Beyond Good and Evil

by

Friedrich Nietzsche

Beyond Good and Evil: 3. What Is Religious Summary & Analysis

Summary
Analysis
Comparing the depths of the soul to a great, primeval forest and the philosopher to a lone hunter, Nietzsche reflects on the difficulties and dangers of trying to understand the workings of the human conscience—and therefore of religion. Alone, the metaphorical hunter wishes for help, but this is a misguided desire, as this knowledge must be found by and for oneself. Approaching the problem of religion, Nietzsche stresses the difference between the original spirit of Christianity and that of Protestantism. Original Christianity, to Nietzsche, was a religion of sacrifice. In Christianity, the slaves of “the Orient” avenged themselves on Rome; Nietzsche sees the slave mentality as demanding the unconditional, unlike the noble taste, which values nuance and skepticism.
In Nietzsche’s use of the forest as a metaphor for self-knowledge—moral and otherwise—the hunter’s desire for help symbolizes religion. Echoing other social critics of religion such as Marx, Nietzsche argues that religion’s role is not to attain true knowledge, but to relieve individuals of the burden of the search for knowledge. Where Nietzsche breaks with other critics of religion is in his belief that this is a necessary social function. The issue with Christianity, rather, is its glorification of the slave mentality out of which it originated, which inhibits the development of the noble taste that a true, solitary hunter needs to explore the forest of the soul.
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Nietzsche argues that religion, or what he calls “the religious neurosis,” always appears alongside “solitude, fasting, and sexual abstinence.” He warns the reader, however, not to assume that there is any simple relation of cause and effect here. This case—that of the saint—is rather so overinterpreted that the philosopher struggles to see it clearly. To Nietzsche, what is most compelling in the figure of the saint is the opposite values that coexist in him, which seem to contradict the system of morality that the examples of saints are used to uphold.
Nietzsche offers a counterintuitive reading of the concept of the saint, and this reading reveals the complexity of Nietzsche’s relationship with religion. Rather than dismissing the saint as a dummy figure of religious moral virtue, Nietzsche argues that the power of the saint is derived from the coexistence of “good” and “evil,” as sainthood transforms worldly evil into religious good. Critics of Nietzsche could argue, however, that there are just as many examples of Christian saints remembered for their virtue alone.
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Catholicism, to Nietzsche, is specifically connected to the culture of the Mediterranean and is therefore a very different kind of Christianity than Northern European Protestantism. Northerners, as descendants of “barbarian races,” practice religion poorly, with the exception of the French. Nietzsche then turns to religion in ancient Greece, noting how in its earlier manifestations it centered gratitude, but as the “rabble” become politically dominant, gratitude was replaced by fear. Nietzsche then describes several kinds of passion for God, all of which he finds express their social contexts more than any transcendent religious feeling.
Nietzsche continues to develop the theme of national or racial characters, in whose existence he firmly believes. To Nietzsche, the differences between Catholicism and Protestantism are as much cultural as theological, and indeed perhaps primarily cultural. He then introduces the idea that fear as a dominant response to morality is an invention of the crowd, not the elite. He will develop this idea in greater detail later on.
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Nietzsche finds in the allure of the saint just another expression of the will to power, as the saint takes self-conquest to an extreme. He then turns to the Jewish Old Testament, a group of writings he greatly prefers to the New Testament. Where the style of the former is grand, the latter is “small,” and the combining of the two into the Christian Bible is an offensive crime. Nietzsche suggests his own paradoxical theory for the growth of atheism in Europe: that the religious “instinct” is stronger than ever, but the Christian God can no longer satisfy it.
Nietzsche’s unorthodox criticisms of Christianity often appear to contradict each other, as he praises the style of the Jewish Old Testament despite also identifying it as the origin of the religious slave morality, a point he will address more directly later on. His theory regarding atheism, however, returns to the theme of the free spirit. To Nietzsche, modern atheists are more prisoner than ever to religious logic, but they have merely substituted “science,” “the people,” or “the nation” for God. Atheism is clearly not the answer to religious dogmatism, but merely another form of it; yet he leaves the true answer unclear. 
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Nietzsche argues that modern philosophy is at its roots an “epistemological skepticism,” and therefore is directly opposed to the old Christian concept of the soul. Nietzsche stresses, however, that this is not necessarily anti-religious, only anti-Christian. Prior to the development of morality, religion demanded blood sacrifice. At the height of the moral era—a period Nietzsche does not explicitly define but that likely refers to the Middle Ages, before the Enlightenment—religion demanded the sacrifice of the believer’s desires. Nietzsche believes that once all these desires had been sacrificed, there was nothing left to sacrifice but God, who has been traded for “the nothing”: materialism and nihilism.
While Nietzsche often portrays Platonist morality as the link between ancient and modern philosophy, he makes an important distinction here, arguing that though the Christian morality lives on in modern philosophy, the Christian faith itself its under attack. While dismissive of religion, Nietzsche clearly does not support or welcome the disappearance of God and the ascendancy of nihilism, instead perhaps evoking nostalgia for the prehistoric religious doctrine of sacrifice.
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Quotes
Criticizing Schopenhauer’s version of pessimism as limited by its morality, Nietzsche still sees a grain of truth in its “world-denying” thinking. He then wonders whether religion and religious morality will one day seem like childish toys to a more developed humanity—although he cautions that even that humanity will still be childish enough to have found new toys.
To Nietzsche, Schopenhauer’s great insight was the claim that the world does not objectively exist beyond humankind’s subjective perception of it. Nietzsche takes issue, however, with Schopenhauer’s negative characterization of life, which he sees as a moral bias. In his musings on the humanity of the future, Nietzsche cautions against both the allure of progress and the excessive confidence humans have in having overcome their past.
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True religious life, as Nietzsche sees it, has historically always required a leisure class. Moreover, this leisure class needs a “good conscience” which it can only receive by divine right in the form of an aristocracy. The hard-working bourgeoisie of modernity, by contrast, are in no position to live religiously, leading to the crisis of belief in Europe. This leads to the perfunctory form religion has taken on for many, especially in Germany, where it is treated as yet another national custom. Unreligious, “modern” people in such societies also avoid the issue, practicing a false tolerance of religion that is really just a disguised sense of superiority, one which Nietzsche thinks is very much unearned.
Nietzsche continues to allude to his ideal society, one in which there is a distinct social hierarchy. His issue with the bourgeoisie, unlike many of his contemporary critical philosophers, is not their rule as such, but their unwillingness and inability to rule correctly. While Nietzsche does not advocate for the return to a more Christian order, he finds the empty, ritualistic nature of modern Christianity as it exists in bourgeois society to be an embarrassing farce.
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Nietzsche finds the religious desire for purity to express a fear of the more complex truth that lies beneath. This is the source of religion’s fearfulness, as it is threatened by a deep pessimism. Piety, therefore, is a “subtle,” highly developed fear of truth. Nietzsche sees the love of humankind for God’s sake as an equally intricate yet wrongheaded way of thinking. To the true philosopher, rather, religion is instrumental. Nietzsche points to the example of the Brahmins to show how religion orders society by rank, enabling the “noble” to philosophize. At the same time, religion gives meaning to the majority of citizens who work, explaining and justifying their suffering. This ability to help the suffering and oppressed make peace with their position is in fact Christianity’s most redeemable aspect in Nietzsche’s eyes, a characteristic it shares with Buddhism.
Here Nietzsche returns to the idea that morals are born out of fear, not love. His suggestion that piety reflects one’s fear of truth would indicate the degree to which religious moral prejudice has prevented philosophers from discovering the truth while still maintaining their faith—an impossible and indeed foolhardy aim, according to Nietzsche. Echoing Marx’s claim that religion is the “opium of the people,” Nietzsche finds value in the meaning it gives individuals but is careful to distinguish this value from “truth.”
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While Nietzsche concedes that religion has an important function in society, he warns that disaster awaits when religion demands to be the end and not the means. Christianity and Buddhism, as “religions for sufferers,” prevent humankind from advancing further by siding with those who suffer most. To preserve and protect those who suffer, these religions privileged suffering and denied joy, beauty, and other values, warping the development of their societies. Nietzsche finds the results of this disastrous, having paved the way for the modern European, “a herd animal,” or the herd man.
Religion, to Nietzsche, is for the crowd, playing a crucial function in a proper, hierarchical society; it is when religion becomes egalitarian, however, that things go awry. Christian morality has created a type of person who does not know their place in the hierarchical society Nietzsche desires. It has also denied the necessity of such a society.
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