Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
Chapter Seven
The rise of suspicion: the religious criticism of religion
‘Idolatry’ is perhaps the one religious category that has taken on and maintains the most secular and critical power.
Idolatry as ideological criticism: the stage is set
In the hands of the Old Testament prophets idolatry was as powerful a warning against false religion as could be imagined. Until the nineteenth century it would have been almost unthinkable that idolatry could be used against not only false religion but against religion itself. What may at first seem an odd use of idolatry as a diatribe against Christian faith in the hands of the great secular prophets of the nineteenth century in fact turns out to be a powerful reminder of the theological temptations that befall the human heart in all ages. It should also come as no surprise that Christianity’s sharpest critics at the end of the Enlightenment should rail against the established church in much the same fashion that the Old Testament prophets railed against Israel’s idolatries in the seventh and eighth centuries BC. The surprise in the nineteenth century was that this form of criticism withered away almost as quickly as it arose. Narrating the story of the secular prophets in the nineteenth century illuminates both the conceptual power of idolatry and the enduring liturgical nature of human identity.
The nineteenth century is neatly demarcated by two of the greatest minds of the modern era: Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) at the beginning and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) at the end. It is imperative to note that Kant’s intellectual shadow dominated the agenda of the nineteenth century unlike any thinker has dominated an age before or since. At the other end of the century it is not an exaggeration to claim that Nietzsche brought the Kantian enterprise to a close, though there were signs that it lingered on for another fifty years, albeit in a severely weakened form.
Alfred North Whitehead wrote famously of the history of philosophy that it was but a footnote to Plato. How much more, then, is it true to say that the nineteenth century was but a footnote to Immanuel Kant. No figure of any age so dominated philosophical discourse in the succeeding age as Kant. His shadow was long and his influence pervasive in the nineteenth century. Nearly every thinker of consequence in the nineteenth century thought Kant had set the agenda to which serious public intellectuals had to respond.
Kant was the central figure of the German Enlightenment. He was born, raised and spent most of his life in the East Prussian city of Königsberg (Kaliningrad). By his own admission there was little of note in Kant’s biography. He led a dull life. He never married and the well-rehearsed story is told of the housewives of Königsberg setting their clocks by the regularity of Kant’s walks in the afternoon. He was raised in a deeply religious home, studied theology in the university, but was generally impatient with traditional formulations of religious belief. He also had an abiding distrust of history as the primary vehicle of religious truth. Being faithful to his own Pietist background, Kant attempted to safeguard religious belief from the inroads being made by a rationalist scepticism grounded in historical criticism. He believed traditional Christian confession was little prepared for this onslaught.
Kant’s central project through the productive years of his writing career concerned the grounding of the natural sciences in a critical philosophical framework that was influenced by both the empirical and rationalist traditions. He affirms in his first major work, The Critique of Pure Reason (1781), that human knowledge begins with sense impressions (following David Hume) but has to consist of more than mere sense impressions. There must be a natural ordering of the impressions according to certain mental categories, such as the concepts of space and time. These categories are the filters through which the world is apprehended and interpreted. They also provide the glue that holds the impressions of the world together.
There are objects that cannot be filtered through our mental categories, most notably God and the self. These are objects of the noumenal realm. They are not the sorts of things of which we can form any sense impression. Try as we might, God and the self cannot be seen or touched. Consequently Kant believed they were not objects of knowledge, but rather objects of faith. Convictions about them rest not on any empirical evidence, but rather on their utility for ethical conduct. In matters of morality Kant thought the concepts of justice and goodness were universal. But further, he believed, our concepts of them depended on there being a final standard of justice and goodness, namely God. Kant rejected the classical proofs for God’s existence and in their stead argued on the basis of morality that humankind nonetheless had to continue to believe in God if morality were to survive.
Kant was convinced that knowledge was best pursued outside the bounds of the authority of church and state. He defended this claim in his aptly titled work Religion Within the Bound of Reason (1793). He believed that an officer of the church was not free to teach what he pleased. It was his religious duty to teach what the church taught. A scholar on the other hand ought to have the freedom to follow truth wherever it led. As a scholar, empirical and rational evidence were paramount to sustain conviction. In matters of religion simple faith alone could sustain belief. But in matters of science and history reason was humankind’s only reliable guide.
The Enlightenment challenge to older forms of institutional authority was by the opening of the nineteenth century well entrenched. Kant brought these challenges together into a sophisticated conceptual framework that gave intelligible voice to the suspicion of all cultural authorities except an individual’s own reason. The external authorities, most notably of church and king, were replaced by a new subjective authority – critical human reason, as Kant had described its inner workings. This effectively formalized what has often been called the ‘subjective turn’. The individual subject (or at least those individual subjects who happened to be teaching in prestigious universities of Europe) was seen as the pre-eminent authority in matters pertaining to the constituents of the real world and how that world was known. The working assumption was that a disinterested scholar, rather than any religious cleric, was in a far superior position to know the world as it really was. According to Kant, ecclesiastical commitment clouded one’s view of reality.
This precipitated a crisis throughout the nineteenth century regarding the proper grounds for believing in God. The long shadow Kant’s work exerted on the nineteenth century suggested that religion could no longer be grounded in historical facts or abstract metaphysical claims. One very compelling alternative was to look for the origin of religion within the psychological needs of humans themselves. This alternative supposed that scholars ought to pay attention to the natural origins of religion, that is those elements of human nature that gave rise to religious belief. The search for these naturalized origins took nineteenth-century thinkers in many directions, though they were bound together by the belief that religion’s source was not in the historical and verifiable past nor in a transcendental and absolute future. Religion belonged to the inner emotive (and nonrational) nature of humans.
The significance of Kant’s legacy in the nineteenth century was effectively to divide intellectual enquiry into two separate domains, the secular and the sacred. The secular world of science was the world of facts and data. The sacred world of religion was the world of faith and trust. In the one realm objectivity and hard-headed scepticism were prized; in the other, blind belief and obedience to authority ruled. There was virtually no interaction between these two domains, nor, according to Kant, should that be worrisome. To hard-headed sceptics after Kant the task was less to defend the secular domains of knowledge than to wonder aloud why the sacred world would any longer be needed. Though it did not appear so at the time, the nineteenth century witnessed the virtual explosion of the secular expanse and the compartmentalization of the sacred realm. Throughout the nineteenth century secular prophets foretold a day when the secular would entirely swallow the sacred, and there would no longer reside a compelling reason to believe in the old world of transcendent beings and traditional values.
The intellectual momentum throughout the nineteenth century headed in the direction of religious unbelief, though much of that did not appear in the English-speaking world until the beginning of the twentieth century. The major intellectual voices mostly spoke German in the nineteenth century and pressed the divide between the secular and the sacred in a fashion probably unforseen by Kant. Starting with Ludwig Feuerbach and culminating in Friedrich Nietzsche, the secular so expanded as to make the sacred seem virtually irrelevant. Traditional religious belief was on trial and a guilty verdict seemed assured by the tone of the secular prophets.
Kant had argued at the end of The Critique of Pure Reason that the objects of the noumenal world (God and self most prominently) were objects not of knowledge, but rather of faith. The secular prophets of the nineteenth century accepted this premise, but instead of viewing the objects of faith as protected from the inroads of empirical enquiry (as the nineteenth-century transcendentalists claimed) they viewed them as irrelevant and in many instances as damaging to human progress. After Kant (and Hegel) these radical thinkers wondered aloud why people believed in God if there was no empirical evidence in his favour. They also well understood the intricacies of the Christian tradition, since most of them had been reared in it. Borrowing the most powerful form of criticism against false religion, the secular prophets turned the tool on its head. Instead of seeking the grounds of false beliefs in idolatry, they supposed religious belief of every kind was intrinsically idolatrous. It was idolatrous precisely because it manifested the disposition of all religious people to create a god in their own image. Religion and idolatry went hand in hand because they were identical – or so the secular prophets hoped to prove.
Kant’s primary interlocutor early in the nineteenth century was G. W. F. Hegel, who accepted some of Kant’s critical realism but also thought it profoundly insensitive to larger metaphysical realities. In many ways Hegel thought he might be able to turn the clock back – reversing the trends unleashed by Kant and the shift towards empirical investigations. Hegel was one of the last grand metaphysicians of the era and in enigmatic ways provided a perfect foil for the later radical secular prophets to appropriate Kant for their own purposes. As it turned out, most German radical intellectuals of the nineteenth century saw Hegel as the last gasp of an outdated, outmoded religion – the religion that believed in things that could not be seen or heard. A quick detour through Hegel is needed to set the wider context for the introduction of idolatry as the prime conceptual tool in the project of the radical secular prophets.
A central Hegelian theme was the contention that history had an ultimate purpose, grounded in the outworking of the Absolute Mind. History moved in inexorable fashion as the self-actualization of this Absolute Mind. In other words, ideas moved history. In religion Hegel supposed that animism was the earliest world view, opposed at some later point by pantheism. A resulting synthesis of sorts, polytheism was itself later opposed by theism. Theism persisted for a time until it clashed with deism, and the resulting synthesis was Hegel’s own brand of religious idealism. It was this synthesis that Hegel believed had brought the dialectical movement of religious history to a climax. This cycle of conflicting religious world views was neither haphazard nor accidental. Neither could that history be reduced merely to empirical and circumstantial realities. It was ideologies rather than social and material realities that mattered most.
Hegel’s religious views were an enigmatic blend of Platonism and Christianity. Plato had supposed that the purpose and meaning of objects in the world lay in a world beyond history. Christianity supposed that the purpose and meaning of objects in the world lay in the meaning granted them by a transcendent deity. Hegel combined the two by collapsing the transcendent world and the historical realm into one.
His followers divided into two camps: those who believed his system was compatible with Christianity (right-wing Hegelians) and those who did not believe this (left-wing Hegelians). The vastly more influential left-wing Hegelians sought to press the radical demands of history as they perceived them on any and all ideology, especially religious ideologies. In part they reversed the priority of ideas over history that Hegel had thought so critical. Rather than ideas moving history, the radicals supposed that concrete empirical history was the only source of ideas. The left-wing Hegelians included biblical scholars such as D. F. Strauss and F. C. Baur, who sought to undermine the ancient conviction that the Bible was a word from outside history. They argued that the Bible was merely a product of its own historical contexts. Other left-wing Hegelians such as Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx claimed that all convictions about God were in fact merely disguised assertions about humanity. In their hands theology became anthropology. These radicals followed Hegel in supposing that history was always a struggle. Religious, political and social conflict were at the very centre of human history. Far from trying to achieve a state of perfection, real social science ought to study and validate these historical tensions, and across the breadth of the nineteenth century religion was often viewed as a primary animating source of conflict. This stereotyping of religion and historical conflict would last throughout the nineteenth century. And the reason it lasted, in part, was that it provided a ‘clean’ alternative to Christian views of God’s providence over history. It appeared to provide a safely secular way to explain history.
Idolatry as psychological projection
Christianity’s radical critics in the nineteenth century emerged in a most surprising way. Using a fundamental argument against false religion as the primary argument against all religion had very little historical precedent. The expectations in the conflict between Christianity and its nineteenth-century detractors would more likely have focused on the accepted facts of history. Was the resurrection historical fact or not? Did miracles happen or not? These oft-heard questions of the eighteenth century receded into the background by the early part of the nineteenth century in large measure because religion had been reconceived primarily as a matter of the heart, a place where the facts of history did not encroach. Far from safeguarding religious faith, this opened it up to an entirely different line of attack. That attack began most clearly in the work of Ludwig Feuerbach, the best known of the left-wing Hegelians and one of their most radical. He had studied at the University of Heidelberg and then at Berlin under Hegel himself. His first published work in 1830 was a searing criticism of Christianity, painting it to be inhuman and egotistic. Before long he was widely known for his zeal for atheism, a zeal that probably cost him a permanent appointment as a university professor in Germany, but it was also a zeal for which the twentieth century viewed him as prophetic.
Feuerbach’s overriding aim was to undermine the confidence in a divine being whom he believed did not exist. Feuerbach did not suppose that the Christian church was particularly detrimental to civilization. Christians had simply misplaced a trust they ought to have had in themselves for a loyalty to a non-existent deity. At times he supposed the church was the last remnant of superstition left in the West, but the church still possessed an unfortunate hold on Western culture. His task was not so much to destroy the church as to cleanse it of superstitions. Karl Barth would later write of Feuerbach:
His principal aim was to change the friends of God into the friends of man, believers into thinkers, worshippers into workers, candidates for the other world into students of this world, Christians, who on their own confession are half-animal and half-angel into men – whole men.
Feuerbach believed the Christian religion confessed loyalty to a being that did not exist. This meant that in the study of religion scholars learned about the religious yearnings of human beings, not about some transcendent reality. Those religious yearnings might have been perfectly natural but were misplaced when viewed as being fulfilled by a deity residing in a distant place in the sky. Feuerbach’s task was to reorient the religious impulse from a worship of an external object to the admiration of the aspirations of all humankind.
Humans, he believed, were prone to create God in their own image as a projection of their ideals. The problem lay in trusting the ideal as if it existed independent of one’s desires. The ideal might have been useful as an imaginative construct to illuminate fundamental values, but the objectification of the concept was dangerous. Feuerbach contended that the creation of God as an objectified ideal alienated human beings from their own nature.
Lying behind this prophetic warning was his conviction that self-consciousness was both a great glory and a great danger. Selfconsciousness separated humankind from the beasts and permitted civilization to emerge. But it also prompted the creation of idols. The ability to name oneself as a species (in contrast to the animals) led to the illusion that abstract objects such as ‘goodness’, ‘god’ or ‘humankind’ existed above individual human beings. Concepts such as beauty or truth existed only as imaginative concepts in the mind
This entailed for Feuerbach that there was no ideal human by any name – much less a deity that existed in a human image. There were only concrete human beings. In Feuerbach’s wonderfully ugly phrase, ‘Man is what he eats,’ nothing more. Combining all of the positive character traits of individual humans gave rise to believing in a perfect human character, which came to be known by the name ‘God’. To see this was to be cured of it Feuerbach thought. The hard part, however, was seeing it. And what better way for Christians to see this, thought Feuerbach, than to reframe the language of idolatry. Feuerbach well understood that the Old Testament prophets had charged Israel with believing in false gods, of creating gods in their own image. Prophets such as Isaiah and Amos understood the powerful human drive to craft a deity that served selfish interests. What these prophets failed to recognize, according to Feuerbach, was that YHWH was Israel’s original idol, created in the image of the powerful overlord who would protect them against the tyrants of the ancient world, and provide for them a Promised Land. Railing against the idols of pagans, Israel had failed to see their own idolatry.
All gods were simply the objectification of human aspirations. ‘What humans are not, but what they will to be, just that and only that is God.’ Humans hope for peace and so create a God who will bring peace. Humans hope for love, and so create a God of love. Humans hope for victory, and so create a God who will bring them victory. Humans create a God in the mirror of their hopes. ‘If God were a being of the birds, he would have been a winged creature’ (28).
An idol symbolized a God who did not exist. But the power of the idol was nonetheless profound and often enduring. In the modern world the gods of ancient Greece had come to be viewed as fictional figures in mythical stories. But at one time these ancient deities demanded absolute loyalty from their human subjects. Some gods demanded children to be sacrificed to them. Others demanded ritual prostitution to be performed. Ancient city states were powerful precisely because their local gods were powerful, or so the ancients believed. So it was with Christianity, Feuerbach believed.
When the ancient polytheistic civilizations fell, they were replaced by a Roman empire that united much of the known world. No longer could they be content with local deities. Rome’s god must eventually be shown to be universal and absolute. Their culture and context demanded a monotheism, and what better place to look than to ancient Israel, yet not in its original Semitic context but in its reshaped Hellenized form, namely that of Christianity. The Romans borrowed Christianity as the ideological means to justify themselves and their place in the world. Long gone, however, in the nineteenth century was the Roman ideology in culture. The world was no longer Roman, and if the Enlightenment had accomplished anything it was to unsettle the old Roman alliance between throne and altar. Political authority rested in the voice of the populace, not in the mediated divine voice of the church. Political culture had begun to loose its bonds to monarchies and must now be freed from Roman religious idols as well. Feuerbach did not desire a new replacement set of idols but the removal of all idols. He desired a culture that simply believed in itself.
The process of overcoming the idols of religion would be a long and arduous task. Idols were the sorts of things people grew comfortable with, which could not be given up easily. The way out of idolatry was first to look inside the human heart itself, to see the needs that gave rise to creating idols in the first place. If those needs could be exposed as the source of religious belief, then it would not be long before the edifice built upon those foundations would come crumbling down. Feuerbach referred to this as the ‘psychogenetic method’. Locating the psychological origins of belief effectively undermined its validity.
God had to cease to exist independently of human hopes and desires. The proper object of religious worship was in fact humankind. It was important to locate the essence of perfection not outside human experience but within humans themselves. This would change the worship of God into the worship of humankind. It would also place squarely on the shoulders of humankind the responsibility to work for peace, to show love – to exhibit the very characteristics they had mistakenly projected upon God. Humans needed to exert their own will rather than to believe that someone or something else would or could solve their problems.
To this end, then, Feuerbach attempted to translate Christianity into a language without any transcendent entities, without any gods. In calculating fashion he believed he could rid the world of idolatry by translating the historic Christian confession into a language without theological overtones. He wrote of performing ‘pneumatic hydrotherapy’ – by which he meant throwing out the baptismal water and replacing it with real water. Humans needed to be rid of the magical water, and get about the business of cleaning themselves with real water. Feuerbach hoped the sacred would get translated into a fully secular discourse.
A brief critical note ought to be sounded now with regard to Feuerbach, as he set the agenda for other secular prophets throughout the nineteenth century. Like many of his contemporaries Feuerbach had yet to wrestle with radical evil, and in particular with radical social evil. He expressed a naive optimism about unbridled human progress freed from the religious constraints of the past. Later thinkers in the left-wing Hegelian tradition would try to do greater justice to evil though there remained a residue of genuine naiveté towards evil. Without God there was no final constraint on evil, as the twentieth century all too painfully bore out.
If Feuerbach had a naively optimistic view of humankind, he also had no means to account for his own views. He believed in human goodness but had no ultimate ground for it. Human dignity in hindsight appeared as but a remnant Feuerbach borrowed from his own prior Judeo-Christian tradition, though without any borrowing rights! After Feuerbach it became the task to ground human dignity in something intrinsic to human culture, though this remained fragile given the transitory character of that culture.
Without recognizing it, Feuerbach had given an implicit counterargument to his claims. Maybe unbelief also had a psychological explanation that in turn would undermine its validity. We follow the narrative from Feuerbach to Marx to Freud to Nietzsche before this irony fully unfolded.
Idolatry as alienation and oppression
Like Feuerbach Marx was well acquainted with the Judeo-Christian tradition. He was born of Prussian-Jewish parents, who converted to Protestantism for what appeared matters of convenience. Though young Karl was baptized into the Christian church, he was never religiously serious and was always suspicious of the motivations behind religious commitment. He studied law and philosophy at university and was, like Feuerbach, profoundly influenced by Hegel. He was arrested, tried and expelled from Germany in 1848 for publishing a radical journal of political protest, and lived the rest of his life in London in relative poverty. During his early time in London he met Friedrich Engels, a prosperous textile mill owner who would support Marx for much of his life.
Marx was taken aback by the extreme working conditions of the early stages of the Industrial Revolution in England. Having none of the naive optimism of Feuerbach regarding human nature, he was appalled at the inhumanity so manifest throughout the Industrial Revolution. Ordinary workers in the factories were exploited with tedious menial labour, low wages and painfully long hours. Young children were forced into similar conditions as the only means of support for their families. They were often given barely enough food to sustain their existence. Workers were treated as commodities. The intensity of factory life crushed many of the labourers in its grip. Jobs were scarce and pay minimal. Demand for jobs was greater than their supply. As a result owners were permitted to abuse workers as they saw fit. For all intents and purposes workers had become virtual slaves of owners.
Following Feuerbach, Marx thought humans were simply the matter out of which they had come. But unlike Feuerbach, Marx thought rather pessimistically about human nature left to itself. Humans were intrinsically selfish apart from the social pressures to sacrifice themselves for the good of their community. Social networks exerted inordinate pressure on individuals to conform to acceptable moral standards, and Marx supposed these social networks were rooted primarily in religious ways of life. If one could change the religious social structures, then there would be hope of changing individuals.
Firmly within the Hegelian tradition Marx supposed that conflict lay near the centre of human history and was the force that pushed it forward. For Marx progress was inevitable but could be accomplished only through struggle. That struggle was best described in terms of social conflict between diverse economic classes. And that struggle could be best understood by more carefully understanding human nature. Marx believed it was of the essence of human nature to work, and humans had an intrinsic natural value that was simply a function of being human. They also possessed an exchange value that was their value as determined by the economic system in which they laboured. A farmer was of much value in an agrarian society, and a banker of much value in an early capitalist society. Updating the illustration, rock stars are valuable today only in an entertainment culture.
Workers could be exploited when their exchange value was itself controlled by individuals seeking their own good rather than the good of the whole community. Deviant social organizations as well as individuals would exploit workers if given the opportunity, as was happening throughout England during the early days of the Industrial Revolution. The result was that workers were alienated from their own labour, neither controlling its value nor its conditions. Craftsmen were alienated from the products of their labours on the assembly line, becoming cogs in a machine they did not own. The drudgery and tedious work further alienated workers from their dignity. Lying behind this dehumanizing and degrading system were the owners of the factories and the religious institutions that legitimated their oppression.
As the emerging dominant economic system of the nineteenth century, capitalism was most often justified by appeal to religious grounds in general and to Christianity in particular. For Marx the Judeo-Christian religion was capitalism’s legitimating world view. Capitalism had latched onto it as the means to validate it. To use Marx’s famous phrase, religion had become the ‘opium of the people’, a drug needed to keep the addictions to capitalism strong. Religion was the sentiment of a heartless world and the soul of a soulless condition.
For Marx the use of religion to validate the power structures during the Industrial Revolution revealed its authentic character as a determined oppressor. A God created in the oppressor’s image was nothing but a fantasy figure serving to justify the system. In capitalism this ‘God’ preached obedience to masters, humility and meekness in the face of hardship and, above all, rewards in another life. All of these religious ‘virtues’ encouraged workers to be servile to those in authority.
For Marx the criticism of religion was the beginning of the end of oppression and alienation. If religion was fundamentally idolatrous, creating a God to serve the economic interests of masters, then workers would have to throw off the shackles of religion if they genuinely desired freedom and dignity. Religion might have appeared to give hope in a hopeless world, but that hope had to be made more concrete and historical and could be done so only by the abolition of religion and the revolt of the workers against their oppressors. For the owners, religion helped to cement the status quo. For the workers, it helped them cope with the status quo. In both cases religion was a conserving force on behalf of the status quo. For Marx the only way forward was the unmasking of these idols. That would be accomplished only by a determined revolt against capitalism and exploitation, by throwing off the shackles of religion in favour of an atheistic humanism. Until humans believed in themselves they would not throw off the burdens of their oppressors.
Marx’s antidote to capitalism was found in his most influential work, The Communist Manifesto. In that work he laid out a programme whereby private property was to be abolished, religion to be abandoned and human communities to flourish. It assumed that without capitalist economic structures mutual cooperation would emerge among communities and even nations. Goods would be produced according to ability and distributed according to need.
Marx’s vision was thoroughly utopian and, with the hindsight of the twentieth century, incredibly naive. It did not take individual evil seriously, hoping only that systemic changes would produce the eradication of evil altogether. And, unbeknown to Marx, communities could oppress as easily as individuals. However, lest Marx’s critique be too easily dismissed, we should note that Amos sounded similar alarms about the oppression within Israel during the eighth century BC. In like manner James, in the first century AD, brought attention to the manner in which religion could be reshaped to serve the interests of the rich and powerful. Marx’s critical use of idolatry worked because greed and oppression often had a religious face to them. Christians were (are) not immune to using their own religious views to legitimate actions repugnant to the gospel. Marx understood that better than much of the established church in the nineteenth century.
What he did not so easily see was that religious confession may also function as a prophetic balance against human injustice because it offers a Word from outside. Its transcendent voice stands as a judge over all peoples and thereby offers the very tools of culture criticism for which Marx yearned. One need only read the Old Testament prophets to find this. Without a transcendent Word the only judge of human actions can come from within human cultures, which by all accounts are always corruptible, individually and corporately.
Idolatry and the origin of religion
Placing Freud in the chronological sequence of the nineteenth-century secular prophets is stretching the temporal construct almost to the breaking point. Freud belongs most fully to the twentieth century and most assuredly was neither a philosopher nor a theologian. However, there is no clearer representative of the flowering of the secular prophets than in the work of Freud. He distilled their larger claims into a working framework that would be influential well beyond the midpoint of the twentieth century. And though Freud’s primary frame of reference was psychology, his impact was felt most acutely across the religious spectrum. His treatment of the natural neurosis of religion brought the secular prophets’ tradition to its most aggressive posture.
Leaving aside Freud’s developed thought on psychological structures, his central contribution to the discourse on idolatry lay in his psychological depictions of the rise of religion. For Freud religion was a psychological disorder common to humankind. Religion arose because of an inner conflict within each person. This was a conflict of dependence upon others and the yearning for independence from others. These were natural forces warring within each person’s soul. The ‘normal’ state of this conflict depended upon one’s own life journey. At birth each person was naturally more predisposed towards dependency on others for survival. As natural development took place, maturing individuals eventually reached a stage where they became self-reliant. Failure to work through that transition from dependence to independence resulted in neuroses of various kinds. When taken collectively, these neuroses expressed themselves most prominently in religious ways.
The central assumption of Freud was that religion has no hold on the ‘way things are’. Religious claims about the existence of God ought to be dismissed because they have no basis in fact. The more pressing question is, why is there religion in the first place? Freud depicted a hypothetical ancient tribal context as the clearest way to explain the emergence of religion in society. The chief of the tribe was viewed as the primal father in the tribe. He held complete authority by virtue of his office as chief, largely justified by the need for order in a surrounding world of chaos. Those outside the structures of power eventually revolted against the chief simply because of the natural desire for independence. In their mutiny the chief would have been killed. However, far from being freed from the tyranny of authority, the younger warriors would have suffered a great sense of loss and guilt. The loss of leadership brought chaos and disruption. To repair the moral fabric that appeared to hold the tribe together the young murderers created a totemic religion wherein the memories of the dead chief restored order and meaning. The young warriors worshipped the chief as if he were still alive, creating representations of him out of wood and stone. It was not long before someone claimed that the chief was still alive, spiritually existing in some distant heaven. The projection of his image was identified as a supreme being and eventually referred to as God. The will of the chief became absolute and therein the warriors eventually found forgiveness.
This mythical depiction of Freud’s described the collective ‘Oedipal complex’ from which religion was to be explained and explained away. Given the familial analogies within Christianity (Father and Son), Freud intended to discredit religious belief by claiming that it evoked a psychological dependence that all social scientists then regarded as neurotic – or so it seemed to Freud. The social structures built to support the myth of religion had been strong enough to sustain this totemic world view for several thousand years. With the coming of modernity Freud saw a time when the shackles of religion could be thrown off and humans could gain their (psychological) independence.
At the root of religion, then, was fear. It was the fear that one could not stand alone. It was a fear of the unknown – especially the unknowns of life in the face of natural disasters. Storms of immense power and natural forces beyond human control threatened human survival at every turn. The first step in dealing with these fears of the unknown was to attempt to tame nature itself. Freud supposed that early animists humanized nature by projecting spiritual qualities onto it. But when nature still seemed to treat humankind arbitrarily, tossing storms of destruction at them, a stronger solution had to be found. If nature could not be tamed, a supernatural force was needed. This supernatural force had to be powerful enough to control the threatening nature, and yet compassionate enough to care for those threatened by nature. Better still if that supernatural force were itself personal and had much in common with humankind. This would assure that the supernatural force would be loyal to the very humans threatened by the forces of nature. And so the resultant mechanism to overcome their fears was to create an idol in the image of those in need, yet stronger and cleverer than them. But far from granting them solace from their fears, this idol kept them in a perpetual state of dependence, always demanding obedience.
The failure to mature beyond the stage of dependence created the opportunity for religion. And religion all but guaranteed that humans would never achieve the independence for which they yearned. This Freudian diagnosis seemed irrefutable to a point. It offered no evidence that could contravene it. It depended simply on the explanatory power of its suggestions. Those who wanted to be freed from the constraints of religious authority had simply to cast away their shackles and be free. Recognizing the neurosis was the first step in curing it. A determined exercise of the will was the lone missing ingredient beyond the correct diagnosis.
The Freudian explanations of religion were fairly tidy. And like its predecessors, the explanations were conceptually dependent on biblical notions of idolatry. Biblical religion had offered resources that in turn could be (and were) used against it. The blind spot for this use of idolatry was the problem of self-referential incoherence. Any criticism of religion that depended finally upon a psychological depiction is open to the same charge. If there were corrupting motives behind religion, could not a similar tale be told with respect to the motives behind the critique? This is to argue that if there were a psychology of belief, there might also be a psychology of unbelief. The presence (or absence) of psychological motives behind (ir)religious beliefs entailed neither the truth nor falsity of the beliefs in question. Freud, as the secular prophets had before him, assumed a naturalistic world view, and on that basis went looking for the only possible cause of religion – a natural one.
However, as with Marx so with Freud, one ought to be careful in too easily dismissing the naiveté of the criticism. The canon of Scripture is replete with examples of idolatrous beliefs and actions on the part of the visible covenant community of God. Woe unto the modern church if secular prophets are required to identify the modern forms of idolatry within Christendom. The church ought to be better equipped to think about itself critically in an age of great temptations. And in part a debt is owed to Freud for exposing tendencies of psychological dependence that often influence how God is viewed. In the present environment too often those dependencies mean that God’s primary responsibility is to look out for the wealth and well-being of the person. Is it not rather the responsibility of the church to reflect the living and true God in his desire for truth, beauty and justice? Religion can be psychologically manipulated and the danger in an individualist culture is precisely that at which Freud often pointed.
However, the secular prophets from Feuerbach to Freud little understood the character of God’s holiness as portrayed in Scripture. Whereas the tamed god of civil religion might have been an easy target to shoot at, this was far less so in the case of the terrifying God met in the books of Job, Isaiah, Hebrews or Revelation – or almost any other of the canonical books if looked at carefully enough. When Job is overwhelmed in the face of God’s presence, there can be little doubt that, left to his own devices, this is not the sort of God that Job would have created (Job 38 – 40). So with Isaiah’s terrifying vision of the holiness of God, one would be hard pressed to conclude that YHWH is merely a figment of Isaiah’s imagination, created to meet Isaiah’s private needs. The author to the book of Hebrews well understood the costliness of salvation in Christ, and it cannot reasonably be said that this is a gospel he would have created if given the opportunity to make things easy for himself. So the suffering and martyrdom portrayed throughout the book of Revelation makes it highly unlikely that any person looking for comfort and convenience would have created a god that brought so much difficulty into the lives of his people. In these and so many other ways the biblical message resounds with a message too overwhelming to be simply a product of an idolatrous imagination. The church ought to be well reminded that in the face of the withering critiques of the secular prophets it must seek to recover the holiness of God in its fullness.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
No one saw the stark contrast between belief and unbelief as Nietzsche, and therefore no other of the secular prophets saw as clearly the implications of atheism. It is fair to say that Nietzsche was the last of the secular prophets, bringing this tradition to its conceptual end, and served as a loud reminder that atheism did not come without great cost. There was no room for easy belief nor easy unbelief after him. It is also important to note that he not only brought the tradition of the secular prophets to a close, but also foreshadowed the coming of the postmodern tradition that put to rest the easy confidence in human nature and rationality trumpeted by the Enlightenment.
Born in Prussian Saxony, Nietzsche’s father was the latest in a long line of Lutheran pastors. But sadly Nietzsche’s father died when Friedrich was just 5 years old, leaving a wife, his mother, two sisters and a daughter to care for the lone son. There was a history of sickness among the males in the family line, and Friedrich was no exception. A fragile child, he was often filled with melancholy and overcome by physical maladies. He battled with bouts of insanity in later life, and wrote his most profound works in a cryptic prose intended to confuse as much as clarify. He died at the relatively young age of 56.
Nietzsche was given a classical education and developed an early love for Greek poetry and mythology. His love of the ancient pagan authors convinced him that Christian morality was repressive and undermined the full moral autonomy of the individual. To Nietzsche there was nothing of greater importance than human freedom, not simply in the sense of being able to choose between alternative actions, but in the larger sense of being freed from any moral constraints whatsoever. Nietzsche would develop this fundamental intuition with a vengeance throughout his life.
While at university he read many of the radical left-wing Hegelians and decided as a result to abandon his Christian upbringing. By all accounts Nietzsche was one of the greatest minds of Western intellectual history and undoubtedly one of Christianity’s sharpest critics ever. It is significant that the university of Leipzig granted him a full academic doctorate without his having fulfilled any of the core requirements, least of all a doctoral dissertation. More amazing still, Nietzsche was promoted to being a full professor in philology the year after being given his academic doctorate, having never taught a class nor written a book. In this light it makes sense why Nietzsche prized intellectual genius and saw it as a flowering of the ancient virtue of creativity in a similar ilk to the great musicians and poets. He came to view Christianity as a repression of this creativity and thereby civilization’s worst enemy.
His analysis was not cool and dispassionate like many of the earlier post-Enlightenment thinkers. There was no pretence of an objective sifting of the evidence for and against religion. ‘Disinteredness has no value either in heaven or on earth.’ Nietzsche understood that reason could never be objective. Reason, a tool in the service of desire, could clarify only the stark choices facing all humans. The first and most important choice concerned God. Nietzsche believed with all his heart that if there was a God, Nietzsche could not be free. If he were free, there could be no God. It was that simple – and yet that terrifying. If this was the beginning of the story, it was also the end. To get from start to finish it is important to follow Nietzsche’s path along the way.
In his most notable work, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche painted a picture of two competing world views. He referred to one as the logic of life and the other as the logic of reason. In the former, human existence was the most primal datum. All else came from this. It accepted life simply as it was: to be celebrated and enjoyed. The logic of reason on the other hand imposed a framework of meaning around life in such a manner that human existence was interpreted through a moral and religious framework. Nietzsche represented these conflicting world views by appeal to the ancient mythological figures of Dionysius and Apollos. Dionysius was the god of wine and song. He celebrated life in all its pleasures and all its dangers. Apollos by contrast was the god of order and balance. For Apollos life was not so much to be celebrated as to be organized and interpreted. Beauty was the celebration of harmony and symmetry for Apollos. For Dionysius there was no such thing as beauty except that which came from the flowering of creative genius. Beauty was enjoyed when life was lived to the fullest for Dionysius. By contrast Apollos preached, ‘Know thyself and do nothing in excess.’ Dionysius proclaimed, ‘Celebrate the excess of life always.’
Whom should we choose, Dionysius or Apollos? According to Nietzsche this was the fundamental choice between the logic of life and the logic of reason. It was also a choice that could not be settled by appeal to reasons – for that would already assume the conclusion the evidence was intended to support. The choice was absolute and absolutely arbitrary. Life could not be chosen because it was ‘right’, for this would be to choose the logic of reason. There can be no reasons in favour of reason, nor in favour of life.
Nietzsche had in effect claimed that all morality and truth in the end were arbitrary – for every argument must start initially with premises that cannot be supported. The original foundation of every argument is merely ‘suspended in air’. First principles are simply and only arbitrary choices, if they are indeed the principles upon which all other principles stand. In this regard first principles cannot be reasonable or rational if they are indeed first principles, for there would be no principles prior to first principles by which to judge whether the first principles satisfied them as reasonable.
If we think of foundationalism as that system of logic committed to rational first principles, Nietzsche heralded the end of foundationalism. At the time most thought of foundationalism as the logical framework of Christian belief. Christians believed in first principles as laid out in Holy Scripture. Few realized that the Enlightenment critiques of Christian belief were every bit as foundational in structure. ‘Trust only empirical evidence’ may seem like a reasonable first principle – but on what basis is it reasonable? None, unless one also assumes that empirical evidence only is reasonable.
The upshot was that rationality came to be seen by Nietzsche as a function of human choice. Rationality was located in human subjectivity rather than any objective rational order. What this entailed was that humans created their own meaning, the logic that made sense of their own lives. They could cede that responsibility to others, but in doing so would themselves have chosen to be slaves to another’s authority over them. Religious people were the worst culprits in this regard. They consigned themselves to the absolute definition by another, and thereby lost altogether what it was that made them truly human: the awful responsibility to choose for oneself.
Nietzsche referred to this ‘awful responsibility’ as the will to power. It was the assertion of the self as the source of meaning. It was the intuition that humans created rather than discovered the world in which their meaning was fixed. In this humans did not find so much as make truth. In contrast to Christianity as well as to the history of the Western philosophical tradition, Nietzsche believed humans did not have a fixed nature. They bore the burden of having to create meaning out of nothing. The Christian tradition had given the illusion that God bore that burden, but, in so doing, Christians had abandoned their true humanity. ‘We should not place perfection above in the heavens or in a place of time nor should we set ourselves a perfection which is unattainable. Man is what man can make of himself.’
If the will to power was the essence of what it meant to be human, then there could be no being who exercised the will to power over another. Most especially, Nietzsche argued, if humans were to exercise their will to power, then God could not be. He had to die if man was to live. For this reason Nietzsche declared God was dead. And if dead, then humankind had to face up to their plight. There was no ultimate meaning to life – only the meaning individuals could create for themselves. There was no absolute good and evil either. The only good left was that which enhanced the feeling of power in each individual to determine his or her own destiny.
Nietzsche believed that in the absence of God and meaning, individuals had to assert a dialectical courage. This was a courage to face up to the consequences of meaninglessness, no longer holding onto the illusion that real absolute meaning could be found or created. This was a call to courage when one knew ultimately that courage would not save. This was the courage to live meaninglessly. Nietzsche understood that few could ever fully face this reality. The person who could overcome the hopelessness of the human plight by the sheer force of his or her will to power Nietzsche called an Übermensch (superperson). In this he was profoundly influenced by the tragic heroes of ancient Greek mythology who fought the gods rather than merely accept their fate.
With the foundation of theism destroyed, and nothing but the will to power left, Nietzsche believed Judeo-Christian morality would eventually crumble. If God were dead, the moral constructs of good and evil would vanish. There would be no room for guilt if right and wrong no longer existed. The only good left would be those actions that were life affirming. All of traditional morality was turned upside down, what Nietzsche called the ‘transvaluation of all values’. Whereas traditional morality valued love of God and love of neighbour, abhorring love of self, Nietzsche believed the only value left would be love of self. Christianity had celebrated humility and meekness, obedience and loyalty. These were moral values for slaves and the weak. The courage to face up to the meaninglessness of life on one’s own terms demanded a morality for self-determining masters.
Nietzsche believed that the rejection of traditional morality was in part accomplished by locating the genesis of moral development, what he called a ‘genealogy of morals’. By locating morality within the story of the past, the pretense to an eternal and transcendent beginning could be abolished. The story of the two moralities (slave and master) arose in cultures that denied desire and endorsed the weaknesses of the masses. The slave morality developed out of fear and hatred of the master class. The impotent, unable to conquer their more worthy and physically powerful foes, sought ‘spiritual revenge’. They made everything that was opposed to the master class ‘good’. Aligning God with their cause, they endorsed the eternal damnation of everyone who violated their moral standards. Eternal damnation was the ultimate revenge, and by it Nietzsche claimed to show that Judeo-Christian morality was rooted not in love but in hatred and vengefulness.
He believed this genealogy of morals was itself sufficient to undermine the slave morality of Christianity by manifesting the stark differences between the two moralities. Christianity was for weak people. Atheism demanded a passionate embrace of strength. Christianity sought to sublimate the core instincts and desires of humanity. Atheism declared that primal instincts and desires should be affirmed. Christianity imposed order by introducing absolutes. Atheism celebrated the chaos of life. Christianity defended the slave morality. Atheism rejected the slave morality and rejoiced that everyone was their own master.
The choice between these alternative moralities and world views was clear and unavoidable, and Christians ought to thank Nietzsche for that clarity. More than anyone else, he was willing to face the consequences of atheism. Liberal Christianity had tried to domesticate religion, making it appear more ‘civilized’, but had denuded it in the process while also trying to avoid the spiritual and moral consequences of its naturalism. The earlier secular prophets had got rid of God, but supposed there was ample room for meaningful existence without him, based largely on the optimistic assumption of human goodness. Nietzsche saw more starkly than his predecessors that without God there was no goodness left, either in humankind or anywhere else. Nietzsche put to rest any easy atheism, as much as the earlier secular prophets had put to death easy believism. Believing in God had no room for making him in one’s own image. By a mirror reasoning Nietzsche believed that atheism had no room for naive hope and optimism. Without God, life was meaningless.
Nietzsche lived the courage of his convictions. He left academic life, believing that it survived by creating an artificial cocoon of ideas. He served for a time in the ambulance corps in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71, in some measure because of his own ill health. During the decade of the 1880s, while suffering from deep clinical depression and wandering around Europe, he wrote his most penetrating and cryptic works. At the end of the decade severe mental illness set in, probably due to a venereal disease acquired during many earlier promiscuous sexual encounters. For the last decade of his life he lived in the care of his mother and sister. It is a strange irony that Nietzsche died while hallucinating that he was Jesus Christ, his greatest enemy.