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.