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by Alistair Kee SCM, 1999 218 pp.; $26, paper |
As his authorship drew to its close, shortly before his sanity gave out, Nietzsche concluded that Christianity was "the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity," and "the one immortal blemish of mankind." Because these sentiments were not untypical of him; because they were couched in literature of such distinctive quality; because his ideas have had such an enormous impact; because one can report them to people in any sphere of life who have neither read nor even heard of Nietzsche and find them instantly recognized as a summary of attitudes they encounter, embrace, or fear, their author has been widely regarded as the foremost anti-Christian writer Europe has produced. In the early days of a new millennium, we may recall that, with a joyful sobriety too disciplined to cross the border into sheer abandoned intoxication, this self-styled antichrist wrote in his greatest work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, of the bliss of pressing one's hand "upon millennia as upon wax" and writing "upon the will of millennia as upon metal."
What if we need to correct our account of Nietzsche? What if the literature has avoided or missed important and positive things he has to say about religion, even about Christianity? What if Nietzsche found a friend in Jesus? Alistair Kee, of the University of Edinburgh, strikes out in the direction of answering these questions in his provocative book, Nietzsche Against the Crucified.
Seven chapters conduct us quickly through some of the major Nietzschean themes. God is dead and, with God, Truth. Morality is gone and aesthetics is applied physiology. Christianity offers the ultimate in decadent resistance to a proper will-to-power. Then comes a hinge chapter, dealing with Nietzsche's thought on eternal recurrence. Here, Kee's thesis that Nietzsche is a fundamentally religious thinker, comes into its own, as he interprets this notoriously controverted teaching as a sign that the numinous mantle of mystical religious experience had settled on his subject.
The way is opened for some reassessments. Nietzsche was a man of faith, a philosophical faith akin to religious faith. He even passes the christological test. For Nietzsche not only called Jesus the noblest human being—he meant it. He not only said that, from the earliest times, Jesus' followers had corrupted his message—he meant that, too, but, more significant still, he thought it important actually to say it. Why bother to do so unless you want to make a point of rehabilitating Jesus?
Nor does Nietzsche embrace a free and independent human Jesus in the context of sheer godlessness. There is a concept of deity worth entertaining, the holy storm-God Jehovah, wreathed not in the holiness of moral goodness or of aesthetic beauty, but in a dreadful uncanniness. Believe in him or not, at least he would be a worthwhile character, president of an order that is neither benign nor moral, an order adequately represented in religion only by the God beyond good and evil that Nietzsche discerns in parts of the Old Testament. Cut it as you will, you will therefore find a religious thinker, if you take Nietzsche at his word. Indeed, Nietzsche is re-opening the question of religion for us—and on terms that are counter to the postmodernism foisted on him by familiar contemporary description. The bottom line is that Nietzsche experienced some kind of revelation that led him to perceive the natural order as religiously colored at its very roots. His is a knowing form of natural, pagan religion.
My account is cryptic, but it just summarizes where the author more or less leaves his readers, with swirling waters surrounding Nietzsche's own position. Kee bequeaths to us the task of ordering our religious life and constructing our religious thought with the aid of Nietzsche's insights. This book is an example of those projects that seek both to separate the inspiration of Jesus from what later Christianity has made of him and to requisition the thoughts of a putative opponent of religious faith for the service of religion.
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