Tuesday, June 01, 2004
(3:14 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Paul and Nietzsche
For the last year, I have been increasingly interested in Paul, particularly in Paul as interpreted by those outside Christian circles -- first Zizek, then Badiou, and now Jacob Taubes, whose Political Theology of Paul was published in English within the last year. I will not be doing any kind of summary of Taubes's work, which is itself a fragment, one last series of lectures while Taubes was quite literally on his deathbed. The incomplete nature of the text is especially frustrating when Taubes turns to the relationship between Paul and Freud.
Taubes's treatment of Paul and Nietzsche, however, is substantially complete, and it is one of several factors that are convincing me that to understand Paul, and therefore Christianity, it is necessary to understand Nietzsche. The problem with understanding Christianity is the romanticization of Christ -- since Christ is good, then anything bad that came out of Christianity must not be real Christianity. Such romanticism robs the gospel message of any concrete content, thus removing any grounds on which one could evaluate whether the gospel is "good" or attractive or a desirable goal. There are very few thinkers who escape such romanticism; I think Nietzsche is one of them, barely. His move of identifying Paul as the founder of Christianity could have been an opportunity for one more chance to get to the real "core" of the Christian message that Paul obscured, but no one can read Nietzsche and claim that he regards Christ the "holy idiot" as a desirable model. Jesus had potential
So now I am going to quote a long passage from Taubes. All boldface (since blockquotes are always italic in my template) are Taubes's italics or emphasis. Underlining indicates my emphasis. This is also a good chance for my readers to get a taste of Taubes's delivery style, which made this text a real joy to read -- I recommend it to everyone.
...increasingly, as Nietzsche's investigations expand and reach a kind of world-historical perspective, he asks why lordship comes to décadence in the first place. How can the ruler become weak? Doesn't he hold everything in his hand? And that's when Nietzsche invents... the type of the priest. The priest is the one who participates in lord-ship but who now emphasizes spiritual values. Not the blond beast, not strength, not power, but one who instills something like sin, like conscience. And this is where the bug gets into aristocratic history. If you will--and one mustn't underestimate the influence of such ideas--this influence extends to Adolf Hitler's saying that conscience is a Jewish invention. This is a sum--and, if I may say so, an accurate sum--drawn from Nietzschean thought, which is preserved in the table talk.
This is what Nietzsche meant: A type emerges here, the priest, and in this type he discovered the first poison of resentment that infiltrates the social body. The type par excellence of the priest is Paul. Sometimes he changes the names: Socrates, Paul, or Jesus, Paul; but in principle it is certain that starting with Daybreak the cannons are pointed at Paul. And pointed in an invective manner that really gives one pause. I am a level-headed reader. However big an authors mouth, or his pen, I ask after what in Yiddish is called tachles. What does he say? Not what does he talk, but what does he say? That's when it becomes clear to me that Nietzsche actually ties himself up in a very deep contradiction. He has a criterion for the status of man. The status of a man is measured according to how he succeeds in forming the values of other men superglobally and over centuries, in imposing upon them his own values. Now, I say, if this is the case: Who has determined the values of the Occident, in Nietzsche's own sense, more deeply than Paul? So he must be the most important man. Because what did Nietzsche want? The transvaluation of values. Well, so there we have someone who pulled it off! And on this point, Nietzsche is very envious too. So he has to say: this guy pulled it off because the poison of resentment holds sway within him....
That's why the history of décadence, the history of modernity is a history that can be pinned on Paul. Because if it is possible for these values that Paul entrenched all over the world by the expansion of Christianity (not that they were adhered to, heavens no, that's not what's at issue here, but that they are there in the first place, as a symbolon) if it is possible then, for these values to be overcome, then I turn out to be the greater lawgiver. This Nietzsche saw quite rightly: either he fails, or a new age begins with him. That is, a new age that begins with a new bible, that is, with the parody of the Bible, Zarathustra...
