"Affirmative" and "Negative" Religions and Nietzsche's General Religious Polemic
Patrick Mooney
Philosophy 184
May 12, 2000
Nietzsche draws a striking distinction in his general critique of religion in the second book of The Will to Power: He claims that some religions are "affirmative," while others are "negative." As examples of "affirmative" religions, he holds up the morality of Manu, the Islamic morality, and the morality of the older parts of the Old Testament. As examples of "negative" religions, he points to Buddhism and the New Testament. (WP 145)
This distinction is both striking and puzzling because of Nietzsche's multiple attacks on religion as a primarily negative force throughout his work. For instance, Nietzsche criticizes the idea of God as necessitating cruelty to others and to oneself -- as requiring as a sacrifice at various times both "human beings, perhaps precisely those whom one loved most" and "one's own strongest instincts." (BGE 55) Religion is criticized as increasing "the guilty feeling of indebtedness to the divinity" over the course of "several millennia." (GM II 20) The moral sentiments that priests prescribe for people have "'tamed,' 'weakened,' discouraged,' 'made refined,' 'made effete,' 'emasculated' (thus almost the same thing as harmed)" the people for whom they were prescribed. (GM III 21) The distinction between "affirmative" and "negative" religions, then, is puzzling because Nietzsche so frequently polemicizes religion as inherently negative, without making any such distinction.
The classification of Buddhism as a negative religion -- and the fact that Nietzsche classes it with Christianity in this way -- is also somewhat problematic because Nietzsche elsewhere praises Buddhism, calling it (for example) a religion of "spiritual glory" and one which had its "origin in the highest castes"; it is a religion which stands "beyond good and evil," like Nietzsche's own figure of the free spirit; it is "a hundred times colder, more truthful, more objective" than Christianity. (WP 154; A 20; A 23)
Many of these problems resulting from an attempt to interpret Nietzsche's views of religion in general on these points can be resolved by a close examination of what Nietzsche says about the history of Christianity and the ideological relations of early Christianity to Buddhism. This will resolve not only the questions about how both religions, apparently so different, can be classed in the same way, but also the question of how religion -- a generally negative phenomenon for Nietzsche -- can be classed into "affirmative" and "negative" groups.
In the beginning, of course, Christianity was a movement within the Jewish religion. Nietzsche argues that this is not only true as a historical accident -- i.e. that Christianity simply happened to grow in an area where Judaism was the predominant religion -- but that Christianity is a natural, perhaps even the inevitable, outgrowth of Judaism. It is, Nietzsche says, the "very consequence" of Judaism, and the Christian himself is "the ultimate Jewish consequence." (A 24) The Christian principle of love ultimately derives from Judaism, says Nietzsche. (WP 175) The symbolism of Christianity is Jewish in origin, he tells us. (WP 183) He also claims that the pacifism of Christianity "could grow only in the soil of Judaism, i.e., amidst a people that had already renounced politics and lived a kind of parasitic existence within the Roman order of things." (WP 204)
Jesus, as the historical figure on which the Christian religion is based, is a reactionary against certain elements of Jewish ecclesiastical life: He looks for an inward "Kingdom of Heaven," Nietzsche tells us, and "he does not find the means to it in the observances of the Jewish church." (WP 160) This idea -- that, for Jesus, the "Kingdom of Heaven" is an inward state, " a condition of the heart" -- is a major theme in Nietzsche's conception of the early history of Christianity and of Jesus as the founder of a movement which eventually resulted in the establishment of the Christian church, and he spends a great deal of time discussing this idea both in his critique of Christianity in The Will to Power and in The Antichrist. Perhaps most explicitly, Nietzsche says that the "glad tidings" -- i.e. the gospel -- is that "True life, eternal life, has been found -- it is not promised [i.e. in an afterlife], it is here, it is in you: as a living in love, in love without subtraction and exclusion, without regard for station." (A 29) Nietzsche further develops this idea of the "Kingdom of Heaven" as an inward state, a method of living and of interpreting life, in several statements: He invokes the traditional definition of "sin" as "any distance separating God and man," and says that Jesus declares that it "is abolished: precisely this is the 'glad tidings.'" For Jesus, according to Nietzsche, "it is only in the practice of life that one feels 'divine,' 'blessed,' 'evangelical,' at all times a 'child of God.'" (A 33)
Most succinctly, Nietzsche explains, "The 'kingdom of heaven' is a state of the heart -- not something that is to come 'above the earth,' or 'after death.'" (A 34) More explicitly and fully, Nietzsche reflects, "The Kingdom of God does not 'come' chronologically-historically, on a certain day in the calendar ... it is an 'inward change in the individual,' something that comes at every moment and at every moment has not yet arrived." (WP 161)
This early type of Christianity, which existed in Jesus of Nazareth as an individual, is, according to Nietzsche, "a naive beginning to a Buddhistic peace movement." (WP 167) And Jesus himself, as a "sermonizer on the mount, lake, and meadow," has an appearance which "seems like that of a Buddha on soil that is not all Indian." (A 31) Early Christianity, then, is for Nietzsche similar to Buddhism in some ways -- and one of the most important of these similarities is the emphasis placed by Jesus of Nazareth on achieving a particular inward state of salvation, which seems to be roughly comparable to the Buddhist quest for a state of enlightenment. Nietzsche draws other explicit parallels with Buddhism, as well: Both have problematic relationships with morality and culture, for instance. Nietzsche says that Christianity is destroyed by belief in morality (because "the Christian moral God is not tenable") and that, similarly, culture is no longer a desirable commodity when the presuppositions of culture are realized. Buddhism is described as arising in and appropriate to "a race satiated and wearied by centuries of philosophical contentions," while Christianity is described as "sprung from and appropriate to a people grown old and tame." (WP 155, 156) Early in its history, then, Christianity is (like Buddhism) a nihilistic antidote to weariness of life, which preaches non-action, non-judgment, and non-confrontation (WP 163) as ways to an inward state of life which constitutes this antidote.
This accounts for the references to Buddhism and Christianity as equivalent in some senses and as both "negative" religions. The distinctions between them -- the characterization of Buddhism as a religion of the upper class and the subtle and of Christianity as a religion of the lower classes and the crude in WP 154, for instance -- can, in part, be traced to their differing origins. Although both Christianity in its early form and Buddhism are nihilistic remedies for life-weariness, there are also historical differences in the ways the two religions developed in their society. Partly, these differences can be traced to the differing social statuses of their founders (Buddhism was founded by a member of the nobility, while Jesus was the adopted son of a carpenter).
Many of these differences, however, can best be explained by noting the development of the Christian religion once it left the hands of its founder. Once this happened, the development of Christian thought took a major turn and developed new characteristics, which Nietzsche argues are completely antithetical to Christianity as lived and preached by Jesus. This happened quickly after the crucifixion. "In truth," says Nietzsche, "there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross." (A 39) Nietzsche argues that the Christian message preached by Jesus -- a message of an inward Kingdom of Heaven -- was perverted by those who came after him, and Paul in particular. Nietzsche says that, "in a quite absurd way, the doctrine of reward and punishment has been crowded in," as were the prophecies and their fulfillment, and that these things are completely external to the original message and even essentially incompatible with it: "Everything has thereby been ruined," he adds. (WP 165) This original message was, he writes, "reversed by Paul into a pagan mystery doctrine" and made into a doctrine which restores everything from which Jesus' message of inward salvation attempted to escape: "The attempt to destroy priests and theologians culminated, thanks to Paul, in a new priesthood and theology," Nietzsche says. (WP 167)
Nietzsche calls this Pauline Christianity "an appalling mishmash of Greek philosophy and Judaism." (WP 169) It is a conglomeration of the original Jewish religion, which was experientially unsatisfying to Jesus, and paganism. It is especially harmful to life because it takes the passive original message of Jesus -- which, like Buddhism, was an antidote to life-weariness in an individual -- and turns it into a religion of "active pity for all the failures and all the weak" which is "more harmful than any vice." (A 2) Christianity, in taking on Pauline characteristics of pity, also misinterprets meaningful symbolism (Nietzsche points, for instance, to the transformation of the dichotomy of "real life" and "false" life -- meaningful and meaningless existence -- into "this life" and "the life to come") and pagan mysteries into crude dogmas and ecclesiastical formulae. (WP 170, 196)
This Christianity of Paul, while it originated in a similar way as Buddhism, has become more harmful to life than Buddhism, partly because it is active and partly because it is a religion which is capable of immense popular appeal. It is a democratic religion that "[puts] so many ideas into the heads of little people, as if their modest virtues were of any consequence." (WP 205) It also inverts the natural order of morality by basing its virtues on a divine command, rather than on the "natural task and utility" that the virtues would otherwise have. (WP 203) Buddhism, on the other hand, is based on "physiological facts" and is "a hundred times more realistic than Christianity." (A 20)
Even within the realm of religions that Nietzsche refers to as "negative" in his critique in section 145 of The Will to Power, then, there is an order of rank between various religions in terms of their utility for life. This ranking is not based on "truth," but rather on how useful the religions are for reaching a certain goal, and that goal (as is true in general for Nietzsche) is the ability to express the Will to Power in its manifold forms. After asking "What is good?" Nietzsche replies, "Everything that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself." Nietzsche then goes on to provide a brief criticism of weakness and goes on to call Christianity "more harmful than any vice ... active pity for all of the failures and all the weak." (A 2) Christianity is a particularly harmful negative religion because it inhibits the expression of the Will to Power.
Although Nietzsche characterizes the ethics of Islam (as "masculine" and active), the ethics of Manu, and the older parts of the Old Testament as "affirmative," they still are problematic and subject to Nietzsche's general criticism of religion as negative. There are several reasons for this; the simplest is that every religion and every priesthood is dependent upon what Nietzsche calls the "Holy Lie," the idea that "the lie is permitted as a means to pious ends." (WP 141) Religion, then, is fundamentally deceptive to believers, and the "affirmative" religions mentioned by Nietzsche are no different: they are still religions, and all of them still have a priesthood of some sort. Even the "affirmative" law-book of Manu is "founded on the holy lie." (WP 142) Although they may be "masculine" or a "deification of the feeling of power," they are still fundamentally deceptive to believers. "A virtue," Nietzsche points out, "must be our own invention," and believers, even those who are members of these "affirmative" religions, are not inventors of values, but passive recipients of values. (A 11) In simplest terms, the moral improvements demanded by religions take the passive receptor of values, "the worst mutilation of man that can be imagined," and present him "as the 'good man.'" (WP 141)
Overall, Nietzsche's view of religion in general is negative, but there are distinctions between different religions. They can be grouped into "affirmative" and "negative" religions, and there are even distinctions between religions within these groupings, but no religion is unequivocally "good": Nietzsche writes, "Religion has debased the concept 'man'" because "its ultimate consequence is that everything good, great, true is superhuman and bestowed only through an act of grace." (WP 136)
A religion, for Nietzsche, is not an incontrovertibly true method of interpreting the world, but merely "the principal means by which one can make whatever one wishes out of man." (WP 144) Nietzsche's new philosopher -- a philosopher liberated from the necessity of merely accepting traditional judgments and are capable of legislating values -- "will make use of religions for his project of cultivation and education." (BGE 61)
This Nietzschean conception of religion is a far cry from the way that the religious conceptualize religion, and for that reason, Nietzsche has a generally negative religious assessment. A closer examination of the text, however, shows a range of subtleties in his interpretation and illuminates a series of difficulties in the interpretation of the various texts.
References
Nietzsche, Friederich. The Antichrist in The Portable Nietzsche. Ed. and Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Viking Press, 1954.
Nietzsche, Friederich. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1966.
Nietzsche, Friederich. On the Genealogy of Morals in On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and RJ Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books, 1967.
Nietzsche, Friederich. The Will to Power. Trans. Walter Kauffman and R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books, 1967.
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