Zadok Paper S95 Autumn 1998
Nietzsche: insight and immorality
by Greg Restall

Who thinks for whom?

WE HAVE ALREADY SEEN that for Nietzsche, Christianity has destructive effects on one's rationality. He writes "the great lie of personal immortality destroys all rationality".19 But what else does Nietzsche says about the negative consequences of religious belief for epistemology? "From a psychological point of view, 'sins' are indispensable in any society organised by priests; they are the actual levers of power, the priest lives on sins, he needs 'the commission of sins' . . . Supreme law: 'God forgives him who repents'-in plain language: who submits himself to the priest."20
The first point at which the rationality of a religious believer is subverted is that she or he submits it to another. Believers abdicate their responsibility to make reasoned decisions to the religious authorities, who tell them what to believe. This is quite rife in Christian circles, and it's quite simple to understand. For Christians, belief is a particularly important thing. It's so important it's hardly to be left to everyone-we appoint experts who find out what we are to believe, they tell us, and we believe it. This is, in rough outline, how many churches operate. Unfortunately, it leaves the people in the pews epistemically naive. They abdicate their own responsibility to rationality, to another. This is seen in the ways people treat questioning and uncertainty.

If I question a particular interpretation of some text (say, Genesis 1 and 2, or Romans 8) or some reasonably core belief (like the doctrine of the Trinity, or the Virgin Birth), then likely as not some discussion will emerge in which the goal is to get me to believe the proposition in question. Once I assent to it, the purpose is achieved and the discussion can stop, irrespective of how I come to it or whether my belief was responsibly formed or not. The aim is to ensure that my beliefs fall within the precribed boundaries.

A particularly interesting example of this was given in a series of interviews given on a Sydney radio station one Sunday night, called Losing My Religion. On this program ex-Christians described their experiences on leaving the church. One described the process as being "born again". She had to start to make up her own mind on issues. She had to start to think for herself, for there was no one who could tell her what to do. She was growing from being epistemically infantile to being a mature adult who is able to decide issues for herself. This experience is quite common, and to be expected, given the way many churches function.

This is a problem for Christian faith, for it is a central tenet of the Christian religion that people are to grow up into maturity, to be rational, to make our own decisions and so on. However, Christianity as practiced does not always encourage this. Why? One reason is the way that we conceptualise our faith. If the object is for us to believe certain things, then of course it doesn't matter how we come to believe those things, as long as we believe them. And if the beliefs are a matter of eternal significance then of course it is reasonable to abdicate your responsibility to make up your mind to someone who is much more expert than you. However, problems strike if you start to question those beliefs. What can you do then? You can no longer listen to the person who was telling you them, because they don't encourage you to question these things. No one has given you any particularly good reasons to keep believing these things, so it is simplest to simply stop believing them altogether. At least that way you make up your own mind.

As bad as this is, for Nietzsche this is not the only problem with rationality. If it were, then there would be some hope for those in power to be rational. For Nietzsche, there is no such hope.
I make war on this theologian instinct: I have found traces of it everywhere. Whoever has theologian blood in his veins has a wrong and dishonest attitude towards all things from the very first. The pathos that develops out of this is called faith: closing one's eyes with respect to oneself for good and all so as not to suffer from the sight of incurable falsity. Out of this erroneous perspective on all things one makes a morality, a virtue, a holiness for oneself, one unites the good conscience with seeing falsely-one demands that no other perspective shall be accorded any value after one has rendered one's own sacrosanct with the names 'God', 'redemption', 'eternity'. I have dug out the theologian instinct everywhere: it is the most widespread, peculiarly subterranean form of falsity that exists on earth. What a theologian feels to be true must be false: this provides almost a criterion of truth. It is his deepest instinct of self-preservation which forbids any part of reality whatever to be held in esteem or even spoken of . . .21

Nietzsche is very perceptive when he talks of the "deepest instinct of self-preservation", for that is part of the dynamics of much religious belief. When my security depends on my holding fast to some religious beliefs, then I will only be secure if I am sure that I will not reject those beliefs-irrespective of whether I've simply adopted them from someone else or if I've come to them myself. As a result, I retract myself from anything which might call those beliefs into question. I must be preserved from any form of 'intellectual attack'. This results in a completely insulated system of belief, which Nietzsche describes all too recognisably:

In Christianity, neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point. Nothing but imaginary causes ['God', 'soul', 'ego', 'spirit', 'free will'-or 'unfree will']: nothing but imaginary effects ['sin', 'redemption', 'grace', 'punishment', 'forgiveness of sins']. A traffic between imaginary beings ['God', 'spirits', 'souls']; and imaginary natural science [anthropocentric; complete lack of concept of natural causes]; and imaginary psychology [nothing but self-misunderstandings, interpretations of pleasant or unpleasant general feelings, for example the condition of nervus sympathicus, with the aid of the sign-language of religio-moral idiosyncrasy-'repentance', 'sting of conscience', 'temptation by the Devil', 'the proximity of God']; an imaginary teleology ['the kingdom of God', 'the Last Judgment', 'eternal life'].

This purely fictitious world is distinguished from the world of dreams, very much to its disadvantage, by the fact that the latter mirrors actuality, while the former falsifies, disvalues and denies actuality. Once the concept 'nature' had been devised as the concept antithetical to 'God', 'natural' had to be the word for 'reprehensible'-this entire fictional world has its roots in hatred of the natural [actuality!], it is the expression of a profound discontent with the actual . . . But that explains everything. Who alone has reason to lie himself out of actuality? He who suffers from it.22
Now of course Nietzsche is merely stating that the Christian concepts of God, sin, redemption, grace and so on are imaginary. However, Nietzsche's contention still has bite, even if Christian practice happens to have 'factual content'. It operates in an epistemic vacuum. This is extremely dangerous, for it gives Christians no language with which to speak to those outside the religious community. If I may abuse terminology somewhat, religious discourse becomes a 'self-contained' language game with rules for the connections between religious concepts, but precious little which connects those concepts to anything with any purchase to those outside the community. I will not be able to communicate with others if my faith is solely expressed in 'technical' terms (such as 'God', 'sin', 'redemption', 'grace' and so on) which have no connection to terms used in the wider community.

If I also use terms which do have some kind of meaningful connection, terms such as 'person', 'trust', 'purpose', 'justice', 'love' and so on, then I basically have two options. First, I could redefine these terms to be technical terms too (Christians use the term agape for love, to mean "perform religious duties towards", such as evangelising, praying for, and so on) or I can leave myself open to learn something from the 'world' which might challenge my own belief. For example, when the natural and social sciences tell us that people are influenced to a great degree by their conditioning and their physiology, do we use this to enrich and enhance what we know about people, or do we ignore it? The church of the Middle Ages attempted to insulate itself from the findings of the young science of astronomy. It let its simple-minded exegesis of Scripture overrule Galileo's theories. The consequences were disastrous. If I allow religious considerations to override non-religious considerations, then I will not always get the 'right answer'.

Nietzsche is pointing us to an alternative: to a self-critical, open, humble, listening faith, one which is open to 'revelation' from more than the obviously religious. This is difficult, for it means getting over our own insecurity. It means having less faith in my own belief and more openness to be taught, from many different directions.

All of these criticisms which Nietzsche has brought us are present within the Christian tradition itself. Nietzsche has reminded us of what we should have already known. But this is not a cause for relaxation. We can't simply say that this is nothing new and nothing to worry about. For the conclusion could be that Christianity is inconsistent. It is a selfish faith teaching the virtue of selflessness. It preaches maturity while keeping one immature. If this is right, then so much the worse for Christianity.

The only way I can think of convincing someone that the Christian faith is consistent is to present an example. To show that it works in practice, that there is someone who is consistently Christian and not particularly selfish. That there is someone who is consistently Christian, yet not particularly irrational. Christians, of course, will point to the example of Jesus. Nietzsche was quite aware of Jesus and he had an interesting, ambivalent view of Jesus. He was admired, though he was seen as an escapist, proclaiming a gospel of escape from the harshness of reality. Of course, that was the Jesus who was described by the Christians of Nietzsche's time. He fit the church of his day, in the way that the Jesus of liberation theologians is a revolutionary, and our Jesus is either a friendly sort of person, an exorcist, a theologian, or something else, depending on whatever our own interests. Perhaps if Nietzsche had known the Jesus of history, and had he known a community of followers who exhibited more of his own risky, open, selfless faith, then he would not have come to the same conclusion. Perhaps this too is the only kind of existence proof that will be convincing for people today.

To: End Notes

Greg Restall lectures at the School of History, Philosophy and Politics, Macquarie University, Sydney. He is not a Nietzchian scholar, rather his disciplines are logic, the philosophy of language and the philosophy of religion. The author wishes to thank Fernando Gros and to Christine Parker for their thoughtful comments and encouragement.