Hatab, Lawrence J. "A Revived God in The Antichrist?

Nietzsche and the Sacralization of Natural

Life." Nietzsche and: Religion, Politics, and Culture in Late Modernity. Ed. Daniel Conway.
London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. 7–20. Bloomsbury Studies in Continental Philosophy.
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 1

A Revived God in The Antichrist? Nietzsche

and the Sacralization of Natural Life
Lawrence J. Hatab

In this chapter, I want to draw from The Antichrist certain ambiguities in

Nietzsche’s approach to divinity, such that within his persistent vilification of
Christianity lies a gesture toward alternative conceptions of deification that are
more consistent with natural existence, and that help illuminate his lifelong
interest in the Greek god Dionysus.
Nietzsche’s pronouncement of the death of God, particularly in the GS 125
“Madman” passage, is not equivalent to atheism in the strict sense. Unlike
common forms of atheism, where religious beliefs are simply rejected as a case
of ignorance and error, Nietzsche’s naturalism issues a much more subtle and
complex posture. Christianity, for example, altered the world and set the stage
for most of the Western tradition, which is far too great an effect simply to
be deemed a cognitive error. God was a living force in history, and “dying”
simply reflects the growing acceptance of secularization in nineteenth-century
European thought—the Madman’s audience is not religious believers but
nonbelievers. Yet, modernity has been too casual in sidelining God—which
the Madman calls the “most sacred and most powerful thing the world has
possessed” (GS 125)—because a divine ground had been the veridical warrant
for most cultural constructs: in morality, politics, philosophy, even science.
Sustaining these domains—these “shadows” of God (GS 108)—ignores the
crisis of their loss of warrant (GS 343), which comes to the brink of nihilism.
Nietzsche embraces God’s demise as an event of unmatched importance (GS
125), but he insists that the loss of foundational truth be embraced as well,
because the earth has become “unchained from its sun” (GS 125). Perhaps that
is why atheists are included in his brief against the ascetic ideal in GM III,
24—if atheism means the dismissal of religious belief on behalf of rational or

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 8 Nietzsche and The Antichrist

scientific truth.1 But there is more going on in Nietzsche’s challenge to atheism

that I want to explore: first, that an honest naturalism must account for how
supernatural beliefs would ever take hold in natural life and harbor so much
world-forming power; and second, that Nietzsche’s texts offer the possibility of
a “revived” deity in Nietzsche’s embrace of Dionysus as a figural sacralization
of natural life, which by force of amor fati and eternal recurrence counters
the denatured ascetic ideal at the heart of Western thought, and in particular
Christian revenge against existence on earth.

1 Nietzsche and atheism

In GM, Nietzsche explores the following question: Assuming that nature is

the only reality, how could anti-natural beliefs have arisen at all and register
powerful world-changing effects? Unlike normal atheism, it is not enough to
diagnose such beliefs as irrational error. Life in some respects must have needed
such beliefs and their productive power (see GM III, 11–13, 28). The analyses
of slave morality and the ascetic ideal address this question by showing how
certain human types spawned anti-natural beliefs and practices to ward off
suicidal nihilism and find some kind of meaning in natural life. Any critique of
anti-natural worldviews, which have shaped so much of Western culture, must
acknowledge and understand the life forces involved before any alternative
worldview is advanced.
Within Nietzsche’s genealogical account, there are important macro-elements
that I want to emphasize. In some basic sense, Nietzsche accepts the Darwinian
idea that human life and culture emerged out of animal nature. But Nietzsche
maintains that being human involves a “sickness,” a disease compared to the
natural “health” of animals. Indeed, Nietzsche calls mankind “the sick animal”
(GM III, 13) and the “sickest” animal (A 14). Why? Animals live instinctively
and immersed in immediate experience; they exist in time but are free of human
anxieties about an uncertain future and memories of past misfortunes—that is,
the rich and stressful awareness of times to come and times past. Animals die, but
they are not aware of death as a possibility in life at any time. Therefore, animals
never worry or get bored; they are “happy” and healthy in their immediacy (see
also HL 1). Compared to such animal health, human existence is an intrinsic
sickness, but it also entails courage (when acting with an awareness of danger)
and creativity (in not being bound to present actuality).2 The point is this: to

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 A Revived God in The Antichrist? 9

be human is to experience life as tribulation, as subject to loss and demise.

Consequently, human existence by nature is susceptible to anti-natural beliefs,
especially religious hopes for salvation. Such beliefs and world-reforming
programs (like slave morality) are thus in the service of certain life forces to avoid
suicidal nihilism. Beyond this diagnostic analysis, however, Nietzsche calls out
the paradox of life-averse life forces and calls for the difficult task of affirming
natural life despite its intrinsic burdens—because the ascetic “cure” for human
sickness is worse than the disease. A significant difficulty in reading GM is that
the text regularly alternates between descriptive and critical postures—between,
on the one hand, honoring the causes and power of life-averse culture, and on
the other hand, proclaiming the need to overcome the paradox and pathology
of life-aversion, which requires an overcoming of both a transcendent God and
a nihilistic loss of meaning in a godless world (GM II, 24).

2 Christian revenge in The Antichrist

The Antichrist is in some ways a continuation of Nietzsche’s genealogical

analysis. Yet, unlike the shifting between description and critical attack in GM,
The Antichrist is a more concentrated and sustained assault against anti-natural
beliefs embodied by Christianity. But certain subtleties remain, especially the far-
from-critical account of Jesus as a figure very much removed from established
Christianity, if the latter is taken as a world-forming cultural force inherited
from Paul and his response to the life and death of Jesus. In any case, Nietzsche
launches a robust campaign against Christianity, which is the most prominent
case of a life-denying project and the elevation of weak human beings over
the life-affirming character of strong, noble types (A 5). Shorn of its fictional
picture of a life to come, Christianity represents a decadent turn against life
instincts and thus the very practice of nihilism (A 6). Christian religion and
theology are at bottom the work of the ascetic priest portrayed in GM (A 8).
The priestly culture established by Judaism and modified by Christianity was a
world-forming set of practices, values, and institutions, which declared war on
natural life energies (A 5) and in time achieved enough force in the world to
overcome the original lack of agency in slave morality and give more credence
to hopes for salvation in the hereafter.
Nietzsche nevertheless takes seriously the radical values of renunciation
portrayed in the life of Jesus, and he dissociates Jesus as a “redeemer” from any

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 10 Nietzsche and The Antichrist

world-shaping culture. Jesus was not the launch of a Christian world; he was the
anti-cultural redeemer (A 30–35), who perfected anti-natural asceticism into a
deliberate repudiation of all normal endeavors in life (sex, family, law, judgment,
contestation). In effect, Nietzsche is giving a naturalistic account of Jesus, a man
who came forth to proclaim the virtue of turning against the world and culture,
not a promise of another life, not the establishment of a church, but simply the
peace and pleasure of withdrawing from the ways of the world (A 30).

Jesus could be called a “free spirit,” using the phrase somewhat loosely—he does
not care for solid things: the word kills, everything solid kills. The concept, the
experience of “life” as only he knew it, repelled every type of word, formula, law,
faith, or dogma. He spoke only about what was inside him most deeply. . . . He
saw everything else, the whole of reality, the whole of nature, language itself, as
having value only as a sign, a parable. . . . This sort of symbolism par excellence is
positioned outside all religion, all cult concepts, all history, all natural science,
all experience of the world, all knowledge, all politics, all psychology, all books,
all art. . . . He does not know anything about culture, even in passing, he does
not need to struggle against it, he does not negate it. The same is true about the
state, about the whole civic order and society, about work, about war. (A 32)

This is why Nietzsche can say that “there was really only one Christian, and
he died on the cross” (A 39). Jesus simply taught a way of life, a passive
renunciation of normal existence, even to the point of inviting harm (A 34–36),
as in turning the other cheek. From this standpoint, Christianity is essentially
a practice, not a set of beliefs or institutions—a practice that Nietzsche says is
indeed possible, even needful for some, today (A 39).3 Jesus therefore represents
the most extreme “cure” for the sick animal of humanity: short of suicide, he
finds meaning in living against life—not unlike, I think, the consummation in
Schopenhauer’s pessimism of willing not to will.4
Nietzsche offers that Jesus did not render moral judgments or talk of guilt
(A 33); he simply proclaimed the living unity of God and man, an egoless
withdrawal from matters of the world into divine quiescence (A 41). Christianity
became judgmental and moralistic after the humiliating death of Jesus, when
revenge set in against a world that could denigrate and destroy such a man (A
40). For Nietzsche, it was Paul who embodied this vengeance and set the stage
for the Christian church, the system that came to condemn and reform natural
life energies.

The disastrous fate of the evangel was sealed with his death, it hung on the
“cross.” . . . It took this death, this unexpected, ignominious death, it took the

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 A Revived God in The Antichrist? 11

cross, which was generally reserved for the rabble, it took this horrible paradox
to bring the disciples face-to-face with the true riddle: “Who was that? What
was that?” . . . Who killed him? Who was his natural enemy? . . . At this point,
people started to feel as if they were in revolt against the order, they started
to understand Jesus as having been in revolt against the order. Before this, his
image had not had any belligerent, no-saying, no-doing features at all; in fact,
he was the opposite of all this. . . . But his disciples were far from being able to
forgive this death, which would have been evangelical in the highest sense; . . .
Revenge resurfaced, the most unevangelical feeling of all. It was impossible for
this death to be the end of the matter: “retaliation” was needed. (A 40)

In order for revenge to take hold and prosper, the scheme of an afterlife was
required, in which earthly wickedness would be punished and otherworldly
faith rewarded.

From now on, a number of different things started seeping into the type of the
redeemer: the doctrines of judgment and return, the doctrine of death as a
sacrifice, and the doctrine of the resurrection; . . . With the rabbinical impudence
that characterizes everything about him, Paul put this interpretation, this
perversion of an interpretation into a logical form: “if Christ did not rise from
the dead, then our faith is in vain.” And in one fell swoop, the evangel becomes
the most contemptible of all unfulfillable promises, the outrageous doctrine of
personal immortality. . . . Paul himself still taught it as a reward! (A 41)

Although Nietzsche does not say so explicitly, it seems evident that Paul
is a prime example of the ascetic priest in GM, who fashions retributive
psychological power over noble values in order to shore up the prospects of
slave morality and reform the world according to anti-natural values.5 In any
case, Paul compensates for the demise of Jesus by emphasizing a life after
death where the righteous will enjoy eternal bliss and the wicked will suffer
eternal damnation. The promise of personal immortality and divine retribution
far exceeds the abdicating bliss of Jesus by actively advancing against worldly
power and elevating the virtues of the weak (A 42–43).
Christianity spread, according to Nietzsche, not because the pagan world was
corrupt but because Paul fought against healthy instincts and lured pagans by
“summing up and surpassing” existing “subterranean cults” in the ancient world
with powerful visions of cosmic retribution and transformation (A 58). Here
and in other texts, Nietzsche is happy to focus on Christian narratives of power
reversal, where virtues of the weak are rewarded not only with salvation but also
the glorious destruction of a fallen world and retaliation against evildoers. One

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 12 Nietzsche and The Antichrist

thinks, naturally, of the Apocalypse in the Book of Revelation, a ghastly spectacle

of vengeful annihilation, the Last Judgment following the Second Coming—
Jesus is back, and he’s pissed!—where one can almost hear the finale of the “1812
Overture” as soundtrack. Also pertinent is Nietzsche’s citation of Tertullian in
GM I, 15, which is meant to illustrate the psychology of ressentiment: Tertullian
offers a full condemnation of the pagan world and he outbids its attractions
with the greater pleasures of witnessing God’s judgment, where an “insatiable
gaze” is cast upon the eternal sufferings of sinners in hellfire and the tortures
of those who abused or refused Jesus—politicians, philosophers, actors, artists,
athletes, even mimes—a spectacle that Tertullian says is more pleasing than any
pagan circus.
Christianity’s early apocalyptic expectations faded when the Second Coming
did not come. As messianic hopes for the end of the world grew dim, Christianity
evolved from its erstwhile sequestration from normal life to a gradual
accommodation with the ways of the world and its historical possibilities.
Consequently, Christian anti-natural values came to shape world history and
culture (contra the posture of Jesus) in such a way that life on earth was pitched
against natural life intellectually, politically, morally, and institutionally.6
Christianity was able to establish a remedial disdain for earthly existence that
was nevertheless still animated by an ever-deferred Apocalypse. Yet, such a
posture includes modern “secular” movements like democracy and socialism
that simply sustain Christian values without any supernatural references,
thereby persisting as divine “shadows.”7 Such is the heritage of Christianity that
Nietzsche is called upon to attack for the paradoxical de-naturing of natural life
(A 25). In The Antichrist, the attack is merciless and unambiguous:

Christianity has been the worst thing to happen to humanity so far. (A 51)

Parasitism is the church’s only practice, drinking all the blood, all the love, all
the hope out of life with its ideals of anemia and “sanctity.” . . . I call Christianity
the one great curse, the one great innermost corruption, the one great instinct
of revenge . . . the one immortal blot on humanity. (A 62)

There is nothing here of the subtlety in GM, but rather outright condemnation.
The assault is likely targeting not every aspect of Christianity (recall the positive
account of Jesus), but the world-transforming effects of the church and its
historical permutations of institutional control—with only some exceptions like
the Renaissance, which however was rebuked by Luther for “corruption” that
was in fact its life-embracing vitality (A 61). In any case, Nietzsche is happy

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 A Revived God in The Antichrist? 13

to adopt the posture of “Antichrist,” which in Christianity represented either a

false Messiah or the cosmic opponent of Jesus who will be battled in the Second
Coming. Nietzsche calls for “a philosophy of the Antichrist” (BGE 256), which
heralds a coming redeemer of the earth: “This Antichrist and anti-nihilist, this
conqueror of God and nothingness—he must come one day” (GM II, 24). On
one occasion, Nietzsche even claims the iniquitous name for himself: “I am, in
Greek, and not just in Greek, the Anti-Christ” (EH Books, 2).

3 A God revived?

Despite Nietzsche’s antipathy to Christianity and the Christian God in The

Antichrist, I want to argue that it need not entail an atheistic denial of divinity
outright. In the midst of his broadsides against Christianity—a religion driven
by an aversion to natural life, which amounts to “the deification of nothingness”
(A 18)—Nietzsche offers some interesting remarks about other possibilities
of deification and religion that are not life-averse. The Christian God is a god
of the sick, which is called “one of the most corrupt conceptions of god the
world has ever seen . . . a new low in the declining development of the types of
god” (A 18). He mentions northern European peoples, whose “skill in religion”
withered when they failed to reject the Christian God (A 18). He has positive
things to say about Buddhism (A 20) and the Hindu Book of Manu (A 56). He
objects to Christianity because it lacks “sacred purposes,” because it pursues
bad purposes that poison and slander life (A 56). The predominance of the
Christian God in European history leads Nietzsche to this declamation: “Almost
two thousand years and not a single new god!” (A 19). Christian “monotono-
theism” is pathetic in holding itself to be the pinnacle of “god-creating energy”
(A 19). In A 16, Nietzsche seems to say that a critique of the Christian God need
not rule out other possibilities of religion, where a people that still believes in
itself “projects the pleasure it takes in itself, its feeling of power, into a being that
it can thank for all of this.” He says that “on this supposition, religion is a form
of gratitude . . . and this is why they need a god.” But such a deity cannot be the
anti-natural Christian God of absolute goodness: it must bestow both benefit
and harm, both good and bad, both victory and loss, if it is to be truly lifelike. In
another section, Nietzsche contrasts the Judeo-Christian tradition with pagan
religion, where “a pagan is anyone who says yes to life, who sees ‘god’ as the
word for the great yes to all things” (A 55).

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 14 Nietzsche and The Antichrist

It is not hard to see much of Nietzsche’s positive remarks about religion

as fitting the early Greek mythological tradition, which some philosophers,
especially Plato, decried because of its immersion in the lived world, its mixture
of benign and harmful forces in its array of different deities.8 Nietzsche, of
course, celebrated this mixture in BT, wherein the combined forces of Apollo
and Dionysus brought forth tragic drama as the epitome of pre-Socratic Greek
culture.9 Dionysus continued to figure in Nietzsche’s texts, all the way to the last
line of a late work: “Have I been understood?—Dionysus versus the crucified”
(EH Destiny, 9).
Although Dionysus is not mentioned specifically in The Antichrist, the
gestures there toward life-affirming religious possibilities certainly fit Nietzsche’s
frequent mention of that god in other works of the late 1880s. Twice Nietzsche
calls himself a “disciple of the philosopher Dionysus” (TI Ancients, 5; EH P, 2).
Dionysus—the paradoxical god of life and death, of sexual regeneration and
ritual killing, of bliss and ecstatic self-abandonment—was for Nietzsche the
most vivid image for all the conflicted forces of natural life.10 But I think that
religious elements of awe and reverence were equally important for Nietzsche—
to capture, if I may, an übermenschlich excess beyond human-centered fixations
that render powerful life forces problematic and disownable, which generates
vengeful abnegation and hopes for deliverance into immortality. As Nietzsche
says in The Antichrist, “‘Salvation of the soul’—in plain language: ‘The world
revolves around me.’” (A 43). So, for Nietzsche, a proper religious attitude—a
“sacrificial” disposition in this world—could not be based in transcendence and
deliverance; it could only “worship” life in all its evident powers of creation and
destruction. That is why the myth of Dionysus, where he is torn to pieces and
restored to life again, appeals to Nietzsche as a “sacralization” of natural life.
Consider this passage from TI Ancients, 4, where “eternal life” is not personal
immortality but the ever-productive cycle of life, death, and procreation:

I was the first one to take seriously that wonderful phenomenon that bears the
name “Dionysus.” . . . The fundamental fact of the Hellenic instinct—its “will
to life”—expresses itself only in the Dionysian mysteries, in the psychology of
the Dionysian state. What did the Hellenes guarantee for themselves with these
mysteries? Eternal life. . . . The true life as the overall continuation of life through
procreation, through the mysteries of sexuality . . . the word “Dionysus” . . . gives
religious expression to the most profound instinct of life, directed toward the
future of life, the eternity of life—the pathway to life, procreation as the sacred
path (heilige Weg). . . . It was Christianity, with its fundamental ressentiment
against life that first made sexuality something unclean.

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 A Revived God in The Antichrist? 15

And this contemporary (1888) passage from the notebooks depicts two religious
responses to the “sick animal” that is humanity:

The two types: Dionysus and the Crucified One. . . . Is not the pagan cult a
form of thanking and affirming life? Ought not its highest representative be a
vindication and deification of life? . . . This is where I set the Dionysus of the
Greeks: the religious affirmation of life, of life as a whole, [which] awakens
depth, mystery, and reverential awe (Ehrfurcht). (KSA 13, 265–66)

That God on the cross became the enduring symbol of Christianity is, for
Nietzsche, indicative of its rancor toward the world and its dismissal of earthly
life (A 51). In particular, it is the Christian condemnation of the pagan world as
“vanity” that most offends Nietzsche’s historical sense.

The entire work of the ancient world in vain: I do not have words to express
my feelings at something so enormous. . . . All of this in vain! Turned overnight
into just a memory! Greeks! Romans! The nobility of the instincts and of taste,
methodological research, genius in organization and administration, the belief,
the will to a future of humanity, the great yes to all things made visible as the
imperium Romanum, made visible to all the senses, the great style no longer just
as art, but turned into reality, truth, life. . . . And not buried overnight by some
natural event! . . . But instead defiled by sly, secretive, invisible, anemic vampires!
Not defeated, just sucked dry! The hidden need for revenge, petty jealousy come
to power! Everything miserable, suffering from itself, plagued by bad feelings,
the whole ghetto world of the soul risen to the top in a single stroke! (A 59)

With the image of Dionysus, Nietzsche gathers his passion for the pagan world,
his prosecution of Christian revenge, and his hopes for an affirmative posture
toward earthly existence.
Nietzsche’s clear self-association with Dionysus is expressed in BGE 296,
where he refers to Dionysus as a “genius of the heart,” a kind of conscience
that nourishes and inspires new possibilities, “new wills and currents.” He calls
himself “the last disciple and initiate of the god Dionysus,” who is “that great
ambiguity and tempter/experimenter god (Versucher-Gott),” to whom he offered
as a sacrifice his “firstborn in all secrecy and reverence” (which is a reference to
his first book, BT). Addressing his readers, Nietzsche expresses hesitancy about
his pronouncement because

I have heard that you do not like believing in God and gods these days. And
perhaps in recounting my story, I will have to take frankness further than will
always be agreeable to the strict habits of your ears?

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 16 Nietzsche and The Antichrist

Despite his reverent praise for Dionysus, Nietzsche imagines the god demurring
at public honor and counseling him to “Keep this for yourself.” Yet, despite the
ambivalence implied here, Nietzsche seems comfortable expressing a kind of
religious attitude toward Dionysus.

4 Amor fati and eternal recurrence

It is well known that Nietzsche expresses the affirmation of life in terms of amor
fati and its articulation in eternal recurrence.

Amor fati: let that be my love from now on! . . . All in all and on the whole: some
day I want only to be a Yes-sayer! (GS 276)

My formula for human greatness is amor fati: that you do not want anything
to be different, not forewords, not backwards, not for all eternity. Not just to
tolerate necessity, . . . but to love it. (EH Clever, 10)

Eternal recurrence is a picture of world-time that pushes amor fati to the limit.
Genuine affirmation of life says yes to everything that happens by willing its
eternal repetition, which cannot find relief in transcendent hopes. Yet, the
recurrence scheme also forbids a worldly teleological script of perfection, the
pessimistic relief of nothingness, and even the possibility of eternal novelty.11
As I have argued in the past, such affirmation does not entail the approval
of all things, because according to the agonistic structure of will to power—
which is directly implicated in eternal recurrence (Z II On Redemption)—
one’s own meaning is necessarily linked to overcoming counter-meanings.
So, eternal repetition includes eternal resistance to counter-meanings.12 In
this way, one affirms a life that includes limits to one’s interests, limits that
have spawned all the life-averse outlooks challenged by Nietzsche.
Amor fati and eternal recurrence could be ascertained apart from any religious
or sacred reference. Yet, Nietzsche specifically links eternal recurrence to the god
Dionysus in Ecce Homo Books: Z, 6. In TI, directly after the aforementioned
declaration of the Dionysian giving “religious expression to the most profound
instinct of life, . . . the eternity of life” (TI Ancients, 4), Nietzsche recalls his early
interest in Greek tragedy and calls the Dionysian a yes-saying “counter-example”
to Schopenhauerian pessimism. Continuing, he writes that BT

was my first revaluation of all values: and now I am back on that soil where my
desires, my abilities grow—I, the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysus—I,
the teacher of eternal recurrence. (TI Ancients, 5)

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 A Revived God in The Antichrist? 17

Eternal recurrence represents Nietzsche’s “biodicy,” as a countermeasure

to a pessimistic denial of life and a Christian judgment against life in favor
of transcendence—which from a naturalistic standpoint amounts to the
same thing as pessimism, as Schopenhauer saw clearly. Both pessimism and
Christianity stem from revenge against time, “the will’s ill-will toward time
and its ‘It was’” (Z II, On Redemption), against the misfortunes of life that
cannot be undone. Affirming eternal recurrence overcomes such chronophobia
by accepting the necessity of life’s unfolding, to the point of desiring its eternal
repetition. In this context, it is interesting to note that Schopenhauer and
Augustine both confronted and rejected the possibility of life repeating itself.
Schopenhauer tells us that “at the end of his life, no man, if he be sincere and
also in possession of his faculties, will ever wish to go through it again” (1958:
324). Augustine, in The City of God, directly argued against pagan models of
cyclic repetition in favor of the Christian idea of linear time stretching from
a one-off creation to salvation after the end of the world—because salvation
followed by repetition of the fall is absurd, and so a “godless” circularity should
be corrected by the “straight path” of divine deliverance (1950: Book 12, Chs.
13, 17, 18, 20). The linear structure of Christian time was indeed codified in the
West by measuring history according to what came before and after the time
of Jesus Christ.
Amor fati and eternal recurrence, on the other hand, with their Dionysian
constitution, issue a sacralization of, and reverence for, natural existence. The
linear picture of world-historical time in Western thought, with its teleological
script of overcoming or escaping forces of nature, is exchanged for the earth-
time of cyclic destruction and regeneration.13 Accordingly, Dionysus is
specifically rendered by Nietzsche as the Antichrist (BT ASC, 5). The “cure”
for human sickness can no longer countenance life-averse treatments, but must
now embrace the Dionysian therapy of eternal recurrence. As indicated earlier,
compared to animal health, human sickness is an inevitable consequence of
the temporal awareness of becoming and its destructive effects. Indeed, it is
a productive sickness, since it is no longer immersed in present immediacy.
The therapy for human sickness cannot be a return to animal health (see WS
350); it must convert a dis-eased temporal consciousness into the recuperation
of eternal recurrence, of willing the temporal structure of natural life—which
moves from judgments against time to the “innocence of becoming” (TI Errors,
8). The Dionysian affirmation of eternal recurrence therefore performs a reversal
of Christian revenge against the earth. In the words of Zarathustra: “Once
sacrilege against God was the greatest sacrilege, but God died, and thereby

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 18 Nietzsche and The Antichrist

the sacrilegious did too. Sacrilege against the earth is now the most terrible
thing” (Z Prologue, 3). When we are called to “remain faithful to the earth” (Z
Prologue, 3), in effect Nietzsche proclaims the “glad tidings” of life before death.

Notes

1 Natural science cannot be a proving ground for atheism because it is still attached
to Christian value judgments (KSA 12, 108). Nietzsche does on occasion identify
himself with atheism (EH Clever, 1; EH Books, Untimely Ones, 2), but it seems
to be in opposition to existing religious systems; and in any case, it is not a matter
of cognitive critique but contesting Christian ways of life and ideals with counter-
ideals.
2 See GM III, 13 and Hatab 2008: 143–46.
3 See also BGE 61.
4 Indeed, Schopenhauer claimed that the pessimistic denial of the will to live is not
his invention because it has been the core of Christian asceticism. His philosophy
simply gives conceptual form to this core without any mythological depiction of
eternal life to come (1958: 383).
5 For the connection between Paul and the ascetic priest, see Conway 2008: 128–34.
6 See Shapiro 2016: Ch. 6. Especially helpful is a discussion of Franz Overbeck,
a friend of Nietzsche’s who wrote about the shift in Christianity from early
renunciation to an appropriation of pagan philosophy and institutions in order to
justify its place in a fallen world and fight off heresies and rival religions (188–95).
7 In an 1881 note, Nietzsche calls political secularization a “delusion” (KSA 9, 504).
8 See Hatab 1990.
9 See Hatab 2001: 45–56.
10 See Hatab 1990: Ch. 5.
11 For a discussion, see Hatab 2005: 85–89.
12 See Hatab 2005: 137–43.
13 See Shapiro 2016: 180–81.

Works cited

Augustine, St. (1950), The City of God, M. Dodds (trans.). New York: Random House.
Conway, D. (2008), Nietzsche’s “On the Genealogy of Morals”: A Reader’s Guide.
London: Bloomsbury.
Hatab, L. (1990), Myth and Philosophy: A Contest of Truths. Chicago, IL: Open Court.

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Hatab, L. (2001), “Apollo and Dionysus: Nietzschean Expressions of the Sacred,” in W.

Santaniello (ed.), Nietzsche and the Gods. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 45–56.
Hatab, L. (2005), Nietzsche’s Life Sentence: Coming to Terms with Eternal Recurrence.
New York: Routledge.
Hatab, L. (2008), Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality: An Introduction. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Schopenhauer, A. (1958), The World as Will and Representation, E. F. J. Payne (trans.).
New York: Dover.
Shapiro, G. (2016), Nietzsche’s Earth: Great Events, Great Politics. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press.

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