Nietzsche the Christian

Stephen Kern suggestively notes that Bergson, Proust, and Freud, who all “insisted that the past was an essential source of the full life,” had Jewish backgrounds, and he doesn’t think this an accident: “Both Judaism and Christianity share a reverence for the past and argue their validity partly from tradition. The implicit ethic is that old is good.” But Judaism is older, and if old is good older is better: “It is possible that the insistence of these men that the past alone is real, that only the recapture of the past can inspire art or cure neurosis, is linked to this feature of the Jewish experience.”

A few pages later, Kern summarizes Nietzsche’s 1874 essay The Use and Abuse of History , where Nietzsche complains that the past is often used as “a cloak under which their hatred of the present power and greatness masquerades as an extreme admiration of the past” and that drawing comfort from the past inhibits action and innovation. It treats the present as “late survivals,” and turns people into beasts who live “by chewing a continual cud.”

And in Zarathustra , Nietzsche further complains that redemption means liberation of the will to power from the domination of the past. The “malignant historical fever” of the age leads only to vengefulness and frustration: “Powerless against what has been done, [the will] is an angry spectator of all that is past. The will cannot will backwards; and that he cannot break time and time’s covetousness, that is the will’s loneliest melancholy.” Revenge is simply “the will’s ill will against time and against its ‘it was.’” The will is liberated when it recreates “all ‘it was’ into ‘thus I willed it.’”

The contrast between Nietzsche and the historically-minded Jewish thinkers of his time is recapitulated (perhaps) in the experience of Rosenstock-Huessy, whose conversion from Judaism to Christianity was a conversion to future. In contrast to the Jewish giants of modernism, and though he found precious little help from the Christianity of his own day, Nietzsche is a thinker shaped by Christian sensibilities, a thinker able to say “Behold, a new creation.”