Nietzsche's "Antichrist" and Pauline Theology
Why Nietzsche might be closer to St. Paul than he thinks
Nietzsche’s late work, The Antichrist, achieves the remarkable feat of annoying and offending almost any group you can think of, from religious folks to academics, from liberals to racists, from materialists to classicists.
And yet, so many people over the decades have read him and gotten something out of him, including theologians, philosophers, etc. Even in today’s intellectual world, citing Nietzsche is still often seen as cultivé, in contradiction to the otherwise rampant political correctness.1 Or maybe most people just have never read the Antichrist, arguably Nietzsche’s most inflammatory book?
But perhaps the reason for Nietzsche’s incredible impact is that, precisely because he is so direct and offensive, you cannot help but think deeply about the issues he discusses. His absolutely fantastic style (his German is priceless, hilarious, and clear as a bell even to this day) helps with that: it makes you chuckle against your anger and wonder whether the guy didn’t have a point here, after all, and that it might be worthwhile to do some soul-searching.
Another reason is that despite his ranting style, Nietzsche actually presents a very complex picture that can’t be easily pinned down or dismissed. There are many subtle contradictions even within this one book, the Antichrist, that forces out nuances and big picture thinking. For example, on one page he calls concepts such as “soul” and “spirit” nonsensical inventions by weakling-priests, on another page he freely talks about the “greatness of the soul” and “high-spirited people” as if this were the most normal thing in the world, forcing you to think: what kind of “soul” and “spirit” does he mean in connection with Christian doctrine and priesthood? And what kind does he mean when he speaks positively about them?2
I suggest that a fruitful reading of the Antichrist keep two distinctions in mind: first, between morality as a mere means of controlling society, and a higher form of morality that amounts to affirming the life force on an individual level; and second, between a lower form of “earthy” spirituality advanced purely for “fleshly” reasons, and a higher form that is sincere, meticulous, and nuanced in its perception—and that is much closer to Nietzsche’s ideas than a superficial reading of his anti-religious rants might suggest.
This is precisely the kind of nuanced distinction we find in Paul’s letters.
Nietzsche’s Hatred for Paul: Misplaced?
Nietzsche goes hard against Christianity. And he seems to have a particular hatred for the Apostle Paul.
I can somewhat understand his perspective here: reading the old German translation of Paul’s letters without some serious theological, historical, and linguistic background that simply hadn’t been available at Nietzsche’s time, it is easy to perceive them as silly ramblings of a weakling-priest with an agenda.3 The result is that Nietzsche turns Paul into a sort of stand-in, a punching ball for the worst aspects of Christianity and its institutions.
The irony here is that in my reading, Nietzsche has a lot in common with Paul.
For example, Paul is not the softie universalist Nietzsche seems to suggest he is. Indeed, Paul was the direct inspiration for the Gnostics, and you can find many Gnostic elements in Paul.4 For instance, he was quite elitist in the sense that he drew a hard line between those who live “according to the flesh” and those who live “according to the spirit.” The latter have actually much in common with what Nietzsche calls “the noble:” they affirm the life force, that thing which according to Nietzsche goes way beyond the mere instinct for survival, and channel it into their lives, totally and completely. They also look at the world with supreme subtlety, therefore developing spiritual sight—a concept much closer to what Nietzsche calls “Wissenschaft” and “people of the highest mind” (Geistigste) than he might realize. They are also not at all lost in a dream about the afterlife, nor are they hiding from reality like a turtle, as Nietzsche put it—quite the opposite: they radically affirm reality in its subtle symbolic form.
What’s more, if we understand Nietzsche’s Will to Power as a path that seeks to maximize free will—against the tyranny of the sophists and weaklings who keep humanity under their thumbs and hypnotize them into all kinds of delusions, the parallels to Paul’s “principalities in high places” should be obvious. Paul clearly was a fighter, someone who sought to reawaken a spark in those who are capable and receptive, against the authorities of his time, including the zealot faction of the Jewish Christians. He was a troublemaker and contrarian.
When Nietzsche writes about the early Christians and priests in general:
They have reduced the psychology of every great event to the idiotic formula of "obedience or disobedience to God.”
—what he is describing is what Paul would call “those who live according to the flesh,” that is, people incapable of subtle perception or a deep understanding of what’s really going on.
The same is true for Nietzsche’s critique of the concept of sin and how priests use it to shame people and cement their power. Paul is all about abandoning this childish notion of sin and transcending it: a person living and partaking in the Christ spirit is morally self-sufficient, has grown up, has left his childhood behind where he needed laws and rules.5
Paul is all about abandoning this childish notion of sin and transcending it: a person living and partaking in the Christ spirit is morally self-sufficient, has grown up, has left his childhood behind where he needed laws and rules.
Nietzsche also says that there can be no truth in things “priests talk about,” or that fanatics like Luther, Rousseau, Robespierre, etc. are “sick epileptics of concepts” and represent the opposite of strong minds (spirits) who became free. All such ideas are perfectly compatible with Pauline theology, which is about personal liberation and transformation, truth, love, and freedom in Christ, and certainly not about rabbinical legalism or absolute truths derived from first principles.
Indeed, what Nietzsche repeatedly and approvingly refers to as the “evangelium,” that is, what salvation is really about, is Pauline through and through. Astonishingly, it foreshadows in many ways later readings of Paul, including discussions about pistis (faith vs. belief), or the mistranslation that turned faith of Jesus into faith in Jesus, or indeed the idea that the gospels should be read more as parables than as anything resembling history. Consider this passage:6
In the whole psychology of the “Gospels” [“Evangelium”] the concepts of guilt and punishment are lacking, and so is that of reward. “Sin,” which means anything that puts a distance between God and man, is abolished—this is precisely the “glad tidings.” Eternal bliss is not merely promised, nor is it bound up with conditions: it is conceived as the only reality—what remains consists merely of signs useful in speaking of it.
The results of such a point of view project themselves into a new way of life, the special evangelical way of life. It is not a “belief” that marks off the Christian; he is distinguished by a different mode of action; he acts differently. […]
The life of the Saviour was simply a carrying out of this way of life—and so was his death.... He no longer needed any formula or ritual in his relations with God—not even prayer. He had rejected the whole of the Jewish doctrine of repentance and atonement; he knew that it was only by a way of life that one could feel one’s self “divine,” “blessed,” “evangelical,” a “child of God.” Not by “repentance,” not by “prayer and forgiveness” is the way to God: only the Gospel way leads to God—it is itself “God!”—What the Gospels abolished was the Judaism in the concepts of “sin,” “forgiveness of sin,” “faith,” “salvation through faith”—the whole ecclesiastical dogma of the Jews was denied by the “glad tidings.”
The deep instinct which prompts the Christian how to live so that he will feel that he is “in heaven” and is “immortal,” despite many reasons for feeling that he is not “in heaven”: this is the only psychological reality in “salvation.”—A new way of life, not a new faith....
34.
If I understand anything at all about this great symbolist, it is this: that he regarded only subjective realities as realities, as “truths” —that he saw everything else, everything natural, temporal, spatial and historical, merely as signs, as materials for parables. The concept of “the Son of God” does not connote a concrete person in history, an isolated and definite individual, but an “eternal” fact, a psychological symbol set free from the concept of time. The same thing is true, and in the highest sense, of the God of this typical symbolist, of the “kingdom of God,” and of the “sonship of God.” […]
But it is nevertheless obvious enough what is meant by the symbols “Father” and “Son”—not, of course, to every one—: the word “Son” expresses entrance into the feeling that there is a general transformation of all things (beatitude), and “Father” expresses that feeling itself—the sensation of eternity and of perfection.—I am ashamed to remind you of what the church has made of this symbolism: has it not set an Amphitryon story[13] at the threshold of the Christian “faith”? And a dogma of “immaculate conception” for good measure?... And thereby it has robbed conception of its immaculateness—
The “kingdom of heaven” is a state of the heart—not something to come “beyond the world” or “after death.” […]
This “bearer of glad tidings” died as he lived and taught—not to “save mankind,” but to show mankind how to live. […]
—We free spirits—we are the first to have the necessary prerequisite to understanding what nineteen centuries have misunderstood—that instinct and passion for integrity which makes war upon the “holy lie” even more than upon all other lies.... Mankind was unspeakably far from our benevolent and cautious neutrality, from that discipline of the spirit which alone makes possible the solution of such strange and subtle things: what men always sought, with shameless egoism, was their own advantage therein; they created the church out of denial of the Gospels....
Whoever sought for signs of an ironical divinity’s hand in the great drama of existence would find no small indication thereof in the stupendous question-mark that is called Christianity. That mankind should be on its knees before the very antithesis of what was the origin, the meaning and the law of the Gospels—that in the concept of the “church” the very things should be pronounced holy that the “bearer of glad tidings” regards as beneath him and behind him—it would be impossible to surpass this as a grand example of world-historical irony—
Again, what Nietzsche criticizes here is what Paul would call the mindset of those “living according to the flesh,” who twist everything for their own advantage and turn everything that is symbolic, subtle, and deep into a crude literal and “earthy” interpretation. And so, for example, protestants came up with the “faith alone” doctrine, whereas Paul was all about opening your heart to the transformative Christ spirit, that is, to what is real, the subtle symbolism of reality, the ability to see the unseen.
To say that Nietzsche can be entirely read as secretly advancing Pauline theology would, of course, be absurd. But his view of Paul is clearly distorted by Martin Luther’s butchering of Pauline ideas, which, among other things, has entrenched the silly notion of “salvation by belief” in Protestantism. It is mostly ideas like these that Nietzsche hates (which jives well with his hatred for Luther!), not those actually advanced by Paul, as later research and thought have revealed them.
To be fair, some of Nietzsche’s ideas, such as those about the importance of base instincts, perhaps wouldn’t have gone down well with Paul. Also, while Paul’s emphasis on the primacy of love is not at all about fleeting emotions that make you blind, but rather about love as shining truth and truthful, empathetic perception, Nietzsche perhaps would never accept such emphasis on love. No to mention that Paul was a religious mystic whose radical teaching saw personal transformation as a complete and sometimes violent spiritual awakening to the divine spirit, followed by a reordering of one’s life and being according to this awakened spark—something Nietzsche certainly wouldn’t endorse if put in such religious terms. But then again, despite his professed hatred for all mystics, if Nietzsche doesn’t sound like a mystic bringing radical and divisive ideas to earth that are supposed to lift up people’s spirits, I don’t know who is!
Indeed, when Paul says:
The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit. (1 Corinthians 2:14)
—doesn’t this describe the initial reaction of entrenched philosophers, priests, etc. to Nietzsche’s radical ideas? That people are offended by them, cannot understand them, ignore them—because a subtle and deep perception is needed for such understanding?
A charitable reading of the Antichrist, in any event, can still produce many insights and stimulate reflection about many uncomfortable ideas and topics. And I’m sure that looking at old teachings such as Paul’s in new ways, discerning the underlying spirit even against traditional readings by the priestly classes and institutional religion, is very much in Nietzsche’s spirit, even if it shows that Nietzsche himself might have gone after the wrong guy, so to speak.
For an insightful discussion about the Antichrist and Nietzsche’s reception, listen to this interview with Nietzsche scholar Paul Bishop on the Hermitix podcast.
These nuances tend to get lost in translation, especially when it comes to the German word “Geist,” which has a wide range of meanings from spirit, intellect, mind to ghost and soul. “Geistig,” for instance, is often translated as “intellectual,” which I think doesn’t capture at all the spiritual and holistic undertones of the word. “Spiritually advanced” would be more like it, in the sense of “having developed a very advanced and high quality of spirit.”
Funnily enough, I’m pretty sure Nietzsche’s work partly inspired later theological and bible-critical approaches that helped shed new light on Paul and his teaching.
For a Gnostic reading of Paul, see Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Paul: Gnostic Exegesis of the Pauline Letters, Trinity Press International, 1992
For great insights into Paul’s theology and how it got misread due to translation issues, see Timothy Ashworth, Paul's Necessary Sin: The Experience of Liberation, Routledge, 2016.
See also my discussion of Pauline theology here:
This post is based on Friedrich Nietzsche, Der Antichrist: Fluch auf das Christentum, Hoffmann, 2016 (the text follows the edition: Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke in drei Bänden. Herausgegeben von Karl Schlechta, Hanser, 1954)
The English quote comes from H. L. Mencken’s translation, see: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/19322/19322-h/19322-h.htm (emphasis mine)
Fascinating take. Did they not both, after all, set themselves against the established religious authorities of their respective times, seeking to shatter the ossified dogmas that shackled the human spirit to dogmatic misinterpretations and blind rituals? Paul too, philosophized with a hammer.
Which isn't to say that their philosophies were necessarily entirely compatible. At the risk of over-interpreting Paul's symbolism, Pauline theology denigrates the flesh in favor of the spirit - he seems to draw a line between the two, and hold the latter up as superior. From this we get the ascetics, the celibates, the flagellants. For Nietzsche, the flesh was foundational; spirit and body were intimately related, and a healthy thoughts could not blossom from unhealthy soil. Hence his emphasis on movement, exercise, diet.
As I say, there's a good chance such a reading mistakes Paul's actual meaning. But then, this is always a risk when one speaks in metaphor. Particularly when translations are poor. If so, one might see Nietzsche's emphasis on the embodied and carnal as a necessary corrective to many centuries of misinterpretation that had thoroughly corrupted the root meaning of Christian practice. Nietzsche's struggle was with the church as it had become; perhaps without realizing it, his thought was a necessary step in accessing once more that which it was originally meant to be.
Nietzsche tirelessly sought in order to find, whereas many Christians ‘believe’ they already found everything there is to find. I always saw Nietzsche as one of the truest of Christians, and his brutally honest manner concealing the humbleness of not even claiming to be a Christian.