Today I cooked a bunch of food. I made homemade salsa, set up the slow cooker for dinner tomorrow with friends, and made a poppy seed chicken casserole recipe (shared by a friend). All the while I was listening to some Nietzsche on my IPod, trying to assure that more than my belly grew in the dinner process. I will admit that I have found Nietzsche very interesting ever since a fundy preacher from Australia yelled about how God isn‘t dead and taunted Nietzsche before thousands of pumped up teenagers at Cornerstone. Any way, without speaking to the eternal destination of anyone’s soul I would like to share a passage from Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals and ask if there is any irony (or a crippling shot) in this passage for the Australian preacher who decided to use Nietzsche’s presumably not-so-pleasant final destination as a rallying cry for a crowd of conservative evangelicals?
Belief in what? Love for what? Hope for what? There’s no doubt that these weak people at some time or another also want to be the strong people, some day their “kingdom” is supposed to arrive…they call it simply “the kingdom of God,” as I mentioned. People are indeed so humble about everything! But to experience that, one has to live a long time, beyond death…in fact, people must have an eternal life, so they can win eternal recompense in the “kingdom of God” for this earthly life “in faith, in love, in hope.” Recompense for what? Recompense through what?
In my view, Dante was grossly in error when, with an ingenuity meant to inspire terror, he set that inscription
The Australian preacher would have loved this....and Nietzsche would have called it 'exhibit A.'
over the gateway into his hell: “Eternal love also created me.” Over the gateway into the Christian paradise and its “eternal blessedness” it would, in any event, be more fitting to set the inscription “Eternal hate also created me”…provided it’s all right to set a truth over the gateway to a lie!
For what is the bliss of this paradise? . . . We might well have guessed that already, but it is better for it to be expressly described for us by an authority we cannot underestimate, Thomas Aquinas, the great teacher and saint: “In the kingdom of heaven the blessed will see the punishment of the damned, so that they will derive all the more pleasure from their heavenly bliss.” (1.15)
I figured he ruined dinner by telling you how much your diet makes you an intellectual or not an intellectual.
But to leave a serious comment: Suppose Nietzsche were a Christian, which is of course a pretty huge stretch. He says over and over again that we must accept all of life as it is, that this is all we can do, hence his doctrine of the eternal return. If he accepted the Bible, wouldn’t he be forced to accept all of the afterlife–hell as created by divine love? (Assuming, of course, he were the sort of Christian who believes in hell. I’m making a lot of assumptions here.)
I just got a new idea for the next style of facial hair I’m going to sport. That’s amazing!
“In the kingdom of heaven the blessed will see the punishment of the damned, so that they will derive all the more pleasure from their heavenly bliss.” (1.15) In my vision of heaven I will not derive pleasure from the punishment of the damned. I will rejoice that God is still trying very hard to reach them and to love them. Will there every be a time when God stops trying? You know as much about heaven and hell as I do. For us it is simply “concepts” as no one has returned from either place to tell us what it is like. I just keep on hoping that God keeps on trying to help us see the good that could be. I do not think God would force us either way, it is our choice. However, I do think that God has ways to try and reach God’s “free” children. I think each child of God is “reached” in a different way and that is one reason for sharing our experiences of God our creator.
I gotta disagree with you, Michial. To explain why, let m start with stupid philoosphical example. If you make the claim that “it is impossible to know any truth about this world,” I would respond that you’ve just claimed to know some truth. That is, you’ve claimed to know “that it is true that we can know no truth about this world.” It’s a concrete, or self, contradictory statement; a contradiction where you’re very denial of something affirms it. It’s similar with Nietzsche.
Nietzsche’s claim, then, is that these weak Christians, who profess to act out of “love,” are simply the most clever politicians in the world. For these Christians, in pretending to act out of love, are simply buying themselves a spot in heaven–the political Kingdom of God–where they get to watch their political enemies burn in misery. The claim to love is an underhanded claim to power, namely, the power of the Roman Empire that crucified Christ. Or, again, the ends of the Christian faith are accordingly not love, for Nietzsche. They are political power, and the false humility of the Christian party sickens Nietzsche for its self-contradictory understanding of itself. I agree. My friend, if we seek this political power through a Roman God, let Nietzsche bring us hope through eternal recurrence!
If I’m to reinterpret this passage in the context of your statement, I think the implication is that hell and love are incompatible, even if hell and political power are not. But it’s clear to me that the way of Christ, which is the way of the cross, is not a political power, at least not how Nietzsche understands it. The way of the cross receives lashes without lashing back; it doesn’t return lashes with more lashes. Accordingly, the way of Christ is not the way of hell (for anyone) because the way of Christ is the way of love. Hell and love don’t congrue because Roman empire and the way of the cross don’t congrue.
I would never have associated Thomas Aquinas with Schadenfreude; however, the quotation of his that you cite above seems to indicate that he indeed did harbor such lowly, vengeful sentiments.
As a result, I’ve revised my estimations of both Aquinas and Nietzsche. The former’s has descended precipitously and the latter’s has ascended loftily.
Nietzsche can ruin entire nights of sleep… And that, I think, makes him like God (who can comfort and disturb us greatly).