Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols: Passion, Morality, and the Church

Nietzsche, Passion, and the Church's Moral Tradition

Friedrich Nietzsche mischaracterizes the Christian tradition when he states that "the Church fights passion by cutting it out." The Catholic Church has never dogmatically opposed passion itself — it has opposed sin. Nietzsche writes out of the naturalist, Romantic tradition. He is a believer in self-determination and the will to power, and he views natural instincts and desires as justified and in no need of redemption. His conflict with the Church centers on the fact that the Church views man as possessing a fallen human nature in need of redemption, offered through the Blood of Jesus Christ. Nietzsche rejects this view entirely: he sees man in line with what Rousseau taught — that what is natural is good.

The Church, for example, preaches against lust because lust is a disordered passion. Ordered passion, according to the Church, is sexual love between husband and wife. If one spouse lusts after someone who is not his or her partner, that constitutes sin and is to be condemned. By preaching against lust or any other form of disordered love — what St. Augustine calls sin — the Church attempts to help Christians cut out sin. But it is not passion per se that is being cut out. Indeed, Christ Himself is said to have undergone His own Passion in the Way of the Cross, which Christians commemorate. Nietzsche, however, would view such Passion as weak and as an expression of slave morality, which he identifies as Judaic in conception. He admires the Roman conception of morality — master morality, as he calls it — the supreme example of which he finds in Medea, from the play by Euripides of the same name.

Spiritualizing Desire: Nietzsche's Pagan Idealism

When Nietzsche speaks of spiritualizing, beautifying, and deifying a desire, he is speaking in his characteristically poetic terms, by which he means to signal that there is nothing sinful about the human condition or about human nature — except, in his view, to scorn it, which is what he perceives the Church as doing. When he speaks of deifying a desire, he follows in the tradition of the French Revolutionaries who deified Reason. It carries no overwhelming philosophical significance beyond demonstrating that the worshipper supports an idol of his own creation. In Nietzsche's case, that idol is passion — the sort he confessed to having for Wagner's wife, and the sort that, as Wagner indicated, enabled him to act as a compulsive masturbator.

Nietzsche's justification for these acts — which the Church would have identified as sinful and as the effect of disorder — was that they were the fruit of passion, and passion is beautiful. In other words, Nietzsche attempts to impose upon human nature an order that is distinctly his own, informed by neither God nor Church. His spiritualizing of desire is a poetic way of asserting that your desires are good in and of themselves because they are your own, and no one has the right to declare them bad. It is willfulness that Nietzsche ultimately idolizes.

The Church does not view nature as bad but rather as fallen. It views natural law as indicative of God's desire for man and His intention for how mankind should behave. Natural passions are good in and of themselves because they are given by God, but they must be exercised according to their proper intended purpose. Because sex is for procreation and not merely recreation, the Church condemns adultery and masturbation. Nietzsche rejects this condemnation as anti-nature. What he is really rejecting, however, is the idea that there is an order to nature that man is meant to submit to — because Nietzsche does not want to submit to anything but his own will.

When Nietzsche speaks of spiritualizing desire, it is not in the traditional Christian sense of lifting one's mind and heart to God, Who is spirit, but in a pagan sense of associating the one, the good, the true, and the beautiful with one's own desire. In this way, Nietzsche resembles Euthyphro in Plato's Dialogues. Euthyphro is a subjectivist, opposed to submitting to the objective reality of truth and moral natural law, which Socrates attempts to reveal to him.