Easter with the Anti-Christ

In an early note, Nietzsche writes that the only appropriate attitude towards Christianity is kindly forbearance, since mockery, cynicism and animosity have all been exhausted as options. And yet, by the end of his philosophical life Nietzsche is styling himself as the Anti-Christ and aggressively condemning Christianity as an extreme form of spiritual and physiological corruption.

Rather than see this as a sign of incipient madness, I think Nietzsche's later more negative and more clinical appraisal of Christianity is a valid and legitimate reading due to a more profound philosophical analysis of morality in relation to questions of sickness, health, and modern European nihilism. 

Unfortunately, in a post such as this, I can't trace out the development of Nietzsche's fateful (but non-dialectical) opposition between Dionysus and the Crucified at any length or in any detail. But, since it's Easter, I'd like to make a few remarks on this topic - if only to make my own implacable opposition to the Church quite clear.

In the retrospective and revisionary 1886 preface to The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche is keen to persuade us that his uncompromising opposition to Christianity is already evident in this first published work. But it's actually not until Human, All Too Human that his attitude begins to decisively harden. For by 1878, he has realized that one cannot simply turn one's back on a pathological phenomenon such as Christianity. Rather, one must make an attempt at treatment and seek out a cure: that is to say, if one wants to live and be strong, then one must learn how to actively negate the negative. This is not only a matter of hygiene, but of good conscience; for to be a Christian today, says Nietzsche, is not only to be sick, but also dishonest.

The idea of Christianity as a crisis of health is one that Nietzsche fully explores in the Genealogy of Morals. Here, he offers us a diagnosis of both society and the modern soul via the construction of a symptomatology based upon his theory of ressentiment and an aetiology that looks for causes in terms of reactive forces. In this work, arguably, Nietzsche becomes the physician of culture that he believed a philosopher should aspire towards being.

Finally, we arrive at Nietzsche's most sustained polemic against Christianity, The Anti-Christ. It is vital to note that in this text Nietzsche's real opponent is not Jesus (whom he continues to think of as noble), but that "genius of hatred" St. Paul. For it is the latter who would keep Christ nailed to the Cross for all eternity and turn his teachings into what Deleuze terms a mortuary enterprise; and it is Paul who invents a new type of priest who foists ideas of guilt, judgement, and punishment upon mankind in the name of Love. 

It is precisely this vicious desire to condemn and seek retribution, that reveals just how shamefully ignorant those who call themselves Christians can be of the glad tidings given us by Jesus; indeed, as Nietzsche points out, even the very term Christian reveals a profound misunderstanding.

Thus, although Nietzsche describes Jesus as an idiot and a holy anarchist, he acknowledges that the gospels contain no trace of ressentiment or any will to revenge. Jesus might be immature and a decadent - he may suffer from a pathological horror of being touched - but he is also, in a sense, an anti-Christian.