Nietzsche: His Life and WorksLudovici, Anthony M. (Anthony Mario)
Philosophy
Nietzsche: His Life and Works
Ludovici, Anthony M. (Anthony Mario)
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900
Not one of these would-be rationalists, however, halted at the
Christian terms "good" and "bad" themselves, in order to ask himself
whether, like all the other notions of good and evil prevailing
elsewhere under the shelter of other religions, these, the Christian
notions, might not have been invented at some particular time by
a certain kind of man, simply with the view of preserving and
universalising his specific type. Breathless from their efforts at
getting rid of the dogma, they did not dream that perhaps the most
important part of the work still remained to be done.
Nietzsche went to the very foundation of the Christian edifice.
He pointed to its morality and said: if we are going to measure the
value of this religion, let us cease our petty quarrels concerning
the truth or falsehood of such stories as the loss of the Gadarene
swine, or the miracle of the loaves and fishes, and let us throw the
whole of Christian morality into the scales and appraise its precise
worth as a system of ethics. Nietzsche would have scorned to quarrel
with the Church, as Huxley did; for much more important issues were at
stake. The worth of a religion is measured by its morality; because by
its morality it moulds and rears men and reveals the type of man who
ultimately wishes to prevail by means of it.
With the metaphysics and the dogma of Christianity in ruins all around
him, therefore, Nietzsche took a step very far in advance of the
rationalistic iconoclasts of his age. He attacked Christian morals,
and declared them to be, like all other morals, merely a weapon in the
hands of a certain type of man, with which that type struggled for
power.
But bold as this step was, it constituted but the first of a series,
the next of which was to discover the type which had laid the
foundations of the Christian ideal. If it could be proved that these
Christian values had been created by a noble species with the object of
perpetuating that species, then Christianity would come forth from the
inquiry vindicated to the hilt, and fill the damage done to its dogma
would not have deterred Nietzsche from standing by it and upholding it
to his very last breath. Alas! Things turned out somewhat differently
and Nietzsche was not by any means the least pained by the result.
Pursuing the inquiry with his usual unflinching and uncompromising
honesty, and avoiding no conclusion however unpleasant or fatal,
Nietzsche, the scion of a profoundly religions house, the lover of
order and tradition, with the blood of generations of earnest believers
in his veins, finally found himself compelled to renounce and even to
condemn, root and branch, the faith which had been the strength and
hope of his forebears.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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