The Overton Salon

By Austin

I remember doing a paper on Nietzsche and being struck by this paragraph of The Anti-Christ (which is also the theme of Ingmar Bergman’s wonderful “Through a Glass Darkly):

The Christian conception of God – God as God of the sick, God as spider, God as spirit – is one of the most corrupt conceptions of God arrived at on earth: perhaps it even represents the low-water mark in the descending development of the God type. God degenerated to the contradictions of life, instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yes! In God a declaration of hostility towards life, nature, the will to life! God the formula for every calumny of ‘this world’, for every lie about ‘the next world’! In God nothingness deified, the will to nothingness sanctified!

The best thing about this paragraph is Nietzsche’s utter accuracy about this God of the Christians. This is exactly what God is God of: the slave, the sick, the dejected, the addicts and the damned. And it’s not an accident. God choose from the beginning to use foreigners like Abraham and Jacob, slaves like the Israelites and the lowly of the Greco-Roman world, orphans and barren mothers, and ultimately a man – who also happened to be God himself – counted as political criminal and strung up in the most shameful way possible. For some reason, God choose the shit of the earth (Terry Eagleton’s translation of anawim, a word that Paul uses for the low of the earth that make of the church). If you are looking for something offensive, this is it.

To clarify this point, here is a great paragraph from David Bentely Hart. Speaking about AC Grayling’s preference for Renaissance art featuring Nubile goddesses rather than Crucified Gods, he says

Here, displayed with an altogether elegant incomprehensibility in Grayling’s casual juxtaposition of the sea-born goddess and the crucified God (who is a crucified man), one catches a glimpse of the enigma of the Christian event, which Nietzsche understood and Grayling does not: the lightning bolt that broke from the cloudless sky of pagan antiquity, the long revolution that overturned the hierarchies of heaven and earth alike. One does not have to believe any of it, of course—the Christian story, its moral claims, its metaphysical systems, and so forth. But anyone who chooses to lament that event should also be willing, first, to see this image of the God-man, broken at the foot of the cross, for what it is, in the full mystery of its historical contingency, spiritual pathos, and moral novelty: that tender agony of the soul that finds the glory of God in the most abject and defeated of human forms. Only if one has succeeded in doing this can it be of any significance if one still, then, elects to turn away.

If you want to understand Christianity, this is the place to start. And, by the way – for all Christians out there – if you want to understand your faith, and your political or otherwise relation to the rest of the world – this is also the place to start.