Beyond Good and Evil: 3. What Is Religious 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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.