"Returning to Reality: Christian Platonism for Our Times” by Paul Tyson is one of the best books I’ve ever read, clear, simple, and a devastating critique of modernity. Here he shows how Nietzsche hypocritically falls prey to the very critiques of Christianity he asserts :
“Nietzsche’sexplains the internal dynamic of Christianity as a function of what Nietzsche called “the will to power.” In exchange for the people being given access to the larger rituals and institutions admitting them to belief in a (false) promise of idealized perfection, the church gets power over the masses. In important regards the critique of Christianity put forward by Feuerbach and Marx prefigures the Nietzschean fascination with the immediate and tangible power-dynamic of the practices of embodied life as the only “sincere” reality revealed in any structure of belief. So to Nietzsche the nature of Christianity is thus explained as the generation of a delusional popularist mythos of ideal perfection for the real purpose of the expansion and protection of very tangible (economic and violent) expressions of ecclesial power.”
In important regards the critique of Christianity put forward by Feuerbach and Marx prefigures the Nietzschean fascination with the immediate and tangible power-dynamic of the practices of embodied life as the only “sincere” reality revealed in any structure of belief. So to Nietzsche the nature of Christianity is thus explained as the generation of a delusional popularist mythos of ideal perfection for the real purpose of the expansion and protection of very tangible (economic and violent) expressions of ecclesial power.”
“Unsurprisingly, this perspective plays a significant role in nineteenth- and twentieth-century modern theology in general and Protestant liberal theology in particular. This is not surprising because, in Scotist and Ockhamean fashion, modernity’s movement away from metaphysics to epistemology, its move away from divine Being to human knowing must reverse the polarities of our cultural outlook on reality. Now, in modernity and postmodernity, “the real” is the apparent; then, the transcendent was the ground of the apparent and only the reality of that ground could give substantiality to the apparent. But even within its own terms, Nietzsche’s “explanation” of Christianity is not convincing.”
“If Nietzsche is genuinely persuaded that all meaning is exclusively apparent, entirely contingent, and nothing other than imaginatively generated mythos, then this must also apply to his own account of the essence of Christianity, and that account is then clearly seen as but a screen for his own will to power. If we are to consider reasoning as a valuable truth-seeking tool (something Nietzsche cannot do) then there are two consequences to this stance.
Firstly, there can be no “objective” way of deciding that the beliefs of Christianity are any more delusional than Nietzsche’s preferred poetic alternative. Conversely, how could the belief in “ideals” be false if no belief can be true? Suspicion is a worm that eats itself. In other words, one must abandon the truth-revealing capacity of reason if one accepts Nietzsche’s reasoning, but then one would not be accepting his reasoning on the grounds that it was reasonable, but simply because one liked his willful imaginative assertion. Then, of course, if you ditch reason, there is no reason why belief in transcendence is false, it is merely that you do not like that belief and would rather imagine a different reality. But this is to abandon reasoning as such and to revert—in the final analysis—to arbitrary will and violent power.
“The point I am making in these two sentences is that “false” is a notion tied to a bivalent conception of “truth.” False makes no sense if there is no true. If one abandons bivalent truth itself—as Nietzsche seems to be attempting—then all “knowledge” and “meaning” claims becomes poetic assertions, and then the idea that any claim could be false is meaningless. But then the poetic assertion that there is no bivalent truth is itself an act of unreasoned will such that there can be no Nietzschean reason why Platonist ideals are false (or true). Here we touch a virulent voluntaristic irrationalism.”
“Secondly, the vitriolic stance against Christian religion that this outlook supports cannot escape the charge of resentment.The Nietzschean nihilist resents the cultural and political power that the Christian imagination exerts over Western culture and simply wills to replace it with a nihilistic culture of power that is more amenable to its own imaginative desires. ”
“Simone Weil well saw that the dynamic of resentment in Nietzsche is an inversion of his stated claims. To Weil, that Christianity is a religion of slaves is undoubtedly true, but it is the powerful who resent the weak on whom their power must depend, and all too often it is not the weak who resent their powerful oppressors. For the great ones are only great in relation to the not great whom they stand out from and on whom they stand. No great one is genuinely great out of their own splendor. They must have viewers and a stage apart from themselves in order to be great. And as they would never worship any other than themselves, they despise those who worship them, yet they need their worship as a function of their own greatness. ”
“Christianity—where creation is an originary harmony, a gracious act of divine joy, love, and goodness—espouses the radical inversion of the agonistic religio-mythic power structures that emerged with the rise of the great ancient agrarian civilizations.118 The prophetic imagination is the eschatological imagination of the weak and the oppressed, not for power over their oppressors, but for life without oppression for all.119 This is a profoundly subversive understanding of power”
“Of course, the church, like any human institution, readily succumbs to the false “realism” of a Babylonian understanding of power and religion, but this is something recognized as a failure by its own doctrines and sacred texts.
Where “Platonism” means belief in transcendent Reality that relativizes the transience, contingency, injustice, moral relativism, violence, and mortality of human existence understood in exclusively immanent terms, then yes, Christianity is a type of Platonism.
Even so Christianity (and also Plato) does not despise the immediate nature of immanent human existence; indeed, the incarnation gives human immediacy its great dignity within Christian faith. But the immediate is never understood as merely immediate for either the Christian or the Platonist. And this does indeed distinguish it from Nietzsche and from any who believe in the early modern idea of “pure nature,” where the immediate and immanent is real in its own terms, and is really the only reality we can meaningfully talk about.
But Nietzsche can offer no reason why there is only immanence without appealing to something beyond mere contingency (reason). So the manner in which thoughtful argument must shatter in the hands of those who use it in the name of a realism of unmitigated immediacy—of embracing the reality of mere appearance—divides reason from immanence and upholds a profound irrationalism of mere will and merely willful imagination.”
Excerpt From: Paul Tyson. “Returning to Reality: Christian Platonism for Our Times (KALOS Book 2).” iBooks.
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