This is an extended quote from Nietzsche’s Late Notebooks (p 116, the italics reflect Nietzsche’s underlining in his hand written notebooks):
What advantages did the Christian moral hypothesis offer?
1. It endowed man with an absolute value, in contrast to his smallness and contingency in the flux of becoming and passing away.
2. It served the advocates of God by conceding to the world, despite suffering and evil, the character of perfection, including that ‘freedom’ - evil seemed full of meaning.
3. It posited that man knows about absolute values, thus giving him adequate knowledge precisely of what is most important.
It shielded man from despising himself as man, from taking sides against life, from despairing of knowledge: it was a means of preservation - in sum, morality was the great antidote to practical and theoretical nihilism.
I take it for granted that points 1 & 2 can both be correct and uncontroversially used to argue for or against Christian morality. However, point 3 is quite remarkable, for I tend to agree with Nietzsche here and see this as a current sin of the Church. My only concern would be that man can know absolute value versus knowing about absolute value. It we take him to mean the Christian morality can equip us with a kind of knowledge that is absolute, then I’m not sure what biblical warrant or situation we will be able to find in support of this.
The great deceit of certainty extends into our sense of the moral and the Body of Christ must be clear as to what our epistemology is like. What sense does it make to say that we can know some moral in an absolute way when every law of morality has to be transgressed in order to maintain its coherence (sans the worship of God)? As I often point out, the command to ‘not murder’ is given by a God who just murder thousands of children and Egyptian soldiers and is planning the systematic slaughter of the people of Canaan. Further, this God gives that commandment through the hands and prayers of a man who is established an enraged murderer himself. What absolute value do we gain from such a narrative and its embedded codes?
If the goal is to walk away from canon with a knowledge of absolute values transferred to your mind, then Nietzsche’s words here ought to cut you to the bone. That kind of knowledge can only act as an illusory antidote to nihilism. But I will suggest that our retort to Nietzsche is to argue against abuse of absolutism in favor of an epistemology that does allow us to know what is moral, but not contain or domesticate that morality. In the end, our morality is based in the worship of Yahweh, His Son through the Spirit given to us. That is, after all, the intent of the first commandment. All attempts at absolutizing morality will rightly fall under Nietzsche’s admonition here.
Hey Dru,
Just read this post and I have a couple of questions. First, I’m not sure that I buy the idea that transgression of a moral is necessary to maintain its coherence. Why? Now, if you are talking here about absolute knowledge of the moral, that may be a different thing. Yet, that’s not the way it read to me. In addition, I wonder how God can hold us responsible to obey a law if it is not coherent to us unless we break it. Of course, a question like this one may take us down a bunny trail that can only end in a debate over whether God is just in judging those with limited or no knowledge about Him. Second, I really don’t think I buy the idea that God is a murderer. Moses, yes. YHWH, no. Rather, His actions in delivering Israel from Egypt as well as those He will shortly undertake to deliver Canaan to His people fit more clearly, it seems to me, into a Divine Warrior matrix. So, it seems to me, that we are talking apples and oranges when we talk about YHWH’s actions as a warrior and the injunction not to murder. Of course, I am coming in in the middle of a discussion, and so I am probably missing something here.
By the way, the other two points about Nietzsche, whom you’ve been trying to get me to read for years, I find very well taken. As per a text I tried to send you yesterday, the last chapter of H.R. Niebuhr’s book Christ and Culture argued some of the very same points.
John
John,
I think your comment about ‘murderer v. divine warrior’ gets at the point precisely. Depending on how one defines the term murder (intent v. action), implicates the way that command can be followed. There is ‘play’ with the term and in no sense is there an absolute moral about death that is being invoked. Instead, we end up saying ‘death is bad’ or ‘hate that leads to murder is bad’. But there are million ways in which you can live that out (i.e. Jesus’ cutting interpretation of this commandment).
As far as transgression of law maintaining coherence, I was not implicating morality, but rather morality-expressed-in-statute. When I say, “Don’t hit people,” there is a whole moral system that undergirds that simple command. But there are times when I want you to hit people for good and righteous reasons. For example, if I were becoming hysterical in the face of disaster, I would want you to hit me in the face (think “Airplane”). If I were choking, I would want you to hit me in the stomach. “Don’t hit” is a short-hand and truncated communique that grips enough on a current context to reveal a little bit about the moral system that supports such a command.
Again, I have an imperfect moral system working in me, but we presume that God’s is not the same. So his commands are also truncated and only reveal what is sufficient in its context of the larger moral reality. And because it is truncated (or sufficiently pithy, if you like), the case law must ratify the statute via transgression. God said to take your troublesome teenager to the elders and stone them to death if they don’t repent.
But how does one determine exactly what that process looks like? There has to be some ‘feeling out’ of the law and that involves the times where you know you are within God’s intentions and when you have crossed some line. The coherence of such laws can only be appreciated on when we are in that ‘feeling out’ period of case law. It’s shorthand is often stated, “I don’t know what it is, but I know it’s not THAT!”
So I would argue that this is difference between knowing a moral absolutely (which is what rubs Nietzsche and me the wrong way)verses knowing an absolute moral. The former abandons trust in God in favor of trust in my absolute knowledge. The latter requires continuing trust in the source of the sufficiently pithy Law Giver.
Dru,
See that’s what i get for entering a conversation in the middle of it. So, if I may put this discussion into OT terms, it sounds very much like we are talking about apodictic vs. casuistic law. We have the universal maxims (e.g. Thou shalt not commit murder, to continue in that vein), but then we have the case law that seems to come about because of a process of governing (e.g. the laws for the cities of refuge, or the prohibition on putting a stumbling block in front of a blind man, which probably issues in the fact that some 15 year old boy did just that). So, the continual knowing (or coming to know) of the divine absolutes, which as you and I (and apparently Friederich) agree, can only be understood imperfectly, that is un-absolutely.
I also, like the idea of “feeling out” the law. Isn’t that what the 70 assistants of Moses (not to mention others along the way) help Israel to do? In fact, if the Documentary Hypothesis is correct in any way, shape, or form, which I suspect it is, isn’t this exactly what happens in both the Deuteronomic and Priestly traditions?
Gotta run,
John