the symbolic and theological importance of these episodes, is the disagreement between the synoptic evangelists and John in relation to the time at which the Last Supper and the Crucifixion took place. The Synoptics and John agree that the arrest of Jesus was made on a Thursday night and that he was crucified on a Friday. However, while the Synoptics say that the Last Supper took place on the eve of the Passover (and hence on a Thursday night), John says that the Passover started on Friday night, that is, after Jesus had been crucified. And the Synoptics say that Jesus was nailed to the cross at the third hour (i.e., 9  am), that darkness descended over the land at the sixth hour (i.e., noon), and that Jesus died at around the ninth hour (i.e., 3 pm), John’s record says that Pilate ordered Jesus taken away to be crucified at noon. The significance of this difference in John’s chronology lies in the fact that Pilate gives the order for Jesus to be crucified at the same time as the Paschal lambs are being slaughtered in the Temple, an event which, according to the Synoptics’ timescale, had already happened the previous day. Naturally this question of the internal consistency of the Bible was a matter of concern for its most fervent readers. In the second century,

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Tatian of Adiabene, a Syrian Christian theologian, wrote the Diatesseron, synthesizing the material of the four Gospels into a single coherent account of Jesus’s life and death, in a way that was to find numerous imitators in the Middle Ages. And in the fifth century, St Augustine produced his Harmony of the Gospels (De consensu evangeliorum), building a Gospel harmony on the assumption that the first Gospel was written by Matthew, followed by Mark, then Luke, then John. In turn, the burgeoning commentary on Sacred Scripture gave rise to harmonize the different interpretations it received from its learned commentators. In his Catena Aurea (or “Golden Chain”), St Thomas Aquinas produced a synthesis of excerpts from various Greek and Latin commentators on the Gospels, seeking to bring out an overall harmony of scriptural interpretation.38 Yet the issue has never gone away: from the objections first raised by Celsus and which provoked a (lengthy) response by Origen, to the Enlightenment critiques of Spinoza in his Tractatis Theologico-Politicus (1670), of Thomas Paine in The Age of Reason (1794, 1795, and 1807), of Denis Diderot in the Encyclopédie, or Voltaire in his Dictionnaire philosophique, the question of biblical consistency has time and again undermined the claims of the scriptures to coherence and textual integrity. For his part, Onfray points not only to inconsistencies but to improbabilities as well. There is no evidence, he asserts, that a town called Nazareth actually existed prior to the second century CE; for there are no extant non-biblical references in, for example, Flavius Josephus, the Hebrew scriptures, or Talmudic literature. Then again, the Gospel of John gives an account of a dialogue between the prefect of the Roman province of Judaea, Pontius Pilate, and Jesus, but how could a conversation have taken place since Pilate would have spoken Latin and Jesus would have spoken Aramaic? (Or did they both speak to each other in Greek?) Why do Matthew and Luke refer to Pilate as “governor” or “procurator” (Matthew 27:2; Luke 3:1), since this title was not in use for his position until the mid first century? And why is Pilate, who (according to Josephus) was ruthless in his suppression of Jews and Samaritans if they appeared disloyal to Rome, presented in the gospels as an essentially benign figure—to please the Romans? (In the Eastern Orthodox Church, Pilate’s wife, Claudia Procula, is commemorated as a saint, and in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, both she and Pilate himself are

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venerated as saints, on the basis of the account found in the apocryphal Acts of Pilate which confirms Matthew’s account (27: 19) that a dream led her to intervene and try to stop the crucifixion.) The punishment of crucifixion was reserved for those who had committed crimes against the Roman Empire, not religious blasphemy (as in the case of Jesus), which was punished instead (as happened to Stephen) by public stoning. And the corpses of those who had been crucified were abandoned, unburied, in a public grave; there would certainly not have been any tomb. And yet, in the gospel account, Joseph of Arimathea turns up and obtains permission from Pilate to take away the body of Jesus. Only John, however, mentions the mortuary rites that would have obligatory, talking about a mixture of myrrh and aloes, weighing about a hundred pounds, and specifying that Joseph and Nicodemus “took the body of Jesus, and bound it in linen cloths, as it is the custom with the Jews to bury” (John 19:39–40), while the synoptic accounts simply talk about the body being wrapped in a shroud. In so burying Jesus, however, Joseph of Arimathea helps bring about a fulfilment of the prophet Isaiah in the last of the four “songs of the servant,” in which the future Messiah is presented as a “suffering servant” and, specifically, the verse that states, “He was given a grave with the wicked, and his tomb is with the rich, although he had done no violence, had spoken no deceit” (Isaiah 53: 9, NJB). And Joseph of Arimathea’s name is significant, too: since Arimathea = “after death,” his very name means “Joseph, the one who buries.” And numerous legends sprang up after the second century about this figure, who is venerated as a saint in Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches. In addition to being mentioned in such apocryphal accounts as the Acts of Pilate (and the text appended to it, the Gospel of Nicodemus) and the Narrative of Joseph of Arimathea, he is referred to by such early Church Fathers as Irenaeus (125–189), Hippolytus (170–236), Tertullian (155–222), and Eusebius (260–340), and later Hilary of Poitiers (300–367) and Saint John Chrysostom (347–407). In the course of the twelfth century, Joseph of Arimathea became connected with the Arthurian cycle and the legend of the Holy Grail, as whose keeper Joseph is said to have been appointed (according to Robert de Boron’s Joseph d’Arimathie). In fact, John of Glastonbury claimed that King Arthur was descended from Joseph,

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widely regarded in medieval times (see the Perlesvaus) as having brought the Grail and other relics with him to Britain, where he had been the first Christian bishop on those Isles, an important point that was to mark out for Elizabeth I the chronological primacy of the Church of England over the Roman Catholic Church. (In the Lancelot Grail cycle, Josephus, Joseph’s son, is considered to have sailed to Britain.) According to one legend, when Joseph put his walking staff on the ground, it miraculously took root and blossomed as the “Glastonbury thorn,” and such legends and mysteries formed a central part of Glastonbury’s appeal to medieval pilgrims as they still do for tourists today. Given all which, what does it mean to ask whether Joseph of Arimathea was or is “real”? As a signifier, as a cultural symbol, as an historico-­ linguistic phenomenon he is real, and this argument applies a fortiori in the case of Jesus, whose historicity is doubted by Onfray—as by others— although, curiously enough, not by Nietzsche. In fact, Nietzsche’s commitment to philology as a discipline enabled him to prosecute a campaign against the orthodox conception of Christ for linguistic and scholarly reasons rather than historical ones, while in Ecce Homo Nietzsche succeeded in recreating himself on a textual level that displays significant parallels with the way in which Christ can be said to have come into existence through the biblical texts.

Notes 1. For further discussion, see Bamford 2015; Franco 2011; and Meyer 2019. 2. For further discussion, see Bishop 2004 and Bett 2011. 3. For Heidegger’s lecture on “The Grand Style” given at the University of Freiburg during the winter Semester of 1936–1937, see Heidegger 1991, vol. 1, 124–138. 4. For further discussion, see Hirsch 1986 and Düsing 2016. 5. Compare with Nietzsche’s remark in his Nachlass for the end of 1880: “Pascal’s conversation with Jesus is more beautiful than anything in the New Testament! It is the most melancholy bliss that has ever been put into words. About this Jesus there has since then been no more poetry

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written, and this is why after Port-Royal”—the theological centre of Jansenism, and a major influence on Pascal’s thought—“Christianity is everywhere in decline” (KSA 9, 7[29], 324). For further discussion of Nietzsche and Pascal, see Williams 1952; Dionne 1974; Brusotti 1997, 195–212; and Düsing 2006. 6. The Samaritans were descendants of the mixed Israelite and Assyrian population that arose after the fall of Samaria, the city built by King Omri as the capital of the northern kingdom of Israel, after it had been besieged and captured by the Assyrians in 722–721 BCE; by extension, the name Samaria came to be applied to the region in general. While the Samaritans worshipped according to the Pentateuch or “five books” of Moses, they offered their sacrifices, not at Jerusalem, but on Mount Gerizim; indeed, they opposed the rebuilding of Jerusalem’s city walls undertaken by Nehemiah, and at the time of Jesus they had become figures of hate to the Jews. 7. For a recent reading of this central Epistle in the Pauline corpus, see Badiou 2003. 8. For an extended critique of Renan, see TI Expeditions §2. 9. In the Cratylus, Socrates describes the hero as demigod and derives the word “hero” (ἥρως, i.e., hērōs) from “eros” (ἔρως, meaning “desire”), signifying that heroes were “born of love” (Cratylus, 398c; Plato 1989, 436). 10. Renan 1863, 31 (cited in NK 6/2, 155). 11. Cited in NK 6/2, 155; see Petrarca 2008, 152–154. 12. Salis-Marschlins, Meta von 1897, 64 (cited in NK 6/2, 156). 13. Renan 1877, 88 (cited in NK 6/2, 167). 14. Cf. Heraclitus, DK 22 B 52: “Eternity is a child at play, playing draughts: the kingdom is a child’s” (Barnes 1987, 102). For further discussion of the appropriateness or otherwise of the child motif, see Spariosu 1989, 97: n. 53. 15. For further discussion, see Bultmann 1960. 16. Note the echo here of 2 Corinthians 3: 6, “for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life” (DRV). 17. See the commentaries in NK 6/1, 214–215; NK 6/2, 170–171 and 233; and Sommer 2000: 478–488. 18. See Kaufmann’s commentary in Nietzsche 1974, 288: n. 22. 19. See AC §20 to AC §23.

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20. See Alfaric 2005, 61–59; see also “Comment s’est formé le mythe du Christ” (1947) and “Le Problème de Jésus” (1954) in Alfaric 2005, 60–76 and 77–106. 21. For a forthright restatement of the Jessus Myth theory or Christ Myth theory, see Fitzgerald 2010 and 2016–2017. 22. See Wells 1971; Wells 1975; Wells 1988; and Wells 1989. 23. See Kingsbury 1989, 33–37; Smith 1987; and Koester 1987. 24. For discussion of Emmerich, see Schweitzer 1910, 108–109. 25. See Crossan 1988; Helms 1989; Miller and Miller 1990; and Brodie 1981/1987. 26. For further exploration of the mythic parallels between Christianity and paganism, see Murray 1955. “Historically speaking,” according to Gilbert Murray (1866–1957), “the character of Christianity in these early centuries is to be sought not so much in the doctrines which it professed, nearly all of which had their roots and their close parallels in older Hellenistic or Hebrew thought, but in the organization on which it rested” (Murray 1955, 185). 27. For the archetype of the mythic hero, see Lord Raglan, Otto Rank, and Alan Dundes on “The Hero Pattern in the Life of Jesus” (in Segal 1990, 177–223). 28. Named after the Greek mythographer Euhemerus, this approach to mythology assumes that mythical accounts originated in real historical persons or events. 29. In On the Seventy Apostles Hippolytus of Rome distinguishes three figures: John Mark, the Evangelist Mark, and Mark the cousin of Barnabus. 30. See, too, Iamblichus, The Life of Pythagoras, §2, §6-§7, §19, §24, §28, and §30 (Iamblichus 1818, 2–4, 14, 17, 49, 71, 72–75, and 94). 31. Cf. Plato, Apology, 31d. 32. “Immersed in some problem at dawn, he stood in the same spot considering it (συννοήσας γὰρ αὐτόθι ἕωθέν τι εἱστήκει σκοπῶν); and when he found it a tough one, he would not give it up but stood there trying. The time drew on to midday, and the men began to notice him, and said to one another in wonder: ‘Socrates has been standing there in a study (φροντίζων τι) ever since dawn!’ The end of it was that in the evening some of the Ionians after they had supped—this time it was summer— brought out their mattresses and rugs and took their sleep in the cool; thus they waited to see if he would go on standing all night too. He

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stood till dawn came and the sun rose; then walked away, after offering a prayer to the Sun” (Symposium 220c-d; in Plato 1925, 235). 33. For further discussion, see Burkert 1972, 140: n. 110. 34. For further discussion, see Karamanolis 2006: 335. 35. Suetonius 1913: vol. 1, 265–269; cf. Bond 2012: 69. 36. Philo 1993, 770; Calpernius Siculus 1934, 253; and see Bond 2012, 122. 37. For the New Testament Apocrypha, see James 1924; Elliott 1993; and Bovon and Geoltrain, with Kaestli 1997–2005. 38. See Aquinas 2013, 4 vols.

References Alfaric, Prosper. 2005. Jésus a-t-il existé? et autres textes, preface by Michael Onfray. Paris: coda. Aquinas, Thomas. 2013. Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels, 4 vols. London: Baronius Press. Austin, J. L. 1961. Truth [1950]. In Philosophical Papers, edited by J.O. Urmson and G.J. Warnock, 3rd ed., 85–101. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Badiou, Alain. 2003. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism [1997]. Translated by Ray Brassier. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Baker, Margaret. 1992. The Great Angel: A Study of Israel’s Second God. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Bamford, Rebecca, ed. 2015. Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Philosophy. London: Rowman & Littlefield International. Barnes, Jonathan. 1986. Nietzsche and Diogenes Laertius. Nietzsche-Studien 15: 16–40. ———, ed. 1987. Early Greek Philosophy. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Bett, Richard. 2011. Nietzsche and the Romans. Journal of Nietzsche Studies 42 (1): 7–31. Bishop, Paul, ed. 2004. Nietzsche and Antiquity: His Reaction and Response to the Classical Tradition. Rochester, NY: Camden House. Bond, Helen K. 2012. The Historical Jesus: A Guide for the Perplexed. London and New York: T. & T. Clark. Bovon, François, Pierre Geoltrain, and Jean-Daniel Kaestli (eds). Écrits apocryphes chrétiens, 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1997–2005. Brandon, S.G.F. 1967. Jesus and the Zealots: A Study of the Political Factor in Primitive Christianity. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Brodie, Thomas L. 1981/1987. Luke the Literary Interpreter: Luke-Acts as a Systematic Rewriting and Updating of the Elijah-Elisha Narrative in 1 and 2 Kings. PhD dissertation, Rome: Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas; Rome: Pontificia Studiorum Universitas a Sancto Thoma Aquinate in Urbe. Brusotti, Marco. 1997. Die Leidenschaft der Erkenntnis: Philosophie und äasthetische Lebensgestaltung bei Nietzsche von “Morgenröte” bis “Also sprach Zarathustra”. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter. Bultmann, Rudolf. 1960. Jesus Christ and Mythology. London: SCM Press. Burke, Tony. 2013. Secret Scriptures Revealed: A New Introduction to the Christian Apocrypha. Grand Rapids, MI, and Cambridge: Eerdmans. Burkert, Walter. 1972. Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism, trans. Edwin L. Minar, Jr., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Calpernius Siculus. 1934. Bucolica. In Minor Latin Poets, trans. J. Wight Duff and Arnold M.  Duff. London: Heinemann; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 207–285. Crossan, John Dominic. 1988. The Cross That Spoke: The Origins of the Passion Narrative. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Currie, Robert. 1974. Genius: An Ideology in Literature. London: Chatto & Windus. Dionne, James Robert. 1974. Pascal et Nietzsche: Étude historique et comparée. New York: Burt Franklin. Doherty, Earl. 1999. The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin with a Mythical Christ? Ottawa: Canadian Humanist Publications. Drews, Arthur. 1998. The Christ Myth, translated by C. DeLisle Burns. 3rd ed. Amherst: Prometheus Books. Düsing, Edith. 2006. “Der einzige logische Christ”—”Pascal, den ich beinahe liebe”! Streiflichter zu Pascal im Spiegel Nietzsches. In Vernunft und Glauben: Ein philosophischer Dialog der Moderne mit dem Christentum: Père Xavier Tilliette SJ zum 85. Geburtstag, ed. Steffen Dietzsch and Gian Franco Frigo, 297–314. Berlin: de Gruyter. ———. 2016. Explosive Ambivalenz: Nietzsches antichristliche Umdeutung von Luthers Motiv der Rechtfertigung des Sünders durch Gottes Gnade. Nietzscheforschung 23: 13–35. Elliott, J.K., ed. 1993. The Apocryphal New Testament: A Collection of Apocryphal Christian Literature in an English Translation. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Fitzgerald, David. 2010. Nailed: Ten Christian Myths that show Jesus never existed at all. Morrisville, NC: Lulu.

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———. 2016–2017. Jesus: Mything in Action. Vol. 1–3. Scotts Valley, CA: Create Space. Franco, Paul. 2011. Nietzsche’s Enlightenment: The Free-Spirit Trilogy of the Modern Period. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Gibbon, Edward. 1840. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. H.H. Milman. Vol. 2. New York: Harper. Heidegger, Martin. 1991. Nietzsche: Volume I: The Will to Power as Art; Volume II: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, translated by David Farrell Krell. San Francisco: HarperCollins. Helms, Randel. 1989. Gospel Fictions. Buffalo: Prometheus Books. Hirsch, Emanuel. 1986. Nietzsche und Luther: Mit einem Nachwort von Jörg Salaquarda. Nietzsche-Studien 15: 398–439. Hollingdale, R.J. 1969. Introduction. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, translated by R.J. Hollingdale, 11–35. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Iamblichus. 1818. Life of Pythagoras, or Pythagoric Life, translated by Thomas Taylor. London: Watkins. James, M.R., ed. 1924. The Apocryphal New Testament. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Julian. 1923. “Against the Galileans.” In Letters; Epigrams; Against the Galilaeans; Fragments [Works, vol. 3], translated by William C.  Wright, 319–427. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Karamanolis, George E. 2006. Plato and Aristotle in Agreement? Platonists on Aristotle from Antiochus to Porphyry. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kingsbury, Jack Dean. 1989. The Christology of Mark’s Gospel. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Koester, Helmut. 1987. Introduction to the New Testament: History, Culture and Religion of the Hellenistic Age. Berlin: de Gruyter. Lampert, Laurence. 1993. Nietzsche and Modern Times: A Study of Bacon, Descartes, and Nietzsche. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Lessing, G.E. 1956. On the Proof of the Spirit and Power. In Lessing’s Theological Writings, ed. Henry Chadwick, 51–56. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Loisy, Alfred F. 1950. The Origins of the New Testament, translated by L.P. Jacks. London: Allen and Unwin. Maccoby, Hyam. 1991. Paul and Hellenism. Philadelphia: Trinity Press International. MacDonald, Dennis R. 2000. The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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Mack, Burton L. 1996. Who Wrote the New Testament?: The Making of the Christian Myth. San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco. Mettinger, Tryggve N.D. 2001. The Riddle of Resurrection: “Dying and Rising Gods” in the Ancient Near East. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. Meyer, Matthew. 2019. Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Works: A Dialectical Reading. New York: Cambridge University Press. Miller, Dale, and Patricia Miller. 1990. The Gospel of Mark as Midrash on earlier Jewish and New Testament Literature. Lewiston: Mellen. Murray, Gilbert. 1955. Five Stages of Greek Religion [1925]. 3rd ed.. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor. Nagy, Gregory. 2013. The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours. Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1974. The Gay Science, edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House. ———. 1995. Unpublished Writings from the Period of “Unfashionable Observations”, translated by Richard T.  Gray. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. NK 6/2 = Sommer, Andreas Urs. 2013 Kommentar zu Nietzsches “Der Antichrist”, “Ecce homo”, Dionysos-Dithyramben, Nietzsche contra Wagner [Historischer und kritischer Kommentar zu Friedrich Nietzsches Werken, vol. 6/2]. Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter. Onfray, Michel. 2006. Le christianisme hédoniste [Contre-histoire de la philosophie, vol. 2]. Paris: Grasset. ———. 2007. Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, translated by Jeremy Leggatt. New York: Arcade. ———. 2011. La Construction du surhomme [Contre-histoire de la philosophie, vol. 7]. Paris: Grasset. Open Court. Petrarca, Francesco. 2008. On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others. In Invectives, translated by David Marsh, 113–183. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press. Philo. 1993. The Works of Philo: Complete and Unabridged, trans. C.D. Yonge, Peabody, MA: Hendrikson. Plato. 1925. Plato, 12 vols. Vol. 9. Translated by Harold N. Fowler. Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press; Heinemann. ———. 1989. Collected Dialogues, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Price, Robert M. 2005. New Testament Narrative as Old Testament Midrash. In Encyclopedia of Midrash, ed. Jacob Neusner and Alan J. Avery-Peck, 2 vols. Leiden: Brill, vol. 1, 534–573. ———. 2011. The Christ-Myth Theory and its Problems. Cranford, NJ: American Atheist Press. ———. 2016. Blaming Jesus for Jehovah: Rethinking the Righteousness of Christianity. Valley, WA: Tellectual Press. Renan, Ernest. 1863. Vie de Jésus. Paris: Lévy. ———. 1877. Les Évangiles et la seconde génération chrétienne. Paris: Lévy. ———. 1904. Marcus Aurelius [Marc-Aurèle et la fin du monde antique, 1882], translated by William G. Hutchison. London and Newcastle-on-Tyne: Scott. Salis-Marschlins, Meta von. 1897. Philosoph und Edelmensch: Ein Beitrag zur Charakteristik Friedrich Nietzsches. Leipzig: C.G. Naumann. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 2010. The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics [1841], edited and translated by David E. Cartwright and Edward E.  Erdmann. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Schweitzer, Albert. 1910. The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede, translated by W.  Montgomery. London: Adam and Charles Black. Segal, Robert A., ed. 1990. In Quest of the Hero. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Smith, Jonathan Z. 1987. Dying and Rising Gods. In The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade, vol. 4, 521–527. New York: Macmillan. Sommer, Andreas Urs. 1998. Augustinus bei Franz Overbeck: Ein Rekonstruktionsversuch. Theologische Zeitschrift 54 (1998): 125–150. Spariosu, Mihai I. 1989. Dionysus Reborn: Play and the Aesthetic Dimension in Modern Philosophical and Scientific Discourse. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Vermaseren, Maarten J. 1977. Cybele and Attis: The Myth and the Cult., translated by A.M.H. Lemmers. London: Thames and Hudson. Veyne, Paul. 1988. Did the Greeks Believe in their Myths? An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination. Translated by Paula Wissing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wells, G.A. 1971. The Jesus of the Early Christians: A Study in Christian Origins. London: Pemberton Books. ———. 1975. Who was Jesus? London: Elek; Pemberton Books. ———. 1988. The Historical Evidence for Jesus. Buffalo: Prometheus Books. ———. 1989. Who was Jesus? A Critique of the New Testament Record. La Salle, IL: Open Court.

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Widengren, Geo. 1958. Early Hebrew Myths and their Interpretation. In Myth, Ritual, and Kingship: Essays on the Theory and Practice of Kingship in the Ancient Near East and in Israel, ed. S.H. Hooke, 149–203. New York: Oxford University Press. Williams, W.D. 1952. Nietzsche and the French: A Study of the Influence of Nietzsche’s French Reading on his Thought and Writing. Oxford: Blackwell.

7 Nietzsche on Philology

In section 52 of The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche turns to a consideration of the “unfitness for philology” as a chief characteristic of theologians, listed second only to their “impulse to lie” (AC §52). What in this context does Nietzsche mean by philology? Here, anticipating his later remarks in section 59, Nietzsche defines philology as “the art of reading well,—to be able to read facts without falsifying them through interpretations, without letting the desire to understand make you lose caution, patience, subtlety” (AC §52). In fact, philology as a discipline had long been one of Nietzsche’s greatest concerns.1 In Daybreak, Nietzsche mused, “I have not been a philologist in vain, perhaps I am one yet” (Man ist nicht umsonst Philologe gewesen, man ist es vielleicht noch) (D Preface §5), and Nietzsche’s philological training is evident in his philosophical instrumentarium of such concepts as “text,” “genealogy,” “interpretation,” “perspectivism,” and not least in his rejection of Christianity.

Nietzsche’s Critique of Philology As Christian Benne has argued, in The Anti-Christ Nietzsche stages a confrontation between the culture of Hellenistic scholarship in Alexandria and the Stoic-based approach of allegoresis (AC §47), proposing instead a “sceptical science”—symbolized by the term ephexis or a “suspension of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Bishop, Discourses of Philology and Theology in Nietzsche, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42272-0_7

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judgement”—that derives from the Bonn School of historical-critical philology (AC §52) (see Benne 2005). In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche expressed the hope that he would find “a reader such as I deserve, and one who reads me just as the good old philologists used to read their Horace” (EH Books §5); such a reader would possess “delicate fingers” (zarten Finger) and philological “tact” (Takt). As becomes clear from his letter to Paul Deussen of 4 April 1867, Nietzsche attached an almost ethical value to philology as a discipline—“every great task […] has an ethical influence,” for “the effort of concentrating material and shaping it harmonically is a stone falling into the life of our soul: from the narrow circle many other further ones emerge” (KSB 2, 206)—while in Daybreak Nietzsche hailed the “passion for truth” (cf. KSA 9, 6[457], 6[459], 6[461], 316), describing it as “one of our most recent virtues, not yet quite mature, frequently misconstrued and misunderstood” and as “a virtue in process of becoming” (D §456; cf. Vivarelli 2007, 430). In his lecture material from 1870 to 1871 published as Encyclopedia of Classical Philology (Encyclopädie der klassischen Philologie), Nietzsche urged his students to remember that, “because how something is handed down is usually the text itself, we have to learn to read again,” and he continued by insisting: “We have to learn to read again: something which, with the predominance of the printed word, we have forgotten how to do” (§8; KGW II.3, 373, cf. 404; cited in Benne 2005, 152). In the concluding section of his Encyclopädie, Nietzsche summarized the significance (in his eyes) of classical philology as follows: “However dark the world might be: if one suddenly introduces into it a piece of Hellenic life, it immediately brightens up. They [i.e., the Greeks] transfigure the history of antiquity and are in fact a place of refuge for every serious human being. So I hope I have showed you the task of philology: as a means of transfiguring one’s existence and that of the rising generation” (KGW II.3, 437; cited Wilson 1996, 115). In the second of his Untimely Observations, entitled “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” Nietzsche praised the (antiquarian) historian for having “an ability to feel his way back and sense how things were, to detect traces almost extinguished, to read the past quickly and correctly no matter how intricate its palimpsest may be—these are his talents and virtues” (UM II §3). He associated them with the admiration

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expressed by Goethe in his essay “On German Architecture” (1773) for Erwin von Steinbach (c. 1244–1318), the main architect responsible for the construction of Strasbourg Cathedral; with the famous account offered by the Swiss historian (and Nietzsche’s former colleague in Basel), Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897), in his famous account, published in 1860, of The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien); and with the history of ancient Rome, published in three volumes under the title Römische Geschichte (1811–1832), of the German historian (and, for some, founding father of modern historiography), Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776–1831) (see UM II §3). And in Human, All-Too-Human, Nietzsche defines “the historic sense” as meaning “that out of given instances we can quickly reconstruct such systems of thoughts and feelings, just as we can mentally reconstruct a temple out of a few pillars and remains of walls accidentally left standing” (HA I §274). The historical approach undertaken by philology is later extended by Nietzsche into his preference for using genealogy to understand morality (Benne 2005); in short, it is no exaggeration to talk about the birth of Nietzschean philosophy from the spirit of philology (Sommer 2007, 400). Indeed, Nietzsche’s blend of philological and philosophical concepts is one of the reasons for his position in intellectual history as a key figure in the history of hermeneutics and of deconstruction (Schrift 1990). In his Nachlass for the period November 1887 to March 1888, Nietzsche summarized his rejection (for philological reasons) of Christianity that underpinned his condemnation of it in such coruscating tones in The Anti-Christ: Here every word is a symbol [= Symbol]; basically there is no reality any more. There is an extreme danger of making a mistake about these ­symbols. Nearly all ecclesiastical concepts and evaluations lead one astray: one cannot misunderstand the New Testament more fundamentally than the Church has misunderstood it. It lacked all prerequisites for an understanding: the historian’s neutrality which does not give a damn about whether ‘the salvation of souls’ depends on the word. […] The Church has never had the good will needed to understand the New Testament: it wanted to use it to prove itself. It searched and searches

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behind it for a theological system: it presupposes it,—it believes in the One Truth. Not until the nineteenth century—le siècle d’irrespect—2 was it possible to regain some of the most provisional conditions to read the book as a book (and not as the truth), in order to recognize this story not as a ‘sacred story,’ but as a devilish mix of fable, tidying up, forgery, palimpsest, confusion, in short as reality. (KSA 13, 11[302], 128)

Nor should this preoccupation with philology be a surprise. After all, Nietzsche’s professional career had been precisely as a philologist or a classicist. For, after his school studies at Schulpforta, he had originally gone to university in Bonn to study theology. But his school-leaving dissertation on the sixth-century BCE Greek lyric poet Theognis of Megara, entitled “Theognis as a Poet,” served as a reminder of what was now his real passion: classical philology, and thus his subsequent change from theology to philology, undertaken in 1865, formalized in curricular terms a switch of focus that had already taken place. And when his favourite lecturer, the great classical scholar Friedrich Ritschl (1806–1876), moved from Bonn to Leipzig, Nietzsche decided to switch universities as well; Ritschl’s exclamation when he spotted his student among the audience at his inaugural lecture, entitled “On the Value and Use of Philology”— “Look! Nietzsche is here, too!” (Ei da ist ja auch Herr Nietzsche!)—captures something of the sense of intellectual excitement he and Nietzsche shared, until the latter gradually began to question precisely the value and use of philology.3 At Bonn, Nietzsche was able to witness the great Philologenstreit, sometimes even called the Philologenkrieg, between Ritschl and his rival, Otto Jahn (1813–1869). Nietzsche’s decision to follow Ritschl to Leipzig rather than remain at Bonn with Jahn reflects his investment in one side of this dispute about philology (Jensen 2014). Ritschl was the leading representative of the so-called Bonner Schule of philology, whose approach was characterized by the “linking of textual criticism with the study of prosody, metre, epigraphy, and literary history” (Benne 2005, 59). Concretely this meant a focus on the study of historical sources (Quellenforschung), establishing texts, and critically interpreting them in order to determine how they have been handed down (ibid., 59). The Bonn School prided itself on the forensic discipline of its methodology,

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insisting not so much on its purely formal rigour as on the critical distance maintained towards its own scientific imagination (ibid., 59). As a consequence, the outlook of the Bonn School was empirical, anti-­ metaphysical, and anti-theological in temperament, and Christian Benne has listed its eight chief characteristics (ibid., 59 and 60–68). First, philology was regarded as being rigorous in its method and its ethical outlook. (In an anecdote related by Friedrich Paulsen (1846–1908), during a lecture on Homer Ritschl once suddenly paused, unsure about his own reading of a difficult passage. The following day he declared that he had been right after all, a conclusion reached after having spent the night reading Homer—all of Homer!). Second, although philology aimed to gain a comprehensive knowledge of antiquity, its practical work was focused on individual aspects for examination in the most thorough way possible, despising what Ritschl is reported by Otto Ribeck (1827–1898) to have called “that superficial, lazy universality that has no real home.” Third, in its treatment of these individual aspects, the Bonn School aimed at an almost artistic perfection in its academic presentation. In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche recalled: “My old master Ritschl went so far as to declare that I planned even my philological treatises after the manner of a Parisian novelist—that I made them absurdly thrilling” (EH Books §61). Fourth, as practised by the Bonn School philology was never purely formal, but demanded the use of intuition, intimate knowledge, and far-­ reaching textual expertise. Or in Ribbeck’s words, it demanded “educated feeling, healthy commonsense, and a careful eye.” Fifth, philology was essentially textual criticism (Textkritik), partly because texts are the most important monuments in which antiquity is handed down to us and partly because of philology’s essentially pedagogical function, developing such key skills as critical consciousness and a critical imagination. Sixth, in methodological terms, philology à la Bonn School meant a balance between criticism and hermeneutics. Seventh, philology meant reading—slow reading, careful reading, a kind of reading that responded to the fifth of Ritschl’s “Ten Commandments of classical philologists,” thou shalt learn to read … And eighth, this emphasis on wide reading combined with philosophical abstinence points to the final key element of Bonn School philology: a sound empirical underpinning. In one of his

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early lectures at Bonn, Ritschl had lamented “the mutual lack of respect that is expressed between representatives of natural sciences [Naturwissenschaften] and the so-called humanities [Geisteswissenschaften],” and this embrace of empirical science (and its concomitant rejection of theology and metaphysics) was a position that Nietzsche himself made his own in Human, All-Too-Human (Benne 2005, 60–65). Under Ritschl’s supervision, Nietzsche undertook and published a number of projects: a long article (published in instalments in the Rheinisches Museum für Philologie) on the sources used by Diogenes Laërtius, the author of the famous Live and Opinions of the Philosophers; a paper on Simonides’s Danae and a study of Theognis (again, published in the Rheinisches Museum); an analysis of the sources of Suidas; a draft of an essay on Democritean spuria; a paper on the satire of Varro and Menippus; and a comprehensive index of twenty-four years’ editions of the Rheinisches Museum. During his two years in Leipzig, Nietzsche was entirely committed to the ideals of philology: together with fellow students Heinrich Wilhelm Wisser (1843–1935), Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher (1845–1923), and Richard Arnold (1845–1910), he founded a philological society, the Philologischer Verein, and he met regularly with friends in Café Kintschy to discuss philology and philosophy. Through another philological society, the Ritschlsche Sozietät, Nietzsche met fellow-­ student, Erwin Rohde (1845–1898), with whom a close friendship developed.4 On the strength of the philological excellence of his publications in the Rheinisches Museum, Ritschl―one of the co-editors of that journal― urged his colleagues in Basel to appoint Nietzsche to their Chair for Greek language and literature. In a letter to his colleague, Adolf Kießling (1837–1893), Ritschl wrote in December 1868 that, of all the “young talent” he had seen in the last thirty-nine years, he had never come across someone who had been “so mature, while so early and so young,” as Nietzsche, and he hailed him as “the idol and (without wishing to be) the leader of the world of young philologers here in Leipzig” (cited in Stroux 1925, 32). And so Nietzsche became a classics professor in Basel; to be precise, in April 1869 Nietzsche was appointed Extraordinary Professor of classical philology at the University of Basel, at the age of twenty-four.

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Yet if, as we know, as a student Nietzsche had had doubts about religion, he was now beginning to have doubts about philology. Writing to Rohde on 3 or 4 May 1868, Nietzsche had told his friend that “we cannot live for ourselves, […] but for our part let us see to it that the young philologists conduct themselves with the necessary scepticism, free from pedantry and overvaluation of their discipline, as true promoters of humanistic studies. Soyons de notre siècle—a standpoint which no one forgets more easily than the classicist-to-be” (KSB 2, 307; cf. KSA 2, 329). And in the months leading up to his appointment to Basel, he had in fact been developing a plan to abandon philology and study chemistry (see his letter to Rohde of 16 January 1869; KSB 2, 359–60). Despite all the help he had received from Ritschl in landing his job in Basel, Nietzsche’s attitude towards his Doktorvater was highly ambivalent. Ritschl, so Nietzsche wrote to Rohde on 1–3 February 1868, was “a pimp” (ein Kuppler) whose only desire was “to hold us in the toils of Madame Philology,” adding “I have a surprising desire in the next essay I write in honorem Ritscheli […] to tell the philologists a number of bitter truths” (KSB 2, 248). To Deussen he wrote in October 1868: “If I were to speak mythologically, I should view Philology as an abortion begotten on the Goddess Philosophy by an idiot or a cretin” (KSB 2, 329). And on 20 November 1868, after his first meeting with Wagner in the Brockmann household, Nietzsche wrote a letter to Rohde, in which his dissatisfaction with scholars and with his academic colleagues was expressed with some force: “Now that I see once more the swarming breed of philologists at close range—so that I must daily observe all the mole-like efforts, the full cheek-pouches and the blind eyes, the joy over the captured worm and the utter indifference to the true and highest problems of life—it seems even clearer to me that we two, if we remain uncompromisingly loyal to our genius, will not proceed along life’s path without being struck by it and thwarted in many ways” (KSB 2, 344). In some ways, Nietzsche’s critique of philology anticipates his critique of religion in The Anti-Christ: both Christianity and classicism are— albeit in different ways and to different degrees, to be sure—deemed to be fundamentally anti-life in their outlook. In a letter to Gersdorff of 11 April 1869, Nietzsche contrasts the kind of humanistic education he was

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beginning to envisage—and the kind of vitalist outlook he was beginning to espouse—with the professional occupation of philology: To be a philistine, ἄνθρωπος ἄμουσος [i.e., an illiterate or uncultured person], a man of the crowd—may Zeus and the Muses preserve me from that! […] To infuse my discipline with fresh blood, to convey to my audience that Schopenhauer-like seriousness which is stamped on the brow of the high-minded man—this is my wish, my dearest hope. I want to be something more than a taskmaster to virtuous little philologists: the production of teachers of the present, the care for the growing brood that is coming, all this is before my mind. (KSB 2, 385–386)

In short, Nietzsche’s intellectual trajectory shifts from the desire (as expressed in his correspondence and in his planned Untimely Observation called “We Philologists”) to produce better philologists at universities— to the desire to will the Superman; Thus Spoke Zarathustra stands at the end of this trajectory, just as The Anti-Christ reasserts in a negative form that earlier ideal while seeking to quarrel with and condemn its opponents. The disquiet that Nietzsche was beginning to feel about philology had repercussions in his public discourse and published writings; gradually, and increasingly perceptibly. If his inaugural lecture at Basel of 1869, Homer and Classical Philology, took the form of a sceptical defence of philology, in a follow-up series of public lectures given in 1872 entitled On the Future of Our Educational Institutions he no longer pulled any punches (Nietzsche 2014, 2016). In its own way, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1871) was the great act of leave-taking from the academic establishment and the world of classical philology; at any rate, its reception sealed Nietzsche’s fate and effectively ended his career.5 The Birth of Tragedy—its birth, as the subtitle of the first edition of 1872 emphasized, “out of the spirit of music”—was a complex, difficult, subtle work, whose central lines of strategic argument can be summarized as follows. From Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768), via Goethe—who, for instance, had told Eckermann “study Molière, study Shakespeare; but, above all things, the ancient Greeks, and always the Greeks”6—to G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831), the culture of ancient Greece

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had fascinated German writers, thinkers, and artists, classical and Romantic alike.7 To his subject Nietzsche brought the opposition between the Dionysian and the Apolloninan, an opposition from which, so he told Rohde on 4 August 1871, he believed he could derive much (KSB 3, 215). But prior to Nietzsche, other thinkers and scholars—including Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), Friedrich Creuzer (1771–1858), and F.W.J.  Schelling (1775–1854)—had attached significance to the god Dionysos.8 In the case of Nietzsche, however, Apollo and Dionysos are referred to in The Birth of Tragedy as gods or “art deities” (Kunstgottheiten), as creative human drives or Triebe, and as physiological states, namely, Traum (dream) and Rausch (frenzy) (BT §1). Yet its immediate reception showed that most people had no awareness of this work’s subtlety and complexity. True, Wagner loved the book—“I have never read anything more beautiful than your book!”, he enthused— and this delighted Nietzsche (KSB 3, 272–73). (Indeed, according to Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, the publication of The Birth of Tragedy made Nietzsche—literally want to dance [Förster-Nietzsche 1915, 95].) But the response of his professional colleagues was first silence and then rejection. On 30 January 1872, Nietzsche wrote an indignant letter to his former mentor in Leipzig, Friedrich Ritschl, expressing his surprise at Ritschl’s lack of response (KSB 3, 281–82); for his part, Ritschl wrote to Wilhelm Vischer-Bilfinger, the senior philologist in Basel, on 2 February 1872: “But our Nietzsche!—this is a really sad story […] he is too giddyingly high-flying for me”; what annoyed Ritschl most, however, was “his impiety toward his own mother, who has suckled him at her breast: philology” (KGW II.7.1, 622). When the young Berlin philologist, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-­ Moellendorff (1848–1931), published an attack on The Birth of Tragedy entitled Zukunftsphilologie or The Philology of the Future (Berlin, 1872), Nietzsche’s friend, Erwin Rohde, who had already reviewed The Birth of Tragedy in glowing terms, responded on his behalf with a vigorous defence entitled Afterphilologie (Leipzig, 1872), perhaps best translated as Philology of the Posterior. But Nietzsche now found himself, in effect, deprived of “both mission and profession” (Brown 1990, 238). Composed amid military war—amid the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 and “the thunder of the battle of Wörth” (BT Attempt)—The Birth of Tragedy

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launched a war of words, and arguably it marks the beginning of Nietzsche’s strategic withdrawal from the sphere of philology. Behind the scenes Nietzsche’s scepticism about philology as a professional occupation had been growing, but his feelings were not simply negative ones. At the end of January and the beginning of February 1870, he wrote to Rohde: My love for Greek antiquity keeps on growing; there is no better way of approaching it than that of tirelessly shaping one’s own small person. The stage I have reached in the most shameful confession of my ignorance. The philologist’s existence in any critical task whatever, but a thousand miles away from the Greek experience, is becoming more and more impossible for me. I doubt I will ever be able to become a true philologist. The unfortunate thing is that I have no model and I run the risk of going mad at my own hands. (KSB 3, 94)

The kind of “model” that Nietzsche had in mind becomes clearer in a subsequent letter to Rohde, dated 28 March 1870: “I have the best hopes for my own philology, only I must allow myself several years’ time. I am approaching a unified perception of Greek antiquity, step by step and with a timid amazement” (KSB 3, 112). And a month later on 30 April 1870 he wrote again to Rohde: When I have finished several minor tasks (on old topics), I want to gather my strength for a book for which new ideas keep coming to me. I am afraid that it will not make a scholarly impression, but how can I oppose my own nature? The period of scandal is beginning for me, after a period in which I aroused a certain benevolence because I was wearing the old, familiar slippers. Theme and title of the future book: Socrates and instinct. (KSB 3, 120)

This projected title points to a continuity in Nietzsche’s interests between the earlier and the later periods of his writing, especially between the “Untimelies” and The Anti-Christ. For many years later, in Twilight of the Idols and then in The Anti-­ Christ, we find Nietzsche still waging his war against Socrates. In Twilight Nietzsche sets up a contrast between the idealized figure of the Greek aristocrat and the figure of the decadent Socrates: “The same kind of

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degeneration was everywhere silently preparing itself: the old Athens was coming to an end. […] Everywhere the instincts were in anarchy […]” (TI Socrates §9). Rather than the instincts being regulated by what Nietzsche in Ecce Homo calls “the organising ‘idea’” (EH Clever §9), the Athenian soul as threatened by chaos, or as Nietzsche put it, the Athenians became “full of weariness with life, full of opposition to life,” and life became regarded as a sickness (TI Socrates §1). In this context, Socrates functions both as a symptom and as a response. When Zopyrus reveals to Socrates that he is “a cave of every evil lust,” Socrates responds with “a phrase that provides the key to him”—“‘That is true,’ he said, ‘but I have become master of them all’” (TI Socrates §9).9 So while he was “the extreme case, only the most obvious instance of what had at that time begin to be the universal exigency,” he proposed that “a counter-tyrant” should oppose the tyranny of the instincts (TI Socrates §9). This new tyrant was reason and it exercised its power through the dialectic: The moralism of the Greek philosophers from Plato downwards is pathologically conditioned: likewise their estimation of dialectics. Reason = virtue = happiness means merely: one must imitate Socrates and counter the dark desires by producing a permanent daylight—the daylight of reason. One most be prudent, clear, bright at any cost: every yielding to the instincts, to the unconscious, leads downwards. (TI Socrates §10)

Or to put it another way (as Aaron Ridley summarizes Nietzsche’s argument), Socrates becomes an idealist, inasmuch as he “accorded absolute value to a hypertrophied version of one human capacity, rationality, invented a realm of the Forms that would answer to it, and then used it as a rod with which to beat and denigrate the rest of human nature and the world” (Ridley 2012, 234). To this extent, what Plato and subsequently all philosophers have selected “as an expedient, as a deliverance, is itself only another expression of décadence” (TI Socrates §11). Although Socrates portrays himself as a “physician” and, even more, as a “saviour”— a soter, like Christ—he is, in Nietzsche’s view, nothing of the kind. Likewise, this entire argument is presented in a compact form in The Anti-Christ when, in section 20, he writes: “Perhaps one will here recall that Athenian who also declared war upon pure ‘scientificity,’ to wit,

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Socrates, who elevated personal egoism even in the realm of problems into a morality” (AC §20). In The Anti-Christ as in Daybreak, Nietzsche turns philology against Christianity, much as he had earlier turned philology against itself and quit the academic field. And this goes to the heart of one of his objections, if not his chief objection, against Christianity: we simply cannot know what it means. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche praises “the Jewish ‘Old Testament’” as “the book of divine justice, there are human beings, things, and speeches in so grand a style that Greek and Indian literature have nothing to compare with it” (BGE §52). In stark contrast to this is the New Testament, and “to have glued this New Testament, a kind of rococo of taste in every respect, to the Old Testament to make one book, as the ‘Bible,’ as ‘the book par excellence’—that is perhaps the greatest audacity and ‘sin against the spirit’[10] that literary Europe has on its conscience” (BGE §52). Nietzsche’s stylistic objection to the New Testament is not a merely stylistic one, given the existential importance that he attaches to style; “one thing is needful,” echoing a biblical phrase also found in The Anti-Christ, is the title of an aphorism in The Gay Science, which begins: “To ‘give style’ to one’s character—that is a grand and a rare art!”: For one thing is needful: namely, that man should attain to satisfaction with Himself—be it but through this or that fable and artifice: it is only then that man’s aspect is at all endurable! He who is dissatisfied with himself is ever ready to avenge himself on that account: we others will be his victims, if only in having always to endure his ugly aspect. For the aspect of the ugly makes one mean and sad. (GS §290)

Rather, Nietzsche’s objection involves whether it is actually, philologically, possible for us to understand the origins of Christianity, given our lack of access to the cultural and intellectual world in which it developed. On the other hand, Nietzsche’s struggle with philology in the 1870s also led him to question whether it was any longer possible to understand the Greeks. In response to Wilamowitz’s critique of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche mused to Rohde in a letter of 16 July 1872:

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The soft thesis of the Homeric world as a youthful world has begun to irritate me. In the sense in which it is expounded, it is false. That an enormous struggle—savage, of gloomy roughness and cruelty—precedes it; that Homer is, as it were, a conqueror at the close of this long and desolate period—this is for me one of my firmest convictions. The Greeks are much more ancient that anyone thinks. One can talk about springtime, provided one puts the winter before the spring. But this world of purity and beauty certainly didn’t fall from the skies. (KSB 4, 23)

While the remarkable speed and extent of Nietzsche’s academic promotion should not be underestimated, nor should his eventual and scathing disillusionment with the profession in which he had been so swiftly advanced. This lead him to write (in a letter of 6 January 1889, addressed to his former colleague, Jacob Burckhardt) the bitingly satirical sentence: “In the end I would much rather have been a professor at Basel than God” (KSB 8, 577). Nietzsche spent the first half of 1875 working on an essay intended for his series of Untimely Observations, one entitled “We Philologists” (KSA 8, 11–127) and devoted to his own professional class, but in the end he left it incomplete.11 (Was the subject simply too painful for him to confront in full?) In his notes for this essay, Nietzsche achieves his final reckoning with philology, as this remark demonstrates: “Ninety-nine classicists out of a hundred shouldn’t be in the profession” (Nietzsche 1990, 330–331). And in part 2 of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in the speech entitled “Of the Scholars,” Nietzsche reiterated this critique in the characteristically playful language of this work: “When I lay asleep, then did a sheep eat at the ivy-wreath on my head,—it ate, and said thereby: ‘Zarathustra is no longer a scholar.’ […] For this is the truth: I have departed from the house of the scholars, and the door have I also slammed behind me” (Z II 16). In addition to the early philological writings of Nietzsche’s early student days, the more mature work of his professional years, that is, between 1869 and 1879, constitutes a constant, continuous, and ever deepening reflection on philology: his lectures on Greek drama and on other classical subjects; his sketch, “Introduction to the Study of Classical Philology”; his inaugural lecture at Basel; Homer’s Contest; various sections of On the

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Future of Our Educational Institutions; his notes for an unfinished “untimely observation,” to be entitled “We Philologists”; The Birth of Tragedy (which provoked an attack by Wilamowitz on Nietzsche and a counter-attack on Wilamowitz by Rohde); and Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. And throughout his philosophical writings, in Human, All-Too-Human, in Daybreak, The Gay Science, and Twilight of the Idols, no less than in The Anti-Christ itself, Nietzsche repeatedly returns to philological concerns and themes.

Existential Philology The correct interpretation of texts belongs to one of Nietzsche’s central concerns, and as we have suggested this is no less true of The Anti-Christ than it is true of his work as a whole. For Nietzsche, interpretation has a significance that is visceral, even existential: in Beyond Good and Evil he defines his philosophical task precisely in terms of translation. Nietzsche makes a plea that, away from “the old mendacious pomp, junk, and gold dust of unconscious human vanity” and “under such flattering colours and make-up as well,” we make the effort to recognize again “the basic text of homo natura” (BGE §230). He goes on to outline this project of what one might call an existential philology: To translate the human being back into nature, to become master over the many vain and overly enthusiastic interpretations and connotations that have so far been scrawled and painted over that eternal basic text of homo natura; to see to it that the human being henceforth stands before human beings as even today, hardened in the discipline of science, he stands before the rest of nature […]—that may be a strange and insane task, but it is a task—who would deny that? (BGE §230)

Typically for Nietzsche, he too cannot resist a leap while making this point into the allegorical or the mythological, invoking the figures of Sophocles’s Oedipus and Homer’s Odysseus: the human being stands before “the rest of nature, with intrepid Oedipus eyes and sealed Odysseus ears, deaf to the siren songs of old metaphysical bird catchers who have

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been piping at him all too long, ‘you are more, you are higher, you are of a different origin’” (BGE §230). In Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation (1990), Alan D. Schrift undertakes a close analysis of what he calls Nietzsche’s “pluralistic approach to interpretation” (Schrift 1990, 194) by relating Nietzsche to the hermeneutics of Heidegger and the deconstruction of Derrida (and, indeed, of the “French scene” tout court). The text from Beyond Good and Evil (cited above), to which Schrift also refers (Schrift 1990, 194), illustrates perfectly the ambiguous position occupied by Nietzsche in terms of intellectual history. For, on the one hand, Nietzsche is echoing some of the most ancient writers in Western thought. The Latin phrase homo natura echoes Iamblichus’s discussion of Pythagoras’s definition of human nature as composed of body and soul (homo natura compositus sit ex animo et corpore),12 but in this passage Nietzsche himself explicitly recalls the second messenger’s description in Sophocles’s Oedipus the King of how Oedipus stabs his eyes in order to blind himself after learning of the terrible deeds he has committed (Oedipus the King, ll. 1271–1274) and Homer’s description of how Odysseus commands his men to stop their ears with wax while binding him to the ship’s mast so that they cannot hear the Sirens’s song but he can (Odyssey, book 12, ll. 47–52).13 In this respect we can read Nietzsche as reaching out back to the past and connecting himself with it. On the other hand, these references and allusions are knowing ones, in the sense that Nietzsche is aware that the world to which they belong has passed and is gone. In section 109 of The Gay Science, Nietzsche warns us to “be on our guard” because, while “the astral arrangement in which we live is an exception; this arrangement, and the relatively long durability which is determined by it, has again made possible the exception of exceptions, the formation of organic life,” nevertheless “the general character of the world […] is to all eternity chaos; not by the absence of necessity, but in the sense of the absence of order, structure, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever else our aesthetic humanities are called” (GS §109). Similarly, when Nietzsche talks about Greek history, morality, and homo natura as texts, he does not mean that these things exist as static, completed objects, but rather that they exist as “palimpsests”—as texts that undergo a continual process of re-writing (Schrift 1990; cf. UM I §3).

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For Nietzsche argues that there is no proposition more important than the following one: in his words, “the cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual employment, lie worlds apart” (GM II §12). Instead, he contends, we must learn to see the world through the prism of the will-to-power, and so we have arrived at Nietzsche’s core insight (Schrift 1990, 181–194): Whatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted to new ends, taken over, transformed, and redirected by some power superior to it; all events in the organic world are a subduing, a becoming master, and all subduing and becoming master involves a fresh interpretation, an adaptation through which any previous ‘meaning’ [Sinn] and ‘purpose’ [Zweck] are necessarily obscured or even obliterated. (GM II §12)

In other words, to understand the world, we have to see it in terms of will-to-power. In “Of Self-Overcoming” Zarathustra, having “crept into the heart of life itself, and down into the roots of its heart,” discovers the following: “Wherever I found a living thing, there found I Will to Power; and even in the will of the servant found I the will to be master” (Z II 12). Indeed, life itself reveals to Zarathustra this secret: “‘Behold,’ said she, ‘I am that WHICH MUST EVER SURPASS ITSELF […]’” (Z II 12). This is Nietzsche’s answer to the Faustian project—“That I the mighty inmost tether / May know, that binds the world together” (dass ich erkenne, was die Welt / Im Innersten zusammenhält) (Faust I, ll. 382–383). And Nietzsche applies this insight to his own genealogical method, arguing that everything must be seen in terms of the logic of the will-to-power: Purposes and utilities are only signs that a will to power has become master of something less powerful and imposed upon it the character of a function; and the entire history of a ‘thing’ [eines ‘Dings’], an organ, a custom can in this way be a continuous sign-chain [Zeichen-Kette] of ever new interpretations and adaptations whose causes do not even have to be related to one another but, on the contrary, in some cases succeed and alternate with one another in a purely chance fashion. (GM II §512)

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In the rest of this paragraph, Nietzsche develops this doctrine of the will-to-power, for “the essence of life,” he says, is “its will to power,” and “the essential priority of the spontaneous, aggressive, expansive, life-­ giving forces that give new interpretations and directions, although ‘adaptation’ follows only after this” (GM II §12). But this is not a new insight but rather one of Nietzsche’s oldest ideas. For in his engagement with the disciplines of history and classical philology in his second Untimely Observation where he distinguishes between the “monumental,” the “antiquarian,” and the “critical” modes of regarding the past (UM II §2), Nietzsche relates all three of them to “the service of life”—of “life alone, that dark, driving power that insatiably thirsts for itself ” (UM II §3). For, as he wistfully reflects, “all living things require an atmosphere around them, a mysterious misty vapour” (UM II §7).

Nietzsche’s Philological Strategies As a classical philologist and then as a philosopher, Nietzsche develops two main techniques for approaching classical texts—and subsequently biblical ones, too. First, there is the principle adopted by Nietzsche and enunciated in his letter of 16 September 1882 written to Lou von Salomé (1861–1937): “Your idea of reducing philosophical systems to the personal deeds of their originators is truly an idea from a ‘kindred mind’: I myself in Basel related the history of ancient philosophy in this way and I used to like to tell my audience: ‘This system is refuted and dead―but the person behind it is irrefutable, the person always remains immortal’― for instance, Plato” (KSB 6, 259). Throughout his writings and across the field of philosophy as a whole was how far Nietzsche sought to extend this principle, as he suggested in Beyond Good and Evil (1886): “Gradually I have understood what every great philosophy until now has been: namely, the personal confession of its originator, and a kind of involuntary and unnoticed memoir; equally, that the moral (and immoral) intentions in every philosophy constitutes the real germ-seed from which the entire plant has sprung” (BGE §6). And as his Preface (1887) to The Gay Science (1882) makes clear, this “germ-seed” of every philosophy is essentially physiological: “I have often enough asked myself, whether on the

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whole philosophy hitherto has not generally been merely an interpretation of the body, and a misunderstanding of the body” (GS Preface §2). Second, there is an approach to a text which Nietzsche described as exposing its “retrospective” or “backward inference” (Rückschluss), and which he claimed to have derived from his engagement with the Greek thought of Epicurus and Christianity alike, inasmuch as he “gradually began to understand Epicurus, the opposite of a Dionysian pessimist;— in a similar manner also the ‘Christian,’ who in fact is only a type of Epicurean, and like him essentially a Romanticist” (GS §370). Accordingly, Nietzsche defined this technique of “backward inference” as follows: “My vision has always become keener in tracing that most difficult and insidious of all forms of retrospective inference, in which most mistakes have been made—the inference from the work to its author, from the deed to its doer, from the ideal to him who needs it, from every mode of thinking and valuing to the imperative want behind it” (GS §370). What this meant in practice is explained by Nietzsche in The Gay Science and clarified in Nietzsche contra Wagner (1888), in which he reprised this passage: In regard to all aesthetic values I now avail myself of this radical distinction: I ask in every single case, ‘Has hunger or superfluity become creative here?’ […] The desire for destruction, change and becoming, may be the expression of overflowing power, pregnant with futurity (my terminus for this is of course the word ‘Dionysian’); but it may also be the hatred of the ill-­ constituted, destitute and unfortunate, which destroys, and must destroy, because the enduring, indeed, all that endures, in fact all being, excites and provokes it. (GS §370)

In the case of Goethe, one finds superabundance that has become creative; in the case of the French novelist Gustave Flaubert (1821–1881), by contrast, hatred (NCW We Antipodes). Precisely these two principles or techniques—which one could uncharitably describe as an approach ad hominem and as a vitalist psychologizing reduction—inform and underpin Nietzsche’s argument as it is presented in The Anti-Christ. That argument, however, had been worked out in Nietzsche’s earlier writings.

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In an aphorism in Daybreak (1881), Nietzsche had already launched an excoriating attack on “the philology of Christianity,” which opens with a startling assertion followed by a series of questions: “How little Christianity cultivates the sense of honesty can be inferred from the character of the writings of its learned men. […] Their continual cry is: ‘I am right, for it is written,’ and then follows an explanation so shameless and capricious that a philologist, when he hears it, must stand stock-still between anger and laughter, asking himself again and again: Is it possible? Is it honest? Is it even decent?” (D §84). In Daybreak, Nietzsche chooses to focus on the way in which this “dishonesty” is practised in Protestant pulpits—“in what a clumsy fashion the preacher takes advantage of his security from interruption; how the Bible is pinched and squeezed; and how the people are made acquainted with every form of the art of false reading”—but at the same time he highlights how this philological practice is inherent in Christianity from its earliest forms, or what Nietzsche describes as “a religion which, during the centuries when it was being firmly established, enacted that huge philological farce concerning the Old Testament,” and he went on to elaborate this charge: “However strongly Jewish savants protested, it was everywhere sedulously asserted that the Old Testament alluded everywhere to Christ, and nothing but Christ, more especially His Cross […]” (D §84). The kind of interpretation that Nietzsche has in mind here is the one in which “wherever reference was made to wood, a rod, a ladder, a twig, a tree, a willow, or a staff, such a reference could not but be a prophecy relating to the wood of the Cross” (D §84), and he goes on to allude to a number of biblical episodes—“even the setting-up of the Unicorn and the Brazen Serpent, even Moses stretching forth his hands in prayer, indeed the very spits on which the Easter lambs were roasted: all these were allusions to the Cross, and, as it were, preludes to it!” (D §84). The fundamental question that Nietzsche puts to his readers is this: “Has anyone who asserted this ever believed it?” (D §84). As a final example, Nietzsche cites the case of a disputed, even controversial, verse from the Book of Psalms, Psalm 96[95]:10,14 translated (in the DRV) as “Say ye among the Gentiles, the Lord hath reigned” (DRV) or (in the NJB) as “Say among the nations, ‘Yahweh is king’” (NJB) or (in the Coverdale translation of the Psalms) as “Tell it out among the heathen that the Lord

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is King.” In their commentary on the Psalms, the Anglican clergymen John Mason Neale (1818–1866) and Richard Frederick Littledale (1833–1890) offer the following remarks on this text: “In the time of St Justin Martyr, and for a long time subsequently, the reading of the first member of this verse was, The Lord hath reigned from the Wood,” and Justin Martyr “explicitly charges the Jews with having quite recently cut out the latter words, as well as some expressions in Ezra and Jeremiah, as being too distinctly prophetic of Christ.”15 In the hymn Vexilla Regis by Venantius Fortunatus, the idea is retained in the stanza which, translated (by J.M. Neale), runs: “Fulfilled is all that David told / In true prophetic song of old; / Amid the nations God, saith he, / Hath reigned and triumphed from the Tree.” Neale and Littledale note, however, that while Tertullian, St Cyprian, and Lactantius, as well as St Augustine “adopted” these words, they were not in the Hebrew manuscripts consulted by St Jerome, and Genebrardus “inclines to the view that they were a paraphrase introduced by the Seventy”—that is, the authors of the Septuagint—“into the Greek text.”16 (In fact, Neale and Littledale suggest that the original reference, if it existed, was to the wood of the Ark of the Covenant, as the source of the power which overthrew Dagon, the idol of the Philistines, thus bringing about the return of the Ark itself to Israel.) In an extensive footnote on this verse in Psalm 96[95], the Catholic scholar George Leo Haydock (1774–1849) discusses the omission or alleged erasure of these words from the text and concludes that “whatever may be the decision on this important matter, it is certain that the reign of Christ was propagated from the wood, in a wonderful manner, as he there began to draw all to himself, and the prophet seems evidently to allude to the times when Christ proclaimed, the kingdom of God is at hand, and when the conversion of the Gentiles, and the institution of the blessed Eucharist, would fill all the world with rapture” (H, 764). Today in our postmodern (and post-Vatican-II) world one might well be tempted to smile at these interpretations; yet in 1898—that is, only ten years after The Anti-Christ was written—it was possible for Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907), the French novelist and art critic who converted to Catholicism, recording his spiritual journey in a trilogy of novels (Là-bas [1891]; En route [1895]; and La cathédrale [1898]),17 to put

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the following words into the mouth of Durtal, his main autobiographical character ‘Argument is vain,’ murmured Durtal, who was meditative. ‘The Messianic prophecies are irresistible. All the logic of the Rabbins, the Protestants, the Freethinkers, all the ingenuity of the Germans, have failed to find a crack or to undermine the old rock of the Church’ (Huysmans 1997, 218)

to which Durtal’s interlocutor, Abbé Plomb, responds by confirming this view. (Of course the Germans, to whose “ingenuity” Durtal alludes, are precisely those scholars whose (re)interpretation of scripture accompanied the “quest for the historical Jesus,” the progress of which we tracked in Chap. 3; while the references to the Rabbins and the Protestants remind us of the unfortunate anti-Semitic and sectarian aspects of Huysmans’s discourse.) In response to Durtal’s question that, “supposing the Gospels were to be annihilated, they could, I suppose, be restored, and a brief history written of the Saviour’s life as they relate it merely by studying the Messianic announcements in the books of the Prophets?”, Abbé Plomb again answers in the affirmative (Huysmans 1997, 219). In fact, Durtal’s question and the answer it elicits from Abbé Plomb gets close to how the New Testament actually came to be written. As Michel Onfray has reminded us, the very names of biblical characters are replete with significance: the name Jesus means “God saves, has saved, will save,” the name of Bethlehem, the town where Jesus is said to have been born, means the “house of bread,” while the name of Joseph of Arimathea, the man who according to all four Gospel sources took responsibility for the burial of Jesus after the Crucifixion, means “Joseph, the one who buries” (Arimathea = “after death”).18 (From within the perspective of faith itself, this symbolic dimension has long been recognized: in 1923, for instance, Abbot Prosper Guéranger (1805–1875) noted the significance of the names of the three places in which Jesus as Redeemer began, continued, and ended his life on earth: (a) he is conceived at Nazareth, which signifies “a Flower,” and as in the Canticle of Canticles (2:1) he is “the Flower of the field and the Lily of the Valley, by whose fragrance we are refreshed”; (b) he is born at Bethlehem, “the House of Bread; for he is the nourishment of our souls”; and (c) he dies on the Cross in

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Jerusalem, the holy city whose name signifies “Vision of Peace” and “by his Blood, he restores peace between heaven and earth, peace between men, peace within our own souls.”)19 This linguistic dimension is so dense that it defines the etymological origin of Christianity; it would be no exaggeration to describe it as a religion built out of texts. Now in Daybreak Nietzsche sees these philological interventions made by the Patristic writers in the interpretation of ancient Hebrew texts as something to be taken very seriously. With reference to the debate over the text of Psalm 96[95], verse 10, he remarks that “the Church did not shrink from putting interpolations in the text of the Septuagint […], in order that she might later on make use of these interpolated passages as Christian prophecies,” for they were “engaged in a struggle, and thought of their foes rather than of honesty” (D §84). So when, in section 52 of The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche returns to and picks up again this critique of the philology of Christianity, he does not need to give any specific examples, but he can content himself with lamenting the way that philology is exercised as “ephexis”—that is, suspension of judgement—“in interpretation”: The way in which a theologian, whether in Berlin or in Rome, is ready to explain, say, a ‘passage of Scripture,’ or an experience, or a victory by the national army, by turning upon it the high illumination of the Psalms of David, is always so daring that it is enough to make a philologist run up a wall. (AC §52)

Here Nietzsche’s objection is to the instrumentalization of religion in general and biblical interpretation in particular for political purposes, along the way that, for example, the famous opening of Psalm 68[67], “Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered,” can be used in any given situation as an appeal for military intervention. At the same time, however, he objects to the way that religion is used—as it is, for instance, by some Evangelical Christians—to portray the world as somehow through prayer being at our beck and call: “However small our piety, if we ever encountered a God who always cured us of a cold in the head at just the right time, or got us into our carriage at the very instant heavy rain began to fall, he would seem so absurd a God that he would have to be

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abolished, even if he existed” (D §52). Today, we might call this conception of God “the God of the parking space,” a deity who intervenes miraculously to find someone a place to park the car, while curiously yet conspicuously failing to intervene in cases of famine, plague, or war. In Nietzsche’s terms, this is God “as a domestic servant, as a letter carrier, as an almanac-maker—at bottom, he is a mere name for the stupidest sort of chance” (D §52). Given the importance that this etymological or philological dimension has for Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity in The Anti-Christ, we need to consider the textual nature of Christianity in closer detail. In so doing, it substantiates Nietzsche’s philological approach to Christianity, and it can help us understand why, given that philological approach, Nietzsche came to the view that faith was no longer possible.

The Textual Nature of the New Testament The importance of interpretation is a key message of the New Testament scriptures themselves, which constantly refers back to the Hebrew bible or “Old” Testament. Here, let us consider three examples, and it is no coincidence that they come from Luke (or the gospel and Acts ascribed to him), a writer just as much at home in the Hellenic world as he is in the Jewish. The underlying intention of Luke’s writings, it has been suggested, is to create an alignment between (a) the line of prophets belonging to historical epochs in Israel’s past; (b) the life of Christ, presented as that of a model prophet-teacher; and (c) the age of the apostles, to which he himself is thought to have belonged (Mack 1993, 186). The first example constitutes one of the most celebrated of the post-­ Resurrection appearances of Jesus: the story of the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13–35), which elaborates on an anecdote found in Mark (16:12–13). Two of the apostles are walking back from Jerusalem to Emmaus, seven miles or so away. Jesus approaches him; but, in line with other appearances, they do not recognize him. Asked why they are so sad, Cleopas relates everything that has happened in Jerusalem: the Crucifixion and the empty tomb. In response, Jesus retorts: “O foolish, and slow of heart, to believe in all the things which the prophets have spoken! Ought not

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Christ to have suffered these things, and so to enter into his glory? And beginning from Moses and all the prophets, he expounded to them in all the Scriptures, the things that were concerning him” (Luke 24:25–27). Jesus goes on to perform a kind of Eucharist, in which he takes bread, blesses it, and breaks it—at which precise moment “their eyes were opened, and they knew him,” before he “vanished from their sight” (24:31). This moment of insight and recognition is bound up with the act of (re)interpretation that had taken place in Jesus’s earlier biblical-­ exegetical discourse: “Was not our heart burning within us, whilst he was speaking in the way, and opening to us the Scriptures?” (24:32). In the second example, this act of (re)interpretation is placed at the centre of the last instructions given to the apostles by Christ before his ascension. On the day of resurrection (as it would seem to be in the Gospel of Luke) or a period of forty days after it (as would seem to be the case in the Acts of the Apostles) Jesus gathers the apostles together and tells them: “These are the words which I spoke to you while I was yet with you, that all the things must needs be fulfilled, which are written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms concerning me” (Luke 24:44). At that moment—and perhaps through those very words— “he opened their understanding, that they might understand the Scriptures” (24:45). In other words, the Jewish Scriptures are now to be interpreted in the light of his, Christ’s, death and resurrection—“And he said to them, Thus it is written, and thus it behoved Christ to suffer, and to rise again from the dead the third day” (Luke 24:46)—and this act of (re)interpretation constitutes the starting point of the apostolic mission. The third example is a demonstration of how this injunction to (re) interpret, to preach, and to convert is supposed to work in a concrete situation. As the Acts of the Apostles recounts the story, one of the apostles, Philip, receives an instruction from an angel to set off down the desert road that leads from Jerusalem to Gaza. On this road Philip meets an Ethiopian, an officer and a eunuch at the court of the kandake, the queen of Ethiopia. He is on his way home and sitting in his chariot, reading the Book of Isaiah. Moved by the Spirit to run up to the chariot, Philip asks him: “Thinkest thou that thou understandest what thou readest?” (Acts 8:30). “How can I, unless someone shew me?”, the Ethiopian eunuch replies, opening the way to the moment of scriptural (re)

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interpretation and inviting Philip to join him in his carriage. The passage he is reading is from the fourth song of the servant (Isaiah 53:7–8), part of “Second Isaiah” and a text that takes up the theme of suffering from the third song. In response to the question, “Of whom doth the prophet speak this? of himself, or of some other?” (Acts 8:34), Philip follows the apostolic injunction to (re)interpret the Scripture in the light of the gospel, and “beginning at that scripture, [he] preached to him Jesus” (8:35).20 Whatever Nietzsche might have thought of this philological method, it convinces the Ethiopian eunuch. When they pass some water, he asks Philip to baptize him. His conversion and baptism are confirmed by something miraculous: when they emerge out of the water, “the Spirit of the Lord took away Philip, and the eunuch saw him no more” (Acts 8:39), much as in the deuterocanonical story of Bel and the dragon appended to the Book of Daniel, where an angel seizes the prophet Habbakuk by his hair and transports him, along with the food he is carrying, to Daniel who has been thrown into a lion pit (Daniel 14:33–39). However, as the story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch is positioned in Acts, this baptism will soon be confirmed by something even more miraculous—the conversion of Saul. In the midst of the discourse of parables in the Gospel of Matthew we come across an explanation of why the people are taught only in parables. “All these things Jesus spoke in parables to the multitudes: and without parables he did not speak to them,” we read, and so “that the words might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying: I will open my mouth in parables, I will utter things hidden away from the foundation of the world” (Matthew 13:34–35). The prophet concerned is, of course, David, and the text is Psalm 77[78]:2. This text is translated in the DRV as follows, “I will open my mouth in parables: I will utter propositions from the beginning,” and Haydock notes that “propositions” means “deep and mysterious sayings” (H, 747). And “by this it appears,” he continues, “that the historical facts of ancient times, commemorated in this psalm, were deep and mysterious; as being figures of great truths appertaining to the time of the New Testament,” concluding that “the facts, etc., of the Old Testament, prefigured the mysteries of the New” (H, 747). Likewise, in their commentary Neale and Littledale observe that “the passage is thus fatal to the bare literal interpretation of Holy Writ, as it teaches us

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that all the events recorded therein have a deeper mystical intent underlying the narrative, a truth on which St Paul dwells more than once.”21 The function of the quotation, of course, is to confirm Christ’s status as the Messiah—and to make the point that the Messiah is not a figure who is coming in the future, but that the Messiah has come (Onfray 2017, 58–59). On this point the Gospel of Matthew is insistent; at the beginning of the discourse of parables, Christ explains why he uses the form of the parable (Matthew 13:10–17). As Haydock observes in his biblical commentary, this passage, by which Isaiah (6:9–10) was ordered to foretell “the obstinate blindness of the Jews, in refusing to receive and believe in their Messias,” is cited no fewer than six times in the New Testament (Mark 4:14; Luke 8:10; John 12:40; Acts 28:26; and Romans 11:8): it could thus be described as a key text in the New Testament. For it is significant that this passage, the original context for which is the call of Isaiah in the year of King Uzziah’s death (i.e., 740 BCE), emphasizes the problem of interpretation and recognizes, as the commentary in the NJB observes, that “the prophet’s preaching will be met by incomprehension on the part of his audience” (NJB, OT, 1199). Furthermore, the textual nature of the figure of Christ is evident from the very opening of the Gospel of Matthew, which provides the ancestry of Christ in terms of figures that feature in numerous books of the Hebrew scriptures—including Genesis, Joshua, Ruth, Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, Isaiah, and so on. This list of names used to be read on the Feast of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary on 8 September as well as on the Feast of her father, St Joachim, on 16 August, and its rhetorical and theological effect still resonates with the German writer (and traditionalist Catholic) Martin Mosebach, who describes this genealogical text as being “for modern human beings […] at best an absurd sound-poem” (Mosebach 2007, 189). Yet, as Mosebach goes on to explore, this list of names contains within it a variety of subtle theological nuances (ibid., 198–199). In various ways, the links between the two sets of scriptures— Hebrew (Jewish) and Greek (Christian)—are explicit or implicit and underpin the claim of Christianity to be the truth. Gabriel, the angel who announces the Incarnation to Mary (Luke 1: 26–38), has his counterpart in the angel of Yahweh who announces the birth of Ishmael to Abram’s wife, Sarai (Genesis 16:7–12). The famous

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text about a virgin (or a young woman) who gives birth can be found in Isaiah (7:14), extending the sign of the birth of a son to King Ahaz, that is, Hezekiah, into a prophecy of the birth of Christ. The baptism of Christ in the River Jordan by John has a counterpart in the episode when Naaman, on the instruction of Elisha, immerses himself seven times in the Jordan and is healed (2 Kings 5:1–14). In fact, numerous scenes in the New Testament—the temptation in the desert, the casting out of the merchants of the Temple, the multiplication of the loaves of bread, the institution of the Eucharist, and so on—have equivalents or counterparts in the Hebrew bible. And here lies the problem: do the “Old” Testament episodes prefigure those of the New Testament? Or are the accounts in the New Testament constructed, confected, or fabricated out of the older “Old” Testament texts? What these difficulties mean for the modern reader (and they are difficulties of which Nietzsche was evidently very aware) has been summarized by Michel Onfray as follows: The more the gospel is earth-bound and concrete, and the more it enters into factual detail, the more it becomes difficult to decipher, because it is easier to remain on the level of anecdote, one gets caught up in all the little stories, one stagnates, and one does not rise to the true sense which is hidden, encrypted. To believe that the multiplication of the leaves is the consequence of a miracle is to ignore that sacred numerology allows one to refer back, here again, to a hidden sense: in Hebrew, each letter is, as well as being a letter, a number. (Onfray 2017, 61)

As a result, what comes to dominate is less the actual historical and more the symbolic dimension of the text, a dimension described by Onfray as “a construct which is allegorical, mythical, mythological, fabulous, metaphorical, and symbolical” and which functions “like a mille feuilles of enigmas” (Onfray 2017, 61). Thanks to the crystallization of these allusions and references, Christ acquires a body, but it is a body of paper; on Onfray’s account, he never had any other kind of body, certainly not a physical one. In fact, even his incarnational body is really fictional or symbolic: when Christ drinks wine, it is because as a red liquid it “announces the blood of the Passion,”

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but at the same time it is the “vine of the Lord, planted by Yahweh and symbolising the people of Israel”; Christ eats bread, because “the leaven announces the fermenting agent of the believers who make the dough of the Church rise,” but at the same time it is “the bread sent by God to Moses for the people of Israel, the bread sent from Heaven” as one finds it in Exodus (16:4); and Christ eats fish, because the Greek letters that describe him and those of the word “fish” are identical,22 but at the same time it is “a nod in the direction of Ezekiel (chapter 47)” and the spring which flows from the Temple which is plentiful in fish, for “there shall be fishes in abundance after these waters shall come hither, and they shall be healed, and all things shall live to which the torrent shall come” (Ezekiel 47:9), and this living water is the baptismal water of John the Baptist, of Christ, and of all Christians (Onfray 2017, 61). These biblical references, echoes, and allusions run throughout the gospels, including their narrative of the Passion. The account found in the earliest gospel, Mark (15:16–39), has Psalm 22[21] running in the background: the mocking of Christ by the centurions—“All they that saw me have laughed me to scorn: they have spoken with the lips, and wagged the head” (22[21]:8); the sharing out of his clothing by the centurions, casting lots for what each should get—“They parted my garments amongst them: and upon my vestments they cast lots” (22[21]:29); the act of crucifixion itself—“They have dug my hands and feet: They have numbered all my bones” (22[21]:17–18); and finally, the climax of the Passion, when at the ninth hour, Christ cries out: “O God, my God, look upon me: why hast thou forsaken me?” (22[21]:1). In fact, a text which, in its original context, expresses “the sufferings and hopes of the upright” (as the NJB titles the text) acquires an almost programmatic sense as a prediction of the Passion; as Neale and Littledale point out, numerous Church Fathers and writers (including the Venerable Bede, Eusebius of Cæsarea, St Jerome, and Theodore of Mopsuestia) read the text in precisely this sense.23 Even a brief examination of the New Testament bears out the claim that it offers a field-day for philologists. Consider, for example, the passage in Matthew which shows us Christ in theological dispute with the Pharisees:

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And the Pharisees being gathered together, Jesus asked them, saying: What think you of Christ? whose son is he? They say to him: David’s. He saith to them: How then doth David in spirit call him Lord: saying: The Lord said to my Lord: Sit on my right hand, until I make thy enemies thy foot-stool? If David then call him Lord, how is he his son? And no man was able to answer him a word: neither durst any man from that day forth ask him any more questions. (Matthew 22:41–46)

Now the passage which Christ puts to the Pharisees for interpretation in this encounter is Psalm 110[109], one of the so-called royal psalms, a number of ancient texts dating from the time of the monarchy and which (in the form of divine pronouncements, prayers for the king, thanksgiving for the king, and processional and bridal songs) reflect the idiom and ceremonial of the royal court (NJB, OT, 812). The theme of this text, as the commentary in the NJB notes, is the prerogatives of the Messiah— worldwide sovereignty and perpetual priesthood. The striking image found in its first verse, “Sit thou at my right hand: until I make thy enemies thy footstool,” reflects a prominent theme in many of the royal psalms, that is, the protection by God of the king from the nation’s enemies, and in some Egyptian murals, the pharaoh is depicted as enthroned with his feet resting on the heads of kneeling captives (Alter 2007, 196). The puzzle put by Christ to his interlocutors is this: granted that, as was agreed by common consent, the Messiah was to be the son of David, then how it can be that, in the words of the psalm attributed to David, the Messiah was both the Lord and the son of David? The point being made to the Pharisees, who are reluctant to accept it, is the dual nature of the Messiah—on the one hand, that his human origin can be traced back to David (as the opening genealogy of Matthew, 1:1–17, purports to show), and, on the other, his superiority to David, which explains why David calls him Lord, owing to the divine nature of the Messiah as the son of God. For this reason, the beat of this psalm runs throughout the soundtrack of the New Testament, and in Gregorian and monastic liturgical celebration alike, the psalm is solemnly chanted on Sunday at Vespers. Aside from the passage in Matthew discussed above, the psalm is cited on five further occasions in the New Testament: once in the Gospel of Mark (12:36), once in the Gospel of Luke (20:42), once in the Acts of

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the Apostles (Acts 2:34), and twice in the Epistle to the Hebrews (1:13 and 5:6). (The tradition of commentary on this text continues in St Augustine in his Enarrationes in Psalmos and in Theodore of Mopsuestia’s Expositionis in Psalmos, whose influence in the West was achieved in an abbreviated form in Latin of the original Greek.)24 When the episode recounted in Matthew is told by Mark, we learn that “a great multitude heard him gladly” (Mark 12:36), presumably because they understood the point that was being made. In Acts, the psalm forms part of the textual tapestry woven by Peter in his address to the crowd at Pentecost; after citing Joel (1:1–5) and Psalm 16:8–11, Peter quotes the lines from Psalm 110[109], prefacing them with the remark, “For David did not ascend into heaven, but he himself said,” and following them up with this concluding observation, “Therefore let all the house of Israel know most assuredly, that God hath made this Jesus, whom you have crucified, both Lord and Christ” (Acts 2:34 and 36). If the function of this prefatory remark is to suggest that, as David lies in his tomb and did not ascend to heaven, so the summons spoken by God in the psalm must be addressed to someone other than David (and, by implication, to someone who did leave the tomb and who did ascend into heaven), the function of Peter’s concluding observation is precisely the kind of manoeuvre to which Nietzsche so vociferously objected—the argument from scripture. The events preceding Pentecost, Peter is arguing—the crucifixion and the resurrection, which reveal Christ to be the “holy one,” whose soul is not left “in hell” nor is allowed to “see corruption” (in the words of Psalm 116), and to be the “Lord” of which Psalm 110[109] speaks—constitute proof of his divinity; textual proof. In fact, the strategy of providing proof from the scriptures is used by the author of the Letter to the Hebrews (traditionally thought to have been written by Paul, although most scholars today tend to question this). After quoting Psalm 2:7, the Second Book of Samuel 7:14, Psalm 97[96]:7, Psalm 104[103]:4, Psalm 45[44]:6–7, and Psalm 102[101]: 25–27, the author triumphantly concludes this series of quotations with an allusion to Psalm 110[109] and two questions: “But to which of the Angels said [God] at any time: Sit on my right hand, until I make thy enemies thy footstool? Are they not all ministering spirits, sent to minister for those, who shall receive the inheritance of salvation?” (Hebrews

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1:13–14). Evidently the point of the questions is to emphasize that, compared to the status of Christ as the Son, angels are mere “ministering spirits,” that is, servants, although the logic of this position only makes sense within a worldview that accepts the existence of angels (or, for that matter, of God). Indeed, this is the entire objection to the “proof from scripture,” namely, that if one disagrees with the premise that the psalmist or the prophets hold the key to the future, then citing these sources cannot in itself ever be convincing. Nevertheless, in philological terms Psalm 110[109] could be regarded as providing the textual and ideological template for much Christian doctrine. (And, in philological terms, the poor textual state of this psalm, with its oddities of language and wide-ranging variants across the manuscript sources, makes it semantically malleable and open to interpretation—perfect for the kind of textual “reverse engineering” the early Christians and Patristic writers wanted to undertake.) In the phrase, “With thee is the principality in the day of thy strength,” one can read an argument for the consubstantiality, hence equal authority, of the Son with the Father; from the phrase, “from the womb before the day-star I begot thee,” one can derive the doctrine of the eternal existence of Christ prior to his birth as a human being, and in the statement, “Thou art a priest for ever, according to the order of Melchisedech,” one finds a text that was to be of central importance for the author of the Letter to the Hebrews. For this Letter sets out to address a problem that, once again, only made sense within the Jewish theological framework of the intellectual environment in and from which early Christianity emerged. The problem was this: if the Messiah was to be a king and a priest, how did this fit with Jesus, who was—in the conventional sense—clearly neither? The issue of kingship could be addressed through tracing, at least in one form of genealogical table, his descendancy back to the house of David, that is, the royal house. But equally clearly Jesus was not a member of the Levitical priesthood, that is, the priesthood that began with Aaron, the older brother of Moses, and was passed on through the tribe of Levi, descended from the third son of Jacob and Leah. Evidently Christ had not been a member of that tribe, nor had he been one of the priests serving in the Temple; in fact, he had implicitly disassociated himself from

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the cult of the Temple when he threw the merchants and money changers out of it, in an episode recounted in all four canonical gospels (Matthew 21:12;17; Mark 11:15–19; Luke 19:45–48; and John 2:13–16). So the solution was to invent or to discover (depending on one’s point of view) an alternative line of priesthood, based on Psalm 110[109]:4, “Thou art a priest for ever, according to the order of Melchisedech.” This priestly order is based on the enigmatic figure of Melchizedek, only mentioned on one earlier occasion in the Book of Genesis. As the commentary in the NJB suggests, this “brief and mysterious appearance” made by Melchizedek in the narrative “as king of that Jerusalem where Yahweh will choose to dwell, as priest of the Most High before the levitical priesthood was established,” becomes in Psalm 110[109] a figure of David who, in turn, is “a figure of the Messiah who is both king and priest” (NJB, OT, 33); all that was required of the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews was to apply this figure, so rich in resonance, to the “priesthood” of Christ and to elaborate a doctrine that presented Christ’s sacrifice as superior to the sacrifices of the Mosaic law. In this way a textual Christ emerges from the pages of the Hebrew scriptures, now functioning as an “Old” Testament. Indeed, Christ himself is recorded by Luke as saying in one of his post-resurrection appearances, “All things must needs be fulfilled, which are written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms concerning me” (Luke 24:44).25 It is striking how often this Psalm is quoted in the New Testament (and in ecclesiastical liturgy) as compared to Psalm 2, where the psalmist writes: “The Lord hath said to me: Thou art my son, this day have I begotten thee. Ask of me, and I will give thee the Gentiles for thy inheritance, and the utmost parts of the earth for thy possession. Thou shalt rule them with a rod of iron, and shalt break them in pieces like a potter’s vessel” (Psalm 2:7–9). The portrayal of the messianic King as a warrior in this text intersects with the imagery of Psalm 110[109]:5–6: “The Lord at thy right hand hath broken kings in the day of his wrath. He shall judge among the nations, he shall fill ruins: he shall crush the heads in the lands of many.” (Since the liturgical reforms of Vatican II, verse 6 tends to be omitted when this psalm is said or chanted in the vernacular, as its imprecatory nature is deemed likely, in the words of the General Instruction on

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the Liturgy of the Hours, §131, to cause “certain psychological difficulties.”) While the acts of destruction envisaged in Psalm 2 are echoed in the Book of Revelation (Revelations 2:27 and 19:15), its theme of divine sonship is picked up by Paul in his great inaugural discourse to the Jews in the synagogue in Antioch on the Sabbath (Acts 13:17–43, esp. verse 33) and (as alluded to above in the context of discussing Psalm 110[109]) in the Letter to the Hebrews (Hebrews 1:5 and 5:5). Predictably, Haydock comments that verse 7, “Thou art my son, this day have I begotten thee,” applies to David, now secure in his throne by his military victories described and celebrated elsewhere, but “literally” refers to Christ, either born in time, or baptized, or rising again, or born from all eternity (H, 680). In this regard, a perfect example of the kind of textual interpretation to which Nietzsche so strenuously objected can be found in Augustine’s Expositions on the Psalms, which interprets verse 7 as speaking “prophetically” of the day “on which Jesus Christ was born according to the flesh.” Augustine notes that “in eternity there is nothing past as if it had ceased to be, nor future as if it were not yet, but present only, since whatever is eternal, always is,” yet “as today intimates presentiality, a divine interpretation is given to that expression, Today have I begotten You,” turning it for “the uncorrupt and Catholic faith” into a proclamation of “the eternal generation of the power and Wisdom of God, who is the Only-begotten Son.”26 Subsequently, the fourteenth-century German mystic Johannes Tauler took his cue from the fact that the introit to the first of the three Masses for Christmas Day opens with the words from Psalm 2, “The Lord hath said to me, ‘Thou art My Son, this day have I begotten Thee’” (Psalm 2:7), thus pointing (in Tauler’s words) to the “hidden birth which happens within the secrecy of the unknown Godhead” (Tauler 1985, 35). In fact, Tauler describes the feast of Christmas as commemorating a “threefold birth”: a divine one, the birth in which “the Heavenly Father begets His only Son within the divine essence, yet distinct in Person”; an allegorical and moral one, the birth of “maternal fruitfulness brought about in virginal chastity and true purity”; and an allegorical and mystical one, a birth that takes place whenever God “is born in a just soul every day

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and every hour truly and spiritually, by grace and out of love” (ibid., 35). These sorts of readings are clearly allegorical, and as such are by no means lacking in interpretative sophistication. But are they philologically valid? Although the Catholic Church (in its General Instruction on the Liturgy of the Hours, §109) continues to promote the validity of christological interpretations (even if some of them are “mere appropriations,” on the grounds that such appropriations have been “commended by the tradition of the Church”), a recent scholarly translator of the Psalms warns us that, “despite Christological readings of this verse over the centuries,” it was in fact “a commonplace in the ancient Near East, readily adopted by the Israelites, to imagine the king as God’s son”; consequently, the Hebrew emphasis on the concept of divine sonship “seems to be more political than theological” (Alter 2007, 6). Doubtless, this is exactly the kind of warning that Nietzsche—with his emphasis on the philological, socio-­ political, psychological, and strategic context of texts—would also be concerned that we should heed.

The Book of Q A good example of how philology can be when brought to bear on biblical sources is furnished by The Lost Gospel, published in 1993 by the scholar of early Christian history, Burton L. Mack (born 1931), who was based at the Claremont School of Theology in California. His book summarizes and synthesizes in an accessible way some important work that has been done on the origins of the New Testament, notably by the Canadian professor of religion, John S. Kloppenborg (born 1951). Now, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries proved to be an age of major discoveries, as far as early biblical manuscripts are concerned. In 1859, for example, the Epistle of Barnabas was discovered at St Catherine’s monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai, and in 1873 the Didache, or the Teaching, attributed to the Twelve Apostles, was rediscovered in the Codex Hierosolymitanus in the Jerusalem Monastery of the Most Holy Sepulchre in Constantinople. Then, in the twentieth century, the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in the 1940s and 1950s at Qumran, a location believed to have been the home of a Hebrew sect, possibly the so-called Essenes.27

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And a major collection of Gnostic texts were found in 1945 at Nag Hammadi, a site known in antiquity as Chenoboskion (in Greek) or Sheneset (in Coptic), then a centre of early Christianity that had been a base for the Desert Fathers (in the third century), and later the site of a monastery (in the fourth).28 Mack takes as his starting point the “two-source theory” that is now accepted by most scholars, but itself is a major departure from traditional view regarding the authorship of the New Testament gospels. In his commentary on the New Testament published in 1859, for instance, Haydock confidently asserts that the gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were written by those very people: by Matthew, a Galilean, the son Alpheus, a Jew, and a tax-gatherer, known also by the name of Levi; by Mark, a follower of St Peter in Rome and later bishop of Alexandria (although Haydock notes the various views on Mark’s identity held by St Irenaeus, St Jerome, St Epiphanius of Salamis, and others); by Luke, a physician and a native of Antioch, and the disciple, travelling companion, and fellow-labourer of St Paul (while noting various conjectures about whether he was a Gentile and a pagan or a Jew); and by John, a native of Bethsaida in Galilee, the son of Zebedee and Salome, and the same as the author of the Book of Revelations.29 The similarities between the first three gospels has led to them being described as “synoptic,” that is, they can be placed side by side and viewed synoptically, that is, “at a glance”: how is one to explain how this similarity came about?30 Could it be explained, for instance, by a common oral tradition, although the similarities between the three texts reside not simply in the details but also in the sequencing of the passages with those details? Or could it be explained by a written tradition, although this would not explain how the interdependence of the evangelists on each other and the way in which they appear not just to copy but to correct one another? According to the hypothesis proposed by St Augustine (and hence known as the Augustinian hypothesis), the first Gospel to be written was Matthew’s; then the Gospel of Mark was written as an abridgement of Matthew’s; and finally Luke wrote his Gospel, using both Matthew and Mark. While Catholic scholars favoured this hypothesis, Protestant scholars tended to support the hypothesis put forward by Griesbach that

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Matthew wrote his gospel before Luke wrote his, and both were written earlier than Mark (see below). This hypothesis, called the “two-gospel” hypothesis, offered an explanation for the fact that nearly all of Mark’s Gospel is found in Matthew, while much of it is also found in Luke, while Matthew and Luke share a large amount of material not in Mark’s gospel. So the two alternatives about the order of composition of the gospels were Matthew → Mark → Luke or Matthew → Luke → Mark. Then, in the nineteenth century, everything changed. In 1832, the German theologian and biblical scholar, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) drew attention to a statement made by Papias of Hierapolis, namely, “Matthew compiled the oracles [logia] of the Lord in a Hebrew [i.e., Aramaic] manner of speech, and everyone translated them as well he could.”31 Schleiermacher argued that, rather than referring to the Gospel of Matthew in Hebrew, Papias was referring to a collection of sayings put together by the Matthew (the apostle) that was subsequently used by Matthew (the evangelist) and the other Synoptic evangelists.32 Subsequently, in 1838, the German Protestant religious philosopher, Christian Hermann Weisse (1801–1866), took up Schleiermacher’s notion of a “sayings” source and added the idea of Markan priority, that is, the idea that Mark’s Gospel had in fact been the first to be written, thus proposing in Die evangelische Geschichte, kritisch und philosophisch bearbeitet (2 vols, 1838) what came to be known as the so-called two-­ source theory. In 1863, the German Protestant theologian Heinrich Julius Holtzmann (1832–1910) reformulated and supported this solution in Die synoptischen Evangelien, ihr Ursprung und geschichtlicher Charakter (The Synoptic Gospels: Their Origin and Historical Character; Leipzig, 1863). On this view, which quickly became standard, Mark’s Gospel was written first; Matthew (the evangelist) derived his material from Mark and from the collection of sayings put together by Matthew (the apostle) and identified by Papias as the logia; and Luke derived his material from Matthew and Mark. Over time, scholars were becoming less and less certain about the reliability of Papias’s account, and so the German Protestant theologian and biblical scholar Johannes Weiss (1863–1914) suggested using the letter “Q” (for Quelle = “source”) instead.

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In the course of the twentieth century, the two-source theory came to be accepted (especially by scholars working in “form criticism”) as standard, so that the two-sources were now regarded as being (1) Mark, the source for the narrative sections in Matthew and Luke, and (2) Q, a source whose existence is simply inferred from the textual evidence, and which is the source of the “sayings” or discourses (logia) of Christ in Matthew and Luke, but barely represented in Mark. Philological analysis into the origin of the New Testament gospels thus provided a route into analysis of the origin of New Testament beliefs themselves. As we explored in Chap. 3, the nineteenth century was also the century in which the quest for the historical Jesus began in earnest. Of course, the problem it sought to solve was not new. As we saw, such thinkers as Reimarus questioned the authenticity of the gospels and such figures as Meslier even questioned the existence of God; in response to these kinds of challenges to belief that were emerging, the English Enlightenment philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) argued in his treatise The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) that, even if reports of miracles in general could not be believed, the miracles of Jesus may actually have happened because they were so unusual, unrepeatable, and unique (Mack 1993, 18). Over time, however, such a position became increasingly untenable. In section 10 of his An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748), David Hume offered a trenchant dismissal of miracles, proposing as a test the following maxim, “That no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish” (Hume 1975, 115–116). A century or so later, Nietzsche’s scholarly bugbear, David Friedrich Strauß, would, in his Life of Jesus (1835), explain miracles away as illusions, legends, and myths. By “myth” Strauß did not mean (as we saw in Chap. 3) the definition that had been given to it by the Roman historian Sallust in On the Gods and the World, §4, “Now these things never happened, but always are” (cited in Murray 1955, 195),33 but Strauß saw myth more in terms of a narrative device, noting how miracles accrue in the course of early Christian attempts to say how important Jesus’s appearance had been (Mack 1993, 18). Finally, another century or so later, we find (as we saw in Chap. 2) an even more radical approach taken

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by The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906), in which Albert Schweitzer presented Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet—part of a paradigm shift from seeing Jesus as a teacher of a humane ethics to presenting him as a radical visionary prophesying the end of the world (ibid., 30–31). The shift in the understanding of the Christ figure that took place in the course of the quest for the historical Jesus had its counterpart in the changing philological understanding of the origin of the New Testament. The focus of this changing understanding was the problem of the Synoptic Gospels (Mack 1993, 19). In 1776, the German biblical scholar, Johann Jakob Griesbach (1745–1812), published his synopsis of the first three Gospels, suggesting—in line with a view earlier proposed by St Augustine—that the first gospel to be written was Matthew, aimed at reconciling the fledgling Christian community with the established Jewish community in which it had arisen and from which it had moved away. Then Luke was written, presenting the Gospel to the pagan communities as the nascent Church expanded across the Middle East. Finally, the eyewitness testimonies of Peter provided the basis for the third of the gospels to be written, that is, Mark. Unlike the two-source hypothesis, Griesbach’s hypothesis not only agreed with the position taken by the early Church and Patristic theologians, it did not require that one posit the existence of a lost source or putative “Q” document. But could it stand up to closer philological scrutiny? In 1835, the German philologist and textual critic, Karl Lachmann (1793–1851), made an important contribution to the synoptic problem. (In the nineteenth century, Lachman was a significant figure in the history of philology as a discipline, famous for his textual work on Middle High German texts as Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parival and the Nibelungenlied; for his suggestion in his Betrachtungen über Homer’s Iliad (1837–1941) that the Iliad did not have a single author but was composed of a number of originally independent layers; and for his critical edition in 1850 of Lucretius. Roughly contemporaneous with Nietzsche, Lachman’s work illustrates how philological questions about classical texts could equally be applied to biblical ones.) In his editions of the New Testament that appeared in 1831, 1842 and 1850, and 1846, Lachman made the following observation: namely, that Matthew and Luke agreed in the order of material in their Gospels only when they followed Mark;

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when they were not following Mark, Matthew and Luke went separate ways, even when presenting non-Markan material they both shared; and material in Matthew not contained in Mark consisted primarily of sayings of Jesus (Mack 1993, 19–20). Consequently, in 1838 the German theologian Christian Wilke (1788–1854) argued for the “priority” of Mark, that is, that Mark’s Gospel was the earliest of the three Synoptic Gospels and that Mathew and Luke were dependent on Markan account. Hence the stage was set for Christian Weisse in the same year to propose his “two-document” hypothesis, that is, that Matthew and Luke had composed their Gospels independently, by combining two written sources—the Gospel of Mark and a source containing the sayings of Jesus (or, in other words, Q) (Mack 1993, 21). And in 1863 the nineteenth-century German scholar Heinrich Julius Holtzmann (1832–1910) put the Q idea to the test in an exhaustive investigation in The Synoptic Gospels: Their Origin and Historical Character and came to the conclusion that it was essentially correct. As these philological procedures sought to demonstrate how these texts had come into being, so they looked more and more like purely human products and less and less like expressions of divine revelation. In his own research into this missing text known as Q, the “lost gospel” to which the title of his study refers, Mack follows the twists and turns of the philological endeavour to discover how the New Testament came to be written and hence, although not intentionally, confirms Nietzsche’s suspicions about the divine origin of these documents and his key intuition that, once critically and philologically examined, belief in their divine inspiration was simply no longer possible, and so it was inevitable that religious belief would fall away. In fact, only a couple of years after Nietzsche had collapsed in Turin in 1890, Johannes Weiss published his study, Jesus’ Proclamation of the Kingdom of God (1892), in which he traced announcement of kingdom of God in the New Testament and its pronouncement of a future judgement back to the tradition of apocalyptic literature in Judaism (Mack 1993, 30). But increasingly scholars began to feel that something was missing from the available historical sources. So in the following years, attention began to focus on the “missing link” in the story of how the New Testament evolved, or in other words, on Q. In 1907, the German biblical scholar Bernhard Weiss (1827–1918),

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the father of Johannes Weiss, published a study called Die Quellen des Lukasevangeliums in which he demonstrated the dependence of the Gospel of Luke on Q. In the same year, the German liberal theologian and historian of religion, Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930), published a short book called The Sayings of Jesus, which was in effect a collection of sayings approximate to the document known as Q.  Interested in how Hellenistic philosophy might have influenced the early Christians seeking to consider how the teachings of Jesus might sound when divorced from their conventional setting of miracle and myth, Harnack’s work was in part a reaction and a response to the Tübingen School of historical-­ critical interpretation (Mack 1993, 21). Over time, Harnack’s liberal theological project of stripping away miracle and myth to reveal the pure teachings of an elevated humane ethic became mainstream in academic thinking about the New Testament; it was precisely the kind of “watered-­ down” Christianity which, of course, Nietzsche would have detested. In the 1920s, two major theologians—Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976), Professor of New Testament Studies at the University of Marburg, and Burnett Hillman Streeter (1874–1937), Professor of the Exegesis of Holy Scripture at the University of Oxford (and later Provost of Queen’s College)—published their monumental studies on the synoptic tradition; by now, the “two-source” hypothesis was largely accepted by scholars in the liberal tradition (Mack 1993, 21). In his History of the Synoptic Tradition (1921), Bultmann traced the changes that had occurred in individual sayings as the tradition had developed. For his part, in The Four Gospels: A Study of Origins (1924) B.H. Streeter focused on the manuscript traditions of the gospels, treating them as literary units in their own right, and producing a detailed comparison of each gospel to the others while emphasizing the variant readings of each manuscript. In the meantime, a different set of questions began to arise, questions that would challenge the Protestant desire to think of early Christianity as some kind of pure, uncontaminated religion (Mack 1993, 22). To begin with, as Mack puts it in The Lost Gospel, “study after study had shown that early Christianity was not a unique religion but had been ‘influenced’ by the religions of late antiquity”: first, and “especially troubling,” was the “similarity of the early Christian message to Jewish apocalyptic thought, a discovery that linked Christianity too closely to Judaism

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on the one hand, and estranged the modern church from its origins on the other,” and second, “also unsettling,” was the discovery that “early Christianity bore a distinct resemblance to hellenistic mystery cults, particularly where it mattered most, namely in their myths of dying and rising gods and in their rituals of baptism and sacred meals” (ibid., 22). These observations led in turn to another question: “Was the core of Christianity to be found in the person of Jesus and his message according to the gospels, or was it contained in Paul’s interpretation of Christian faith with its focus on the ‘proclamation’ (kerygma) of the death and resurrection of Jesus?” (ibid., 23). Now for Bultmann, the message of early Christianity was most profoundly expressed in the Gospel of John and in the Pauline kerygma (i.e., the κήρυγμα or kérugma, the Greek word used in the New Testament to refer to “preaching”). This kerygyma or proclamation could be understood in categories—themselves, of course, indirectly derived from Nietzsche!—as an existential message: as a pronouncement of freedom from one’s past and a call to be radically open to one’s future, that is, as an invitation to choose an “authentic” human existence (Mack 1993, 23). At the same time, a work published in 1919 by Karl Ludwig Schmidt (1891–1956), professor of New Testament studies at Nietzsche’s old university in Basel (after he had been dismissed by the Nazis from Nietzsche’s previous university in Bonn), effectively “brought to an end the old quest for the historical Jesus with its desire for a biography and its unexamined assumption that the basic plot of the narrative gospels was essentially historical record” (Mack 1993, 24). Published in 1919, Schmidt’s Der Rahmen der Geschichte Jesu (The Framework of the Story of Jesus) marked the intervention of form criticism in the biblical textual scene by showing how the chronology of Mark’s gospel had been created by the evangelist out of different individual scenes. Form criticism had already been used in the field of interpreting both Hellenistic and Jewish literature, trying to identify literary patterns in texts and tracing them back to the earlier oral transmission of the text. Now this technique was being applied to the texts of the New Testament in a series of works: Bultmann’s Die Geschichte der synoptischen Tradition [i.e., History  of the Synoptic Tradition] in 1921; Die Formgeschichte des Evangeliums [i.e., Form Criticism of the Gospel] (1919) by Martin Dibelius

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(1883–1947) of the University of Heidelberg; and The Formation of the Gospel Tradition (1933) by Vincent Taylor (1887–1968), a Methodist biblical scholar based in Leeds (Mack 1993, 24). Over the period of the 1920s and 1930s, three proposals were put forward by scholars about proverbial wisdom and apocalyptic sayings in teachings of Jesus and the relation between these two textual types (Mack 1993, 32–34). First, in Die Geschichte der synoptischen Tradition [i.e., History of the Synoptic Tradition] (1921), Bultmann placed an emphasis on the apocalyptic sayings, arguing that the wisdom sayings had been added by the Church at a later stage. Second, these two textual types could be related in another way, as Bultmann also did in his study called Jesus (1926), where he argued that both the announcement of the immanent reign of God and wisdom sayings could both be ascribed to Jesus and understood as a call for “radical obedience” (ibid., 32). Finally, both of these views coalesced into a third, put forward in C.H. Dodd’s The Parables of the Kingdom (1935), that Jesus’s teachings themselves proposed an “eschatology,” that is, a doctrine about the final events of history or the end of the world and that his allusions to the “kingdom of God” referred, not to a future apocalypse, but to a present reality. A New Testament scholar perhaps best known for his work as the Vice-­ Chairman and Director of the Joint Committee of the translators of the New English Bible, the Welsh New Testament scholar and theologian C.H. Dodd (1884–1973) had been influenced by the philosophical and theological work of the Existentialist philosopher, Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), and the German Lutheran theologian and comparative religionist, Rudolf Otto (1869–1937). On Dodd’s account, the parables should not just be understood as containing “sayings” in the wisdom mode but were also metaphors that referred to the “kingdom of God.” While some of the parables assumed that the advent of this kingdom lay in the future, others imagined the kingdom as existing in the present time: a view described by Dodd as a “realized eschatology” (Mack 1993, 33). In the course of the 1960s, a combination of Dodd’s parable theory with Bultmann’s programme of existentialist interpretation led to the formation in the 1970s of a school of parable interpretation. Form criticism then dominated New Testament scholarship during Second World War and into 1970s. But after the War, scholarship turned

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to examining the gospel texts as larger units of composition, including using literary criticism techniques, and this coincided with a renewed interest in the question of Q.  In an article originally published in a Festschrift for Bultmann and later revised and expanded (Robinson 1964; Robinson 1971), James M.  Robinson (1924–2016), another biblical scholar who taught at Claremont in the USA, considered Q from the perspective of its literary genre (Mack 1993, 34–35). Robinson’s work reflects both the philological and the archaeological discoveries that had been made over the previous couple of decades. Robinson made a connection between Q and the so-called Gospel of Thomas, a collection of sayings in the library of Coptic-Gnostic texts manuscripts that had been discovered in 1945 at Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt. Robinson pointed to similar early Christian collections of sayings, such as the parables recorded in Mark, chapter 4; the anonymous work called the Didache (or The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles), usually dated to the first century; and various Coptic-Gnostic writings, comparing them with examples from wisdom literature writings from ancient Egypt and early Judaism. Robinson concluded that the genre of Q had probably been a type of wisdom literature, like those “words of the wise” (DRV/ KJV) or “saying of the sages” found in the Book of Proverbs (cf. Proverbs 22:17). In a paper published in 1973, Gerd Theißen (born 1943), Professor of New Testament Theology at the University of Heidelberg, considered what sort of people the Q document had been intended to address. In this article (whose title translates as “Itinerant Radicalism: Aspects of the Treatment of the Transmission of Words of Jesus in Early Christianity in Light of the Sociology of Literature”), he suggested that Q’s audience would have been itinerant charismatics who had decided to imitate the radical lifestyle of Jesus (Theißen 1973). In 1977 he went on to suggest in A Sociology of the Jesus Movement: A Contribution to the Origins of Early Christianity that settled Christian communities had also followed these sayings (Theißen 1977). Other scholars found this a fruitful line of inquiry and followed suit. In a study boldly called A Theology of Q: Eschatology, Prophecy, and Wisdom (1976), Richard A.  Edwards argued that the mix of wisdom, apocalyptic, and prophetic sayings in Q could have found a theological justification through a “christology” based on

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the eschatological message of Jesus—and his resurrection from the dead (even though this resurrection was never mentioned). And in Sayings of the Risen Jesus: Christian Prophecy in the Synoptic Tradition (1982), Eugene Boring proposed that the people addressed by Q were ecstatic prophets, filled with the spirit of the risen Lord (Mack 1993, 42–43). In part, New Testament scholarship was being driven forward by the publication of text-critical studies, based on principles much like Nietzsche’s belief (derived from the Bonn School) that philological accuracy was paramount. As far as the putative Q document is concerned, important studies were published by Siegfried Schulz (1972), Wolfgang Schenk (1981), Athanasius Polag (1982), and Dieter Zeller (1984). But Q Parallels: Synopsis, Critical Notes, and Concordance (1988), prepared by John S. Kloppenborg and providing the parallel texts from Matthew and Luke in Greek and in English translation together with a scholarly apparatus, soon became the standard text of reference for Q studies in the English-speaking world (Mack 1993, 42–43; see also Kloppenborg 2008). In a related work, The Formation of Q: Trajectories in Ancient Wisdom Collections (1987), Kloppenborg tested Robinson’s theses about the origins of Jesus’s sayings in the tradition of ancient wisdom literature, compiling a collection of wisdom literature from ancient Near East and Hellenic sources which showed that Q was composed of the kind of maxims, proverbs, injunctions, and other kinds of “sapiential instruction” that were typical of the Hellenistic age, to which apocalyptic and prophetic sayings had been added. Those additional apocalyptic elements had been studied in detail by Dieter Lührmann, whose Editing the Sayings Source (1969) showed that the theme of judgement was integral to Q and functioned as an organizational principle for the document. In other words, Q would have been an example of wisdom literature, but not just that. In response, Kloppenborg now proposed that Q had taken shape in different stages, beginning with an initial layer of material consisting of “sapiential instruction,” onto which a later layer of apocalyptic and prophetic sayings or “the announcement of judgment” had been added (Mack 1993, 35–36). All this work provided the basis for the synthesizing account given in 1993 by Burton L. Mack in The Lost Gospel. He clarified the emerging

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distinction between different layers in the composition of Q, which could be summarized as follows: • Q1 → the earliest layer of collection, that is, the earliest collection of sayings in the Q tradition • Q2 → a second layer, with compositional design • Q3 → even later additions to the text For Mack, the shifts of discourse documented in the collection of sayings, or Q, would allow scholars and modern readers to trace the history of the Q community (Mack 1993, 203). Or in other words, philology would allow us to reconstruct nothing less than the genealogy of Christianity itself—a project that would have been close to Nietzsche’s heart. The first stage consists of the aphorisms of Q1, a material or discourse that has its nearest analogy in the contemporary Hellenistic world of the profile of the Cynic sage (Mack 1993, 203). The aphoristic quality of sayings in Q1 is strikingly similar to speech characteristics of the Greek tradition of Cynic philosophy (ibid., 45), a tradition exemplified by Diogenes of Sinope (who was a figure much admired by Nietzsche),34 as well as Antisthenes, Crates of Thebes, Bion of Borysthenes, Teles of Megara, Meleager of Gadara, Musonius Rufus, Dio Chrysostomos, Demonax, Peregrinus Proteus, Sostratus the Boeotian, and Theagenes of Patras. In terms of the practical ethic enjoined on its readers, Q1 could be said to be thoroughly Cynic.35 The second stage consists of the codification or organization of the material of Q1 into blocks. Or, in the language of the Greek school traditions, Q1 represents the teachings or doctrines (doxai, dogmata) of Jesus (Mack 1993, 203–204). The third stage represents a transition between Q1 and Q2, reflecting the experience of social conflict arising because of membership of the Q community or association with the Jesus movement. The figure of Jesus changes from being that of a teacher giving instructions into a prophet making pronouncements (ibid., 204). And the fourth stage can be detected in Q2, in which reflecting on the social place and purpose of the Q community leads to the need for a myth of origin and, in turn, to a shift in the understanding of the term “son of

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Man.” During this stage in the presentation of the figure of Jesus, the voice of wisdom’s child (or the “son of Man” #1) acquires the character of revelation (i.e., the “son of Man” #2). The fifth and final stage, documented in Q3, takes place after the Roman-Jewish War (from around 66 CE to the fall of Masada in 73 CE). In this stage Jesus becomes not just the “son of Man” but the “son of God,” announcing a kingdom which would only be revealed at the end of time. As Mack comments, “the marvel of the Q tradition is that characterization was achieved, not by narration, but by artful ascription in the genre of a collection of sayings or instructions,” and the extent of its accomplishment is that “this authorization of Jesus created a mythic figure with which each of the authors of the narrative gospels had to contend in order to appropriate Jesus in the composition of their stories” (Mack 1993, 204–205). This explanatory hypothesis, which is essentially philological in nature, allows us to read afresh both canonical and apocryphal biblical literature—both those texts which were, as it happens, being uncovered at precisely the time when Nietzsche was in the final years of developing his philosophy and writing The Anti-Christ, as well as those texts that were not to be discovered until after his death. For instance, the story of the temptations that can be found in the layer designated Q3 introduces three new themes not found in Q1 or Q2 (Mack 1993, 171–173). The first of these themes is the shift outlined above, that is, the shift in the presentation of Jesus as a child of wisdom (or the “son of Man” #1) via a revelatory figure (or the “son of Man” #2) to the “son of God” (i.e., an essentially mythological conception of Christ as an otherworldly being, destined to rule over the future kingdom of God). The second theme concerns the attitude expressed to the Temple, the focal point of Jewish liturgical worship and its sacrificial cult, which acquired a new significance after its destruction in the Roman-Jewish War. Rather than the demise of this institution creating a crisis for the Q community, it foregrounded the sense that the coming kingdom would be a realm apart from Jewish or Roman history, reflected in new passages that were a lament for Jerusalem. And the third theme is a new sense of accommodation with the authority of the Jewish scriptures and the Law. This third element marks out the specific character of the Q community

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as opposed to other groups of Jesus people, such as the “Christ cult” (cf. Mack 1993, 214–215), the name given by biblical scholars to the branch of the Jesus movement that developed into a religious society on the model of a Hellenistic mystery cult (ibid., 177). By disengaging a text from the extant biblical texts and designating it as Q, the hypothesis proposed by Kloppenborg, Mack, and others casts new light on the origin of those texts and how they came to be composed. For instance, it suggests that Mark wrote his gospel after the Roman-­ Jewish War and after Q had been revised with its Q3 additions, that is, between 75 and 80 CE (Mack 1993, 177–178). In his gospel, the author of Mark introduced a number of innovations, notably the device of the “messianic secret,” as the German Lutheran theologian William Wrede (1859–1906) called this motif (Wrede 1901; Wrede 1971), as well as the story of the crucifixion as a plot on the part of the Jewish leaders. The so-called “messianic secret” also introduced a radical shift in the portrayal of John the Baptist and Jesus, which involved “pictur[ing] John as knowing his role as the predicted precursor for Jesus, invent[ing] a story about John actually baptizing Jesus, and us[ing] that scene to introduce Jesus to the reader and to the world as the son of God endowed with the holy spirit” (Mack 1993, 179). The “Q hypothesis” also casts light on such apocryphal texts as the Gospel of Thomas.36 Written in Coptic, this Gospel was discovered in 1945 as part of the collection of documents referred to as the Nag Hammadi library and is now dated to the last quarter of the first century. It is named after Thomas, one of the apostles (and known as Didymus, i.e., “the twin”), sometimes called “doubting” Thomas after the episode recounted by John (John 20:24–29). It consists of 114 sayings attributed to Jesus, around half of which resemble those found in the canonical gospels, while the other half sound distinctly Gnostic in character. Read in relation to Q, around a third of its sayings have parallels in Q, the majority being from the Q1 layer, suggesting this tradition belonged to the earliest stages of the Jesus movement (Mack 1993, 181). Yet this text differs from Q in three important respects. First, the use of dialogue; second, the number of teachings that have no parallel in Q (or the canonical gospels); and third, the riddle-like nature of many of the sayings.

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One of the earliest surviving references to the Gospel of Thomas can be found in the writings of Hippolytus of Rome, who wrote in his Refutation of Heresies, 5.7.20, about a Christian-Gnostic sect known as the Naassenes that they spoke of “a nature which is both hidden and revealed at the same time and which they call the sought-for kingdom of heaven which is within man” and that they transmitted “a tradition concerning this in the Gospel entitled According to Thomas, which states expressly, ‘The one who seeks me will find me in children from seven years of age and onwards. For there, hiding in the fourteenth aeon, I am revealed’” (cited in Layton 1987, 103).37 Indeed, the very first verse of this gospel speaks of the “obscure sayings” (or “secret sayings” or “secret words”) that Jesus had spoken and Thomas had written down.38 At around the same time as the Gospel of Thomas was being written, that is, circa 85–90 CE, the Gospel of Matthew was being composed, apparently through a process of combining the Gospel of Mark and the text of Q into a single document (Mack 1993, 183). To put it in shorthand, Matthew wrote his gospel by taking Mark’s narrative but dividing it up and inserting five blocks of instruction derived from Q. Correspondingly, rather than Mark’s emphasis on such mythological identifications as “son of Man,” “son of God,” the Messiah, and wisdom, Matthew’s emphasis is placed instead on the Jewish ethical codes of the Torah and on the ekklesia (or “assembly”) of Christians as an inheritor of the Jewish legacy. In fact, the early Christian treatise known as the Didache (or The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles), rediscovered in 1873 in the eleventh-century Greek manuscript called the Codex Hierosolymitanus (sometimes known as the Bryennios manuscript or the Jerusalem Codex), makes no distinction between the sayings of Jesus as found in Matthew, maxims from Jewish scripture, and ethical wisdom sayings in the Hellenistic tradition (ibid., 184–185). Probably written at the beginning of the first century, around 80–100 CE, the Gospel of Luke drew on Q as part of the early Christian historiographical project ascribed to its Evangelist author. To put it again in shorthand, Luke wrote his “narrative” (diegesis) together with the Acts of the Apostles as a religio-political history of the Christian congregation or Church. His strategy was to align three different historical epochs: the history of Israel, the life of Jesus, and the early apostolic period, using the

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notion of a line of the prophets to do so (Mack 1993, 186). As indebted to Mark and to Q for this conception of the line of prophets as he was for the notion of the spirit of God as a principle from mythological continuity between epochs and their prophets, Luke replaced the early mythologies of Jesus as the Messiah, the martyr, the wisdom of God, the son of God, the son of Man, the eschatological prophet, etc., instead presenting Jesus as the ideal prophet-teacher whose discourse combined wise instructions, prophetic pronouncements, and miraculous responses (ibid., 187). Meanwhile, however, an entirely different mythology was developing in some of the other early Christian congregations, to judge by its emergence in the letters of Paul. Yet it is this mythology that has become familiar to us (and that Nietzsche, reasonably enough, interpreted as representing the orthodox Christian view). In this case the focus lies on what such scholars as C.H. Dodd and Rudolf Bultmann called the kerygma, that is, “proclamation”: namely, the death of Jesus as a saving event and his subsequent resurrection to cosmic lordship. It was thanks to the kerygma that—to use Mack’s terms—the “Jesus movement” gradually became transformed into a “Christ congregation,” signalled by the term christos, meaning “the anointed one.” So how did this term christos, with its connotations of the Messiah and an installation to royal or priestly office, come to be used? It did so, Mack argues, as a result of the “mythmaking process” out of which the kerygma emerged, and he adds that, “if we are able to reconstruct the logic by which Jesus came to be thought of as a god with a right to rule over these [Christ cult] communities, we may be able to understand why christ was chosen for his new name” (Mack 1993, 215–216). In this respect a vital clue lies in the notion that Christ died “for us.”39 For whereas in Jewish or Israelite traditions the notion of vicarious human sacrifice would have been anathema (i.e., shunned or detested),40 it would not have been in Hellenic culture with its notion of a noble death, such as that of a soldier for his country or Socrates for his principles. On the other hand, the notion of resurrection from the dead, believed in by the Pharisees (Acts 23:6) but not by the Sadduccees (Matthew 22:23; Mark 12:18–27; Acts 23:8), was anathema to the Hellenic sensibility of the Greeks, as Paul discovered to his cost in his speech before the council of the Areopagus in Athens (see Acts 17:30–32). As Mack explains, the

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solution to this cross-cultural problem was to map the notion of resurrection onto the archetypal “wisdom tale,” an age-old narrative plot that involved a false charge made against an innocent victim and his (or her) subsequent vindication—in some cases, a vindication even after death (Mack 1993, 217). Examples of the first kind of wisdom tale are the stories of Joseph, Esther, and Daniel, all individuals who are vindicated by their faith in Yahweh, and an example of the second kind is the story of the Maccabees, including Mattathias the Hasmonean, a priest from Modein, who unleashed the holy war against the Hellenizing Seleucid kings; Judas Maccabeus, the leader of the Jews, in various subsequent campaigns; and the Maccabean martyrs (a mother, her seven sons, and their teacher, who were arrested by Antiochus IV Epiphanes who tried to force them to eat pork and, when they refused, ordered them to be killed). The theological aspects of this martyrdom applied to Christ—first, that the God worshipped by the Christ congregations was same as the God of Israel; second, that God had vindicated Jesus by raising him from the dead; and third, that Jesus was the rightful heir to the “kingdom of God”—enabled a shift to take place: a shift “from Jesus as the child of wisdom, or the righteous one whom wisdom rescued, to the son of God whom God designated as king” (Mack 1992, 218). Thus two different groups, Jewish and Gentile, could be addressed at the same time: in Mack’s words, Hellenized Jews could “think of the myth in terms of the wisdom tale,” while Greeks could “imagine the resurrection on the model of apotheosis or of the translation and transformation of a hero into a god” (ibid., 219). Now the crucial role of Mark in changing the presentation of Christ from the “son of Man” #1 (or “child of wisdom”) to the revelatory “son of Man” #2 and finally to the “son of God” has already been discussed above, but now the means by which he (or, rather, the text ascribed to this Evangelist author) effected this shift are apparent. Mark’s genius was, as Mack puts it, to “use a form of wisdom mythology that could relate both to the Jesus traditions and to the Christ myth and so mediate between them,” and “the particular form of wisdom mythology used was the wisdom tale of trial and vindication” (Mack 1993, 222). As a result, the term christos came to be used, not with reference to a cultic divinity, but because of its Messianic connotations—Mark’s “reduction of the Christ

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myth to terms compatible with the Jesus myths” was, as Mack observes, “an intellectual and literary accomplishment of truly historic proportions” (ibid., 223). In a way, this accomplishment is recognized by Nietzsche when, in section 45 of The Anti-Christ, he quotes a passage from Mark and comments, albeit sarcastically: “Well lied, lion!” (AC §45; cf. Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 5, Scene 1).41 By contrast, another kind of combination of these two traditions was achieved by John, in the Gospel that bears his name. (John the Evangelist used to be identified with the apostle and John of Patmos, the author of the Book of Revelation; nowadays this identification and common authorship are disputed.) Written towards the end of the first century CE, that is, around 90–110, John’s Gospel takes a radically different approach to the Christ myth from the one found in the Synoptics (i.e., Mark, Matthew, and Luke).42 In Das Evangelium des Johannes (1941) Rudolf Bultmann argued that John had used as his source a so-called “Signs Gospel” or semeia source, a kind of Johannine equivalent of Q (Bultmann 1971). This hypothetical source would have included Christ’s miracles, a revelation discourse, and a passion narrative. So rather than downplaying (as Mark had done) the death and resurrection of Christ by presenting the crucifixion of Jesus as a plot on the part of the Jewish leaders, John explained the Crucifixion as a “moment” in history, as a turning point that revealed a divine world of life and light, always present but hitherto never perceived (Mack 1993, 223; cf. 178). This helps to explain the difference in the chronological order of events between the Passion narrative as found in the Synoptics and as found in John, where it clearly has a symbolic value. For instance, according to the Synoptics, Jesus was nailed to the cross at the third hour (i.e., 9  am), darkness descended over the land at the sixth hour (i.e., noon), and that Jesus died at around the ninth hour (i.e., 3 pm) while, according to John, Pilate gives the order for Jesus to be crucified at the same time as the Paschal lambs are being slaughtered in the Temple. Thanks to John’s imaginative genius, the “Johannine image of Jesus at the center of a universe pulsating with the powers of light and darkness, the miraculous and the banal,” became a “very early projection of the mythic mentality that became characteristic of medieval Christianity” (Mack 1993, 224). Equally, it also became the springboard for various Gnostic treatments of

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the Christ myth as well. (Oddly, the entire question of the Gnostic appropriation of the Christ of orthodoxy—or, depending on one’s point of view, the orthodox appropriation of Christ from Gnosticism—is never considered or even mentioned by Nietzsche.)43 In short, the work of Kloppenborg and Mack allows us to begin, albeit speculatively, to assemble what Robert M. Price (in his most recent work) has called the “gospels behind the gospels”—the competition between such dimly-perceptible figures as Paul, Apollos, and Cephas as figureheads of different sects with rival views of Jesus as the prophet Elijah who had returned, as the Samaritan Taheb (a second Moses), as a resurrected John the Baptist, as a Zealot revolutionary, or as a Gnostic (Price 2023).

Symbolic Readings The sort of philological approach advocated by Kloppenborg, Mack, and other scholars shows, in a surprisingly Nietzschean way, how understanding the genealogy of a text allows us to understand its meaning. This kind of scholarship is exciting, because it demonstrates how philology intersects with a genealogical approach in order to show—to paraphrase Nietzsche’s argument in Human, All-Too-Human, volume 1—how “a definite false psychology, a certain kind of fantasy in the interpretation of texts is the necessary presupposition for becoming a Christian” and how “with the insight into this aberration of reason and imagination one ceases to believe the foundational texts of Christianity” (cf. HA I §135; my changes in italics). We can illustrate how this approach works with reference to two examples in which Nietzsche is particularly interested in The Anti-Christ, the concepts of the “kingdom of God” and the “son of Man”—examples of the more general way in which the New Testament textually references the so-called Old.

Kingdom of God According to Mack, the term “kingdom of God” (basileia tou theou) connotes “both the power and authority of God to rule or execute a

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judgment, as well as a realm or domain within which God’s rule was fully actualized” (Mack 1993, 123). As such, it is a term that “would not have sounded strange to hellenistic ears,” since during this period the predominant models for discussing social issues were (a) the city (derived from the Greek tradition of the polis) and (b) the kingdom (derived from Near Eastern traditions). One should note that these two forms of society had correspondingly different foundations: on the one hand, society was founded on nomos, that is, legislation or social convention understood as laws enacted by the city’s demos, that is, council of citizens; on the other, it was founded on physis, that is, nature, and the divine order reflected in the cosmos. In turn, ancient political thought drew a distinction between two different kinds of representative figures, that is, between a king and a tyrant: between someone who lived in accordance with and as an embodiment of the highest ethical standards and someone who didn’t. Over time, “king” became a metaphor for someone who lives at the “highest” imaginable human level, expressing and embodying ethical excellence (Mack 1993, 125). (In the Platonic tradition, for example, the expression “the king of all” is used to refer to the cause of all things’ being.)44 Correspondingly, the term “kingdom” became a metaphor for a “sovereignty” that manifests itself in “independent bearing,” “freedom,” “confidence,” and so on, so that to be a person of ethical integrity means to “rule” one’s world in an imperious way (Mack 1993, 126). In turn, this image of kingship was taken by the Stoics, reflected in their maxim that “the only true king is a wise man” (a saying found in Seneca and Cicero).45 In the Discourses of Epictetus, the staff of the Cynic was his “sceptre,” his mission was to represent the great king Zeus, and his “sovereignty” was the imperious bearing with which he “ruled” the public arena (ibid., 126). The use of the term “kingdom of God” in the documentary layer identified by Mack as Q1 matches its use in these traditions of popular philosophy in general and in the Cynic tradition in particular, especially in regard to the Cynic practice of using countercultural behaviour as a means of social diagnostics. As a result, the apparently baffling term “kingdom of God” can be de-transcendentalized and understood in an immanent sense, in accordance with Nietzsche’s understanding of the term in The Anti-Christ, where he recalls that the kingdom of God “is

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within you” and declares that it is “an experience of the heart, it is everywhere and it is nowhere” (AC §29 and §34).

Son of Man Along with the figure of the wisdom of God and the person of John the Baptist, the phrase “son of Man” is, as we have seen, something that is said to have entered the tradition of Q at the Q2 level, that is, during what Mack describes as its second compositional phase. Invented by Jewish scribes during the period following the Babylonian exile, the figure of the wisdom of God came to enjoy a great popularity during the Greco-Roman period (Mack 1993, 149–150). One thinks, for example, of the so-called Sapiential Books or “books of Wisdom,” a subset of books from the Hebrew bible in the Septuagint translation that includes the books of Proverb, Ecclesiastes, the Wisdom of Solomon, and Sirach (or Ecclesiasticus)46; the use of wisdom mythology by Philo of Alexandria to interpret the Torah (or the five books of Moses), deploying logos (“reason”) as a guide to the intelligible world and sophia (“wisdom”) as a guide to the world of the senses47; and the proximity in the presentation of Jesus in Q to the figure of the Cynic sage (as noted above). A text found in Matthew and Luke alike actually refers to Christ as the “son of Man” as follows: “The son of man came eating and drinking, and they say: Behold a man that is a glutton and a wine-drinker” (Matthew 11:19; cf. Luke 7:34), and its source text can be found in the texts known as Q (see QS §18) (ibid., 159; cf. 86). The term “son of Man” is deemed by Mack to have played an important role in the developing mythology of Q2. For in the expression “son of Man,” one can see how two senses of the term collide or coincide— Jesus as a “child of humankind” and Jesus as a figure in apocalyptic mythology (Mack 1993, 159). In this second sense, the term “son of Man” derives from the Book of Daniel and its account of Daniel’s dream of the four beasts. In a vision, Daniel sees four beasts, a figure described as the One most venerable, and a figure described as the son of Man: “I beheld therefore in the vision of the night, and lo, one like the son of man came with the clouds of heaven, and he came even to the Ancient of days:

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and they presented him before him. And he gave him power, and glory, and a kingdom: and all peoples, tribes and tongues shall serve him: his power is an everlasting power that shall not be taken away: and his kingdom that shall not be destroyed” (Daniel 7:13–14). However, the same term “son of Man” can also be found in such Jewish apocalypses as those contained in the second part of the Book of Enoch (also called 1 Enoch), known as the Book of Parables of Enoch (or the Similitudes of Enoch), which describes a Messiah, called the Son of Man, who possesses divine attributes, was born before creation, and who will be involved in the final day of judgement, seated on a throne of glory (1 Enoch 46:1–4, 48:2–7, 69:26–29), or in the Apocalypse of Esdras (chapters 3 to 14 of a work also known as 2 Esdras or 4 Ezra) (Mack 1993, 159–160). As Mack observes, “thus the term son of man was doubly mysterious in the Q tradition”: “It sounded odd in Greek, and it had the capacity for ambiguous reference, either to a particular person as a human being (in this case Jesus), or to an apocalyptic figure, or both. The authors took full advantage of this referential capacity by using the term in both ways” (ibid., 160). In other words, the argument being pursued here is an essentially philological one, based on analysis of how the biblical texts came into being: Thus the bits and pieces of several diverse mythologies converge on the figure of Jesus and position him at the decisive turn of a fantastic history. The wisdom myth, the notion of a line of prophets, the epic of Israel read inside-out, the mechanism of prediction and fulfillment, the projection of a final judgment, and the apocalyptic figure of the son of man were all linked to Jesus as the linchpin of a dynamic myth of origin for the people of Q. (Mack 1993, 161)

On this account, it is not so much the case that Jesus existed and that what he said gave rise to Q, but rather that the gradual addition of different layers of Q have given rise to the figure of Jesus: The image of Jesus as the revealer of special, esoteric, and transcendent knowledge of all the world and human history did not evolve because the people of Q had been mesmerized by a charismatic guru. It was an acciden-

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tal accumulation of wisdom generated by the simple device of mythmaking in the genre of instruction. (Mack 1993, 163)

According to Mack, it is possible to trace the development of Jesus mythology that drew on the popular figure of personified wisdom: “Wisdom mythology was used to shift from a characterization of Jesus as a teacher to one that imagined Jesus first as an envoy of the divine agent in Israel’s history and then as a kind of prophet” (Mack 1993, 212). It is entirely in line with Nietzsche’s genealogical ambitions, if not entirely with his actual conclusions in The Anti-Christ, that Mack believes he has demonstrated the historical, philological path by means of which the figure of Christ actually came into (textual) being: The history of the Q movement demonstrates that several mythologies of Jesus as a divine agent were possible without any recourse to martyrological notions. The mythology of Jesus as an envoy of wisdom, or even as the manifest incarnation of wisdom’s child, was not generated by any experience or notion of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. It was […] generated in the course of myth-making in the genre of the teachings of a teacher. (Mack 1993: 213)

On this account, the figure of Christ is generated by means of philology, and so philology in turn can demonstrate how this happened and reconstruct the steps in this development by means of philological analysis. In this sense, what Nietzsche called “the philologist of the future” would prove to be “a sceptic of our whole culture,”48 because he could uncover what had happened in the past.

 extual Referencing of the “Old” Testament T by the New In fact, twentieth (and, now, twenty-first)-century biblical scholarship in general works on philological principles that are not only compatible with Nietzsche’s genealogical approach but in fact highly congenial to his outlook. Textual analysis tends to support Nietzsche’s intuition that philology can explain religion by uncovering the history of its development,

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as well as the related claim made by such soi-disant Nietzscheans as Michel Onfray that Christianity is an almost entirely textual construct. In the Gospel of Matthew, for instance, the story is told of how John the Baptist, while he was in prison, came to hear about what Christ was doing. So John sends his disciples to ask Christ whether he was the one to come or if they should expect someone else. Jesus answers by telling them to go back to John and tell him what they hear and see, but he does this in the form of a biblical quotation, alluding to Isaiah when he replies: “The blind see, the make walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead rise again, the poor have the gospel preached to them” (Matthew 11:5; cf. Isaiah 26:19, 29:18, 35:5 and 61:1). This allusion to the prophecies of Isaiah and its promise of miracles of healing is surely an oblique reference to the time of Israel’s restoration (Mack 1993, 155). After John’s disciples have left, Jesus makes a further (and rather more complicated) textual allusion, when he says: “What went you out into the desert to see? a reed shaken with the wind? But what went you out to see? a man clothed in soft garments? Behold they that are clothed in soft garments, are in the houses of kings. But what went you out to see? a prophet? yea I tell you, and more than a prophet. For this is he of whom it is written: Behold I send my angel before thy face, who shall prepare thy way before thee” (Matthew 11:7–10). This final remark is, in effect, a conflation of God’s words to Moses in his promises and instructions for the entry into Canaan, “Behold I will send my angel, who shall go before thee, and keep thee in thy journey, and bring thee into the place that I have prepared” (Exodus 23:20), and a passage where the prophet Malachi describes the Day of Yahweh, “Behold, I send my angel, and he shall prepare the way before my face” (Malachi 3:1) (Mack 1993, 156). Now the figure of the precursor of Yahweh, mentioned in Isaiah— “The voice of one crying in the desert: Prepare ye the way of the Lord” (Isaiah 40:3)—is identified with Elijah by Malachi when he says, “Behold, I will send you Elias, the prophet, before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord” (Malachi 4:5), and in effect this episode in Matthew applies this text to John the Baptist as the new Elijah (NJB, OT, 1593). In fact, other passages (i.e., Mark 1:2 and Luke 1:17 and 76) confirm the application of these texts from Isaiah and Malachi to John the Baptist in his role and function as the Precursor. But what is the function

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of this intertextual referencing? According to Mack, this “clever intertextual reference that [had] caught the attention of the authors of the gospels” was used by the authors of Q in a way that “eventually determined the logic by which not only the gospels but also the New Testament canon were linked to the Hebrew scriptures to form the Christian bible” (Mack 1993, 242). For instance, Mark makes a highly programmatic use of the text in Malachi about a preparatory fig. (3:1) and the prediction in Isaiah about a voice crying in the wilderness (Isaiah 40:3) to introduce John at the beginning of his Gospel (Mark 1:2–3). Then again, in Luke there is the canticle sung by Zechariah in which John the Baptist is addressed as “the prophet of the most High” who shall “go before the face of the Lord, to prepare his way” (1:76). The inclusion of this Song of Zechariah in the liturgy of the Church (as the canticle known as the Benedictus, sung daily for centuries at the Office of Laudes) serves to underscore the great importance that has come to be attached to this text. In its three central strophes, the canticle invokes “the whole history of salvation”: the covenant with David (cf. vv. 68–71), the covenant with Abraham (cf. vv. 72–75), and the Baptist who brings us into the new Covenant in Christ (cf. vv. 76–79), so that “the tension of the whole prayer is a yearning for the goal that David and Abraham indicate with their presence.”49 And the power of the text from Malachi in particular is further underlined by the rearrangement of biblical texts in the Christian version of the so-called Old Testament. Whereas the order of texts in the Hebrew bible or Tanakh is as follows: first, the Torah or law (the five books of Moses), then the Nevi’im or prophets (including with the “early” prophets, i.e., Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, then Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, and the twelve minor prophets), and finally the Ketuvim or writings (including the Psalms and the wisdom literature), the Christian order reverses the order of the writings and the prophets. As a result, the prophecies of Malachi appear as the conclusion of the “Old” Testament—and by structural implication find fulfilment in the New Testament that immediately follows!

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Myth-Making The reason why we have chosen in this chapter to explore John S. Kloppenborg’s thesis regarding the so-called Book of Q and Burton L. Mack’s exposition of this thesis in such detail is because Q shows how a philological approach can offer genealogical insights into the genesis of Christianity (or even a sensitive appreciation of its intellectual and cultural achievement—without, it should be noted, saying anything about its veracity or otherwise). “From Q1 to the Gospel of John is a long, long way for the imagination of any movement to journey in such a short period of time,” Mack writes, and he suggests that this journey is a powerful example of myth-making in action (Mack 1993, 224). As an overarching narrative of this early Christian myth-making might have developed, Mack’s work—drawing on that of Kloppenborg and of other scholars—tries to correct traditional accounts of the origins of Christianity in three ways. First, it “underscore[s] the many forms of early Christian mythology”; second, it “take[s] multiformation as evidence of intellectual labour”; and third, it “see[s] the variation in myths or “christologies” as evidence for vigorous social experimentation” (ibid., 225). When discussing the case of early Christianity Mack talks frankly about mythmaking in ways that will displease orthodox Christians and yet (or for that reason) is at the same time highly Nietzschean. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche describes myth as “the necessary prerequisite of every religion” (BT §18), and indeed of every culture when he adds: “Without myth every culture loses the healthy natural power of its creativity: only a horizon defined by myths completes and unifies a whole cultural movement” (BT §23). This insight into the need for myth forms the starting point of Nietzsche’s cultural critique: And now the mythless man stands eternally hungry, surrounded by all past ages, and digs and grubs for roots, even if he has to dig for them among the remotest antiquities. The tremendous historical need of our unsatisfied modern culture, the assembling around one of countless other cultures, the consuming desire for knowledge—what does all this point to, if not to the loss of myth, the loss of the mythical home, the mythical maternal womb? (BT §23)

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Nietzsche’s conception of myth is remarkably subtle, and it deserves closer discussion than we have space for here.50 In The Birth of Tragedy he defines myth as “a concentrated image of the world that, as a condensation of phenomena, cannot dispense with miracles” (BT §23). In the fourth of his “Untimelies” entitled “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth,” he notes that “myth is not founded on a thought, as the children of an overly refined culture suppose, but is itself a thinking; it conveys an image of the world through the sequence of events, actions, and sufferings” (UM IV §9). And he opens a remarkable aphorism entitled “The tyrants of the mind” with the following observation, “It is only where the ray of myth falls that the life of the Greeks shines; otherwise it is gloomy. The Greek philosophers are now robbing themselves of this myth; is it not as if they wished to quit the sunshine for shadow and gloom? Yet no plant avoids the light; and, as a matter of fact, those philosophers were only seeking a brighter sun; the myth was not pure enough, not shining enough for them. They found this light in their knowledge, in that which each of them called his ‘truth’” (HA I §261). In turn, this recognition of the necessity for myth forms the starting point of the cultural critique and its associated plea for a renaissance of myth found in the thought of a highly Nietzschean thinker, the psychoanalyst C.G.  Jung (1875–1961). In his groundbreaking work of 1911–1912, Transformations and Symbols of the Libido (translated as Psychology of the Unconscious), Jung adopts an avowedly historical approach to the meaning of Christianity: The meaning of those cults—I speak of Christianity and Mithracism—is clear; it is a moral restraint of animal impulses. The dynamic appearance of both religions betrays something of that enormous feeling of redemption which animated the first disciples and which we today scarcely know how to appreciate, for these old truths are empty to us. Most certainly we should still understand it, had our customs even a breath of ancient brutality, for we can hardly realize in this day the whirlwinds of the unchained libido which roared through the ancient Rome of the Caesars. The civilized man of the present day seems very far removed from that. He has become merely neurotic. So for us the necessities which brought forth Christianity have actually been lost, since we no longer understand their meaning. We do not

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know against what it had to protect us. For enlightened people, the so-­ called religiousness has already approached very close to a neurosis. In the past two thousand years Christianity has done its work and has erected barriers of repression, which protect us from the sight of our own ‘sinfulness.’ The elementary emotions of the libido have come to be unknown to us, for they are carried on in the unconscious; therefore, the belief which combats them has become hollow and empty. Let whoever does not believe that a mask covers our religion, obtain an impression for himself from the appearance of our modern churches, from which style and art have long since fled. (Jung 1916, 80)

Many of the emphases placed by Jung on the historico-cultural significance of Christianity are shared by Nietzsche in his account. For instance, there is an emphasis on sexuality; where Nietzsche observed in Beyond Good and Evil that “Christianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it, certainly, but degenerated to vice” (BGE §168), Jung expanded on this view: Christianity, with its repression of the manifest sexual, is the negative of the ancient sexual cult. The original cult has changed its tokens. One only needs to realize how much of the gay paganism, even to the inclusion of unseemly Gods, has been taken into the Christian church. Thus the old indecent Priapus celebrated a gay festival of resurrection in St. Tychon. Also partly in the physicians Sts. Kosma and Damien, who graciously condescended to accept the “membra virilia” in wax at their festival. St. Phallus of old memories emerges again to be worshipped in country chapels, to say nothing of the rest of the paganism! (Jung 1916, 257)

Then again, where Nietzsche interpreted Christianity in a symbolic (or, as he put it in The Anti-Christ, in a semiotic sense), Jung placed a theory of the symbol at the heart of his interpretation of Christianity: This incestuous phantasy which for some reason possesses an extraordinary strength, and, therefore, appears as a compulsory wish, is repressed and, conforming to the above demand, under certain conditions, expresses itself again, symbolically, concerning the problem of birth, or rather concerning individual rebirth from the mother. In Jesus’s challenge to Nicodemus we

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clearly recognize this tendency: ‘Think not carnally or thou art carnal, but think symbolically, then art thou spirit.’ It is evident how extremely educative and developing this compulsion toward symbolism can be. Nicodemus would remain fixed in low commonplaces if he did not succeed in raising himself through symbols above this repressed incestuous desire. As a righteous philistine of culture, he probably was not very anxious for this effort, because men seem really to remain satisfied in repressing the incestuous libido, and at best to express it by some modest religious exercises. (Jung 1916, 253–254)

In this passage, Jung is taking the reader back to the remarkable conversation, reported only in the Gospel of John, between Christ and one of the Pharisees, Nicodemus, who visits Jesus under the cover of night and tells him, “Rabbi, we know that thou art come a teacher from God; for no man can do these signs which thou dost, unless God be with him” (John 3:2). Jesus responds with the declaration, “Amen, amen I say to thee, unless a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3), prompting Nicodemus to ask how this could be possible: is it possible to re-enter the womb and be born again? Jesus responds by saying, “Amen, amen I say to thee, unless a man be born again of water and the Holy Ghost, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God” (John 3:5). Where the DRV highlights in this response the notion of being “born again,” the NJB prefers to paraphrase this as “being born from above,” although both Haydock and the NJB commentary gloss the passage as referring to the necessity of baptism. On Jung’s account, however, what this passage reveals is not the significance of the sacraments, but the significance of the symbol. Hence the emphasis on not bodily, but spiritual rebirth, or as Jesus puts it, “That which is born of the flesh, is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit, is spirit” (John 3:6). Because, in both Greek as in Hebrew, the same word (respectively, pneuma; ruah) refers to “spirit” and to “wind,” Jesus develops his teaching in the form of a word-play that is also a kind of parable: “Wonder not, that I said to thee, you must be born again. The Spirit breatheth where he will; and thou hearest his voice, but thou knowest not whence he cometh, and whither he goeth: so is every one that is born of

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the Spirit” (John 3:7–8). Jung understands this argument in an archetypal sense: Yet it seems to be important, on the other side, that man should not merely renounce and repress and thereby remain firmly fixed in the incestuous bond, but that he should redeem those dynamic forces which lie bound up in incest, in order to fulfil himself. For man needs his whole libido, to fill out the boundaries of his personality, and then, for the first time, he is in a condition to do his best. The paths by which man may manifest his incestuously fixed libido seem to have been pointed out by the religious mythologic symbols. On this account Jesus teaches Nicodemus: ‘Thou thinkest of thy incestuous wish for rebirth, but thou must think that thou art born from the water and that thou art generated by the breath of the wind, and in this way thou shalt share in eternal life.’ (Jung 1916, 253–254)

On Jung’s account, the instrument of spiritual rebirth is represented in ecclesiastical circles as the sacrament, but what is really at stake is the efficacy of the symbol: Thus the libido which lies inactive in the incestuous bond repressed and in fear of the law and the avenging Father God can be led over into sublimation through the symbol of baptism (birth from water) and of generation (spiritual birth) through the symbol of the descent of the Holy Ghost. Thus man becomes a child again and is born into a circle of brothers and sisters; but his mother is the ‘communion of the saints’, the church, and his circle of brothers and sisters is humanity, with whom he is united anew in the common inheritance of the primitive symbol. (Jung 1916, 253–254)

This “symbolic” dimension is something to which Mack, too, draws our attention when he emphasizes how “all the writings in the New Testament have been read as witnesses to the story of Christian beginnings that was created from the merger of these very same writings” (i.e., of Q, Mark, and Paul) and how “the many interpretations have turned the story into a richly nuanced, multilayered symbol” (Mack 1993, 240). Over time, two aspects of the Christ myth acquired particular resonance: first, the death of Jesus (and its salvific effect), and second, the last supper of Jesus with his disciplines (which became the basis for a

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liturgical tradition reaching from Gregorian chant to Bach’s Mass in B minor, Mozart’s Mass in C minor, and Beethoven’s Mass in C major). And consequently the increasingly complex doctrine of an increasingly powerful Church came to replace the simple message of the Book of Q. For “the Jesus movement represented by Q is,” as Mack readily concedes, “hardly a match for Christianity as a world religion” (ibid., 241). (Or, in Jungian terms, there is an important distinction to be made between, on the one hand, the Gnostic Christ figure and the cross as “natural symbols” and, on the other, the “dogmatic figure” of Christ.)51 Christianity, one might say, has been born of a tradition of textual interpretation and acquired a powerful symbolic dimension. Finally, Nietzsche and Jung would have agreed that, far from being something that should be dismissed as simply obsolescent, Christianity deserved to be taken seriously, both because of the consequences of belief and because of the consequences of disbelief. In the following passage, Jung sets out what he regarded as the contemporary, persisting significance of Christianity: At this time, when a large part of mankind is beginning to discard Christianity, it is worth while to understand clearly why it was originally accepted. It was accepted in order to escape at last from the brutality of antiquity. As soon as we discard it, licentiousness returns, as impressively exemplified by life in our large modern cities. This step is not a forward step, but a backward one. It is as with individuals who have laid aside one form of transference and have no new one. Without fail they will occupy regressively the old path of transference, to their great detriment, because the world around them has since then essentially changed. He who is repelled by the historical and philosophical weakness of the Christian dogmatism and the religious emptiness of an historical Jesus, of whose person we know nothing and whose religious value is partly Talmudic, partly Hellenic wisdom, and discards Christianity, and therewith Christian morality, is certainly confronted with the ancient problem of licentiousness. Today the individual still feels himself restrained by the public hypocritical opinion, and, therefore, prefers to lead a secret, separate life, but publicly to represent morality. It might be different if men in general all at once found the moral mask too dull, and if they realized how dangerously their beasts lie in wait for each other, and then truly a

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frenzy of demoralization might sweep over humanity. This is the dream, the wish dream, of the morally limited man of today; he forgets necessity, which strangles men and robs them of their breath, and which with a stern hand interrupts every passion. (Jung 1916, 258–259)

Moreover, Jung was particularly aware of the Nietzschean dimension of this problematic—and the risks, as he saw them, attendant on discarding Christianity. In an early essay entitled “The Psychology of the Unconscious” (1917; 1926; 1943), Jung developed a far-reaching critique of “the life of instinct” in general and of “the will-to-power” in particular (Jung 1953, §38-§39). In this paper Jung elaborated on the full consequences of the Nietzschean dilemma, as he saw it: The case of Nietzsche shows, on the one hand, the consequences of neurotic one-sidedness, and, on the other hand, the dangers that lurk in this leap beyond Christianity. Nietzsche undoubtedly felt the Christian denial of animal nature very deeply indeed, and therefore he sought a higher human wholeness beyond good and evil. But he who seriously criticizes the basic attitudes of Christianity also forfeits the protection which these bestow upon him. He delivers himself up unresistingly to the animal psyche. This is the moment of Dionysian frenzy, the overwhelming manifestation of the “blond beast” which seizes the unsuspecting soul with nameless shudderings. The seizure transforms him into a hero or into a godlike being, a superhuman entity. He rightly feels himself ‘six thousand feet beyond good and evil’. […] One must reflect that a Dionysian experience may well be nothing more than a relapse into a pagan form or religion, so that in reality nothing new is discovered and the same story only repeats itself from the beginning. (Jung 1953, §40-§41)

And he developed this analysis into a critique not just of Nietzsche in general but of his attitude towards Christianity in particular: A life like Nietzsche’s, lived to its fatal end with rare consistency in accordance with the underlying instinct for power, cannot simply be explained away as bogus. Otherwise one would make oneself guilty of the same unfair judgment that Nietzsche passed on his polar opposite, Wagner: ‘Everything

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about him is false. What is genuine is hidden or decorated. He is an actor, in every good and bad sense of the word.’[52] Why this prejudice? Because Wagner embodies that other elemental urge which Nietzsche overlooked […]. (Jung 1953, §43)

That other elemental urge is, Jung suggests, Eros, and he configures the struggle between “the principle of instinct” and “the principle of the ego,” that is, Eros and the will-to-power, in terms of the “Faustian” conflict, that is, the conflict internal to the character of Faust and explored throughout the two parts of Goethe’s epic drama.53 According to Jung, “all that is insignificant, paltry, and cowardly in us cowers and shrinks from this acceptance”—that is, the acceptance of (sexual) instinct and the acceptance of the ego (and its will-to-power)— and he adds that this refusal to accept is linked to the discovery that “the ‘other’ in us is indeed ‘another’ […]” (Jung 1953, §43). For Jung, a prime example of this principle is Nietzsche in his role of “Nietzsche contra Wagner, contra Paul,” and so on, and Jung concludes his diagnosis with the following devastating remark: Nietzsche had Wagner in himself, and that is why he envied him Parsifal; but, what was worse, he, Saul, also had Paul in him. Therefore Nietzsche became one stigmatized by the spirit: like Saul he had to experience Christification, when the ‘other’ whispered the ‘Ecce Homo’ in his ear. Which of them ‘broke down before the cross’[54]—Wagner or Nietzsche? (Jung 1953, §43)

Is this an unwarranted argument ad hominem or does it hint at an uncomfortable truth? For the core of Nietzsche’s quarrel with Christianity is this: having seen through the philological methods with which it supports its claims to truth, we can no longer believe in it. It is this loss of faith that is deleterious to life and inclines us towards nihilism—arguably Nietzsche’s real enemy in his writings, from his Untimely Observations through to The Anti-Christ, inasmuch as he identifies Christianity with nihilism (see Chap. 1). Nevertheless, this has not prevented numerous Christian philosophers and theologians in the twentieth century—ranging from Paul

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Tillich (1886–1965) to Hans Küng (b. 1928), from Henri de Lubac (1896–1991) to Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988)—from finding in Nietzsche a valuable source of precious theological insight.55

Notes 1. For further discussion, see William Arrowsmith’s introduction to “We Philologists” (or “We Classicists”) (Nietzsche 1990, 307–320) and the linking passages in Bishop 2012, as well as Porter 2000; Benne 2005; and Balaude and Wotling 2013. 2. See Journal des Goncourt, I, 63 (see KSA 14, 756). 3. For further discussion of this period of Nietzsche’s life, see Heise 2000. 4. For further discussion, see Bernoulli 1908; Däuble 1976; and Cardew 2004. 5. For the documents from the debate on The Birth of Tragedy, see Gründer 1969/1989 and Musgrave Calder III 1983. 6. See Goethe’s conversation with Eckermann of 1 April 1827 (in Eckermann 1981, 572). 7. For further discussion, see Butler 1935; Trevelyan 1941; and Valdez 2014. 8. See Baeumer 1976 and Frank 1982: 73–106. As James Porter remarks, Nietzsche’s “uses of Dionysus” are both “a product of the Dionysian tradition that runs from Herder to Friedrich Schlegel, Creuzer, Schelling, Heyne, Bachofen, and beyond”—“a fact that his contemporaries could see in a way we no longer do”—and “a polemical commentary on this tradition, which is to say on the German obsession with Germanic traits, in the guise of Hellenism and Dionysianism” (Porter 2000, 262–263). 9. For the context of the remark reportedly made by Zopyrus, the fifth-­ century BCE physiognomist, see NK 6/1, 270 (cf. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, book 4, §37): “When Zopyrus, who professed to know the character of every one from his person, had heaped a great many vices on him in a public assembly, he was laughed at by others, who could perceive no such vices in Socrates; but Socrates kept him in countenance by declaring that such vices were natural to him, but that he had got the better of them by his reason” (Cicero 1877, 161). 10. In the New Testament Gospels, Christ warns on several occasions about “the sin against the Holy Spirit,” see Matthew 12:30–32; Mark 3:28–30; Luke 12:8–10. In his Summa Theologiae (Second Part of the Second Part,

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Question 14, Article 2), Thomas Aquinas specifies the following six sins as those against the Holy Spirit: despair, presumption, resistance to known truth, envy of someone’s spiritual good, impenitence, and obstinacy. In the Catholic Encyclopedia the sin against the Holy Spirit or “the unforgivable sin” is defined as follows: to “sin against the Holy Ghost is to confound Him with the spirit of evil, it is to deny, from pure malice, the Divine character of works manifestly Divine,” so while “sins against the Father” are those resulting from “frailty” and “sins against the Son” are those springing from “ignorance,” sins against the Holy Ghost are “committed from downright malice, either by despising or rejecting the inspirations and impulses which, having been stirred in man’s soul by the Holy Ghost, would turn him away or deliver him from evil” (Forget 1910, 414–415). And according to the revised Catechism of the Catholic Church, there are no limits to the mercy of God, but anyone who deliberately refuses to accept his mercy by repenting rejects the forgiveness of his sins and the salvation offered by the Holy Spirit, and such hardness of heart can lead to final impenitence and eternal loss (§1864; Catechism 1995, 509). 11. See “We Classicists,” in Nietzsche 1990, 321–387. For further discussion of Nietzsche’s critique of education, see Reitter and Wellmon 2015. 12. See Reich 1865: 22, cited in NK 5/1, 651. For further discussion, see Lemm 2017. 13. Cited in NK 5/1, 651. 14. The numbering of the psalms in the Hebrew text and the KJV differs slightly from that in the Greek Septuagint, with the result that for most of the psalms the Greek numeration is one behind that of the Hebrew; here we cite the Hebrew first and then the Greek in square brackets. For further discussion of the Septuagint in the liturgy of the Church and in the traditional interpretation of biblical texts, see Andersen 2017, and for an introduction to a translation that emphasizes the psalms’ historical context, see Alter 2007, xiii–xxxviii. 15. Neale & Littledale 1874, vol. 3, 234. See Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, §73 (cf. Pouderon et al. 2016, 492 and 1291). 16. Neale & Littledale 1874, vol. 3, 235. 17. After reading Huysmans’s great masterpiece, À rebours (1884), memorably described by Arthur Symons as “the breviary of decadence,” Barbey d’Aurevilly remarked that “after such a book, the author only has to choose between the mouth of a gun or the feet of the Cross” (see Payen

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de la Garanderie 2020–2023). As Huysmans remarked in his preface to the second edition of the novel in 1903: “C’est fait” (Huysmans 2019, 728). 18. See Onfray 2007, 128–129, and Onfray 2017, 47 and 59. 19. Guéranger 2000: 465–466. Guéranger offers these reflections in his commentary on the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin (now called the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord), in which he offers the astonishing interpretation that, while “Mary, the Living Ark of the Covenant, is ascending the steps which lead up to the Temple,” the divine baby she is holding in her arms is “the Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world”: “The blood of oxen and goats will, for a few years more, flow on [the Temple’s] altar; but the Infant, who holds in his veins the Blood that is to redeem the world, is at this very moment standing near that altar. […] at this very moment the Messias has entered the House of God” (ibid., 467). The biblical narrative of this liturgical Feast draws on such texts as Exodus 13:1-3a, 11–16, and Haggai 2:4–9. 20. For further discussion of this prophetic text and its relevance for the textual origins of Christianity, see Averbeck 2012. 21. Neale & Littledale 1874, vol. 2, 544. 22. As an acrostic, ichthys from the Greek (ikhthū́s = ἰχθύς) stands for Iēsoûs Khrīstós, Theoû Huiós, Sōtḗr = Ἰησοῦς Χρῑστός Θεοῦ Υἱός Σωτήρ (i.e., “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour”). Right into the twentieth century this symbolism retained its significance, as can be seen in the writings of Jung, who assimilated the symbol of Christ-as-fish to the astrological constellation of Pisces (see Jung 1968, §127-§149) and in the spiritual epiphany experienced in February 1974 by the American science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick (see Dick 1995, 271)—and into the twenty-first century, as is confirmed by some car bumper-stickers. 23. Neale & Littledale 1874, vol. 1, 288. 24. See McAvoy 2008, 47. For Augustine’s commentary, see Schaff 1888, 541–544, and for Theodore of Mopsuestia’s, see Theodore 1977, 351–352. 25. In a recent study, Robert R. Cargill has argued that, rather than the king of Salem (usually understood to be Jerusalem), the historical Melchizedek was the king of Sodom and that Salem was invented by biblical scribes as a new location for Melchizedek’s priesthood and reign—an argument with consequences for the role of early Israelite priest-kings and the preisthood of Christ alike (see Cargill 2019).

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26. On the Psalms, Psalm 2, §6; translated by an anonymous scholar in Schaff 1888, 3. 27. For the texts involved, see Vermes 1997, and for further discussion, see Lim and Collins 2010. 28. For the texts involved and further discussion, see Robinson 1988. On the question of whether of the Essenes themselves actually ever existed, see the work of the Israeli scholar Rachel Elior (2009). 29. For a scholarly overview of the main discussions and debates relating to the texts regarded as the canonical Gospels, see Barton and Brewer 2021. 30. See NJB, NT, “Introduction to the Synoptic Gospels” in NJB, NT, 1599–1608 (esp. 1600). 31. See Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica, book 3, §39, 16 (in Eusebius 1965, 152); cf. Papias of Hierapolis 1894, 235. 32. See Schleiermacher 1832; cf. Schleiermacher 2001. For further discussion, see Yarbrough 1983, and Hultgren 2002, 9–11. 33. Cf. Sallustius, On the Gods and the World, §4: “Now these things never happened, but always are. And mind sees all things at once, but reason (or speech) expresses some first and others after. Thus, as the myth is in accord with the Cosmos, we for that reason keep a festival imitating the Cosmos, for how could we attain higher order?” (in Murray 1955, 195). 34. For further discussion, see Branham 2013, and Branham and Goulet-­ Cazé 1996. 35. For further discussion, see Betz 1994. 36. For the text of the Gospel of Thomas, see Layton 1987, 376–399; Robinson 1988, 124–138; Elliott 1993, 123–147; and Bovon and Geoltrain, with Kaestli 1997–2005: vol. 1, 23–53. For further discussion of the work, see Valantasis 1997; Pagels 2003; and Meyer 2004. 37. Cf. the Gospel of Thomas, verse 4, although Layton notes that as well as obvious similarities with the Gospel of Thomas, there are also apparent differences (Layton 1989, 103). 38. See Layton 1987, 380; Robinson 1988, 126; and Elliott 1993, 135. 39. 1 Cor 15:3; cf. also Acts 3:18; 7:52; 13:29; 26:22–23. See Catechism of the Catholic Church, §601. 40. The term derives from the ancient Greek anathema, meaning something “offered” or “dedicated”—on occasion, dedicated for destruction. 41. For a bravura performance that extends Nietzsche’s parodic approach to the whole of the Bible, see Price 2017–2018.

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42. The difference between the fourth Gospel and the Synoptics is evident and widely acknowledged, with the NJB noting the following differences vis-à-vis the Synoptics: (a) it is more concerned to emphasize the significance of what Christ said and did; (b) its author seems to have been influenced by ideas found in the Essene documents of Qumran; and (c) it is more interested in worship and sacraments. In short, it is “a complex work”: “It is related to the earliest Christian preaching, and yet at the same time it gives us the results of a quest, completed under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, for a deeper and more rewarding apprehension of the mystery of Jesus” (NJB, NT, 1737–1738). Within the system of esoteric Christianity proposed by Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), the author of the Gospel of John, the Epistles of John, and the Apocalypse is identified with Lazarus, whom Christ raised from the dead (John 11:1–44) and whose “sleep” (John 11:11) represents the three-and-a-half-day transportation of the soul to the spiritual world and its subsequent return as a transformed initiate; together with Mary, the mother of Jesus (in turn identified as the “Virgin Sophia”), Lazarus-John founded an esoteric or Johannine community in Ephesus. (See his lecture cycle of 1908 [Steiner 2022].) 43. Nevertheless, an affinity between Nietzsche and Gnosticism has been noted by various commentators, including the radical theologian Thomas J.J.  Altizer (1927–2018), who distinguished between ancient Gnosticism, which “negated the world as profane reality in its quest for an other-worldly sacred reality” (and, in this respect, “followed the archaic or traditional religious way”), and modern Gnosticism, which “inherit[s] the Faustian transformation of absolute transcendence into absolute immanence, a transformation symbolically portrayed in Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God” and hence “attempts to escape a cosmos and a history in which man has lost his human reality by searching for a non-transcendent and non-sacred state of subjective purity and existential authenticity” (Altizer 1962, 20). As Altizer notes, the theme of modern Gnosticism lay at the heart of the thinking of the political philosophy of Eric Voegelin (1901–1985), as reflected in The New Science of Politics (1952). Yet a­ ccording to Altizer, Voegelin failed to grasp the “deep hostility to the world” that is an essential characteristic of true Gnosticism, and when he speaks of the Gnostic murder of God (see Voegelin 1952, 131), his analysis “joins forces with Nietzsche—with whom it should have begun,” for it was Nietzsche who “grasped most

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profoundly the religious meaning of the historical and existential situation of modern man” (Altizer 1962, 21). For further discussion by Voegelin of Nietzsche’s political significance, see his essay “Nietzsche, the Crisis, and the War,” first published in the Journal of Politics in 1944 (see Voegelin 2000, 126–156). 44. Cf. Plato’s observation in his second letter: “It is in relation to the king of all and on his account that everything exists, and that fact is the cause of all that is beautiful” (312e; in Plato 1989, 1566). This passage is discussed in detail by Plotinus in Enneads, VI.7, “How the Multitude of the Forms came into being, and on the Good,” §42, and A.H. Armstrong notes that this “cryptic passage,” while “very unlikely to be authentic Plato,” nevertheless had “great authority” for the Neoplatonists (Plotinus 1988, 219). 45. For further discussion of Stoic views of kingship, see Seneca 2009, 64–66. 46. For further discussion of the biblical tradition of Wisdom literature, see Dell et al. 2022. 47. See Schäfer 2011, 159. 48. KSA 8, 5[56], 56l, cf. Nietzsche 1990, 357 (translation modified). 49. See the address of Pope John Paul II at his General Audience on 1 October 2003 (John Paul II 2003). 50. For further discussion, see Bennett 1979 and Grottanelli 1997. 51. See Jung’s essay on transformation symbolism in the Mass (1942; 1954), in which he exemplifies this distinction with reference to an apocryphal work, The Acts of Peter, and its account of the martyrdom of Peter (Elliott 1993, 424–425); see Jung 1969, §435-§436. 52. Cf. “You do not know who Wagner is: a first-rate actor. […] In projecting his plot, too, Wagner is above all an actor” (NCW §8 and §9). 53. According to Jung, “in the first part of Faust Goethe has shown us what it means to accept instinct and in the second part what it means to accept the ego and its weird unconscious world” (Jung 1953, §43). 54. Cf. “Richard Wagner, apparently most triumphant, but in truth a decaying and despairing decadent, suddenly sank down, helpless and b­ roken, before the Christian cross” (NCW §2); cf. HA II Mixed Opinions and Maxims, Preface to the 2nd edn, §3-§4. 55. These and other figures will be the subject of a forthcoming study.

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Eusebius. 1965. The History of the Church. Translated by G.A.  Williamson. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Forget, Jacques. 1910. Holy Ghost. In Catholic Encyclopedia, ed. Charles G. Herbermann et al., volume 7, 409–415. New York: Encyclopedia Press. Förster-Nietzsche, Elisabeth. 1915. Wagner und Nietzsche zur Zeit ihrer Freundschaft. Munich: Müller. Frank, Manfred. 1982. Der kommende Gott: Vorlesungen über die Neue Mythologie, I. Teil. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Grottanelli, Cristiano. 1997. Nietzsche and Myth. History of Religions 37 (1): 3–20. Gründer, Karlfried, ed. 1989. Der Streit um Nietzsches “Geburt der Tragödie”: Die Schriften von E.  Rohde, R.  Wagner, U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff. Hildesheim: Olms. Guéranger, Abbot. 2000. The Liturgical Year, vol. 3, Christmas: Book II. Translated by Laurence Shepherd. Great Falls, MT: St. Bonaventura Publications. Heise, Ulf. 2000. ‘Ei da ist ja auch Herr Nietzsche’: Leipziger Werdejahre eines Philosophen. Beucha: Sax-Verlag. Hultgren, Stephen. 2002. Narrative Elements in the Double Tradition: A Study of Their Place within the Framework of the Gospel Narrative. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter. Hume, David. 1975. Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals. Edited by L.A.  Selby-Brigge. 3rd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Huysmans, Joris-Karl. 1997. The Cathedral. Translated by Clara Bell [1898]. Sawtry: Dedalus. ———. 2019. Préface écrite ving ans après le roman. In Romans et nouvelles, ed. André Guyaux, Pierere Jourde, et al., 715–728. Paris: Gallimard. Jensen, Anthony K. 2014. Friedrich Ritschl, Otto Jahn, Friedrich Nietzsche. German Studies Review 37 (3): 529–547. Jung, C.G. 1916. Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations and Symbolisms of the Libido, a Contribution to the History of the Evolution of Thought. Translated by Beatrice M.  Hinkle. London: Kegan Paul Trench Trubner. ———. 1953. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology [Collected Works of C.G. Jung, vol. 7], translated by R.F.C. Hull. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ———. 1968. Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self [Collected Works of C.G.  Jung, vol. 9/ii]. Translated by R.F.C.  Hull. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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———. 1969. Psychology and Religion: West and East [Collected Works of C.G.  Jung, vol. 11]. Translated by R.F.C.  Hull. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Kloppenborg, John S. 2008. Q, the Earliest Gospel: An Introduction to the Original Stories and Sayings of Jesus. Louisville, KY, and London: Westminster John Knox Press. Layton, Bentley, ed. 1987. The Gnostic Scriptures. London: SCM Press. Lemm, Vanessa. 2017. Who is Nietzsche’s Homo Natura? Self-Knowledge, Probity and the Metamorphoses of the Human Being in “Beyond Good and Evil” 230. Internationales Jahrbuch für philosophische Anthropologie, 7.1: 33–50. Lim, Timothy H., and John J. Collins, eds. 2010. The Oxford Handbook of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mack, Burton L. 1993. The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q & Christian Origins. New York: HarperCollins. McAvoy, Liz Herbert, ed. 2008. A Companion to Julian of Norwich. Woodbridge and Rochester, NY: Brewer. Meyer, Marvin. 2004. The Gospel of Thomas: The Hidden Sayings of Jesus. San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins. Mosebach, Martin. 2007. Häresie der Formlosigkeit: Die römische Liturgie und ihr Feind. Munich: Hanser. Murray, Gilbert. 1955. Five Stages of Greek Religion [1925], 3rd ed.. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor. Musgrave Calder, William, III. 1983. The Wilamowitz-Nietzsche Struggle: New Documents and a Reappraisal. Nietzsche-Studien 12: 214–254. Neale, J.M., and R.F.  Littledale. 1874. A Commentary on the Psalms from Primitive and Mediæval Writers, 4 vols. London: Masters. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1990. We Classicists. In Unmodern Observations, ed. William Arrowsmith, 321–397. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. ———. 2014. On the Future of our Educational Institutions. Translated by J.M. Kennedy [1910]. Scotts Valley, CA: CreateSpace. ———. 2016. Anti-Education: On the Future of Our Educational Institutions. Edited by Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon, translated by Damion Searls. New York: NYRB. NK 5/1 = Sommer, Andreas Urs. 2016. Kommentar zu Nietzsches “Jenseits von Gut und Böse” [Historischer und kritischer Kommentar zu Friedrich Nietzsches Werken, vol. 5/1]. Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter.

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NK 6/1 = Sommer, Andreas Urs. 2012. Kommentar zu Nietzsches “Der Fall Wagner”, “Götzen-Dämmerung” [Historischer und kritischer Kommentar zu Friedrich Nietzsches Werken, vol. 6/1.] Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter. Onfray, Michel. 2007. Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Translated by Jeremy Leggatt. New York: Arcade. ———. 2017. Décadence: Vie et mort du judéo-christianisme. [Brève encyclopédie du monde, vol. 2]. Paris: Flammarion. Pagels, Elaine. 2003. Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas. New  York: Random House. Papias of Hierapolis. 1894. The Oracles Ascribed to Matthew: A Contribution to the Criticism of the New Testament. London: Longmans, Green. Payen de la Garanderie, Isabelle. 2020–2023. La quête esthétique de la foi: au pied de la croix. Nouvelle revue théologique 142: 465–470. Plato. 1989. Collected Dialogues, including the Letters. Edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Plotinus. 1988. Works VII: Enneads VI.6–9. Translated by A.H.  Armstrong. Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press; Heinemann. Pope John Paul II. 1980. Ansprache von Papst Johannes Paul II an die Theologen. Altötting, 18. November 1980. Accessed 4 February 2022. https://www.vatican.va/content/john-­paul-­ii/de/speeches/1980/november/documents/hf_ jp_ii_spe_19801118_professori-­teologia.html Porter, James I. 2000. Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Pouderon, Bernard, Jean-Marie Salamito, and Vincent Zarini, eds. 2016. Premiers écrits chrétiens. Paris: Gallimard. Price, Robert M. 2017–2018. Holy Fable, vol. 1, The Old Testament Undistorted by Faith, vol. 2, The Gospels and Acts Undistorted by Faith; vol. 3, The Epistles and the Apocalypse Undistorted by Faith. Valley, WA: Tellectual Press; Selma, NC: Mindvendor. ———. 2023. The Gospels Behind the Gospels. Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing. Reitter, Paul, and Chad Wellmon. 2015. How the Philologist Became a Physician of Modernity: Nietzsche’s Lectures on German Education. Representations 131 (1): 68–104. Ridley, Aaron. 2012. Nietzsche: The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols. In Introductions to Nietzsche, ed. Robert B. Pippin, 215–239. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Robinson, James M. 1964. LOGOI SOPHON: Zur Gattung der Spruchquelle Q. In Zeit und Geschichte: Dankesgabe an Rudolf Bultmann zum 80. Geburtstag, ed. Erich Dinkler, 77–96. Tübingen: Mohr. ———. 1971. ‘Logoi Sophon’: On the Gattung of Q.  In Trajectories through Early Christianity, ed. James M.  Robinson and Helmut Koester, 71–113. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. ———., ed. 1988. The Naghammadi Library in English. 3rd, revised ed. Leiden: Brill. Schäfer, Peter. 2011. The Origins of Jewish Mysticism [2009]. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Schaff, Philip, ed. 1888. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 8. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1832. Über die Zeugnisse des Papias von unsern beiden ersten Evangelien. Theologische Studien und Kritiken 5: 735–768. ———. 2001. “Über die Zeugnisse des Papias von unsern beiden ersten Evangelien” [1832], in Kritische Gesamtausgabe, edited by Hermann Patsch and Dirk Schmid, vol. 1.8, Exegetische Schriften, 227–254. Berlin: de Gruyter. Schrift, Alan D. 1990. Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation: Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction. New York and London: Routledge. Seneca. 2009. De Clementia. Edited and translated by Susanna Braund. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Sommer, Andreas Urs. 2007. ‘[Review of ] Christian Benne. Nietzsche und die historisch-kritische Philologie’, Arbitrium: Zeitschrift für Rezensionen zur germanistischen Literaturwissenschaft 24 (3): 399–401. Steiner, Rudolf. 2022. The Gospel of John: A Cycle of Twelve Lectures. Edited by Frederick Amrine, trans. Maud B. Monges. Hudson, NY: Steiner Books. Stroux, Johannes. 1925. Nietzsches Professur in Basel. Jena: Frommann. Tauler, Johannes. 1985. Sermons. Translated by Maria Shrady. New  York and Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press. Theißen, Gerd. 1973. Wanderradikalismus: Literatursoziologische Aspekte der Überlieferung von Worten Jesu im Urchristentum. Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 70: 245–271. ———. 1977. Soziologie der Jesusbewegung: Ein Beitrag zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Urchristentums. Munich: Kaiser. Theodore of Mopsuestia. 1977. Theodori Mopsuesteni Expositionis in Psalmos. Ed. Lucas de Coninck [CCSL, 88A]. Turnhout: Brepols. Trevelyan, Humphry. 1941. Goethe and the Greeks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Valantasis, Richard. 1997. The Gospel of Thomas. London and New  York: Routledge. Valdez, Damian. 2014. German Philhellenism: The Pathos of the Historical Imagination from Winckelmann to Goethe. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Vermes, Geza, ed. 1997. The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English. New York: Allen Lane/Penguin. Vivarelli, Vivetta. 2007. [Review of ] Christian Benne, Nietzsche und die historisch-­kritische Philologie. Orbis Litterarum 62 (5): 430–433. Voegelin, Eric. 1952. The New Science of Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2000. Published Essays, 1940–1952. Edited by Ellis Sandoz [Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 10]. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press. Wilson, John Elbert. 1996. Schelling und Nietzsche: Zur Auslegung der frühen Werke Friedrich Nietzsches. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter. Wrede, William. 1901. Das Messiasgeheimnis in den Evangelien. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. ———. 1971. The Messianic Secret. Translated by J.C.G.  Greig. Greenwood, SC: Attic Press. Yarbrough, Robert W. 1983. The Date of Papias: A Reassessment. Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 26 (2): 181–191.

8 Conclusion

In the iconic science fiction action film The Matrix (1999), the rebel leader Morpheus offers Neo, the main character, the choice between a red pill and a blue pill. As Neo looks into Morpheus’s eyes, the spectacles show him only a reflection of himself. Holding the pills in the palm of his hand, Morpheus asks, “Do you want to know what it is, Neo?” Neo swallows and slowly nods his head. Morpheus tells him: “It’s that feeling you have had all your life. That feeling that something was wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad, driving you to me. But what is it?” As Morpheus sits back in his chair, the leather creaks, and he continues: “The Matrix is everywhere, it’s all around us, here even in this room. You can see it out your window, or on your television. You feel it when you go to work, or go to church or pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.” “What truth?”, Neo asks. Morpheus replies: “That you are a slave, Neo. That you, like everyone else, was born into bondage … kept inside a prison that you cannot smell, taste, or touch. A prison for your mind.” Outside, the wind batters at a loose pane of glass. “Unfortunately,” says Morpheus, “no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.” “How?”, asks Neo. Morpheus tells him to hold out his hands, and drops a red pill into Neo’s right hand, and a blue pill into his left. “This is your last chance,” he tells Neo, “After this, there is no going © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Bishop, Discourses of Philology and Theology in Nietzsche, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42272-0_8

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back.” And he presents Neo with a simple, yet devastating choice: “You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and you believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.” As Neo contemplates the pills, Morpheus reminds him: “Remember that all I am offering is the truth. Nothing more.” Neo chooses the red pill and swallows it. Smiling, Morpheus tells him: “Follow me.” It is nothing new to describe The Matrix as a philosophical film, or even as a Gnostic or a Buddhist film.1 After all, its fundamental premise offers a reprise of Plato’s allegory of the cave, the butterfly dream in the Chuang Tzŭ, the scepticism of René Descartes and his notion of the malin génie, the Kantian distinction between the phenomenon and the Ding an sich, Robert Nozick’s “experience machine” or “pleasure machine,” or any philosophical thought experiment involving the brain in a vat that posits the concept of simulated reality. As the philosopher Nick Bostrom once famously asked, Are you living in a computer simulation? (Bostrom 2003). Yet it is remarkable to what extent The Matrix is also a highly Nietzschean film. For its fundamental premise also offers a reprise of Nietzsche’s position as set out with unmistakable clarity in Ecce Homo: All those things which humankind has valued with such earnestness heretofore are not even real; they are mere creations of fancy, or, more strictly speaking, lies born of the evil instincts of diseased and, in the deepest sense, noxious natures—all the concepts, ‘God,’ ‘soul,’ ‘virtue,’ ‘sin,’ ‘Beyond,’ ‘truth,’ ‘eternal life.’ … But the greatness of human nature, its ‘divinity,’ was sought for in them….’ (EH Clever §10)

As Nietzsche goes on to explain, these lies (as he calls them) have distorted all the great areas of human endeavour, including politics, the ordering of society, and—crucially—education. (In his notes for the spring and summer of 1888, i.e., at the time when he was working on The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche defined education (Erziehung) as “a system of means to ruin the exceptions in favour of the rule” and even Bildung as “a system of means to direct the taste against the exception in favour of the ordinary” [KSA 13, 16[6], 484].)2 Behind these problems in education,

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as in questions of politics and society, Nietzsche detects one fundamental, underlying problem: All questions of politics, of social order, of education, have been falsified, root and branch, owing to the fact that the most noxious men have been taken for great men, and that people were taught to despise the small things, or rather the fundamental things, of life. (EH Clever §10)

And in the final chapter of Ecce Homo he assumes the voice of Zarathustra and directly addresses the reader thus: Good men never speak the truth. False shores and false harbours were ye taught by the good. In the lies of the good were ye born and bred. Through the good everything hath become false and crooked from the roots. (EH Destiny §4)

Explaining that Zarathustra calls “the good” now “the last men,” now “the beginning of the end,” and considering them to be “the most detrimental kind of men, because they secure their existence at the cost of Truth and at the cost of the Future,” Nietzsche goes on to declare in Zarathustrian tones3: ‘The good—they cannot create; they are ever the beginning of the end.’ ‘They crucify him who writeth new values on new tables; they sacrifice unto themselves the future; they crucify the whole future of humanity!’ ‘The good—they are ever the beginning of the end.’ ‘And whatever harm the slanderers of the world may do, the harm of the good is the most calamitous of all harm.’ (EH Destiny §4)

As we observed in Chap. 6, it is easy to overlook the significant fact that here and elsewhere Nietzsche insists on the criterion of truth. Perhaps this is the reason why, paradoxically enough, it is Christian writers who have most profoundly, extensively, and fruitfully engaged with Nietzsche’s anti-Christian arguments. The main outlines of the reception of Nietzsche’s thought in Germany in general and by Catholic thinkers in Germany in particular have been sketched out and discussed in depth by Peter Köster.4 Yet it was not only

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in Germany (or, for that matter, Austria and Switzerland) that Nietzsche’s critique of religion underwent an intensive reception, for—in line with the general fascination with Nietzsche in that country that continues to this day—a good number of the critics who demonstrated a deep engagement with Nietzsche in general and with his critique of religion in particular came from France, as well as other European countries. So much so that in 1984 Yves Ledure (b. 1934), a priest belonging to the Congregation of the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ and a lecturer in the Faculty of Catholic Theology at the University of Metz, dedicated an entire study to Christian readings of Nietzsche (Ledure 1984; Rémy 2010).5 His account could easily serve as the starting point for a survey of how critics across Europe responded to the competing discourses of theology and philology in Nietzsche’s writings on religion, encompassing thinkers and theologians from France, Italy, and Switzerland—to be the subject of a future study. Although Nietzsche chose never to address one aspect of the truth (i.e., the question: Did Jesus ever exist?), instead his commitment to philology as a discipline enabled him to prosecute a campaign against Christ for linguistic and scholarly reasons, while in Ecce Homo Nietzsche succeeded in recreating himself on a textual level that displays significant parallels with the way in which Christ can be said to have come into existence through the Bible. On numerous occasions (as examined in Chap. 7) Nietzsche argues for the significance, even the existential significance, of philology. In his preface (§5) to Daybreak, he described philology as “that venerable art which exacts from its followers one thing above all—to step to one side to leave themselves spare moments to wax silent to become slow—the leisurely art of the goldsmith applied to language,” and addressing his readers, he urged: “My patient friends, this book desires for itself only perfect readers and philologists: learn to read me well!” (D Preface §5). And nowhere is the importance of “Reading and Writing” emphasized more strongly than in the chapter of Zarathustra that bears that title, in which Zarathustra declares: “Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood. Write with blood, and thou wilt find that blood is spirit” (Z I 7). In this book I have argued that, in his writings on religion, notably Christianity, from the Untimelies to The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche stages a

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confrontation between the competing discourses of philology on the one hand and, on the other, theology. This competition can be seen in its purest form in the question and its answer with which Ecce Homo concludes: “Have you understood me?”, he asks, and then replies: “Dionysos against the Crucified” (EH Destiny §9).6 While “the Crucified” is a theological notion (one that has been repeatedly explored by theologians from Paul of Tarsus to Jürgen Moltmann),7 Dionysos is a philological or philosophical one, inasmuch as, for Nietzsche, the god Dionysos is a philosopher. In Twilight of the Idols (1889), Nietzsche identifies himself explicitly as “the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysos” (and, in this sense, as “the teacher of the eternal recurrence”) (TI Ancients §5) (Fig. 8.1). This passage is widely recognized as a crux in Nietzsche’s writing (Salaquarda 1974; Haas 2003; Detering 2010), and the critical discourse has often been interested to explore whether the relationship between Dionysos and the Crucified is really one of contradiction or complementarity (Voigt 2018, 132). Does the formula “Dionysos against the Crucified” express a contradictory opposition or is their relationship one of permanent tension between two contrary poles? Or does it pose the Dionysos

the Crucified

Wagner

Nietzsche

Fig. 8.1  Dionysos “against”/“and” the Crucified

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possibility of a connection between Dionysos and the Crucified, between the sublime heights of the Übermensch and the depths of the human, all-­ too-­human, between the dark drive of vital plenitude of the Dionysian and an Apollonian-informed order and form—is the formula “Dionysos and the Crucified” really no more than a silent Christian annexation of Nietzsche (ibid., 132)? In his Nachlass for Spring 1888 Nietzsche presents Dionysos and the Crucified as two types, in a passage that was reproduced in part in Nietzsche’s discussion of the Dionysian in Twilight of the Idols (TI Ancients §4). Here we find Nietzsche’s first use of the phrase “Dionysos versus the ‘Crucified One’”—“there you have the opposition,” and he goes to explain: It’s not a distinction regarding their martyrdom—just that this martyrdom has a different meaning. Life itself, its eternal fruitfulness and recurrence, conditions torment, destruction, the will to annihilation … In the other case suffering, ‘the Crucified as the innocent,’ counts as an objection to this life, a formula to condemn it. One divines that the problem here is that of the meaning of suffering: whether a Christian meaning, a tragic meaning … In the former case it’s held to be the path to a blissful existence; in the latter, existence is held to be blissful enough to justify even monstrous suffering The tragic man says yes to even the bitterest suffering: he is strong, full, deifying enough to do so The Christian says No to even the happiest earthly lot: he is weak, poor, disinherited bough to suffer from life in whatever form … ‘the God on the cross’ is a curse on life, a hint to deliver oneself from it Dionysos cut to pieces is a promise to life: it will eternally be reborn and come home out of destruction. (WP §1052; KSA 13, 14[89], 266–267)

While the critics can be lined up between those who see the relationship between Dionysos and the Crucified as one of contrariness or contradiction (e.g., Peter Köster), those who see it as one of polarity (e.g., Hans Urs von Balthasar), and those who see it as one of subtle differentiation (e.g., Alois Maria Haas),8 this passage in Nietzsche’s Nachlass and the one at the conclusion to Ecce Homo also reflect the struggle between the

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discourses of philology and theology in Nietzsche’s writings from the Untimely Meditations and The Anti-Christ (Fig. 8.2). For in setting up this relation—whether one of contradiction or complementarity, of gegen or und—between Dionysos and the Crucified, Nietzsche is reflecting his own intellectual trajectory (or, as the Germans call it, Werdegang) from theologian to philologist; in other words, from being der kleine Pastor (“the little pastor”), so called because of his ability as a six year old to cite biblical passages from memory and sing hymns, who was, in the eyes of his family, destined to be a church minister, to the nineteen year old who, in a sketch dated 18 September 1863, expressed the following doubts (and a concomitant sense of liberation): “And so the human being grows out of everything that used to embrace him; he does not need to break his shackles, for unexpectedly, when a god bids it, they

Nietzsche

theology

philology

the Crucified

Dionysos

Nietzsche Fig. 8.2  Relation between the discourses of theology (the Crucified) and philology (Dionysos)

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fall away; and where is the ring that in the end still encircles him? Is it the world? Is it God?―” (W 3, 110), and who, in a remarkably frank letter to his sister written on 11 June 1865, asked: “Do we, in our enquiries, seek rest, peace, happiness? No, only truth, however abhorrent and ugly it may be” (KSB 2, 61). In this same letter he diagnosed for her the moment of caesura he was facing, in the following dramatic phrase: “Here the ways of men part: if you want to strive for peace of mind and happiness, then believe; but if you want to be a disciple of truth, then enquire” (KSB 2, 61). After his studies at Schulpforta, the famous school that, among others, Klopstock and Fichte had attended, Nietzsche had gone to university in Bonn to study theology. But he soon switched from theology to philology, and thus the course was set for Nietzsche’s promotion to academic stardom; then early retirement from academia; and his rebirth as a philosopher. In this rebirth it was philology that served, so to speak, as his philosophical midwife. In the Theaetetus, Socrates compares his own work as a philosopher to that of his mother, Phaenarete, as a maia or midwife (Theaetetus, 149a), and in Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche offers a dramatic reprise of this image: Creating—that is the great salvation from suffering, and life’s alleviation. But for the creator to appear, suffering itself is needed, and much transformation. Yea, much bitter dying must there be in your life, ye creators! Thus are ye advocates and justifiers of all perishableness. For the creator himself to be the new-born child, he must also be willing to be the child-bearer, and endure the pangs of the child-bearer. (Z II 2)

This image is so important for Nietzsche that, in the chapter of Part 4 entitled “Of the Higher Man,” he returned to it—and even parodied it: Ye creating ones, ye higher men! One is only pregnant with one’s own child. […] In your self-seeking, ye creating ones, there is the foresight and foreseeing of the pregnant! What no one’s eye hath yet seen, namely, the fruit— this, sheltereth and saveth and nourisheth your entire love.

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Where your entire love is, namely, with your child, there is also your entire virtue! Your work, your will is YOUR ‘neighbour’: let no false values impose upon you! Ye creating ones, ye higher men! Whoever hath to give birth is sick; whoever hath given birth, however, is unclean. Ask women: one giveth birth, not because it giveth pleasure. The pain maketh hens and poets cackle. Ye creating ones, in you there is much uncleanliness. That is because ye have had to be mothers. A new child: oh, how much new filth hath also come into the world! Go apart! He who hath given birth shall wash his soul! (Z IV 13 §11 and §12)

Yet while Nietzsche turned his back on theology, both intellectually and emotionally, he could never entirely free himself of its earnestness, its passion, and its conviction that the truth was something that mattered (even if, paradoxically, he charged Christianity with advocating the very opposite of the truth: of promulgating lies). And as Thus Spoke Zarathustra shows, he never turned his back on the Bible stylistically.9 For C.G.  Jung, the case of Nietzsche illustrated why, “at this time, when a large part of mankind is beginning to discard Christianity, it is worth while to understand clearly why it was originally accepted” (Jung 1916, 258). As Jung argued in “The Psychology of the Unconscious” (1917, 1926, 1943), the case of Nietzsche “shows, on the one hand, the consequences of neurotic one-sidedness, and, on the other hand, the dangers that lurk in this leap beyond Christianity” (Jung 1953, §40). On this account, Nietzsche “undoubtedly felt the Christian denial of animal nature very deeply indeed, and therefore he sought a higher human wholeness beyond good and evil,” but those who “seriously criticize the basic attitudes of Christianity also forfeits the protection which these bestow upon them” (ibid., §40).10 All the negativity displayed by Nietzsche towards St Paul as towards Wagner suggested to Jung a devastating insight: Nietzsche “had Wagner in himself, and that is why he envied him Parsifal; but, what was worse, he, Saul, also had Paul in him. Therefore Nietzsche became one stigmatized by the spirit: like Saul he had to experience Christification, when the ‘other’ whispered the ‘Ecce Homo’ in his ear. Who ‘broke before the

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cross’—Wagner or Nietzsche?” (Jung 1953, §43). In this way Jung rewrites “Dionysos against the Crucified” as “Nietzsche contra Wagner,” and he reads these oppositions as a chiasmus, that is, with Dionysos and Wagner on the one hand and the Crucified and Nietzsche on the other. But they can also be read as a dialectic, that is, Nietzsche opposes theology in the name of philology as he opposes the Crucified in the name of Dionysos, yet he nevertheless covertly identified with the Crucified as he recognized that, even or especially as a philosopher, he would always remain a philologist. To put it another way, in Jungian terms what Nietzsche is addressing is something we are currently experiencing in the West—a collapse of the symbolic system or the “death of the symbol.” In a seminar talk given in 1939 to the Guild of Pastoral Psychology in London, C.G.  Jung discussed what happens to a symbol when it ceases to be a living one—it is killed or devoured by doubt, a form of the truth which one can no longer accept (Jung 2014, §632). And he reiterated his warning that he had earlier expressed in relation to Nietzsche: My psychological condition wants something else. I must have a situation in which that thing becomes true once more. I need a new form. When one has had the misfortune to be fired out of a church, or to say ‘This is all nonsense,’ and to quit it—that has no merit at all. But to be in it and to be forced, say, by God to leave it—well, then you are legitimately extra ecclesiam. But extra ecclesiasm nulla salus;[11] then things really become terrible, because you are no more protected, you are no more in the consensus gentium,[12] you are no more in the lap of the All-Compassionate Mother. You are alone and you are confronted with all the demons of hell. That is what people don’t know. (Jung 2014, §632)

In Jung’s case, this quest for a new form is what he undertook in his Black Books and in his Red Book, a project which he described to Christiana Morgan in the following terms: “Put it all down as beautifully as you can—in some beautifully bound book. […] You can go to the book & turn over the pages & for you it will be your church—your cathedral— the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal.”13 This search for renewal was at the heart of analytical psychology from the beginning, when he told Freud on 11 February 1910: “We must give [ΨΑ, that is,

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psychoanalysis] time to infiltrate into people from many centres, to revivify among intellectuals a feeling for symbol and myth, ever so gently to transform Christ back into the soothsaying god of the vine, which he was”14—in other words, to turn Christ back into Dionysos. After all, Jung placed above the entrance to his house in Küsnacht a plaque containing the saying Vocatus atque invocatus deus aderit (i.e., “called or not called, god will be there”)—an allusion to a prophecy from the Delphic Oracle reported by Thucydides (The Peloponnesian War, book 1, §118) and, in its Latin form, popularized in the Adagia of Erasmus of Rotterdam (Adagia 1232 = 2.3.32). In his treatise On the Parts of Animals, Aristotle relates an anecdote with a similar import, according to which Heraclitus “is said to have spoken to the visitors who wanted to meet him and who stopped as they were approaching when they saw him warming himself by the oven—he urged them to come in without fear, for there were gods there too” (De Partibus Animalium i 5.645a17–23).15 For Jung, analytical psychology had an ethical dimension, too, reflected in the gnomic inscription carved into the wall of the Tower he built at Bollingen, Philemonis sacrum—Fausti poenitentia (i.e., Philemon’s shrine—Faust’s repentance).16 And in the majestic language and stunning illustrations of his Red Book, Jung reveals in aesthetic form just how deeply he himself had integrated Nietzsche’s argument that faith was something that deserved to be taken seriously, precisely because it was something one could no longer believe in. In 2008, the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy (1940–2021) was interviewed by Le Monde about the significance of Nietzsche for his own intellectual trajectory and for the contemporary world. Nancy recalled how, in the parable of the madman in which the “death of God” is announced, the madman himself asks: “What sacred games shall we have to invent?” (GS §125), and Nancy commented that “this question is more than ever ours” (Nancy 2008). He continued: “We have to rediscover what the ‘sacred’ means for us: something which is foreign to the human-all-too-human, the sense of the incommensurable, the sense that we ourselves are incommensurable, irreducible as little to the values of the market as to the rights and to the knowledge that we are accumulating” (ibid.). For the universal moral order that Nietzsche regarded as empirically refuted has acquired “a new consistency, one that is humanist

476 

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and progressive, which shields it from its refutation but which results in a renewed confusion: who are we? where are we going?” (ibid.). Nancy recalls an article he had written some forty years earlier entitled “Nietzsche: Mais où sont les yeux pour le voir?”, published in the historically significant year of 1968. “Today there are available to us many philosophical interpretations [of Nietzsche],” Nancy had then written, and “the common theme of a unified discourse is traced across the tangle of his work, a latent articulation is uncovered, eluding the ruses of the manifest statement. We needed theorizing readings of Nietzsche”—and, in the form of the “French Nietzsche,” there were certainly plenty of such readings available (Nancy 1968, 499).17 Yet, Nancy continued, “it is nevertheless the case that a theory about Nietzsche, however true it might be, is produced while governed by a theoretical thought that Nietzsche himself is jeopardizing,” which leads to the following problem: “To be sure, one can determine theoretically Nietzsche’s discourse. But it remains to be explained why this discourse reveals itself in another; the aphorism, the image, the dot, dot, dot” (ibid., 499). Looking back in 2008 on this article of 1968, Nancy explained that he had been trying to say that “we could not yet really discern Nietzsche’s profile” and that he still believed this to be the case (Nancy 2008). For while there exists a body of thought with which we are (or, until recently, were) familiar, that is, tragedy, the death of God, slave morality, eternal recurrence, and so on, Nietzsche primarily represents “an abrupt change of tone” , but also “an abrupt break in history” (ibid.). For with Nietzsche “the entire philosophical continuum judders to a halt,” “the tune falters,” “the discourse loses its way” (ibid.). And all this happens because “the confidence of being encircled by the logos has shattered,” not in the name of irrationality but “in the name of a higher reason” (ibid.). In this sense, Nietzsche remains, as Paul Valadier put it in 2014, “an untimely figure who still speaks to us” (Valadier 2014, 75).

Notes 1. See Irwin 2002; Grau 2005; and Flannery-Dailey and Wagner 2001. 2. For further discussion, see chapter 1, “The Education Question” (in Holub 2018, 19–74).

8 Conclusion 

477

3. Cf. Z III Of Old and New Law Tablets §26; cf. NK 6/2, 623–624. 4. For further discussion of the Catholic reception of Nietzsche in Germany, see Köster 1981/1982; and Köster 1998. 5. For a survey of Nietzsche’s presence in the discourse of contemporary theology, see Thiede 2001; and Braun 2010. 6. For further discussion of this statement, see Valadier 1985 (extracted from Valadier 1974); and Kee 1999. 7. See 1 Corinthians 1:22–23 (“For both the Jews require signs, and the Greeks seek after wisdom: but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling-block, and to the Gentiles, foolishness”); and Moltmann 2001. 8. See Köster 1998; Balthasar 1998, vol. 2; and Haas 2003. 9. For further discussion, see Large 2001. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche noted the stylistic excellence of Luther’s translation of the Bible when he observed: “The masterpiece of German prose is […] the masterpiece of its greatest preacher: the Bible has so far been the best German book. Compared with Luther’s Bible, almost everything else is mere ‘literature’ […]” (BGE §247). 10. As Jung had earlier formulated this idea in his Red Book in 1913: “I believe I have learned that no one is allowed to avoid the mysteries of the Christian religion unpunished. I repeat: he whose heart has not been broken over the Lord Jesus Christ drags a pagan around in himself, who holds him back from the best. […] Do you believe that Christianity left no mark on the souls of men? And do you believe that one who has not experienced this most intimately can still partake of its fruit?”—and going on in his Draft version of the Red Book to add: “No one can flout the spiritual development of many centuries and reap what they have not sowed” (Jung 2012, 215–216). For further discussion, see Giegerich 2004. 11. That is, “there is no salvation outside of the Church,” an axiom first stated in Letter 72 of Saint Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage (d. 258). 12. That is, “the agreement of the people,” an ancient expression of the consensus theory of truth. 13. Christiana Morgan, analysis notebook, Countway Library of Medicine, 12 July 1926 (cited in Shamdasani 2012, 77). 14. See Jung’s letter to Freud of 11 February 1910 (in Freud and Jung 1974, 294). 15. See Gregoric 2001 for the text and further discussion. 16. For discussion of this inscription, see Ziolkowski, chapter 5, “Carl Gustav Jung: The Tower of the Psyche” (1988, 131–148); Shamdasani 2012, 77–84; and Kingsley 2018, 177–182 and 583.

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17. The groundwork for the “New Nietzsche” was laid in the papers given at two major conferences in Royaumont (1964) and Cerisy-la-Salle (1972) and collected in the resulting conference proceedings published as Nietzsche: Cahiers du Royaument, [Philosophie, no. 6], Paris: Éditions de minuit, 1967; and Nietzsche aujourd’hui, 2 vols, Paris: Union générale d’éditions, 1973. For further discussion of the “French Nietzsche” (including its “fate”), see Künzli 1976; Vattimo 1977; Allison 1985; Ansell-­Pearson 1993; Schrift 1995; and Allison 2001

References Allison, David B., ed. 1985. The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press. ———. 2001. Reading the New Nietzsche. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Ansell-Pearson, Keith, and Howard Caygill, eds. 1993. The Fate of the New Nietzsche. Aldershot: Ashgate. Balthasar, Hans Urs von. 1998. Apokalypse der deutschen Seele: Studien zu einer Lehre von letzten Haltungen. 3 vols (vol. 1, Der deutsche Idealismus; vol. 2, Im Zeichen Nietzsches; vol. 3, Die Vergöttlichung des Todes). Einsiedeln and Freiburg: Johannes. Bostrom, Nick. 2003. Are You Living In a Computer Simulation? Philosophical Quarterly 53 (211): 243–255. Braun, Hermann. 2010. Nietzsche im theologischen Diskurs. Theologische Rundschau 75 (1): 1–44. Detering, Heinrich. 2010. Der Antichrist und der Gekreuzigte: Friedrich Nietzsches letzte Texte. Göttingen: Wallstein. Flannery-Dailey, Frances, and Wagner, Rachel L. 2001. Wake Up! Gnosticism and Buddhism in The Matrix. Journal of Religion & Film 5 (2): Article 4. https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol5/iss2/4 Freud, Sigmund, and C.G. Jung. 1974. The Freud/Jung Letters: The Correspondence between Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung. Edited by William McGuire, trans. Ralph Manheim and R.F.C. Hull. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Giegerich, Wolfgang. 2004. The End of Meaning and the Birth of Man. Journal of Jungian Theory and Practice 6 (1): 1–66. Grau, Christopher, ed. 2005. Philosophers Explore the Matrix. Oxford University Press.

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Gregoric, Pavel. 2001. The Heraclitus Anecdote: De Partibus Animalium i 5.645a17-23. Ancient Philosophy 21: 1–13. Haas, Alois Maria. 2003. Nietzsche: Zwischen Dionysos und Christus: Einblicke in einen Lebenskampf. Edited by Hildegard Elisabeth Keller. Wald: Drei-Punkt-Verlag. Holub, Robert C. 2018. Nietzsche in the Nineteenth Century: Social Questions and Philosophical Interventions. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Irwin, William, ed. 2002. The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real. Chicago: Open Court. Jung, C.G. 1916. Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations and Symbolisms of the Libido, a Contribution to the History of the Evolution of Thought. Translated by Beatrice M.  Hinkle. London: Kegan Paul Trench Trubner. ———. 1953. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology [Collected Works of C.G. Jung, vol. 7]. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ———. 2012. The Red Book: Liber Novus [Reader’s Edition]. Edited by Sonu Shamdasani, trans. Mark Kyburz, John Peck, and Sonu Shamdasani. New York and London: Norton. ———. 2014. The Symbolic Life: Miscellaneous Writings [Collected Works of C.G.  Jung, vol. 18]. Translated by R.F.C.  Hull. Hove and New  York: Routledge. Kee, Alistair. 1999. Nietzsche Against the Crucified. London: SCM Press. Kingsley, Peter. 2018. Catafalque: Carl Jung and the End of Humanity, 2 vols. London: Catafalque Press. Köster, Peter. 1981/1982. Nietzsche-Kritik und Nietzsche-Rezeption in der Theologie des 20. Jahrhunderts. Nietzsche-Studien, 10–11: 615–685. ———. 1998. Der verbotene Philosoph: Studien zu den Anfängen der katholischen Nietzsche-Rezeption in Deutschland (1890–1918). Berlin and New  York: de Gruyter. Künzli, Rudolf E. 1976. Nietzsche und die Semiologie: Neue Ansätze in der französischen Nietzsche-Interpretation. Nietzsche-Studien 5: 263–288. Large, Duncan. 2001. Nietzsche’s Use of Biblical Language. Journal of Nietzsche Studies 22 (Fall): 88–115. Ledure, Yves. 1984. Lectures «chrétiennes» de Nietzsche: Maurras, Papini, Scheler, de Lubac, Marcel, Mounier. Paris: Le Cerf. Moltmann, Jürgen. 2001. The Crucified God. Translated by R.A.  Wilson and John Bowden. London: SCM Press.

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Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1968. Nietzsche: Mais où sont les yeux pour le voir? Esprit [NS] 369 (3 ): 482–503. ———. 2008. Nietzsche: redécouvrir ce que ‘sacré’ veut dire. Le Monde, 7 March 2008. NK 6/2 = Sommer, Andreas Urs. 2013. Kommentar zu Nietzsches “Der Antichrist”, “Ecce homo”, “Dionysos-Dithyramben”, “Nietzsche contra Wagner” [Historischer und kritischer Kommentar zu Friedrich Nietzsches Werken, vol. 6/2]. Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter. Rémy, Gérard. 2010. L’apport d’Yves Ledure. Revue des Sciences Religieuses 84 (3): 289–296. Salaquarda, Jörg. 1974. Dionysos gegen den Gekreuzigten: Nietzsches Verständnis des Apostels Paulus. Zeitschrift für Religionsgeschichte 26: 97–124. Schrift, Alan D. 1995. Nietzsche’s French Legacy: A Genealogy of Poststructuralism. New York and London: Routledge. Shamdasani, Sonu. 2012. Liber Novus: The ‘Red Book’ of C.G. Jung. In The Red Book: Liber Novus: A Reader’s Edition, ed. Sonu Shamdasani, trans. Mark Kyburz, John Peck, and Sonu Shamdasani, 1–95. New  York and London: Norton. Thiede, Werner. 2001. “Wer aber kennt meinen Gott?” Friedrich Nietzsches “Theologie” als Geheimnis seiner Philosophie. Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 98 (4): 464–500. Valadier, Paul. 1974. Nietzsche et la critique du christianisme. Paris: Le Cerf. ———. 1985. Dionysus Versus the Crucified. In The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, ed. David B.  Allison, 247–261. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 2014. Nietzsche: Un inactuel qui parle encore. Esprit [NS] 403 (3–4): 75–79. Vattimo, Gianni. 1977. Nietzsche heute? Philosophische Rundschau 24 (1/2): 67–91. Voigt, Albrecht. 2018. Dionysos gegen den Gekreuzigten: Guardinis Blick auf Nietzsche. In Ambo 2018: Romano Guardini und der christliche Humanismus [Jahrbuch der Hochschule Heiligenkreuz 2018, vol. 3], ed. Wolfgang Buchmüller and Hanna-Barbara Geri-Falkovitz, 125–142. Heiligenkreuz: Be&Be-Verlag. Ziolkowski, Theodore. 1988. The View from the Tower: Origins of an Antimodernist Image. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Index1

A

Adler, Alfred, 59 Adorno, Theodor W., 75 Alberti, Julius Gustav, 114 Alcibiades, 369 Alexandrian School, 253 Alfaric, Prosper, 287, 358 Altizer, Thomas J.J., 33, 455n43 Analogia, 11 Analogia entis, 9, 10, 12, 33, 90n9, 90n10 Analogia fidei, 12, 34 Antiochus IV Epiphanes, 434 Antipas, Herod, 247, 364 Antiquity, 334 Apocalypticism, 279 Apollo, 368 Apollonius of Tyana, 358, 367–368

Apuleius, Lucius, 295 Aquinas, St Thomas, 9, 35, 314, 342, 374, 452n10 Aristotle, 475 Arnold, Matthew, 3, 173 Arnold, Richard, 390 Asclepias of Mendes, 370 Atheism, 38, 87, 343 Athenagoras of Athens, 41 Augustine, 245, 342, 417 Augustus, 370 Aurelius, Marcus, 340 Austin, J.L., 357, 371 B

Baal, 158n23 Bacon, Francis, 357

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Bishop, Discourses of Philology and Theology in Nietzsche, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42272-0

481

482 Index

Badiou, Alain, 316 Bahrdt, Karl Friedrich, 114, 115 Baldensperger, Wilhelm, 206 Bally, Charles, 152 Barbarism, 190 Barker, Margaret, 364 Barrès, Maurice, 149 Barth, Karl, 11, 13, 34, 245 Basedow, Johann Barnhard, 114 Bauer, Bruno, 120, 121, 123, 124, 126–128, 154, 215, 218, 220 Bauer, Georg Lorenz, 179 Bauer, Ludwig, 167 Baur, Ferdinand Christian, 103, 124, 169, 214, 259, 264, 273, 274, 287, 288, 294, 298, 311, 312, 360 Bede, Venerable, 412 Beiser, Frederick, 169, 192, 194, 195, 200 Benedict XVI, Pope, 74, 239, 240, 245, 306, 315 Benne, Christian, 385 Benz, Ernst, 125 Bergson, Henri, 87 Betz, John R., 34 Beyschlag, Willibald, 103, 144 Bible de Jérusalem, 152 Binion, Rudolph, 309 Blavatsky, Helena, 216 Bloom, Allan, 76 Bloy, Léon, 148 Bluntschli, Johann, 203 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 252 Bolland, Gerard, 315 Bonn School, 388, 389, 428 Borgia, Cesare, 252 Boring, Eugene, 428 Bornkamm, Günther, 104, 287

Bosc, Ernest, 216 Bostrom, Nick, 466 Bourget, Paul, 148, 149 Bousset, Wihelm, 47, 207, 258, 262 Brandenburger, Egon, 258 Brandes, Georg, 221 Brandon, S.G.F., 359 Braun, Herbert, 104 Brodie, Thomas L., 361 Brunetière, Ferdinand, 148 Buber, Martin, 87 Büchner, Ludwig, 200 Bucke, Richard Maurice, 311 Buddha, Gautama, 296, 308, 311, 360, 369 Buddhism, 209, 250, 355 Bullinger, E.W., 288 Bultmann, Rudolf, 104, 254, 258, 263, 287, 300, 301, 352, 358, 364, 424, 426, 433, 435 Burckhardt, Jacob, 387, 397 Burdeau, Auguste, 147 Burton, Ernest DeWitt, 257 C

Caesar, Claudius, 364 Calvin, John, 245 Camus, Albert, 226n7 Caravaggio, 306 Cargill, Robert R., 453n25 Catechism of the Catholic Church, 454n39 Celsus, 105, 106, 179, 374 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 217 Chenu, Marie-Dominique, 314 Chesterton, G.K., 4 Christ myth, 215 Christ myth theory, 316, 358

 Index 

Chubb, Thomas, 179 Cicero, 198, 437 Claudel, Paul, 37, 146 Clement I, Pope, 288 The Closing of the American Mind (Bloom), 76 Colani, Timothée, 143 Comte-Sponville, André, 66 Congar, Yves, 314 Conradi, Casimir, 184 Constantine the Great, 240 Cooper, Ian, 169 Copernican turn, 90n8 Cosmic consciousness, 311 Creuzer, Friedrich, 393 Crossan, John Dominic, 104, 361 Culture, 190 Cyril of Alexandria, 110, 269, 340 D

Daniélou, Jean, 314 Dannett, Daniel, 74 Darwin, Charles, 71–73, 215 Daudet, Léon, 145 Daumer, Georg Friedrich, 130–134 David, 116, 413, 417 Dawkins, Richard, 67, 68, 70, 76, 365 de Boron, Robert, 375 de Buffon, Comte, 199 de Bunsen, Ernest C.L., 209 de Gobineau, Arthur, 217 de Jonge, Morris, 215, 216 de Lubac, Henri, 13, 23n28, 314, 451 de Man, Paul, 294 de Saussure, Ferdinand, 152 de Wette, Wilhelm Martin Leberecht, 181, 184

Death of the symbol, 474 Decaux, Alain, 316 Deconstruction, 76 Deißmann, Adolf, 258 Deleuze, Gilles, 105, 366 Dennett, Daniel, 71–74 Derrida, Jacques, 76, 120, 399 Descartes, René, 466 Deschner, Karlheinz, 291 Desert Fathers, 419 Detering, Hermann, 288–291, 294, 312 Deussen, Paul, 221, 386, 391 d’Holbach, Baron, 47–50 Diagoras of Melos, 41 Dialectical theology, 13, 15, 34, 104 Dibelius, Martin, 425 Dick, Philip K., 453n22 Didache, 418, 427, 432 Diderot, Denis, 51, 374 Diogenes of Sinope, 429 Dionysos, 469, 475 Discourse of parables, 409 Doctrine of sacrifice, 244 Dodd, C.H., 426, 433 Doherty, Earl, 362 Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich, 347 Doughty, Darrell J., 293 Drews, Arthur, 154, 155, 316, 364 Drusus, Gaius, 370 Dualism, 266–268 Dürer, Albrecht, 291 Durkheim, Émile, 231n87 Düsing, Edith, 32 Dutch Radical Critics, 293, 298 Dutch Radical School, 311, 315, 316

483

484 Index E

Ebeling, Gerhard, 104 Ebionites, 284, 288 Eckhart, Meister, 250 École Biblique, 151 Edelmann, Johann Christian, 125 Edwards, Richard A., 427 Eichhorn, Johann Albrecht Friedrich, 179 Eisenman, Robert, 294 Eliade, Mircea, 231n87 Elior, Rachel, 454n28 Ellegård, Alvar, 361 Emmerich, Anna Katharina, 361 Emmerich, Anne Catherine, 212 Empedocles, 367, 370 Encausse, Gérard, 217 Engels, Friedrich, 57, 132 Ephexis, 406 Epictetus, 437 Epicurus, 42, 253, 369, 402 Epstein, Klaus, 113 Erasmus of Rotterdam, 475 Ernesti, Johann August, 269 Eschatological question, 205 Essenes, 131, 418 Eternal recurrence, 84, 86, 148, 218, 307, 311 Euhemerus, 42, 177, 378n28 Euripedes, 294, 296 Euripides, 290, 359 Eusebius of Caesarea, 108, 239, 364, 412 Exegesis, 241 F

Fairweather, A.M., 10 Feine, Paul, 262

Felden, Emil, 214 Ferry, Luc, 66 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 54–57, 123, 195, 200, 313 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 44, 88, 472 First Vatican Council, 11 Flaubert, Gustave, 402 Fletcher, Paul, 14 Forberg, Friedrich Karl, 44 Forbes, Duncan, 120 Form criticism, 359, 426 Forster, Georg, 196 Förster-Nietzsche, Elisabeth, 348, 393 Fortunatus, Venantius, 404 Four-fold remedy, 42 Fourth Lateran Council, 11, 23n24 Franco-Prussian War, 189, 393 Free spirit, 352 French Nietzsche, 478n17 Frenssen, Gustav, 213 Freud, Sigmund, 58–61, 106, 285 Frizeau, Gabriel, 147 Fry, Stephen, 189, 366 Fuchs, Ernst, 104, 258 G

Gabler, Johann Philipp, 179 Garland, Henry, 114, 117 Garland, Mary, 114, 117 Genebrardus, 404 Geneva School, 152 Genius, 346 George, Leopold, 182 German Idealism, 12, 23n27, 261, 315 Gervinus, Georg Gottfried, 201 Gfrörer, August Friedrich, 130

 Index 

Ghillany, Friedrich Wilhelm, 130 Gibbon, Edward, 338 Gibson, Mel, 361 Gillespie, Michael Allen, 79 Girard, René, 309 Gloël, Johannes, 262 Glucksmann, André, 58 Gnosticism, 436, 455n43 “The Gods of Greece,” 3, 337, 338 Goethe, 51, 64, 196, 387, 392 Goetz, Friedrich Leberecht, 77 Goeze, Johann Melchior, 113, 198 Gogarten, Friedrich, 34 Gospel of Q, 218 Gospel of the Ebionites, 372 Gospel of Thomas, 427, 431, 432 Gospels, Synoptic, 204, 373, 422 Grabbe, Christian Dietrich, 60 Grand style, 337, 338 Griesbach, Johann Jakob, 179, 419, 422 Grillparzer, Franz, 358 Guattari, Félix, 105, 366 Guéranger, Prosper, 405, 453n19 Gutbrod, Walter, 258 H

Haas, Alois Maria, 470 Habermas, Jürgen, 76 Haeckel, Ernst, 200, 214 Haenchen, Ernst, 294 Hammadi, Nag, 419 Harnack, 313 Harris, Sam, 66, 67 Hart, David Bentley, 304 Hase, Karl August, 116 Hauer, Jakob Wilhelm, 213 Hauptmann, Hans, 217

485

Hauser, Kaspar, 133 Hausrath, Adolf, 198 Havemann, Daniel, 265 Haydock, George Leo, 281, 282, 317, 350, 351, 353, 404, 409, 410, 417, 419 Hegel, G.W.F., 5, 12, 32, 36, 52, 53, 88, 90n7, 120, 131, 167, 170, 184, 192, 195, 202, 392 Heidegger, Martin, 31, 85, 338, 399, 426 Heliodorus, 296 Helms, Randel, 361 Hengstenberg, Ernst Wilhelm, 6, 171–172 Hennacy, Ammon, 285 Hennell, Charles Christian, 130 Heraclides, 370 Heraclitus, 286, 367, 377n14, 475 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 5, 115, 196, 358 Hermes, 360 Herodotus, 364 Herod the Great, 247 Hess, Johann Jakob, 114 Higher criticism, 312, 313 Hippolytus of Rome, 378n29, 432 Historical-critical method, 312 Historical criticism, 312 Historical Jesus, 103 Hitchens, Christopher, 70, 76 Hobbes, Thomas, 73, 74 Hoekstra, Sytse, 218 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 5, 167, 200 Hollingdale, R.J., 81, 218, 357 Holsten, Karl, 260, 269 Holtzmann, Heinrich Julius, 103, 154, 203, 206, 211, 261, 420, 423

486 Index

Holtzmann, Oskar, 212 Holy Grail, 375 Homer, 294, 302, 359, 367, 371, 389, 398, 399 Hume, David, 71, 421 Hunt, William Holman, 77 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 148, 404 Hypatia of Alexandria, 110 I

Iamblichus, 378n30, 399 Ibsen, Henrik, 112 Idealism, German, 135 Ignatius of Antioch, 272 Infancy Gospel of Thomas, 372 Irenaeus of Lyon, 272, 284 J

Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 5, 8, 43, 77, 82, 117, 135 Jahn, Otto, 388 Jakobi, Johann Adolph, 115 James, William, 39 Jammes, Francis, 37 Jenisch, Daniel, 77 Jensen, Anthony K., 154, 155 Jerome, 314 Jerphagnon, Lucien, 112 Jewett, Robert, 254, 266, 271 John Paul II, Pope, 65, 66, 315, 456n49 Johnson, Edwin, 316 John the Baptist, 441, 442 Joseph of Arimathea, 375, 376, 405 Josephus, Flavius, 123, 124, 130, 136, 205, 294, 359, 366, 374 Joyce, James, 299

Julian the Apostate, 109, 179, 340 Juncker, Alfred, 262 Jung, C.G., 1, 59, 63, 64, 208, 286, 444–446, 448, 450, 473 K

Kalthoff, Albert, 154, 214 Kant, Immanuel, 79, 82, 117, 147, 179, 184, 187, 195, 225n5, 466 Käsemann, Ernst, 104 Kaufmann, Walter, 317 Keim, Karl Theodor, 144, 203 Kenny, Anthony, 299, 300 Kern, Friedrich Heinrich, 169 Kerner, Justinus, 168 Kerygma, 352, 425, 433 Kießling, Adolf, 390 “Kingdom of God,” 220, 221, 434, 436, 437 Kingdom of Heaven, 223 Kingsley, Peter, 311 Klages, Ludwig, 317 Kloppenborg, John S., 7, 418, 428, 443 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 472 Köselitz, Heinrich, 307 Köster, Peter, 467, 470 Kourie, Celia, 277 Küng, Hans, 451 L

Lachmann, Karl, 422 Lactantius, 404 Laërtius, Diogenes, 41, 368, 369, 390 Lagrange, Marie-Joseph, 149, 152

 Index 

Lampert, Laurence, 341 Laplanche, François, 151 “Law Against Christianity,” 106 Leclerc, Georges-Louis, 199 Ledure, Yves, 468 Left Hegelianism, 174 Lenzerheide fragment, 84 Leo XIII, Pope, 151, 312 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 43, 113, 179, 198, 201, 217, 354 Lewis, C.S., 300, 301, 304 Liberal Lives of Jesus, 204 Library of Alexandria, 335 Lietzmann, Hans, 207, 258 Littledale, Richard Frederick, 404, 409, 412 Locke, John, 421 Lohfink, Gerhard, 295 Loisy, Alfred F., 149, 150, 300, 313, 364 Loman, Abraham Dirk, 315 Lucretius, 43 Lüdemann, Carl Peter Matthias, 264 Lüdemann, Hermann, 257, 260, 264, 265, 269–271 Lührmann, Dieter, 428 Lull, Ramon, 286 Luthardt, Christoph Ernst, 144 Luther, Martin, 35, 245, 342, 477n9 Lutz, Manfred, 292 M

Maccabeus, Judas, 434 Maccoby, Hyam, 361 MacDonald, Dennis R., 368 Mack, Burton L., 7, 104, 359, 418, 424, 428, 433, 434, 436, 438, 440, 442, 443

487

Magdalene, Mary, 348, 373 Magus, Simon, 288, 294, 321n34 Malebranche, Nicolas, 135 Marheineke, Philip, 120, 184 Martyr, Justin, 264, 272, 404 Marx, Karl, 57, 75, 122, 123, 128, 132, 200 The Matrix, 465 Mattathias the Hasmonean, 434 Mauritz, Oscar, 214 Mauthner, Fritz, 40 Mayer, Carl, 88 Melchizedek, 416 Mendelssohn, Moses, 5, 43 Merezhkovsky, Dmitry Sergeyevich, 112 Merz, Annette, 103 Meslier, Jean, 45, 421 Messiah, 16, 116, 126, 183, 204, 208, 218, 413, 415, 432, 433, 439 Messianic, 141, 206 “Messianic secret,” 123, 218, 220, 431 Methods, 333, 334, 343 Metrodorus, 369 Meuzelaar, J.J., 259 Michaelis, Johann David, 269 Midrash, 359, 362 Mill, John Stuart, 39 Miller, Dale, 361 Miller, Patricia, 361 Modernism, 313 Mohrmann, Christine, 152, 153, 320n28 Moloch, 132 Moltmann, Jürgen, 469 Monistenbund, Deutscher, 214 Mörike, Eduard, 167, 304

488 Index

Morton, A.Q., 299 Mosebach, Martin, 410 Moses, 110 Müller, Julius, 269 Müller, Max, 209 Murray, Linda, 2 Murray, Peter, 2 Mystery Religions, 360 Mythicist approach, 103, 121, 154, 360 N

Nagel, Thomas, 322n48 Nag Hammadi library, 431 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 475, 476 Neale, John Mason, 404, 409, 412 Nero, 371 New Atheism, 66 New Atheists, 71, 74 Newman, John Henry, 150 New Nietzsche, 478n17 New Perspective on Paul, 278 New quest, 104 Niebuhr, Barthold Georg, 387 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 311 Nihilism, 77–81, 83–87, 92n54, 218 Noack, Ludwig, 130 Noël, Marie, 37 Nouvelle théologie, 314 Novalis, 5 Nozick, Robert, 466 Numbering of the psalms, 452n14

O

Obereit, Jacob Hermann, 77 Onfray, Michel, 45, 66, 280–282, 284, 285, 366–368, 370–372, 374, 376, 405, 411, 441 Opitz, Ernst August, 115 Origen of Alexandria, 105, 107, 108, 177, 178, 286, 354, 374 Orsucci, Andrea, 125 Otto, Rudolf, 35, 231n87, 426 Overbeck, Franz, 124, 221, 264, 266, 322n53, 333, 341 P

Pagels, Elaine, 293 Paine, Thomas, 374 Pantheism, 35 Pantheism controversy, 5 Papias of Hierapolis, 420 Pascal, Blaise, 32, 90n7, 342 Patrice de la Tour du Pin, 37 Paul, Jean, 79 Paul of Tarsus/Paul, Apostle/St Paul, 49, 68, 125, 156, 218, 224, 239, 242, 248, 275, 284, 305, 433, 469, 473 Paul VI, Pope, 314 Paulsen, Friedrich, 389 Paulus, Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob, 115, 179 Péguy, Charles, 37 Perictione, 368 Perrin, Norman, 360 Petronius, 252, 368

 Index 

Pfleiderer, Otto, 214, 258, 260 Phaenarete, 472 Phenomenology, 76 Philistine, 173, 191, 197 Philodemos of Gadara, 42 Philo/Philo of Alexandria, 126, 177, 268, 371, 438 Philologenstreit, 388 Philology, 4, 5, 15, 17, 18, 20, 46, 68, 71, 85, 135, 207, 209, 253, 268, 317, 385, 386, 388, 389, 392, 396, 397, 403, 440 Philosophical anthropology, 268 Philostratus, 47, 367 Pierce, C.A., 259 Pierson, Allard, 315 Pilate, Pontius, 253 Pirenne, Henri, 339 Pius IX, Pope, 23n25, 33 Pius X, Pope, 151, 302, 313 Pius XII, Pope, 314 Plato, 110, 187, 192, 199, 268, 285, 367–369, 378n31, 395, 401, 456n44, 466 father, Ariston, 368 mother, 368 Pliny, 320n26 Plotinus, 456n44 Plutarch, 32, 42, 364 Polybius, 177 Ponticus, Heraclides, 370 Pontius Pilate, 357, 374 Porphyry of Tyre, 107–109, 179 Porter, James, 451n8 Price, Robert M., 292, 311, 312, 358, 362, 364, 365, 367, 436

489

Priest, Robert B., 152 Priest, Robert D., 148 Problem of communication, 352 Proof of strength, 353, 355, 356 Prophetissa, Maria, 309 Przywara, Erich, 13, 34 Pseudo-Abdias, 239 Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, 302 Pseudo-Marcellus, 239 Pythagoras, 360, 369, 370, 399 Q

Q, 219, 427–432, 435, 438, 439, 442, 443 Querelle des anciens et des modernes, 336 Quest for the historical Jesus, 103, 112, 120, 128, 130, 131, 134, 143, 145, 154, 201, 203, 205, 207, 213, 214, 218, 219, 223, 272 Quest for the historical Paul, 272 R

Ranke-Heinemann, Ute, 290 Rapp, Adolf, 197 Ratzinger, Joseph, 74 Regula fidei, 11 Reid, Thomas, 135 Reimarus, Hermann Samuel, 103, 112, 127, 171, 179, 187, 201, 203, 207, 210, 217, 279, 421 Reinhard, Franz Volkmar, 114 Reitzenstein, Richard August, 258, 263

490 Index

Renan, Ernest, 130, 134, 136–142, 144, 145, 150, 155, 202, 264, 272, 274, 305, 313, 340, 344–346, 349 Ressourcement, 314 Ribeck, Otto, 389 Ricoeur, Paul, 58 Ridley, Aaron, 395 Right Hegelianism, 120–122, 174 Ritschl, Albrecht, 206, 261, 264, 273 Ritschl, Friedrich, 206, 388–391, 393 Robinson, James M., 427 Rohde, Erwin, 197, 390, 391, 393 Rolland, Philippe, 151 Rolland, Romain, 60 Roman Empire, 129 Roman-Jewish War, 430, 431 Roscher, Wilhelm Heinrich, 390 Rosenkranz, Karl, 184 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 342 Rückert, Leopold Immanuel, 269 S

St Ambrose, 153 St Augustine of Hippo, 10, 54, 107, 153, 194, 341, 342, 374, 404, 414, 419 St Cyprian, 404, 477n11 St Epiphanius of Salamis, 419 St Francis of Assisi, 345 St Irenaeus, 419 St Jerome, 315, 404, 412, 419 St John Chrysostom, 269, 281, 350 Sallust, 421 Salvation is of the Jews, 344

Samaritans, 344, 377n6 Sanders, E.P., 104, 277 Sapiential Books, 438 Scheler, Max, 13 Schelling, F.W.J., 5, 32, 62, 115, 167, 170, 179, 180, 184, 393 Schenkel, Daniel, 171, 203 Schiller, Friedrich, 3, 196, 337 Schlatter, Adolf, 258 Schlegel, Friedrich, 5, 117, 393 Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst, 5–9, 116, 122, 170, 184, 185, 195, 206, 354, 420 Schlosser, Johann Georg, 114 Schmidt, Karl Ludwig, 104, 425 Schmidt, Richard, 261 Schmithals, Walter, 293 Schmitt, Carl, 87 Schnädelbach, Herbert, 292 Schoeps, Hans-Joachim, 294 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 78, 87, 192, 200, 305, 336 Schreber, Daniel Paul, 285 Schrift, Alan D., 399 Schuchardt, Hugo, 153 Schule, Tübinger, 264 Schulpforta, 388, 472 Schwalb, Moritz, 214 Schwarz, Hermann, 13 Schweitzer, Albert, 18, 103, 154, 155, 170, 201, 202, 218–223, 261, 272, 273, 275–277, 287, 292, 300, 422 Second Temple Judaism, 277 Second Vatican Council, 245, 314 Self-overcoming, 84 Semler, Johann Salomo, 114, 117, 269

 Index 

Seneca, 246, 268, 320n26, 437 Septuagint, 294, 359, 438 Seydel, Rudolf, 209 Shakespeare, William, 435 Shapiro, Gary, 139 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 52 Siculus, Calpurnius, 371 “Signs Gospel,” 435 Simon of Cyrene, 373 Simon, Richard, 46 Simonides, 390 Sitz im Leben, 301 Smith, Joseph, 296 Smith, Walter Chalmers, 57 Socrates, 38, 368, 369, 377n9, 378n32, 394, 395, 472 Sokolowski, Emil, 262 Sommer, Andreas Urs, 125, 139, 140, 142, 143 “Son of God,” 430, 432, 433 “Son of Man,” 218, 429–430, 432, 433, 436, 438, 439 Sophocles, 398, 399 Spinoza, Baruch, 5, 36, 43, 187, 195, 374 Stace, Walter T., 311 Steck, Rudolf, 316 Steiner, Rudolf, 134, 216, 231n85 Stelzenberger, Johannes, 258 Stern, J.P., 120, 191, 199, 200 Steudel, Johann Christian Friedrich, 171, 197 Stirner, Max, 57, 128, 200 Strauß, Botho, 75 Strauß, David Friedrich, 6, 17, 103, 111, 116, 122, 130, 133, 145,

491

154, 155, 167, 169, 264, 272, 279, 305, 313, 421 Strauss, Leo, 87 Streeter, Burnett Hillman, 424 Suetonius, 366, 370 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 286 Swoon hypothesis, 217 Sylvester, Pope, 240 Symbol, 447 Synoptic, 419 Synoptic Gospels, see Gospels, Synoptic T

Tabor, James, 288 Tacitus, 366 Tatian of Adiabene, 374 Taubes, Jacob, 13, 33 Tauler, Johannes, 417 Taureck, Bernhard H.F., 32 Taylor, Thomas, 111 Taylor, Vincent, 426 Temple theology, 364 Tertullian, 272, 342, 404 Tetrapharmakos, 42 Theißen, Gerd, 103, 427 Theodore of Mopsuestia, 269, 412, 414 Theodoret of Cyrrhus, 109 Theodorus of Cyrene, 41 Theognis of Megara, 388, 390 Theopanism, 35 Theory of Q, 210 Theosophical Society, 216 Third quest, 104

492 Index

Tholuck, August, 259 Thucydides, 199, 336, 475 Thurneysen, Eduard, 34 Tillich, Paul, 300, 358, 450–451 Tolstoy, Leo, 285 Transcendental idealism, 77 Troeltsch, Ernst, 12 Tschižewskij, Dmitrij, 125 Tübingen Four, 299 Tübingen School, 124, 169, 206, 298, 311, 312, 424 “Two-gospel” hypothesis, 420 Two-source hypothesis/theory, 12–13, 419, 420, 424 Tyrrell, George, 302

Volkelt, Johannes, 12 Volkmar, Gustav, 218 Voltaire, 45, 374 vom Humboldt, Wilhelm, 196 von Balthasar, Hans Urs, 451, 470 von Bülow, Hans, 308 von Engelhardt, Moritz, 264 von Gersdorff, Carl, 197 von Harnack, Adolf, 35, 264, 272, 287, 292, 316, 424 von Hartmann, Eduard, 200, 210, 315 von Hase, Karl August, 103 von Salis-Marschlins, Meta, 349 von Salomé, Lou, 285, 309, 401 von Treitschke, Heinrich, 201 von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich, 393

U

Uhland, Ludwig, 168 Usteri, Leonhard, 269 V

Valadier, Paul, 476 van den Bergh van Eysinga, Gustaaf Adolf, 315 van Manen, Willem C., 298, 311 Vater, Johann Severin, 181 Venturini, Karl Heinrich, 115, 217 Vergely, Bertrand, 32 Vidler, Alec, 300 Virgil, 294 Vischer-Bilfinger, Wilhelm, 393 Vischer, Friedrich Theodor, 167, 168, 195, 198, 200, 225n3 Voegelin, Eric, 455n43

W

Wagner, Richard, 191, 197, 286, 305, 306, 391, 393, 473 Wallace, Alfred Russell, 72 Weiffenbach, Wilhelm, 205 Weiss, Bernhard, 261, 423 Weiss, Johannes, 119, 206, 219–221, 263, 420, 423 Weisse, Christian Ernst, 12, 119 Weisse, Christian Hermann, 12, 103, 118, 123, 154, 206, 209, 211, 420, 423 Weizsäcker, Karl Heinrich, 144 Welcker, Friedrich, 62 Wellhausen, Julius, 62, 208, 264 Wells, G.A., 287, 358, 361

 Index 

Wendt, Hans Hinrich, 262 Wieland, Christoph Martin, 196 Wiesel, Eli, 40 Wilke, Christian Gottlob, 103, 118, 123, 154, 423 Will-to-power, 81, 84, 86, 138, 400, 401, 449 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 392 Windisch, Hans, 263 Wisser, Heinrich Wilhelm, 390 Woolston, Thomas, 179 Wrede, William, 104, 124, 218, 278, 293, 431

X

Xenophanes of Colophon, 56 Xenophon, 187 Y

Young Hegelians, 121 Z

Zeller, Eduard, 294 Ziegler, Leopold, 13 Zopyrus, 395, 451n9 Zoroaster, 262

493