ABSTRACT
Nietzsche’s obstinate fascination with the Christian religion, M.S. Silk and J.P. Stern have recently argued, only seems to have soured into the antagonism that we systematically analysed in the previous chapter after the completion of his first book, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, despite what is standardly noted both by most commentators on Nietzsche and – therefore misleadingly – by Nietzsche himself in his post-eventum reflections on that particular text in such places as Ecce Homo and the preface he later added to The Birth of Tragedy in 1886. According to Silk and Stern’s convincing reading, Nietzsche, although no longer himself either a practising or believing Christian at this point, nevertheless retained enough sympathy for the religion and its values and practices to actually identify the expression of that faith with the ‘Dionysian impulse’ in The Birth of Tragedy, associating, for example, the Christian celebration of the Eucharist with quasi-Dionysian festivity.1 But whatever we may think of the merits of that particular association (later denied in Ecce Homo: ‘Christianity is neither Appollonian nor Dionysian’ (EH 79)), and although it may be worth noting that the early Nietzsche might not therefore have been a rabid out-and-out anti-Christian, this insight does not affect the argument of the present book, as it is rightly regarded as a commonplace that matters stand quite differently with his later self. The later Nietzsche condemned the Christian religious tradition again and again in his writings, to the extent that many authors, from varying schools of philosophy and criticism, today regard Nietzsche as the most significant critic of Christianity and, in particular, Christian ethics. Three religious psychopathologies were diagnosed by the mature Nietzsche: an ascetic escapism sought by terrestrial discontents, a kind of resentment which essentially involves self-deception, expressed by those who felt themselves inferior to some ‘other’, and the psychological masochism which ptolemaicly supplemented the escapist account, with regard to those supposedly strong and dominant types who nevertheless still embraced Christianity. We have thus encountered what seemed to Nietzsche to be the three fundamental forms of religion’s historic perversion of the human species: the figures of ressentiment, ‘bad conscience’ and the ‘ascetic ideal’. These three forms of religious psychopathology are independently treated by Nietzsche in the three successive essays of On the Genealogy of Morals, giving that particular text a profoundly anti-religious mode of organisation.
