NIETZSCHE’S DOUBLE TAKE: JESUS AND THE CHRIST

Perhaps the strongest attack Friedrich Nietzsche has made against religion, particularly the
Christian tradition, is his repudiation of it as a negation of the significant meaning of earthly life. He
believed that the Christian religion is supposed to bring meaning and fulfillment in life, but he found a
way of life which he sees is in a depressing and fearful state, ultimately denying this life which Christians
believed would and should be totally replaced by a life lived with suffering and emphasis on the
transcendent, on that which is beyond this life.
Christians in particular might think of Nietzsche as throwing away all the values that the
Christian tradition handed over. However, before making such claim, it would be important to
appreciate and know why Nietzsche sees the triumph of Christianity as a depressing moment for man,
and we would be able to understand it if we see it as a calling-into-question, a critique that nudges and
disturbs Christian thinking with the aim of not only calling its attention to what it has done to humanity,
but also teaching a very important lesson that it has missed for centuries already. Ultimately, Nietzsche’s
ideas are to be understood as that which takes into great consideration the acceptance of one’s own
existence as geared towards a salvation that entails not a denial, but an affirmation of life.
With these things in mind, we would then take a look at how Nietzsche views the Christian
religion, not just on what it is but what it ought to be, through two different images of its Savior. The
first would be his critique on the Christ of the creeds and the Church founded upon it, which he
repudiates because it leads the faithful towards a servile way of life, lived in weakness and in fear. The
second, however, would be the life of Jesus as a life that goes against the Jewish hierarchy and towards
the cultivation of the individual self, hence close to being the Ubermensch. Eventually, through this, we
would be able to understand the real point behind all of Nietzsche’s rejection and critique of Christian
life. Finally, there would be a quick glimpse of contemporary Christian commitment, which I see as the
response of the Second Vatican Council to the challenges posed by Nietzsche’s thought, and this
response is characterized by an affirmation of the earthly life which supposedly serves both as a glimpse
of eternity and as the only direction towards it.

Dysangel: Christianity as the Denial of the Self

Nietzsche sees the Christian faith and morality of his time, with emphasis on the Catholic
hierarchy and his very own Protestant Church, with much disdain. He even looks at believers as slaves
being led to a false perception of the world, hindering them from living a truly human life driven by
authenticity and the willingness to stand out among the flock. With his ideas geared towards virility of
life and the restoration of the glory of man on earth, he sees the Christian religion and the organized
Church as a prime factor in the decadence of cultural values that elevate man.
In “Human, All-Too-Human,” Nietzsche writes:
Christianity… oppressed man and crushed him utterly, sinking him as if in deep mire; then into
the absolute depravity it suddenly threw the light of divine mercy, so that the surprised man,
dazzled by forgiveness, gave a cry of joy and for a moment believed that he bore all heaven [the
1
next life] within himself.

1
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All-too-Human 114.
 Christianity then, for Nietzsche, was seen as an oppressive force that conceals the truth about
people and urges them to live false lives geared toward a false future. In Christianity, according to him,
there is the corruption of man, full of lies centered on empty symbols, erected on “the holy lie and
punishment and reward set by the priestly hierarchy,”2 a lie that puts man in shackles and deprives him
of the right to overcome oneself.
As a whole, Nietzsche sees Christianity as a “city of decay,” a religion that “saps vitality” which
put meaningless suffering above everything else,3 instead of helping people find meaning and purpose
in life. What Christianity has done was to say no to the life of man, and has corrupted him with faith on
another life. What does he mean when he says this? In order to understand this, we would have to go
through Nietzsche’s criticism of Christianity, from its roots up to its attitudes in his time.
However, if one looks at it, Nietzsche did not really hate the Christian way of life, referring to the
way Jesus lived his life. However, the Christianity that is known as an organized religion is that which he
criticized. And for him, it was the apostle Paul, with the way he has portrayed what it means to follow
Christ by having faith in him, who started propagating the false and corrupting belief that we come to
know today as the Christian belief. Paul was the dysangel, the bringer of “bad tidings,”4 the one that
hindered people to realize what they really are.
The apostle Paul was the inventor of Christianity, and consequently, the first Christian who
would soon later on bring forth a way of life that emphasizes faith in Christ in place of the ideal Christ-
like life and preached it across the Western World.5 What he preached was a faith that was completely
stripped off of practice and the struggle for self-authenticity, carrying out the whole tradition of
“contempt and bitterness against the Pharisees and theologians into the type of the master.”6
The Christian way of life introduced by Paul was based on his idea of the Cross, not as Jesus’
triumph on his struggle towards self-authenticity, but as a sign of “escape and perfect revenge,”7which
shows deep hatred and thirst of power to the ruling class of the Jewish community of his time,8 and the
Christians, believing in the cross, would contain all their hatred,9 hoping for retribution in the next life.
The cross for Paul signifies the death of the guiltless for the guilty, and Nietzsche sees this as an
act of dishonoring and disrespecting the humanity of the evangel, Jesus himself. The faith that Paul
“invented” dishonors the life of the evangel, for it is a way out of one’s inability to get rid of one’s sins
and be what one should be, as well as serve for as a screen for “fanatical hatred,”10 a kind which desires
revenge for one’s enemies not in this life, but in the next, seeing the Kingdom of God as a judgment
against all the enemies of Christians, especially the Jewish priestly class who trampled upon them as
their masters.
The faith that Paul preached betrayed the very essence of the Christianity that Christ taught. It
strays from the central insight on Jesus’ life, the fact that the Kingdom of God is not in the next life, but
2
Roger Hazelton, “Was Nietzsche an Anti-Christian?” The Journal of Religion, Vol. 22 No. 1 (Jan 1942), accessed from
www.jstor.org, p. 74.
3
Arthur C. Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York: Macmillan, 1980), p. 177.
4
Nietzsche, Antichrist 39.
5
Walter Kaufman, Nietzsche: philosopher, psychologist, antichrist (New York: Vintage, 1968), p. 345.
6
Antichrist 40.
7
Kaufman, p. 344.
8
Hazelton, p. 69.
9
Danto, p. 168.
10
Kaufman, p. 344.
in the current life that human beings live in. Paul, in a way, “placed” this Kingdom to a non-existent state
of life-after-death. It is in this state of life that the hatred of Christians towards those against them will
be judged, and the revenge that Christians were looking for will be served. The Christian “virtues” of
humility is a way of expressing hatred towards the other, as a way of tormenting them out of envy and
punishment (Nietzsche even uses the example of the painter who advances the envy of his rivals by his
great works, and the nun who uses her chastity to punish women who live a normal life) and suffering as
a “meaningless endeavor” which makes for itself an omniscient god who could be a witness to these
scraps of pain.11 Christian suffering, for Nietzsche, is based on the “yoke of imperatives” imposed by the
hierarchy to its followers, engendering slave morality which prevents self-realization and self-
overcoming. The Christianity of Paul antagonizes the glory of the man who truly lives, acting as the
poison of life that provides a false sense of ascendancy through suffering for the sake of the next,
therefore hindering man from his true ascent in this life.12
This Christianity centered on the way Paul presented Christ as a sacrifice for the many, is
founded upon faith that is both devoid of action and reason.13 This is precisely what Nietzsche found in
religion as its core, which is the reason why he hated the faith of the Christian. By conviction in the
saving act of Christ, the Christian for Nietzsche is led to believe that he does not need to trudge the path
toward self-perfection and search for what is true in his life.
Faith, first of all, is devoid of action, which “freezes” man and gives him a false sense that he
could attain salvation and fullness of life without doing anything about his life. It is in the belief that the
true life for man is beyond his earthly existence, and that he has already been destined to be there, as
long as he has faith in the Christ who died for the guilt of man. This has been the disease of Christianity
from the beginning, and it was even aggravated by the Reformation, when Martin Luther insisted that it
is on faith alone (sola fide) which could save. For Nietzsche, the Reformation could have been a sign of
change which could glorify man in his search for authenticity, but because of Luther’s insistence on too
much faith, he has only “paralyzed Christianity,”14 making its situation much worse than before.
Walter Kaufman makes three important points about the Christian faith which Nietzsche
criticized, clearly showing it as a dimension which lacks determination to do something for oneself.15

1. Faith served as the basis for the deprecation of life. It is that which man accepts and processes
“hypocritically” without doing anything about it. Christian faith, most especially that which was
shown and preached both by Paul the apostle and Martin Luther, does not put forward any sort
of action except in complete belief, that each and every act of man will be completely justified
by faith. The Christians of Nietzsche’s time believed that actions in this life won’t matter,
because in the end, it would be faith in Christ that would save us all, whether one has done well
or not. After all, for them, the next life is “the life,” the only thing that is valuable for man, and
thus putting one’s whole trust in this distant future. In faith, the Kingdom of God, which they
wrongly believed as being in the next life, is at the forefront, and everything else, especially the

11
Danto, p. 177.
12
Danto, p. 182.
13
See Kaufman, pp. 346, 350.
14
Kaufman, p. 348.
15
See Kaufman, pp. 346-237.
 imperfection of this world, do not really matter. For Nietzsche, this is a “spiritualized cruelty,” an
act of a slave, supposing that in the next life, they will master over the masters that they envy. It
is a “seductive lie” built on the false foundations of a rewarding and punishing God. 16
2. This would then lead us to the second factor of faith as inaction. The faith of the Christian is that
which completely negated the praxis of Jesus, and going against what he lived.17 As this present
life in flux doesn’t matter, Christians think that it would be useless to act, as man itself has
already been saved by Christ’s Death and Resurrection. Inability, from being a curse which goes
against humanity, now becomes an illusory blessing, transformed in the light of false Christian
faith.
3. Consequently, the belief in the Resurrection of mankind made possible by the Paschal Mystery
becomes a standard for revenge and reward. As explained above, the cross that Paul preached
ran contrary to Jesus’ acts and Nietzsche’s idea of self-overcoming. It becomes a symbol of the
Christian’s wrathful vengeance over his oppressors. Through his action (which is actually
inaction) that suppresses his desire for revenge and keeping it with himself, the Christian hopes
for the eventual torture and destruction of their persecutors in the next life. Christianity has
eventually made wrath not just as a part, but a foundation of its virtues. This has been clearly
exemplified by the death of the Christian martyr and the asceticism of the Christian saint.

Through this understanding of faith as a kind of inaction, it is clear that Nietzsche sees faith as a way
out of this life, to avoid its challenges and sufferings and instead lazily rest and trust in the life that is to
come. Christianity, as a whole, has created slaves carrying the burning desire to overturn those who
master over them, not through self-overcoming and meaningful suffering, but through suppressing this
suffering and covering it with false and pretentious virtues that carry with it the hope that the injustices
they experience would be avenged in the Kingdom of God, in the life after this world.
As much as faith is devoid of true and sincere action, it is also devoid of reason, of clinging to the
truth (this, however, would be later on be criticized by Nietzsche in reference to language; however,
when Nietzsche speaks of the search of truth in religion, he refers to the willful acceptance of man’s
contingent reality, opening himself up to what is revealed before him).
For Nietzsche, faith has already vetoed against science and all other forms of knowing the
18
truth. The strong conviction of the Christian and his belief in Christ, as told by Paul, the Gospels, and
the Church hierarchy, kills the inherent search of man for reason and eventually closes him off the
changing reality. The Christian conviction has replaced truth by being the truth itself, and it becomes a
screen that deludes the believer and leads him to believe what Christianity upholds, that is, the
presence of an afterlife which consequently devalues present life as a preparation for what is to come.
The reasoning of Christians, for Nietzsche, which is founded upon a fundamental conviction, is
his very weakness.19 It is his wishful effort to not see the truth about life, because for them, what is the
Truth is the God that they believe in, and this is what they push forward, and by one’s belief, the

16
Hazelton, p. 68.
17
Nietzsche, Antichrist 39.
18
Kaufman, p. 351.
19
Kaufman 355.
Christian “tears the eyes out of his reason.”20 As slaves of the God that they created, they lost the
fundamental conscience of man, which is his respect for what is true and what is erroneous. For the
Christian, what is true is the fact that there “must” be a God that would save them, a God whom
Nietzsche sees as an imaginary slave driver that forces humans to voluntarily negate life, and the only
proof that they have for this is their firm conviction, which for Nietzsche, does not really say anything
about the truth of what they uphold.
Seeing the whole picture, Nietzsche views the Christian faith as a utility, a tool used to justify the
sorry state of the believer which he cannot eliminate. Instead of striving for self-authenticity, faith
creates false images of a god and a self related to that god in order to avoid facing truth as truth and
error as error through a strong but weakly founded conviction. Consequently, faith destroys man by
creating a screen that would allow him to turn back from seeing the truth of his existence. It is the will to
“deceive and be deceived,” a refusal of man’s unconditional will to truth. It is to live in the illusion of
God’s so-called “revelation,”21 and focus one’s attention on an illusory life after death.
Taking off from his criticism of the faith, Nietzsche dealt a huge blow to the prominent Christian
virtue of neighbor-love and pity, which is founded upon this faith in Christ. To him, this was nothing
more than a man’s willing the other to nothingness, to leave the situation unchanged and to selfishly
disregard the situation of the other. To be pitiful and to show Christian-love is a very selfish act centered
on salvation of the self in the next life, and treats the other as a means to this end, rather than
respecting the true nature of this other.22
The Christian pity is characterized as a person’s “attempt to ameliorate the suffering of the
other,” brought about by the emotional drive to feel sorry.23 Christians would see it as an act that is
totally for the other, but Nietzsche unveils it as an attitude that does not do justice, as it consents to the
sorry state of the other, thereby hindering him from undergoing suffering and achieving self-
authenticity. It is eventually letting the other suffer inability, instead of leading him to suffer towards
ability and perfection. And for Nietzsche, to drive oneself to act out of pity is a sick attitude that impedes
true liberation from passions and enslaving forces around him. In the end, the other, through his
neighbor’s pity, loses the opportunity to become perfect, and the one who pities triumphs in
overcoming the other,24 thinking that he himself has done so much good because he feels happy about
exercising pity. In the end, pity is the very praxis of nihilism,25 that which does not benefit both the one
who pities and the one who is pitied.
Neighbor-love, on the other hand, follows from this pitiful attitude toward the other. The
neighbor-love which Nietzsche repudiates is not that which sincere Christians (meaning those who
imitate Jesus’ way of life), mean by that term.26 What he repudiates as “bad love” is that which is driven
by one’s hope for salvation in the next life, that neighbor-love will reward them in the next life, thus
stripping love of its essence – as a supreme concern for the other, a love that is not for self-gratification
and self-salvation.

20
Kaufman, p. 350.
21
Hazelton, p. 68.
22
Hazelton, p. 81.
23
Danto, p. 185.
24
Kaufman, p. 367.
25
Hazelton, p. 80.
26
Kaufman, p. 363.
 Nietzsche sees the neighbor-love of Christians as the individual’s attempt to keep up and
console his neighbor in his suffering state, to give oneself to, and more importantly, to adjust to the
state of the other with two hidden motives: first, to hinder the other to self-mastery through acts which
show that he feels sorry for the other, and second, to gain the reward of the promise of the next life,
indicated and even strengthened by good feelings after doing such act. Such kind of love, though
seemingly noble and exemplary, remains on the level of self-gratification, a complete egoistic act that
does not show real concern for others.27
When man loves by consoling the suffering of the other, he blocks the way of perfection for the
other. It is a love that contains hatred at its very core, with man choosing that the other remain in his
suffering state, since it is only in this way that he will feel good about himself, for he would soon receive
the reward of heaven with such love. This love is essentially the refusal to act for the sake of the other,
and with action, Nietzsche means that man should learn to push the other into self-perfection. Christian
love has lost the spirit of true philanthropy: education, which pushes man to be strong and undergo
suffering in order for the self to realize his powers, therefore leading him to the path of self-perfection.
Instead, Christianity replaced this with a false sense of altruism grounded on hatred and self-
gratification.
All Christianity is hypocrisy for Nietzsche. What the priests and theologians of his time taught
were lies, which in reality are not beneficient for man but in fact harmful.28 They taught of false realities
that led to slavery and a hindrance of the human spirit towards his fundamental direction. By teaching
the equality of man and the responsibility of man towards the other, both grounded in the transcendent
Kingdom of God and the poison of life called faith, they made slaves out of free humans. The morality
that they preached and engendered was a “morality of the weak,”29 as a way of escaping and not
eliminating man’s lack of power to overcome oneself. It is a false Christianity, an utter lack of respect
and radical dishonesty to the Christ that they believed in. Such Christianity, as Nietzsche believes, should
be repudiated, rejected, and ultimately destroyed, and in doing this, man would liberate himself.

The True Jesus as The Christian

Harsh as Nietzsche’s words against Christianity may be, it is important to “balance” this hatred
against the organized religion with his respect and honor towards that which they are supposed to
imitate and not place a useless faith upon – Jesus.
In the Antichrist, Nietzsche would say that:
30
“In truth, there was only one [true] Christian, and he died on the Cross.”
He would assert that Jesus is the true Christian in terms of the way that he lived his life. He is the
true Antichrist, the “saintly anarchist” who rebelled against the oppressive Jewish church of his time,
saying that:
“I fail to see against what the rebellion… if it was not a rebellion against the Jewish church…
against ‘the good and the just,’ against ‘the saints of Israel,’ against the hierarchy of society – not

27
Kaufman, p. 367.
28
Hazelton, p. 72.
29
Danto, p. 166.
30
Kaufman, p. 338.
 against its corruption, but against case, privilege, order, and formula; it was the disbelief in
31
‘higher men,’ the No to all that was priest or theologian.”
Jesus, for him, is the “free spirit” living amidst the degenerate Jewish society, going against the
system that it constructed as an individual working his way towards self-perfection and helping those
who could not.32 His death on the cross is a witness to his noble act, dying for his guilt, and not, as
Christians think, for the guilt of others.33 Jesus’ whole life and works revolved around affirmation of the
innermost things of life, those which are essential in transforming the self and being what one should
be, radiating the very “purity of life” and freedom from world denial.
Perhaps the theme that would capture the very personality of Jesus as the true Christian is: “The
Kingdom of God is in you!”34 He was the one who fought off the disvaluation of life brought by the
religious and political structures around him, preaching against the hierarchy through his desire to stand
out and refuse to conform to the state. He brought forth the way to true enlightenment, the realization
of his humanity through his mastery over the Jewish hierarchy. However, he did this not by violence, by
willing them to nothingness as a way of compensating for his lack of ability. Quite the contrary, what he
incited is what could be called as a revolution towards perfection, as he helped raise up those who were
considered as the lowly ones of the society, and for this, he died, brought to suffering by the system
which he tried to disassociate from. In his death, he chose his own life, saw it as beautiful, and died with
much readiness and happiness.
Being the true example of self-authenticity, Jesus showed the way to live as a true human being.
Instead of a nihilistic faith that reduces man to a mere slave, he taught a way to true freedom, to self-
perfection and self-overcoming. Sadly, Paul transformed him to a soft bed for the sinner, a God who
lords above all, to whom all men should bow not out of respect, but out of meaningless worship and
submission, thereby contradicting his way of life in the first place.
The Christ of the creeds is professed as a God who is above all, who stands as the master with
everyone as he slaves. But for Nietzsche, the Jesus who saved humanity is not that, for he believes that
self-perfection would start when one completely accepts that “God is dead.” When the Christian faith
ends, when the Christian would cease to believe that Christ died for their sins, but for His guilt, there
goes the start of a genuine Christianity.35
To say that the god of the Christians is dead is not an aimless assault at theism. Instead, it is
Nietzsche’s way of emphasizing that once a faith, without both action and reason, will disappear (since
there will be no one to believe in and place one’s life upon). The faith which enslaves man and keeps
him in his sorry state will not be a concern for him anymore.36 After the death of God, man will have to
pick the pieces up and work for his worldly salvation. It follows that “everything is now permitted,”37
that one can now be able to do what he ought to do as a human being, without the constraints of
inaction and bad reasoning brought by the delusion of faith. In short, free to act and think.

31
Nietzsche, Antichrist 39.
32
Hazelton, p. 66.
33
Kaufman, p. 339.
34
Kaufman, p. 345.
35
Kaufman, p. 344.
36
William Hubben, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Kafka: four prophets of our destiny (New York: Collier Books, 1968),
p. 109.
37
Danto, p. 193.
 With faith thrown out of one’s life, praxis and the acceptance and adjustment to the continuous
flux of life takes the center stage. He once again hears the call to creativity and fresh ideals, therefore
leading to a “transvaluation” of values, creating them and imposing them upon us as a way to self-
perfection. In a way, to lose this faith is also to lose the sense of self-centeredness and cowardice,
learning to face everything man encounters in his life, to get out of one’s self by overcoming and
controlling his passions and work for active self-perfection. He will be able to take hold of himself, work
for self-perfection, conquer the hatred of the world as well as his own hatred and desire for revenge,
and learn to fight against it instead of containing it and justifying it by faith. This, in a way, will be the
new morality for man, with self-perfection as man’s true goal.38
Without faith, man will now learn to fight for the truth of his life, facing the fact that the only life
he has is this life, and that it is characterized by change. He will learn to embrace flux, adjust to it, and, in
achieving self-perfection by being one with this constant state of change, eventually learning how to die
within it, and being glad to do so, without any fear of disappearing into this world. Man will now learn to
appreciate and value reason and its search and attempt to embrace the truth, finding it to be in the
constant state of change in life. It is ceasing to gear oneself towards an impossible preservation of self
through a Resurrection in the next life. Instead, he learns to love life as the true life, the true
Resurrected man, born again in perfection, with the willingness to die. For the faithless man, he learns
to live in so much as he learns to die.
To the man who has no god, the new values imposed upon himself is grounded in a unique way
of relating with the other – friendship, and this is what Jesus has been preaching and practicing his
whole life. The kind of pity and compassion that Jesus has is that which is characterized by SUFFERING
WITH the other instead of merely consoling him out of one’s feelings. Nietzsche saw him as a human
being who loved an enemy by becoming an enemy to the other, by pushing the other towards self-
perfection. Jesus is the example of the true kind of love towards the Other, and for Nietzsche that is the
ideal of the Greek friendship, driven by the motor of eros, and what he instructs his disciples is to form a
community consisting of true friends, walking side by side, striving together to perfect themselves and
each other. 39 True Christian love is driven by a desire for the other, to ultimately go out of one’s path
and reaching out to the other. It is in friendship when love is, as I see it, pure, without any expectation
for any reward or gain in the next life (or even in the present life), but it is a “radical” exit of the self and
towards the other.
As man, it is his duty to be a friend to another fellow human being, and inevitably, the right way
of responding to this duty is through hardness, to resist from treating the self and the other in a very
tender manner. It is to let the other realize his own state of suffering, and in realizing such, to help him
in his pursuit to self-perfection. Contrary to pity that desires to deceive man in saying that suffering is
not necessary for the realization of the self, friendship demands that one has to be made aware of one’s
own suffering in order to go through it and overcome it. To elaborate this, Nietzsche borrowed one idea
of friendship from Goethe, in his play Tasso:
True friendship manifests itself in denying
At the right time, and love will often grant
A harmful good when it heeds more the will

38
Kaufman, p. 365.
39
Kaufman, p. 367.
 40
Of the demanding one than his well-being.
In doing such and hardly extorting the other to work for his own salvation, man learns to cultivate not
only the animal nature of man (which is what the Christians solely take care of), but also the creator in
the other,41 which enables the other to stand up on his own, not just as a creature who follows his
brutish inclinations. Nietzsche emphasizes this point in Beyond Good and Evil:
In man creator and creature are united… Your [the Christians’] pity is for the ‘creature in man,’ or
that which must be formed, broken, forged, torn, burned, and purged – for that which
42
necessarily must and shall suffer.”
True love, therefore, is not doing so much for the other, but allowing the other to do so much for
himself, and Jesus’ works, on the way that he has liberated the poor and the lowly of the society by his
healing and call for change, serve as a testimony to the true kind of love that man should bear within
himself. To be love, then, is to be a true friend to the other, by suffering with him and leading him to
self-perfection by emphasizing that he has to go through suffering and work his way out by himself.
Perhaps the last important point that needs to be emphasized in Nietzsche’s praise of Jesus is
his emphasis on Jesus’ will-to-power in his exemplification of Greek friendship, characterized by his
driving passion to bring out the creator in his fellow, teaching the other to direct and bring out man’s
drives without suppressing it, leading to the overcoming of oneself by imposing a duty to oneself to truly
reach out. Like Jesus, Nietzsche exhorts man to stand out among the crowd, and conquer and go beyond
the poison of the imposed good and evil of the hierarchy of religion.43 In saying that the Kingdom of God
is truly in man, Jesus points the direction, which is to go “beyond where we are right now, but not in
another life.”44 It is to go beyond our own states as herds, be awake of what we are, go through our own
suffering, and finally attain self-perfection. It is the direction towards not just finding the meaning of
one’s life, but, more than that, it is BEING the meaning of one’s own world,45 through his works and
actions, by the way he directs his passions and drives, and most importantly, in pushing the other to
self-perfection as much as he pushes himself towards it. To be this meaning in the world is, for
Nietzsche, to be the true Ubermensch who truly finds himself.
The one who wills himself to power and self-overcoming is to love the life that he has, with
nothing other beyond it. Man has to recognize and realize that he only has one chance of living, the very
life that he lives right now. Life is not about a fruitless search for stability and constancy. Rather, it is
coping up with the variable, to find oneself in flux, and be one with the changing flow of the world.
When Nietzsche means that life is to be loved, it is to love both life and death at the same time, that if
man’s vision “ceases to grow,”46 he embraces death, but as a happy, fulfilled, and enlightened man. This,
for Nietzsche, is Jesus, the one who died on the Cross for his will to power, a guilt that, evil as it might
seem for the Jewish, is a good and happy moment for Him, for he has become a King and a Savior of
Himself, and he has joyfully taught all of these to his true friends and disciples.

40
Kaufman, p. 368.
41
Kaufman, p. 369.
42
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil 225.
43
Danto, p. 196.
44
Danto, p. 180.
45
Danto, p. 196.
46
Hubben, p. 120.
Responding to Nietzsche: The Contemporary Understanding of Faith
In the end, we cannot deny that Friedrich Nietzsche is heavily against Christianity in so many
aspects, most especially in terms of his understanding of what it means to believe. For him, belief entails
denial of Christ’s practice, to believe in a non-existent transcendent life and cease to act and think in the
world. For him, the faith of the Christian in Christ is to deny this world as well as the search for the
fullness of man’s existence, of attempting to become an Ubermensch.
On the other hand, we see his praise of Jesus as the ideal man. Jesus is the one who liberated
himself from the oppressive Jewish monarchy that restrains man and makes slaves of each and every
one. It is he who exemplifies man’s search to become the meaning of the earth, to stand up and walk
the path to self-perfection, together with the desire to help the other as well by becoming friends in the
Greek sense, through education that allows one to realize what it means to suffer and perfect oneself.
For Nietzsche, he is the one whom all men should imitate by living a life centered on practice, putting
the balance on his search for reason and channeling his drives of passion.
Looking at Nietzsche’s thoughts as a whole, it seems that we cannot deny that Nietzsche’s denial
of faith is directly against Christianity. However, it would be important to point out that as a critic of his
time, he pointed out the failure of Christianity, the desire to embrace life and value humanity.
Christianity in Nietzsche’s time has looked upon the value of the transcendent life so much that it denied
and negated the sense of living as a human person of this world.
However, coming from Nietzsche’s qualms and praises about the Christ of the creeds and the
Jesus of the earth, we could say that after a whole century, the Christian perspective of faith has
changed. The Second Vatican Council, which brought forth a huge change not just in the Roman Catholic
Church but also in other Christian groups, introduced a new understanding of the relationship between
faith, action, and reason, as well as a new theology on Christ’s life and works. More than that,
contemporary theologians, the recent Popes and bishops of the Church included, have embraced these
changes and even elaborated these ideas, in the light of the challenge of the contemporary times. The
continuous effort of Christianity to point out regard for humanity in imitation of Christ, in a way,
responded to the challenges and criticisms that Nietzsche posed in his thought.
Of course, the Church has not denied the faith aspect of Christian life. Christianity has always
emphasized that there is a life beyond what we live today, that there is something promised, and the
fact that Christ died for the sin of the world, for the salvation of everyone. However, the reformed
Church emphasized the need of the human person to believe in this salvific act, manifested by one’s
actions and convictions in life. It asked for its believers a faith that is more integral, as that which
recognizes the need for a respond to Christ’s life and works in all aspects of one’s humanity.
Perhaps the first and most important point in contemporary Church teaching is the new
understanding on the Kingdom of God, partially agreeing with Nietzsche that it is in the present life.
Post-Vatican II theology has given more stress on the earthly life and practice of Christ, as a very
important aspect of Jesus’ life that should not be separated from his Passion, Death, and Resurrection.
The current Church has put forward the idea of “integral evangelization,”47 saying that the proclamation
of the Kingdom of God lies merely on words and dogmas. Instead, these very articles of faith should
penetrate the lives of each and every believer. It means that the good news of salvation calls forth

47
Gaudium et Spes [GS] 2.
liberation from all aspects of lives, against any form of slavery and oppression, even within man’s very
self.
The Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes, the Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the
Modern World, attests to this change, saying that the Church’s work for human life and liberty in the
world is the very continuation of the work of Christ to bring forth the Kingdom of God and look forward
to its fullness in the end times. In saying this, the Church recognizes its mission to better the world and,
through its works, affirm the life and dignity of the human person. The document explicitly says:
While earthly progress must be carefully distinguished from the growth of Christ’s kingdom, to
the extent that the former can contribute to the better ordering of the human society, it is of
48
vital concern to the Kingdom of God.
With this, it could be said that the Church affirmed the beauty and the glory of life which, as
Nietzsche claimed, has been negated in the first place. Christianity has regarded earthly life as significant
and connected to the life beyond, the Kingdom of God in its fullness. The Church has “married” and
tightly bound its true mission on earth, its task of liberating each and every person and respecting the
dignity and inherent value of each one, with the eschatological aspect of Christian faith. At last, earthly
life is never seen as a useless prelude to the true life beyond. In the present, it is understood as the way
itself, both the actualization of and aspiration to the next life that every Christian hopes for, that
everything in this earth provides a glimpse of what is to come.
And related to that is the new understanding of what it means to have faith. The Catechism of
the Catholic Church, which is basically a compendium of all Church teachings interpreted in the light of
the changes made by the recent developments in contemporary Christianity, points out that faith is:
“… a personal adherence of the WHOLE MAN [meaning, in his totality] to God who reveals
Himself. It involves an assertion of the intellect and will to the self-revelation God has made
49
through his deeds and words.”
For the contemporary Christians, to believe, then, is not just a mere assertion that there is a
God. Instead, this must be lived out through one’s words and actions, through a willful search for truth
in the world and a commitment to do the good, to be faithful to oneself and the other by respecting
each other’s value and dignity, manifested to acts of hope and charity. Fides, then, as one of the
theological virtues of man, is equated and inseparable with spes (hope) and caritas (love, charity). Thus,
one cannot say that he believes without doing anything about it. The faith that Nietzsche talks about is a
kind of faith that, for the Catholic Church, is dead, for faith alone, deprived of hope and love, does not
unite the believer to Christ.50 Believing entails acting, responding to the exigency of man’s will towards
the moral good, to act with respect to his and to others’ value as free, rational beings, trudging the road
to self-perfection. Also, through faith in Christ, love and action becomes more enlivening and liberating,
allowing one to totally offer oneself both to Christ and to the other.
On the other hand, faith is also a continuous search for truth. The Church went back to St.
Anselm’s drive to understand what one believes (“fides quarens intellectum”). For the Christian, to
believe entails and endless and passionate search for truth, responding to man’s rational exigency

48
GS 39.
49
Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) 176.
50
CCC 1815.
towards the very truth and meaning of one’s own being. The search for Truth is essentially liberating,51
that which allows man to really see who he is and how he is related to the God that He believes in. In his
search for truth, not just within the bounds of dogmas of theology and metaphysical assumptions, but is
constantly in dialogue with other methods of searching the truth such as the sciences, man answers the
questions “who am I?” in relation to the reality that he faces, and “who is God?” within the extent of his
own understanding. And therefore, the truths that he discovers lead him to a greater knowing of the
self, towards a greater faith in God and a greater love for the other. Indeed, it is a faith that is
manifested, a faith that is truly alive and becomes life itself.
In honoring the true value of man as a will oriented towards God and the fullness of His
Kingdom, the Church’s mission now becomes centered in man as God’s beloved, being both the creature
and the creator within him, and the Church has a deep esteem for man, for his intellect, for his
conscience, and for his freedom. The Church has now recovered St. Ireneaus’ idea of “homo vivens est
Gloria Dei,” the glory of God is the man fully alive.
For guidance, who does the Christian turn to? In this aspect, the Church agrees with Nietzsche’s
praise of Jesus. Not only that He is the Savior of all, but he is the exemplar for every man, for Christianity
believes that He came down not just to save man from sin, but also teach man how to become fully
human. One’s faith in Christ is centered not on a reliance that brings comfort because one need not seek
for the truth and find his way to self-perfection. On the contrary, it is in praxis that he actualizes his
faith. Christ’s incarnation, his life and works from His birth, to His death on the Cross and His
Resurrection, all point to becoming genuinely human. Pope John Paul II, in his papal encyclical
Redemptor Hominis, said this quite clearly:
“The truth is that only in the mystery of the Incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on
light… Christ… fully reveals man to himself and brings to light his most high calling.”
And further on:
“… He who is the image of the invisible God is himself the perfect man who has restored man… in
the likeness of God which had been disfigured ever since the first sin. Human nature, by the very
fact that it was assumed, not absorbed, by him, has been raised in us also a dignity that we
52
cannot compare.”
Faith, then, is unity in Christ’s life and mission. It is to acknowledge the saving work of Christ by
being one in Him in his love and aspiration for man. Christ is the Love that humans long for, and in
accepting His love, it is required of Him to respond to this love, by practicing that which He exemplifies.
If we would adopt Nietzsche’s understanding of Christ’s pity and love as a form of Greek friendship, then
one is called to desire the other’s perfection, to give oneself completely to the other with much hope
that the other might also be able to imitate Christ and live as a complete human being. To love, then, is
to be a friend to one another, to join in the suffering of the other (cum patire, to suffer with, which is
the etymology of the word “compassion”), to constantly remind him that he should be what he is in
various ways, hardness and tolerance included, ultimately towards being human and achieving self-
perfection and self-overcoming. However, the difference of genuine Christian love with Nietzsche is that
it points to salvation not only in this life, but also in the next. Being human is being in God, and to

51
Pope Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate 1.
52
Pope John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis 8.
imitate Christ is therefore to believe in his salvific act, participate in His mission, and to share in His life,
both in His guilt and His glory.
And, as a concluding note, perhaps by thoroughly looking and organizing Nietzsche’s ideas which
concern his hate towards Christianity and his praise of the life and works of Jesus, we could say that he
really isn’t completely against religion at all. Instead, it is a call for us to an awakening out of acceptance.
Interpreting his thoughts in the light of the contemporary understanding of Christian faith, it seems that
he is calling us to truly believe, to translate what we accept as truths into action and reason, and most
importantly, to “translate” our very being from the language of faith to the language of knowledge and
love, to walk the path of Christ, towards totally reaching to the other and offering oneself to him. By his
repudiation, interpreted in the light of our contexts as Christians, Nietzsche calls us contemporary
believers to fully accept our faith and let it penetrate our whole being, never resting in a useless
conviction that does not push anything to action and reason, but rather “enflesh” it, to manifest our
belief through our endless search for truth and continuous and other-centered love for the other. It is in
this way, that, as believers, we attain self-perfection both in this life and in what is beyond it.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Catechism of the Catholic Church, from http://www.vatican.va. Accessed 14 February 2010.

Danto, Arthur C. Nietzsche as philosopher. New York: Macmillan, 1980.

Gaudium et Spes: The Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the Modern World, from http://vatican.va.

Accessed 14 February 2010.

Hazelton, Roger. “Was Nietzsche an Anti-Christian?” The Journal of Religion, Vol. 2 No. 1 (January

1942), from http://jstor.org, p. 63-88. Accessed 28 January 2010

Hubben, William. Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Kafka: four prophets of our destiny. New

York: Collier Books, 1968.

Kaufman, Walter. Nietzsche: philosopher, psychologist, antichrist. New York: Vintage, 1968.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Antichrist, PDF from http://manybooks.net. Accessed 19 January 2010.

---. Beyond Good and Evil, PDF from http://manybooks.net. Accessed 19 January 2010.

---. Human All-Too-Human, PDF from http://manybooks.net. Accessed 19 January 2010.

Pope Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, from http://www.vatican.va. Accessed 14 February 2010.

Pope John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis, from http://www.vatican.va. Accessed 14 February 2010.