In Beyond Good and Evil, with a brilliance that terrifies, Nietzsche slashes his way through philosophers, intellectuals, religious and political leaders, not so much to refute them as to dismiss and disparage them. Why slow down to make a tightly reasoned case when withering sarcasm delivered presto can demolish them instead? Disdain drips from Nietzsche’s pen. After his vitriolic diatribes against Plato, Stoics, Epicureans, Kant, Locke, Descartes, Hume, Spinoza, and Schopenhauer, Nietzsche scarcely leaves any school of philosophy in the Western canon standing. He doesn’t just sweep their books and ideas off the table: he turns the table over completely. Nietzsche explodes the black and white markers of morality, replacing them with a spectrum of relativistic grays, splashed with garish colors of egotism, eccentricity, violence, narcissism, and nihilism.

Nietzsche despises weakness. He only respects the heroically strong and he is absolutely certain that the New Man will be motivated by the will to power. But on the way to his new world, Nietzsche bumps up against something he does not understand: the strength of the saint. Nietzsche seems to pause just a moment, suspending the stream of cynicism, as he asks himself: “How is the saint possible?”(47). Intuiting a manifestation of some kind of power (definitely not using a priori synthetic reasoning), he can’t quite bring himself to dismiss saints with the withering disdain he uses to annihilate everyone else.

What is it about the saint that brings this larger-than-life, Byronic, ironic philosopher to a halt? Nietzsche despises all of Christianity, both Protestant and Catholic, and blames it for weakening the fabric of Europe.

Christianity has been the most calamitous kind of arrogance. Men, not high and hard enough to have any right to try to form man as artists; men, not strong and far-sighted enough to let the foreground law of thousand-fold failure and ruin prevail, though it cost them sublime self-conquest; men not noble enough to see the abysmally different order or rank, chasm of rank, between man and man – such men have so far held sway over the fate of Europe, with their “equal before God,” until finally a smaller, almost ridiculous type, a herd animal, something eager to please, sickly, and mediocre has been bred, the European of today (62).

To move the culture forward, Nietzsche proclaims that the new philosopher and the modern man must throw off the shackles of all old ways of thinking. Why, then, does he stop in his tracks to contemplate the saint, the ragged remnant of a musty, mothballed faith of old ladies and little girls?

So far the most powerful human beings have still bowed worshipfully before the saint as the riddle of self-conquest and deliberate final renunciation. Why did they bow? In him – and as it were behind the question mark of his fragile and miserable appearance – they sensed the superior force that sought to test itself in such a conquest, the strength of the will in which they recognized and honored their own strength and delight in dominion: they honored something in themselves when they honored the saint (51).

Is the saint intriguing for Nietzsche because he seems like a worthy adversary? It’s much easier (and quicker) to ridicule a philosopher for his flute playing than to refute his philosophy. But it’s harder to make fun of someone who practices asceticism as a way of life. Nietzsche excoriates people who are driven by appetites for material things, comfort, security, and the desire to be liked and accepted.  These are exactly the things that the saint also eschews. Nietzsche highly values solitude and deep reflection as essential for himself and the new philosopher. The saint also knows is it essential to pull back from the noise and activity of the world to foster the interior life in silence. Nietzsche proclaimed that the new philosopher must answer a higher calling, one that it is extremely difficult to live out, a way of life that can’t be taught. Saints answer the highest calling and are made one at a time, often in pain, usually in obscurity, through a journey of the soul on a path that no one else can show them, except perhaps by example. So is it the similarities to the saint that Nietzsche finds compelling? Or the differences?

Let us ask what precisely about this whole phenomenon of the saint has seemed so enormously interesting to men of all types and ages, even to philosophers. Beyond any doubt, it was the air of the miraculous that goes with it – namely, the immediate succession of opposites, of states of the soul that are judged morally in opposite ways. It seemed palpable that a “bad man” was suddenly transformed into a “saint,” a good man. The psychology we have had so far suffered shipwreck at this point: wasn’t this chiefly because it had placed itself under the dominion of morals, because it too, believed in opposite moral values and saw, read, interpreted these opposites into the text and the facts? (47).

Nietzsche styles himself as the “bad boy,” outspoken, rude, shocking, bombastic, unmeasured, insulting, egotistical, cynical, monstrous, and destructive. He is the quintessential narcissist and a nihilist through and through, bad to the bone. Nietzsche’s goal in Beyond Good and Evil is to take the European culture and shake it by the lapels, slap it across the face, and shout “Wake up!” He rejects as hopelessly naïve and outdated all views of morality that stand stark opposites across from each other. Yet the idea that a human person could truly change from being a “bad man,” whatever that might mean to Nietzsche, into a “saint” or a “good man” is an intriguing possibility.  Is such a thing actually possible? How could it be? Nietzsche has much greater confidence in inborn traits that he claims distinguish masters from slaves throughout all of history. Superior abilities are natural for those who are intended to wield the power over lesser beings. The person destined to be the master is born with strength of will, freedom of spirit, clear, cold judgment, and the ability to embrace contradictions. The will to power in the master is neither good nor bad, it just is, according to Nietzsche. Weakness, on the other hand, in whatever form, belongs to the slave class — and is to be despised. Pity is especially despicable. Sacrifice is a fatal sign of weakness.

Here the saint collides head-on with Nietzsche’s new philosopher and the people he says are destined to govern as the master class. Christians are doomed to be crushed, according to Nietzsche, because their faith cripples their spirit: “From the start, the Christian faith is a sacrifice: a sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of the spirit; at the same time, enslavement and self-mockery, self-mutilation”(46). So if this is true, what is it about the saint that rises above the traits of slavery? Can a Christian rise above the slave mentality? This is a question Nietzsche and his new philosophers do not know how to answer.

[T]he sight of the saint awakened a suspicion in them: such an enormity of denial, of anti-nature will not have been desired for nothing, they said to and asked themselves. There may be a reason for it, some very great danger about which the ascetic, thanks to his secret comforters and visitors, might have inside information. In short, the powerful of the world learned a new fear before him; they sensed a new power, a strange, as yet un-conquered enemy — it was the “will to power” that made them stop before the saint. They had to ask him — (51).

Because Nietzsche obsessively focused on the “will to power” and was such a narcissistic egotist, he could not understand the enormous strength of will that is honed in a saint through the process of sanctification. Precisely the spiritual disciplines that he ridiculed – fasting and abstinence – best train the will to triumph over the body’s appetites, bringing them into obedient submission through self-imposed denial. Through prayer and fasting, the saint’s body and mind are cleansed and purified. Mastering one’s emotions to refrain from giving anyone a sharp retort in anger is much more difficult than exploding; restraint takes much more energy. Being generous in spirit, even to one’s enemies, is one of the hardest things a person can do. Training the spirit to focus single-mindedly on prayer, while excluding everything else, putting stray thoughts aside again and again, requires enormous will power for the contemplative saint. Learning to subject one’s own will to God’s will is a long and often painful process, filled with uncertainty and sometimes fear. But the saint learns to say to God “Thy will be done,” rather than insisting “my will be done.” These are spiritual exercises that the saint engages in constantly to train the will, making it supple and strong. Nietzsche’s approach to life is diametrically opposed, explains Fr. Dwight Longenecker:

Nietzsche despised the Christian virtues of humility, service and self-sacrifice as weakness. What he failed to understand is that the true exercise of these virtues requires superhuman strength. Rather than lowering man, self-sacrificial love is the one thing that raises him from ape to angel.[*]

When a man behaves as a narcissist he does not raise himself above common humanity, but lowers himself to the level of the instinctively self-interested beast. He is therefore not more than human, but less than human. The Nietzschean narcissist cuts himself off from society, from family, friends and from love. The only thing that breaks this cycle of self-adoration is self-sacrificial love, but self-sacrificial love is the one thing the narcissist cannot understand and of which he is incapable.

Only when Nietzsche writes about the value of suffering, does he come close to alignment with Christian understanding. The apostle Paul encourages followers of Christ to rejoice in their sufferings knowing that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance produces character, and character produces hope (Romans 5: 3-5). In a surprisingly similar way, Nietzsche writes:

The discipline of suffering, of great suffering – do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far? That tension of the soul in unhappiness which cultivates its strength, it shudders face to face with great ruin, its inventiveness and courage in enduring, persevering, interpreting, and exploiting suffering, and whatever has been granted to it of profundity, secret, mask, spirit, cunning, greatness – was it not granted to it through the discipline of great suffering? (225).

It is here, in the deepest and most profound kind of suffering, that Nietzsche recognizes something of the greatness possible in the human soul. “In man creature and creator are united: in man there is material fragment, excess, clay, dirt, nonsense, chaos; but in man there is also creator, forgiver, hammer hardness, spectator divinity and seventh day”(225). Great suffering ennobles the soul, burning away superficiality, refining the soul to its essence. This is a spiritual truth that saints know well, and which Nietzsche grasped, although he did not see that the Creator is outside man, not the product of his own will.

The true source of the power of the saint eluded Nietzsche. He never surrendered his will enough to realize that the human person can be empowered by the Holy Spirit to do remarkable things far beyond man’s will or power. As a vessel of God’s power, filled with the Holy Spirit, the saint can heal, prophesy, intercede, preach, lead, inspire, and transform lives because he is equipped with charisms that make him supernaturally effective. The saint serves as God’s presence on earth, wielding His power through the Holy Spirit in the service of others. (cf I Corinthians 12, Romans 12, Ephesians 4). Immense, immeasurable power of the Creator Himself flows through the saint like electricity, like white-hot lightning, transforming the body and soul of the person he or she touches. The saint receives the same astonishing power of the Holy Spirit that fell upon the disciples on Pentecost, even the power to work miracles. The saint lives by the same power that has built and sustained the Church universal, the body of Christ on earth, which has existed for the past 2,000 years, much maligned, often ignored, splintered, but in the end, indomitable. By comparison, the kind of narcissistic, personal power Nietzsche envisioned is a pitiful, pale counterfeit.

[*] Dwight Longenecker, “Nietzsche, Napoleon, and Narcissism,” The Imaginative Conservative. (web)

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Works Cited

Longenecker, Dwight. “Nietzsche, Napoleon, and Narcissism,” The Imaginative Conservative.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil, translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House) 1989.

The featured image is an 1885 portrait of Friedrich Nietzsche and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.