"I Said, You Are Gods!" - A Trans-Nietzschean Perspective on Christian Soteriology (Part II).

Part II:
Enter Nietzsche

Skipping ahead to late nineteenth century Europe, we have the entrance of Friedrich Nietzsche, a German poet, psychologist, and philosopher who was very interested in the fundamental nature of humanity and how it related to morality. Contrary to his contemporary Arthur Schopenhauer, who believed that, most fundamentally, all creatures exerted a will for self-preservation, Nietzsche believed that, even more fundamentally, all creatures exert the “will to power.” This was the need of the self to wield and exert power over the self and others according to the self’s interests— a desire for ultimate freedom— and the will for self-preservation was only a product of that. He says as much in his book entitled Beyond Good and Evil: “Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation….” This view is very similar to a Biblical perspective on the fallen nature of man— with the man pursuing his own interests, he will exert power to master both himself and others when it will gain him the freedom to do what he desires, benefiting himself at the expense of others’ subjugation and/or detriment. Nietzsche says earlier in the same section,

"Refraining mutually from injury, violence, and exploitation and placing one’s will on a par with that of someone else—this may become, in a certain sense, good manners among individuals if the appropriate conditions are present…. But as soon as this principle is extended, and possibly even accepted as the fundamental principle of society, it immediately proves to be what it really is—a will to the denial of life, a principle of disintegration and decay."

As he says here, instead of constraining individual “wills to power” for the benefit of the community, as Scripture would have us do, Nietzsche believed that it would be better for humanity to allow those who had strong “wills to power” to dominate and subjugate those who were weaker, because to do otherwise would somehow decay the hierarchy of social structure.

In complete opposition to traditional moral genealogists, who held that the value of “good” was originally developed as a measure of “unegoistic” actions, it was Nietzsche’s view that the value of “good” developed out of those who would be considered the aristocracy, the good people, of a particular culture, the “good” being their own happy condition. They “felt and established themselves and their actions as good, that is, of the first rank.” He believed that this value judgment was made by these aristocrats when they recognized the advantage of their position over the “plebeian” classes, those considered commoners. Nietzsche deduced this from his studies in the etymology of “good,” in which he discovered that in many different languages, the word “good” had its conceptual roots in the same thought. “The basic concept from which ‘good’ in the sense of ‘with aristocratic soul,’ ‘noble,’ ‘with a soul of high order,’ ‘with a privileged soul’ necessarily developed.” Likewise, his studies into the etymology of the word “bad” in various languages showed a very similar relationship to that word and the more common “plebeian” classes, and the terms used to describe them; a tribute to the aristocratic ancestry of social moral values.

Thus, for Nietzsche, the possession of both physical and, more importantly, social power played a fundamental role in the formation of social values. He says of the aristocracy, “They designate themselves simply by their superiority in power (as ‘the powerful,’ ‘the master,’ ‘the commanders’) or by the most clearly visible signs of this superiority…” He believed, literally, that “might makes right,” and also in the one-to-one correspondence of the power of the social nobility to truth. This was especially true, as Nietzsche points out, in the society of ancient Greece, where

"They call themselves, for instance, ‘the truthful’; this is so above all of the Greek nobility…. The root of the word coined for this, esthlos, signifies one who is, who possesses reality, who is actual, who is true; then, with a subjective turn, the true as the truthful: in this phase of conceptual transformation it becomes a slogan and catchword of the nobility and passes over entirely into the sense of ‘noble,’ as distinct from the lying common man…."

The ability to assert one’s (or a group’s) “will to power” was therefore, for Nietzsche, the most essential factor in the formation of moral value constructs, the construct being based most essentially on those values that the aristocratic elements of the particular society valued most highly. Nietzsche coined this moral construct under the title of “master morality.”

Nietzsche goes on to argue that “morality” as it appears today— the “good” being called in general “unegoistic,” and being measured in selflessness— was a reactionary movement against the aristocracy by the common classes, who, wanting to believe themselves happy as well, effectively had to deceive themselves into believing their own wretched condition “happy.” He calls this type of moral construct “slave morality.” This took place most effectively through the priestly institution, who claimed that the weak and lowly were really those who were good, and, to combat the visibly obvious “good”-related happiness of the aristocracy, they convinced the common classes that their happiness lay hidden beyond death, in another more happy afterlife.

This denial of the good of the present life Nietzsche calls the “ascetic ideal,” and, because of their strict religion-based moral construct, he believed that the Jews were the most effective at inspiring it. He says,

"It was the Jews who, with awe-inspiring consistency, dared to invert the aristocratic value-equation (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = beloved of God)… saying ‘the wretched alone are the good; the poor, impotent, lowly alone are the good; the suffering, deprived, sick, ugly alone are pious, alone are blessed by God, blessedness is for them alone—and you, the powerful and noble, are on the contrary the evil, the cruel, the lustful, the insatiable, the godless to all eternity; and you shall be in all eternity the unblessed, accursed, and damned!’"

This grand subversive overthrow of master morality by the Jews and the triumph of the ascetic ideal, Nietzsche believed, was completed by Jesus Christ, and consequently by what followed him: the religion of Christianity. A section later, he states,

"Did Israel not attain the ultimate goal of its sublime vengefulness precisely through the bypath of this ‘Redeemer,’ this ostensible opponent and disintegrator of Israel? Was it not part of the secret black art of truly grand politics of revenge, of a farseeing, subterranean, slowly advancing, and premeditated revenge, that Israel must itself deny the real instrument of its revenge before all the world as a mortal enemy and nail it to the cross, so that ‘all the world,’ namely all the opponents of Israel, could unhesitatingly swallow just this bait?"

Nietzsche condemned this seemingly Christian kind of thinking as ultimately nihilistic and anti-human, because it seemed to him to rob man of the happiness able to be experienced in this life, as well as stifling the excellence of man by denying him the ability to exert his “will to power.” This thereby turned him into a kind of herd animal, a sheep to be led around, and Nietzsche was therefore highly antagonistic toward it.

Because of its embrace of the ascetic ideal and its denial of the “will to power,” Christianity causes those men who are naturally more strong to be suppressed into the herd, and as a by-product, they are kept from exerting their own “will to power” by what Nietzsche calls the “bad conscience,” or guilt—the bad feelings received by not conforming to the system’s conception of “good.” This guilt, as well as the fear of punishment by the system and, more importantly, by God, were the means by which Nietzsche thought Christianity held the world in a vice-grip. Therefore, Nietzsche believed that Christianity was the absolute bane of the existence of mankind, that it ruled mainly by means of fear and deception— much like the moral constructs used in ancient Greece and Socrates’ city in words— and therefore should be rejected at whatever cost was necessary. It is in rejecting this slave morality that has conquered the earth through its cleverness that Nietzsche believes that mankind will be able to progress to a higher state of existence. Man’s complete rejection of the ascetic ideal and its supposed nihilistic tendencies allows him to live fully in the here and now by exerting his “will to power.” This, in turn, will spur on excellence in the whole of humanity, and eventually will give rise to the Superman, a man who is “beyond man,” a man who transcends the moral imperative entirely, a man who goes “beyond good and evil.”