Nietzsche the Drama Queen, and Christianity's Failure to Add Much That Was New to the World

According to Nietzsche, “‘God on the cross.’ Never yet and nowhere has there been an equal boldness in reversal, something so horrible, questioning, and questionable as this formula: it promised a revaluation of all the values of antiquity.”

I disagree, and would argue instead that Nietzsche was a drama queen.

Nietzscheʼs “transvaluation of values” sounds dramatic, but Christianity did not turn values completely upside down, nor did Nietzsche right them again. There have been people who cared for their sick in other lands and cultures, just as there have been dictators in Christian lands. As a trained rhetorician and son of a minister, Nietzsche tended to speak in overblown terms.

In reality the idea of “God on the cross” changed the world very little because basic human needs, insecurities, ignorance and cruelty remained (we are after all, primates who follow alpha male leaders), including the egos of “Christians” which were now super-sized by being joined to the alpha male of alpha males (God).

History demonstrates that the Christian lambs who worshiped the Lamb of God on the cross soon became lions of Judah, killing more fellow lovers of Jesus and persecuting more different people for different reasons than the Romans ever did to the Christians. Christianity also helped fill the western world with the notions of demonic causation/demonization of enemies and thought control, i.e., Christianized Roman emperors decreed in their law books that anyone who doubted the truth of the Trinity was “insane, demented,” and were subject to the Emperorʼs wrath, including Imperial decrees that the books of skeptics like Porphyry and heretics like Arius be burnt. Henceforth anyone daring to question the new Christian status quo was persecuted. [Plenty of historical data to back that up at bottom]

Nietzscheʼs predecessor and idol, Schopenhauer, noted with less drama the truth about Christianity in this brief dialogue:

CONVERSATION, JERUSALEM, A.D. 33

A: Have you heard the latest?

B: No, whatʼs happened?

A: The world has been redeemed!

B: You donʼt say!

A: Yes, the Dear Lord took on human form and had himself executed in Jerusalem; and with that the world has been redeemed and the devil hoodwinked.

B: Gosh, thatʼs simply lovely.

---

Would the world be much better or worse off today had the Persians conquered the Greeks at Thermopylae, leaving the Middle East Zoroastrian? Or if the religion of the Roman Empire had become Mithraism rather than Christianity? Humanity would have eventually learned via people other than Jesus, lessons of practical moral philosophy, and the value of tolerance and love. Either way, It takes time for us primates to learn new things. Our own individual lives have extended childhoods and adolescences compared with those of our primate cousins, during which time we learn more.

Neither am I impressed by Jesusʼ lessons alone. A lot of interpretation has gone into understanding them. See the forthcoming volume from Sheffield Phoenix Press, “The Bad Jesus: The Ethics of New Testament Ethics”

• Are Christianityʼs lessons of love also that much more superior and inspiring than those of other cultures?

• The Uniqueness of the Christian Experience (?)

Furthermore…

Jesus is depicted in the Gospels leading the life of a first century celebrity who, like celebrities today, people either loved or hated. Jesus was either being listened to by crowds of people, invited to dinner and taken care of by his groupies, or he was being denounced and threatened. He never had to endure as most people do, a lifetime of anonymity including such everyday trials as marriage and child-rearing. Talk about a cross to bear. I would have liked to have seen how Jesus could parable-ize his way out of doing the dishes, taking out the trash, getting into a brouhaha with his wife after staying out late nights with his boys, or waiting in line at the check-out counter with a box of much needed diapers or Tampax that he had to get home quickly but the person ahead of him with 100 items in their cart didnʼt invite Jesus to go on through ahead, and then when Jesus thought that person was about to pay and finally allow him to check-out, he sees them take out their check-book to pay and the cashier doesnʼt have authority to cash checks and has to call over the manager. At which point Jesus explodes. But not at the Pharisees, just at life in general. Then he has a heart attack following decades of such day to day stressful situations and dies. No. Jesus was a celebrity and died a celebrityʼs death. So what? Now we have to build churches to honor him, carve statues in his imagined likeness, keep the dust off those statues and light candles for him all year long? As for Jesusʼ death on a cross, people were scourged and/or died on crosses for any number of reasons, justly or unjustly, and Jesus might have been crucified sooner had he been born thirty or forty years earlier or later, when friction between Israel and Rome was greater.

To quote E. M. Cioran: The ultimate cruelty was that of Jesus “leaving an inheritance of bloodstains of the cross… Had he lived to be sixty, he would have given us his memoirs instead of the cross… For two thousand years, Jesus has revenged himself on us for not having died on a sofa.”

The famous “sofa” line from Cioran makes me wonder what the apostles would have done had Jesus tripped and accidentally hit his head on a large rock while preaching, or, took a nasty tumble on his final walk toward Jerusalem, and, instead of being executed on a cross wound up having to be cared for by those same apostles for years until he slowly wasted away? Having to care for a crippled or brain damaged friend for a decade or more seems like more of a challenge, and certainly the image of modern day Christians wearing little bed pans around their necks would be different, along with the message that “Our savior slowly wasted away, required 24 hour care, and was only able to repeat certain syllables up till the end without making much sense… for your sins.” If you were to present the apostles with such a situation and even gave them the choice of one or the other, I bet they would choose to have Jesus die in a few hours on a cross instead, no matter how bloody, so they could march around triumphantly spreading their beliefs soon afterwards.

Cioran added…

“A human being possessed by a belief and not eager to pass it on to others is a phenomenon alien to the earth… Look around you: everywhere, specters preaching, each institution translates a mission; city halls have their absolute, even as the temples—officialdom, with its rules… Everyone trying to remedy everyoneʼs life: even beggars, even the incurable aspire to it: the sidewalks and hospitals of the world overflow with reformers. The longing to become a source of events affects each man like a mental disorder or a desired malediction. Society—an inferno of saviors!… The compulsion to preach is so rooted in us that it emerges from depths unknown to the instinct for self-preservation. Each of us awaits his moment in order to propose something — anything. he has a voice: that is enough… all hand out formulas for happiness, all try to give directions… if you fail to meddle in other peopleʼs business you are so uneasy about your own that you convert your ‘self’ into a religion, or, apostle in reverse, you deny it altogether; we are victims of the universal game.” (Eric Hoffer agreed with Cioranʼs assessment that Christianity, Islam, fascism, communism, and other ideological mass movements attract people for similar psychological reasons.)

Or as Salman Rushdie put it…

“Love can lead to devotion, but the devotion of the lover is unlike that of the True Believer in that it is not militant. I may be surprised - even shocked - to find that you do not feel as I do about a given book or work of art or even person; I may very well attempt to change your mind; but I will finally accept that your tastes, your loves, are your business and not mine. The True Believer knows no such restraints. The True Believer knows that he is simply right, and you are wrong. He will seek to convert you, even by force, and if he cannot he will, at the very least, despise you for your unbelief.”

Logan Pearsall Smith said something similar about human beings being possessed by their beliefs, but in a funnier fashion:

“How is one to keep free from those mental microbes that worm-eat peopleʼs brains—those Theories and Diets and Enthusiasms and infectious Doctrines that we catch from what seem the most innocuous contacts? People go about laden with germs; they breath creeds and convictions on you as soon as they open their mouths. Books and newspapers are simply creeping with them—the monthly Reviews seem to have room for little else. Wherewithal then shall a young man cleanse his way; how shall he keep his mind immune to Theosophical speculations, and novel schemes of Salvation? Can he ever be sure that he wonʼt be suddenly struck down by the fever of Funeral or of Spelling Reform, or take to his bed with a new Sex Theory?”

Returning to Cioran, he went even further, noting…

“In the fervent mind you always find the camouflaged beast of prey; no protection is adequate against the claws of a prophet… Once he raises his voice, whether in the name of heaven, of the city, or some other excuse… he will not forgive your living on the wrong side of his truths and his transports; he wants you to share his hysteria, his fullness, he wants to impose it on you…. The ages of fervor abound in bloody exploits: a Saint Teresa could only be the contemporary of the auto-da-fé, a Luther of the repression of the Peasantsʼ Revolt. In every mystic outburst, the moans of victims parallel the moans of ecstasy… Scaffolds, dungeons, jails flourish only in the shadow of a faith—of that need to believe… The devil pales beside the man who owns a truth, his truth… The real criminals are men who establish an orthodoxy on the religious or political level, men who distinguish between the faithful and the schismatic.”

“I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a Saint Paul, for a jesting wisdom is gentler than an unbridled sanctity… Saint Paul—the most considerable vote-canvasser of all time—has made his tours, infesting the clarity of the ancient twilight with his epistles. An epileptic triumphs over five centuries of philosophy! Reason is confiscated by the fathers of the Church! And if I were to look for the most mortifying date for the mindʼs pride, if I were to scan the inventory of intolerances, I would find nothing comparable to the year 529, when, following Justinianʼs decree, the School of Athens was closed. The right to decadence being officially suppressed, to believe became an obligation… This is the most painful moment in the history of Doubt.”

Historical Data

• Augustine of Hippo set forth the principle of Cognite Intrare (“Compel them to enter,” based on Luke 14:23). Cognite Intrare would be used throughout the Middle Ages to justify the Churchʼs suppression of dissent and oppression of difference.

• Christian persecution of pagans—exceeded the pagan persecution of early Christians

• Christian persecution of fellow Christians—exceeded the pagan persecution of early Christians

• Reformation Christian persecution of fellow Christians—exceeded the pagan persecution of early Christians

• Christian persecution of American Indians—exceeded the pagan persecution of early Christians

• Decrees of Christian Emperors against non-Trinitarians [at bottom of this piece]

• Protestant and Catholic defenses of the necessity of persecuting heretics, blasphemers, infidels, etc.

Emil M. Cioran quotations (did he out-Nietzsche Nietzsche?)

Emil M. Cioran twists my gut with laughter. His own mother once said that if she'd known he would grow up to be so depressed sheʼd have aborted him. He suffered chronic insomnia and rode his bicycle relentlessly through the countryside at night to try and weary himself enough to sleep. He was born in Romania, in 1911, the son of a Greek Orthodox priest. As Hitler rose to power he became anti-communist, anti-Semitic, pro-fascist, and confident that Hitler and his ally, the Romanian fascist dictator, were in the right. Then in the mid-1930s in Romania, when he was still in his early 20s, his first book was published, On the Heights of Despair, followed by The Book of Delusions, and Tears and Saints. In the lattermost work He was looking for a reason to become a believer by exploring the lives of some minor saints but was disillusioned by their penchant for suffering. To share a line from that work, “Schopenhaurer maintains that, if we were to invite the dead back to life, they would refuse. I believe, on the contrary, that they would die a second time from too much joy.” Published in Bucharest in 1937, the book caused quite a stir due to its dark humor that many considered blasphemous. That same year he moved to Paris and wrote A Short History Of Decay, All Gall is Divided: Aphorisms, The Temptation To Exist, History and Utopia, The New Gods, The Trouble With Being Born, Drawn and Quartered, and, Anathemas and Admirations, in that order.

Cioran said his “rejection of God sprung from agonic frenzy.” He complained that he could not feel “at home in God,” that he was a perpetual “exile in Him.” No matter how hard Cioran strove to love and to believe Christianity, his fervor was always undermined by doubt and despair. “My doubts cannot take me further than the shadow of His heart.” Another time he wrote, “One does not need to be a Christian in order to fear the Last Judgment, or even to understand it. Christianity did nothing but exploit human anguish to make profits for an unscrupulous divinity whose best ally was dread… Christianity delights in the sight of bloodstains [or if one is Protestant, singing hymns about ‘the blood’], its martyrs have transformed the world into a bloodbath. In this religion of blazing twilights, evil defeats the sublime… The ultimate cruelty was that of Jesus: leaving an inheritance of bloodstains of the cross.” Jesus, “the bloodthirsty and cruel Christ,” [was] “lucky to have died young. Had he lived to be sixty, he would have given us his memoirs instead of the cross.”

Cioran disagreed with “those who try to eliminate the fear of death through artificial reasoning… because it is absolutely impossible to cancel an organic fear by way of abstract constructs.” (from Searching for Cioran)

His work has been compared to that of the most famous French stylists, and it began appearing in English translation in the 1990s. Late in life Cioran gave up writing, not wanting to “slander the universe” anymore, and died a few years later (in 1995) after an encounter with an over-excited dog. Still, his words continue to provoke and enlighten, though not everyone can take them in large doses. So here's a small dose:

It is difficult, it is impossible to believe that the Good Lord—‘Our Father’—had a hand in the scandal of creation. Everything suggests that He took no part in it, that it proceeds from a god without scruples, a feculent god. Goodness does not create, lacking imagination; it takes imagination to put together a world, however botched. At the very least, there must be a mixture of good and evil in order to produce an action or a work. Or a universe. Considering ours, it is altogether easier to trace matters back to a suspect god than to an honorable one. (The New Gods)

A human being possessed by a belief and not eager to pass it on to others is a phenomenon alien to the earth… Look around you: everywhere, specters preaching, each institution translates a mission; city halls have their absolute, even as the temples — officialdom, with its rules — a metaphysics designed for monkeys… Everyone trying to remedy everyoneʼs life: even beggars, even the incurable aspire to it: the sidewalks and hospitals of the world overflow with reformers. The longing to become a source of events affects each man like a mental disorder or a desired malediction. Society — an inferno of saviors! (from “Genealogy of Fanaticism” in A Short History of Decay)

The compulsion to preach is so rooted in us that it emerges from depths unknown to the instinct for self-preservation. Each of us awaits his moment in order to propose something — anything. he has a voice: that is enough.

From snobs to scavengers, all expend their criminal generosity, all hand out formulas for happiness, all try to give directions: life in common thereby becomes intolerable, and life with oneself still more so; if you fail to meddle in other people's business you are so uneasy about your own that you convert your “self” into a religion, or, apostle in reverse, you deny it altogether; we are victims of the universal game. (from “The Anti-Prophet” in A Short History of Decay)

Consider the polemics of each age: they seem neither motivated nor necessary. Yet they were the very life of that age. Calvinism, Quakerism, Port-Royal, The Encyclopedia, the Revolution, Positivism, etc… what a series of absurdities… which had to be, what a futile and yet fatal expense! From the ecumenical councils to the controversies of contemporary politics, orthodoxies and heresies have assailed the curiosity of mankind with their irresistible non-meaning. Under various disguises there will always be pro and con, whether apropos of Heaven or the Bordello. Thousands of men will suffer for subtleties relating to the Virgin and the Son; thousands of others will torment themselves for dogmas less gratuitous but quite as improbable. All truths constitute sects which end by enduring the destiny of a Port-Royal, by being persecuted and destroyed; then, their ruins, beloved now and embellished with the halo of the iniquity inflicted upon them, will be transformed into a pilgrimage-site.

It is no less unreasonable to grant more interest to the arguments around democracy and its forms than to those which took place, in the Middle Ages, around nominalism and realism: each period is intoxicated by an absolute, minor and tiresome, but in appearance unique; we cannot void being contemporaries of a faith, of a system, of an ideology, cannot avoid being, in short, of our time. (from “The Decor of Knowledge” in A Short History of Decay)

The great philosophical systems are actually no more than brilliant tautologies. What advantage is it to know that the nature of being consists in the “will to live,” in the “idea,” or in the whim of God or of Chemistry? A mere proliferation of words, subtle displacements of meanings. “What is” loathes the verbal embrace, and our inmost experience reveals us nothing beyond the privileged and inexpressible moment. (from “Farewell to Philosophy” in A Short History of Decay)

Ideologies were invented only to give a luster to the leftover barbarism which has survived down through the ages, to cover up the murderous tendencies common to all men. Today we hate and kill in the name of something; we no longer dare do so spontaneously; so that the very executioners must invoke motives, and, heroism being obsolete, the man who is tempted by it solves a problem more than he performs a sacrifice.

Abstraction has insinuated itself into life — and into death; the “complexes” seize great and small alike. From the Iliad to psychopathology — there you have all of human history. (from “Faces of Decadence” in A Short History of Decay)

One of the Ancients said the doctrine of Epicurus has the “sweetness of the sirens.” It would be a waste of effort to look for a modern system that would deserve such praise. (Drawn and Quartered)

“What is truth?” is a fundamental question. But what is it compared to “How to endure life?” And even this one pales beside the next: “How to endure oneself?” – That is the crucial question to which no one is in a position to give us an answer. (Drawn and Quartered)

He who hates himself is not humble.

I have decided not to oppose anyone ever again, since I have noticed that I always end by resembling my latest enemy.

Each opinion, each view is necessarily partial, truncated, inadequate. In philosophy and in anything, originality comes down to incomplete definitions.

I turned away from philosophy when it became impossible to discover in Kant any human weakness, any authentic accent of melancholy. (Book of Delusions)

Never judge a man without putting yourself in his place. This old proverb makes all judgment impossible, for we judge someone only because, in fact, we cannot put ourselves in his place.

Lao-tse, reduced to a few texts, is not more naive than we who have read everything. (Book of Delusions)

I know that my birth is fortuitous, a laughable accident, and yet, as soon as I forget myself, I behave as if it were a capital event, indispensable to the progress and equilibrium of the world.

Dialogue becomes pointless with someone who escapes the procession of the years. I ask those I love to be kind enough to grow old.

If death is as horrible as is claimed, how is it that after the passage of a certain period of time we consider happy any being, friend or enemy, who has ceased to live?

In order to conquer panic or some tenacious anxiety, there is nothing like imagining your own burial. An effective method, readily available to all. In order not to have to resort to it too often in the course of a day, best to experience its benefit straight off, when you get up. Or else use it only at exceptional moments, like Pope Innocent IX, who, having commissioned a painting in which he was shown on his deathbed, glanced at it each time he had to make some important decision. (The Trouble with Being Born)

The human adventure will certainly come to an end… we need only look at man in the face to detach ourselves from him… Thousands of years of sufferings, which would have softened the hearts of stones, merely petrified this steely mayfly, monstrous example of evanescence and hardening, driven by one insipid madness, a will to exist. (Book of Delusions)

Humanity will blush to beget when it sees things as they are… Mind… is only an excuse in the void, as life is only a prejudice.

It's not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.