Part 1of 4 posts on Atheism
Besides Christianity, Nietzsche was equally disgusted with the various delusions and hypocrisies that modern atheist’s haven’t the courage to face.
RR Reno speaks on Nietzsche's deeper Truth, he writes,
“Nietzsche correctly anticipates will be the one truth that his readers cannot bear: the inescapable power of self-denying moral ideals., the human being needs a goal.
Nietzsche surveys the standard modern methods of self-liberation from the narrow way of faith: art, philosophy, humanistic studies, politics, and even atheism. In each instance, he shatters illusions. Covert forms of Christianity, they are all the more unappealing because of their self-protective blindness and uncreative mendacity.
The human will needs a goal. Is this so difficult to understand, asks Nietzsche? We want to make something out of our lives; we want to add up to something. But do we really understand what it means to “make something of our lives,” to achieve something “worthwhile,” to choose something “meaningful,” to create something “beautiful”?
Do we not see that wanting to be something—anything—involves obedience to an ideal? Modern fantasies about post-Christian ways of life make men and women into the most deformed of all possible creatures: ignorant slaves of slave morality.
Our painting must render what is real. Our poetry must serve the muse. “The musician himself” must become “a kind of mouthpiece of the ‘in itself’ of things, a telephone from beyond.” The composer is a “ventriloquist of God.” The listener is no less subservient. We must put ourselves entirely at the disposal of the music. “Not my will but thine” remains as the covert imperative.
The same holds for the larger project of modern, critical education. We must question our dearly held pieties. We need to discipline ourselves to step back and coolly examine our presuppositions. Nietzsche sees the spiritual effect. Guided by the modern critical project, “we violate ourselves nowadays, no doubt of it, we nutcrackers of the soul, ever questioning and questionable.”
The conclusions may contradict Christian doctrine, but the underlying knife of self-denial cuts as deeply as ever. “We experiment with ourselves,” Nietzsche observes of the modern atmosphere of critique that contemporary professors continues this, , “in a way we would never permit ourselves to experiment with animals and, carried away by curiosity, we cheerfully vivisect our souls.”
Self-conscious atheism reinforces rather than overcomes the logic of confessional submission. “Unconditional honest atheism (and it is the only air we breathe, we more spiritual men of this age!) is therefore not the antithesis of [the ascetic] ideal, as it appears to be,” Nietzsche writes. “It is rather only one of the latest phases of its evolution, one of its terminal forms and inner consequences.” In fact, atheism may be the most extreme form of self-denial. It is a frenzied perfectionism of the intellect that “forbids itself the lie involved in belief in God.” Saying no to dogma in obedience to pure reason still involves saying yes to the logic of self-denying service to the truth.
In the final section, he even suggests that the cold facts of our fragile humanity make self-denial the only real alternative for a human life that does not simply give up in despair. “To repeat in conclusion what I said in the beginning,” the final line declares, “man would rather will nothingness than not will.” We would rather live for an otherworldly ideal than abandon ourselves to enslavement to the fickle instincts of our decaying bodies. We would rather consume ourselves in fires of self-imposed moral discipline than simply live and allow ourselves to be slowly, inexorably consumed by the cruel ravages of time.
He clearly despised Christianity and yearned for a form of human life that is creative, free, and fully developed. Yet his most lucid and disciplined investigation into the dynamics of faith ends with a mockery of modern alternatives and a grudging affirmation that the human animal was made to worship, serve, and obey. For if we leave our lives simply as we find them, he suggests, then we are doomed to live a nihilism deeper and more threatening than the most unworldly and aggressive asceticism—life without will.
Nietzsche’s almost unwilling final affirmation of the ascetic impulse echoes St. Augustine’s basic insight into the human condition. Our hearts are restless. The human animal wishes to give itself to something higher. It is a need more basic than our instinctual urges. It is a nature more fundamental than everything our age wishes us to affirm as natural.
Our restless hearts suggest that the real dangers of the present age are not to be found in an open-ended, nihilistic non-judgmentalism that encourages us to imagine our world devoid of compelling truths. Such possibilities are abroad, but, as anyone who has been exposed to our educational establishment knows, it requires the constant infusion of disciplinary energy to keep young people from actually believing something.
Instead, if Nietzsche is right, the danger we face may be idolatry. Deprived of a God worth worshiping, we will find substitutes, even to the point of prostrating ourselves before birds or animals or reptiles that our modern minds have transformed from graven images into shrill moral imperatives and brittle political causes.
The last century’s graveyards testify to the reality of this danger. Turned away from something truly greater than ourselves, we do not come to rest in a modest loyalty to humanity. Instead, as Nietzsche’s and Augustine’s insights into the human condition warn us, we fall into a devotion to subhuman primal powers that reward our service with debasement.”
So, how exactly are Atheists hypocritical secret Christians ? See the part 2 HERE
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