Tag: Death of God

A Historical-Theological Understanding of the Resurrection: From Wittgenstein and Hegel to Moltmann and Paul

Ludwig Wittgenstein and G. W. F. Hegel, two figures not normally cited together, concur that the resurrection of Christ is the triumph of love, and has little to do with the miraculous. Focus on the miraculous aspect of the resurrection misses how resurrection is to be integrated into the life and identity of the crucified. Wittgenstein confides to his diary his struggle with the resurrection. He understands it is not simply a matter of believing another miracle, but a comprehensive shift in how the world is perceived – an alternative grammar in apprehending the world. “Just as ‘God’ does not pick out an agent or an individual among others, in the way a proper name does, so ‘resurrection’ does not pick out a specific event in chronicled history to set beside other events.”[1] Proof or evidence or even the factuality of the resurrection is not primary for Wittgenstein, but the shift in the global “reading” of facts entailing the founding of the church and living in faith. Belief in the resurrection is entry into an alternative world of understanding.

The Death and Resurrection as God’s Story

For Hegel also, the resurrection is not about the miraculous but is to be read as key to the story of God: “the full presence of both humanity and divinity, the despair that God himself is dead, and the reversal, the putting to death of death and the resurrection into life” is “a reenactment of the divine history.”[2] This history is Trinitarian in that the “abstractness of the Father is given up in the Son. But the negation of this negation is the unity of Father and Son—love, or the Spirit.”[3] In Christ a difference in God is realized, in that the distant abstract God is made concrete (in the world), such that he is immediately accessible (in Spirit and love). Through incarnation and death, human finitude is “transfigured into the highest love” as God is poured out and made available in human interiority. The resurrection and ascension are an extension of the incarnation, as in this “exaltation Christ has appeared for immediate consciousness in the mode of actuality.”[4] Hegel refers to the resurrection as making God available for “envisagement,” which he equates with the defeat of death (the negative) and the “preservation in death itself” of the “highest love.”[5]

In Hegel’s estimate this story of God in the history of the “teaching, life, death, and resurrection” makes the community of love, the church, a possibility. This goes beyond an intellectual foundation: “This is the crucial point on which everything depends, this is the verification, the absolute proof. This is what is to be understood as the witness of the Spirit.”[6] This is the history of the kenotic outpouring of the Holy Spirit in which the sensible presence is transfigured into his real presence through the Spirit.[7] In the “eternal repetition of the life passion and resurrection of Christ in the members of the church,” lies the creation and preservation of the world.[8] The world is incorporated into the story of God.

Jürgen Moltmann, like Hegel, reads the resurrection as the unfolding story of God: “The union of Jesus with God and of God with Jesus was constituted . . . by ‘the resurrection of Jesus’.”[9] The risen Christ is the truth of the historical Jesus and the truth of God, and this is captured in the earliest formulas of the New Testament: “Jesus Christ crucified and risen” (1 Co 15:3–5). His resurrection, joined to his life course, teachings, and death, serves as the foundation of Jesus’ identity as Son of God, Lord, or simply God, and is the cornerstone of his eschatological kingdom. Resurrection means his entire life is the founding of the eschatological kingdom, and there is no divide between the life of Christ and the founding of the Church. Luke-Acts, the Gospels and the history of the Church are to be read as a singular movement of God pouring out his life for the world.

Resurrection: The Interpretive Key to All Things

Along with Hegel and Wittgenstein, Moltmann recognized resurrection is not just a fortuitous miracle or another historical event. The resurrection is the end of history as previously understood: “it is not a question of establishing the life and death of Jesus as a historical fact, and regarding the resurrection, the appearances of Jesus and the Easter faith as inter-changeable interpretations of that fact. That would not do justice to the rise of the Christian faith at all.”[10] The resurrection is the interpretive key to understand the life of Christ through faith. The resurrection “does not speak the ‘language of facts’, but only the language of faith and hope, that is, the ‘language of promise.”[11] In this world the cross is foolishness and a scandal, and by the same token the resurrection cannot be “proven.” The cross and resurrection can only be grasped through faith as an alternative world-view.

In the Wittgensteinian sense, for Moltmann the resurrection is the deep grammar by which the meaning of Christ is to be read into all things. Referencing I Cor. 15:14 (“If Christ is not risen, then our preaching is vain and your faith is vain”) Moltmann notes, “If one calls the cross of Jesus the ‘nuclear fact’ of Christian faith, one must call his resurrection the primal datum of that faith.”[12] In the early Christian community, there was little dispute about the fact of the resurrection. The issue was how to interpret Christ’s death in light of the resurrection in which light record of his life was preserved. “As a merely historical person he would long have been forgotten, because his message had already been contradicted by his death on the cross. As a person at the heart of an eschatological faith and proclamation, on the other hand, he becomes a mystery and a question for every new age.”[13]

A Reinterpretation of God’s Righteousness

The Easter faith arose among those who fled the crucifixion, as God seemed to have abandoned Christ. However, where faith in Jesus was shattered at the cross, the resurrection expands faith to include a reconstitution of (Jewish) hope. No longer is righteousness on the basis of the law or Jewish eschatology. Jesus was a “lawless man,” a “rebel,” “abandoned by God” according to the law, but declared righteous by the resurrection. The Jewish apocalyptic says all should wait for the resurrection of the dead, but Easter faith is trust in Jesus resurrection from the dead.[14] “Between the eschatological Easter faith and the various forms of late-Jewish apocalyptic stood Jesus himself and his cross.”[15] The future and past of Judaism are made new in light of God’s identification with Christ. In the resurrection “God has identified himself, his judgment and his kingdom with the crucified Jesus, [with] his cross and his helplessness.”[16] God and life are found in the midst of death as the future kingdom of life is made possible: “namely reconciliation in the midst of strife, the law of grace in the midst of judgment, and creative love in the midst of legalism.”[17]

This is not faith that God will damn the unrighteous and save the righteous – a resurrection unto judgement. This is a different conception of God and righteousness – a trust in God’s righteousness. In the midst of suffering, evil, and death, God has made things right. “The Christian belief in the resurrection does not proclaim world-historical tendencies or anthropological hopes, but the nucleus of a new righteousness in a world where dead and living cry out for righteousness.”[18]

Reading the cross in light of the law makes of Christ’s death one more propitiating sacrifice, with the expiation or propitiation meeting the requirements of the law but the resurrection is the end of the law of just deserts, as executioner, betrayer, oppressor and oppressed alike are received into righteousness by grace. “God had answered the evil deed of men in crucifying Jesus in a glorious way by raising him from the dead (Acts 2.24).”[19] The resurrection read into the cross means all that have been delivered over to death due to unrighteousness will find life. “Through his suffering and death, the risen Christ brings righteousness and life to the unrighteous and the dying.”[20] His death on the cross makes the meaning of the resurrection evident for the unrighteous: as their representative in death provides new life in resurrection. There is passage from death to life for all who are subject to death.

Defeat of Death, Evil and Sin

His is “resurrection from the dead” and not a revivification, reanimation or temporary raising, as it directly counters death (with all of its connotations of sin and punishment). It is not life after death, as conceived in many religions, presuming the immortality of the soul or the transmigration of souls. There is an annihilation of death; not mere life after death. The harshness of the crucifixion is an exclamation that death is a reality, and there can be no peace between this reality (a life lived in light of death) and the reality of crucifixion and resurrection (death defeated by life). This is not on the order of the raising up of Lazarus who would die again, but Jesus is no longer controlled by death: “Christ being raised from the dead will never die again” (Rom. 6.9). “Resurrection means ‘life from the dead’ (Rom. 9.15), and is itself connected with the annihilation of the power of death.”[21] One sort of history ends – “evil, death, abandonment by God” with resurrection marking the beginning of the new world of the righteousness of God.”[22]

He is “the first fruits of them that are asleep,” “the “pioneer of life,” the “firstborn from the dead.” He is “Jesus Christ”: “Jesus” binds him to his past, and “Christ” binds him to his future.[23]

‘Easter’ was a prelude to, and a real anticipation of, God’s qualitatively new future and the new creation in the midst of the history of the world’s suffering. . . For the Easter hope shines not only forwards into the unknown newness of the history which it opens up, but also backwards over the graveyards of history, and in their midst first on the grave of a crucified man who appeared in that prelude.[24]

Through the resurrection the death of Christ becomes the defeat of death for the living and the dead: “For to this end has Christ died and come alive again, that he might be Lord of both dead and living” (Rom. 14.9). The resurrection does not relativize the cross (as a past event), but makes it the point of salvation, qualifying the crucified as Lord and Christ, filling the cross with the eschatological and saving significance of God defeating death in dying and being raised.

The Resurrection as Providing Theological Coherence

The resurrection is often tacked on to legal theories of atonement (e.g., a sign of sacrifice accepted), rather than integrating the resurrection into the life and death of Christ to form a theological coherence. The historical and the eschatological are separated, with Jesus life and death as one half of Jesus and the risen Christ as the other half.[25] His death, separated from his resurrection is a repudiation of what he said and did, but joined together the reality of the incarnation (God become man) is made complete and coherent: “his cross is understood in the light of his resurrection, his way to the cross in the light of the saving meaning of his cross, his words and miracles in the light of his Easter exaltation to be Lord.”[26]

Jesus is raised, which means not only that this single individual has overcome death but his life is extended to church and cosmos. As Rowan Williams puts it, “The life that lives in Jesus is the active source of all relations in the finite world; so it is natural that, in its human embodiment, it is creative of unrestricted relation in the human world – and indeed beyond, if we take seriously Paul’s meditations in Romans 8 on the dependence of the entire creation on the reconciling process that occurs in the death and resurrection of Jesus.”[27] The resurrection is not tacked on to history but is the transformative moment for history and the cosmos, as the indestructible life of God is activated from within history and the cosmos so as to become “all in all” (Col 3:11).

[1] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. Von Wright in collaboration with Heikki Nyman, trans. Peter Winch, Oxford: Blackwell, 1980 (henceforth CV), 64. Cited in Rowan Williams, Christ the Heart of Creation (Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition) 218.

[2] G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: The Consummate Religion, trans. By R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodson and J. M. Stewart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007) 53.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Hegel, 131.

[5] Hegel, 131-2.

[6] Hegel, 145.

[7] Hegel, 149.  As the editor notes, “For Hegel the resurrection of Jesus from the dead indeed entails an Aufhebung—an annulling of his sensible presence, yet a preservation of his real presence and its transfiguration into the modality of spirit.”

[8] Hegel, 152.

[9] Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993) 161.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Moltmann, 173.

[12] Moltmann, 161.

[13] Moltmann, 162.

[14] Moltmann, 172.

[15] Moltmann, 166.

[16] Moltmann,169.

[17] Moltmann, 171.

[18] Moltmann, 177.

[19] Moltmann, 179.

[20] Moltmann, 185.

[21] Moltmann, 170.

[22]Moltmann, 169.

[23] Moltmann, 164.

[24] Moltmann, 163.

[25] Moltmann, 160.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Williams, 38.

Rereading Žižek’s Hegel in Light of the Spirit and Truth of Kenotic Love

Though Slavoj Žižek, reading Hegel as if he were an atheist must ultimately misread him, there is a great deal in Žižek’s atheistic reading which commends itself and acts as a guide, not only to Hegel, but to New Testament Christianity as understood by Hegel. The particular point where there is both convergence and divergence between an atheistic and theistic reading of Hegel concerns the meaning of Spirit and the death of God. As Žižek describes it, the Hegelian notion of the “death of God” in Christ amounts to the death of the “transcendent Beyond” as definitive of the experience of God, and this brings about the opening of reality from within (Metastases of Enjoyment, 39). Indeed, this suspension of God as other, and the immediate experience of God as immanent is key to Hegel. But Hegel’s point of departure is not simply negation, but he is focused on the Pauline concept of kenotic self-sacrifice in which one arrives at the Spirit of Christ. The kenotic sacrifice simultaneously marks the death of something “beyond” humanity and this is realized in the Spirit through imitation of Christ’s self-giving love.[1] But it is not simply the negation of God as Other, but the bringing together of the infinite and the finite in Absolute Spirit as Concept [Begriff] or a new form of speculative understanding and Truth.

In Hegel there is a double movement as the infinite negates itself and so arises in the finite and the finite negates itself and this is realization of the infinite.[2] But this is no mere feeling, but is the way of the Spirit, the way of love and of reason. As Hegel states it, “Thus the life of God and divine cognition may well be spoken of as a disporting of Love with itself; but this idea sinks into mere edification, and even insipidity, if it lacks the seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labour of the negative.”[3] In Kenotic love God incorporates the finite. As Hegel puts it, “If God has the finite over against himself, then he himself is finite and limited. Finitude must be posited in God himself, not as something insurmountable, absolute, independent, but above all as this process of distinguishing that we have seen in spirit and in consciousness—a distinguishing that, because it is a transitory moment and because finitude is no truth, is also eternally self-sublating.”[4] God is not limited by the finite or infinite, as this would be something less than God.

Žižek gets this understanding half right, in that he misses the movement of Spirit as arising from both God as infinite Father, and the immanent Son. As he describes it, the Hegelian “reconciliation” is the “redoubling of the gap or antagonism” as the gap that separates opposites “is posited as inherent to one of the terms” (Parallax View, 106). “The gap that separates God from man is transposed into God himself” through the death of Christ, so “the properly dialectical trick here is that the very feature which appeared to separate me from God turns out to unite me with God” (Parallax View, 106). There is relief from the oppressive otherness of God as Christ makes God immanent, but in Hegel’s understanding there is not simply the relinquishing of the infinite for the finite, but a realization of the infinite in the finite. In “externalization” (Entäußerung), Luther’s rendering of “kenosis,” Hegel depicts the break from “immediacy” through self-sacrifice, which is the work of the Spirit experienced in the Eucharist, and in the Christian’s taking up the life and death of Christ. In Pauline terms, self-sacrifice or being crucified with Christ is to arrive at the self, and in Hegelian terms self-negation is at the heart of self-actualization.

In Žižek’s understanding, the focus is on the negative moment. The move from the legal, symbolic, totalizing religion of Judaism to Christianity, is due to the death of Christ which suspends the perverse relation to the law. In Žižek’s Hegelian/Lacanian notion of dialectic, Judaism and Christianity posit the gap either as a gap between man and God or as within God, respectively. Judaism posits the gap between God and man, as God stands outside the Law in that he cannot be properly represented within it. The holy of holies, the empty room, is isolated and separated from everyone by a series of walls emphasizing God’s absolute transcendence to the Law. God is the Other, outside of the symbolic, and yet the one who holds the symbolic together (Parallax View, 106). The death of Christ exposes the orbit of the oppressive symbolic in God as Other. In Žižek’s Hegel the death of Christ, the fulness of the work of the Trinity comes into effect as thesis/antithesis/synthesis. There is the suspension of the Other (thesis) in the death of God (antithesis). The Holy Spirit is “then posited as a symbolic, de-substantialized fiction” which exists in and through the “work of each and all” (synthesis) (Metastases of Enjoyment, 42).

Of course, the primary contention between a Christian and atheistic reading of Hegel, revolves around Spirit. In Žižek’s reading the Spirit is a fiction, which is not a dismissal of its importance, as the Spirit is an open fiction, where the movement of the Subject, in all of its phases prior to the gift of the Spirit is a necessary lie, but one that remains hidden. The hidden force of negation or death drive animates the Subject – giving life through death, but in therapy exposure of the lie, the death drive and its attendant categories, can be tapped as a source to unplug from perversion and to come to an understanding of Being as sustained in and through negation. The encounter with the death drive is a “limit-experience” which “is the irreducible/constitutive condition of the (im)possibility of the creative act of embracing a Truth-Event: it opens up and sustains the space for the Truth-Event, yet its excess always threatens to undermine it” (Ticklish Subject, 161). Behind the good, the true and the beautiful is the constitutive background of the death drive – “the Void that sustains the place in which one can formulate symbolic fictions that we call ‘truths’” (Ticklish Subject, 161). The means of manipulating the truth is through tapping into the underlying ground of the death drive and approaching the void of deception in which the symbolic truth is grounded. The death of Christ and dying with Christ provides access to this deception undergirding the truth. The truth inheres in a lie, so to refer to the Spirit as a fiction, is a new form of truth.

For Hegel, the Spirit is not a fiction but the absolute truth: “it is here maintained that this content, which the knowledge of absolute Spirit has of itself, is the absolute truth, is all truth, so that this Idea comprehends the entire wealth of the natural and spiritual world in itself, is the only substance and truth of all that constitutes this world, while it is in the Idea alone that everything has its truth, as being a moment of its essential existence.”[5] This truth, in the Spirit is a realized truth. Kenotic love unites the infinite and finite in the Concept (Absolute Spirit), which is the realization of presence (God’s and the self) and identity. Hegel slowly recognizes the inadequacies of other forms of sacrifice, which fall short of fostering the social relation, inherent to kenosis. Mere self-negation, apart from the establishment of a community of the Spirit, simply ends in self-defeat.[6] To be a living sacrifice or to “live” sacrifice is not simply a negation, but the arrival at one’s true essence.

A way to get at the divergence in regard to Spirit, is in Žižek’s focus on the death of Christ, which more or less sums up what he has to say about the gift of the Spirit and resurrection (unlike Hegel). Where for Hegel the death of Christ results in the immanence of God in the Spirit, Žižek has more to say about death, which he equates with resurrection and spirit. He repeatedly refers to Christ’s cry of dereliction: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Mk. 15.34; Mt. 27.46)., “In Lacanian terms, we are dealing with the suspension of the big Other, which guarantees the subject’s access to reality: in the experience of the death of God, we stumble upon the fact that ‘the big Other doesn’t exist’” (Metastases of Enjoyment, 42). This negation or death opens up the possibility of life in the spirit.

In describing the death of Christ, Žižek equates life and death: “Life and death here are not polar opposites, contrasts, within the same global Whole (field of reality), but the same thing viewed from a global perspective” (The Monstrosity of Christ, 292). He concludes, “The (temporal) death of Christ is his very (eternal) life ‘in becoming’” (The Monstrosity of Christ, 292). Death and life are not in some sort of “pseudo-dialectic relation as utter loss/negation (death) and its reversal into absolute life” (The Monstrosity of Christ, 292). The death of Christ is the founding of the community of the Spirit and this community is his resurrection. According to Žižek, “That is to say that Christ’s death, in the Hegelian reading, is the disappearance of disappearance. It is in itself already what becomes for itself the new community.”[7]

Christ’s death reveals the psychoanalytic ground; the Freudian moment of madness which Schelling anticipates and which Žižek comes to understand Paul to describe in Romans 7. Radical negativity, the death of Christ or death drive, is the constitutive moment of the event which serves as the ground of a Subject no longer constrained by law or ideology (the significance of the resurrection Event). Resurrection can be identified with death as they both amount to the destruction of one’s symbolic supports and the emergence of a new form of subjectivity. This new form of subjectivity is the hysteric, which Lacan and Žižek equate with Hegel – “that most sublime of hysterics.” Where the masculine orientation identifies unquestioningly with the symbolic order of the law, the hysteric questions the status of the law. So, for example, Žižek identifies hysteria with the Paul of Romans 7. The feminine, hysteric position from which Paul writes describes the necessary passage through negativity and death drive as this is the road trod by Christ himself.

In my original reading of Hegel, through Žižek and Lacan, the role of negation was key to understanding the rise of the Subject in the dynamic interplay of the three registers of symbolic, imaginary, and real. The real is the engine of negation and death which explains the negative energetics dominating fallen personhood. I think this reading is a partially true reading of Hegel, in its diagnosis of the disease, much as Žižek’s is an insightful reading of Paul’s depiction of the problem in Romans 7. But both Paul and Hegel pass beyond this negative moment. But for Žižek, nothingness and death drive precede the Subject and are the primary “substance” constituting the Subject. In Žižek’s atheistic creation ex nihilo (a creation from nothing) God and truth, subject and object, are preceded by death drive and nothingness, which he does not hesitate to call evil (Reader, 273). Lacan also describes the death drive as the attempt to go beyond the pleasure principle to the realm of excess jouissance, the pure substance of the death drive, which he also does not hesitate to call evil: “We cannot avoid the formula that jouissance is evil” (Seminar VII, 184–5). This evil is subject to manipulation but, inasmuch as it is prime reality, it is not something that can be finally and completely overcome; nor would one want to overcome it, as this nothingness is the only possible ground for the absolute freedom of the Subject. Absolute freedom and autonomy cannot, by definition, be constrained by a prior Good (in Žižek’s reading). The absolutely free, autonomous Subject can be preceded by nothing, and this is the Nothing and negation Žižek links to death drive.

But of course, if one understands Hegel is working with negation, not in an atheistic sense as a point of origin, but in the Pauline sense of kenotic self-giving love, this will account for the illness of the Subject diagnosed as more or less incurable by Lacan and Žižek, and go beyond this privileging of the negative, to kenotic self-giving love, truth and unity in the Spirit.

[1] This is the argument of William Goggin, Hegel’s Sacrificial Imagination, (University of Chicago, PhD. Thesis, 2019).

[2] Goggin, 12.

[3] G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 10.

[4] G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: One-Volume Edition – The Lectures of 1827. Edited by Peter Hodgson. One-Volume Ed edition. Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, 1988, 190. Quoted in Goggin, 273.

 [5] G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures On the Philosophy of Religion: Together With a Work on the Proofs of the Existence of God vol. 1, Trans. By E. B. Speirs, and J. Burdon Sanderson, (London:  Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, & Co. Ltd., 1895) 206.

[6] Goggin, 11.

[7] See On Belief, 106 – 51; The Puppet and the Dwarf, 171; The Parallax View, 106; For They Know Not What They Do, liii.

The Necessity of Nietzsche: An Apocalyptic Philosophy for an Apocalyptic Theology

One’s philosophical orientation and preferences are reflected in their theology and vice versa but it may be that a particular theology inevitably requires or depends upon its philosophical expression, apart from which the theology would not exist. Whether one is Platonic or Aristotelian (in Nietzschean terms they are both fallen post-Socratics) may make a slight theological difference but the presumption is that “ordinary avenues of philosophic reason” are adequate for Augustinian, Thomistic, or certain Protestant theological leanings. One may need to tweak his Plato or Aristotle but the presumption is that the philosophy and theology are more or less interconnected if not exactly interchangeable. There is no questioning of reason, language, or human psychology, at least not enough to bring the enterprise to a halt. Thus, the Augustinian shift is guided by Neo-Platonism (Augustine equates Plato to Moses) in the same way Thomism is Aristotelian (for Thomas, Aristotle is “the philosopher”). Anselm of Canterbury, in both his philosophic arguments and his atonement theory, is the proper father of scholasticism in his pure distillation of a theology guided by Platonic philosophy. Modern philosophy and theology, in its Cartesian presumptions, will follow a predictable, interlocked pattern (Platonic and Anselmian). So too, Nominalism might as well name both a theology and philosophy as the theology is determined by the philosophy.

It is only in recognizing that theology and philosophy became inextricably interwoven in shared presumptions and foundations (summed up in the term “ontotheology”) that Friedrich Nietzsche’s pronouncement of the death of God can be taken as both theological and philosophical. For Nietzsche Christianity was “Platonism for the masses,” so his pronouncement is prophetic (the spirit in which his Zarathustra makes it) of the coming collapse of Western thought and religion. The demise of the God of the philosophers is implied in the demise of the Christian God, but the death of God is not simply a metaphor for Nietzsche. This death simultaneously points to the role of Platonism and Platonic Christianity in its denial or obscuring of the role of death.

The death of God in Christ on the Cross was, for Luther, the point for challenging scholasticism (the fusion of Greek and Christian thought) and what Luther called “the theologians of glory.” Hegel will take up the Lutheran refrain, not simply as a challenge to the Aristotelian God of pure thought, but also as a new founding moment in the understanding of how God and those created in his image must take up death in the founding of an authentic subjectivity. Hegel’s tarrying with the negative is a zeroing in on the Lutheran challenge to the God of the philosophers but it is also a challenge to modern (Cartesian) notions of an ego-based reason and subjectivity. Nietzsche takes the refrain one step further to declare God and the philosophy and morality attached to him as dead. As with Hegel, his is a call for a new form of radical subjectivity.

There is a shared recognition of the orientation to death that is thematic in Hegel and his heirs. Though Nietzsche is often pitted against Hegel – Hegel is philosopher of the system and Nietzsche is anti-system – yet they share reaction to Kant and the uncovering of a new form of subjectivity centered on the exposure of mortality and death. In the end, Hegel and his disciples (Marx, Freud, Lacan, and Žižek) are the arch-conservatives who brilliantly recognize the darkness of nihilism and imagine its mechanisms can only be manipulated (death drive – the real can be toyed with but must ultimately be submitted to) so as to provide a less painful outcome. Nietzsche names the nihilism and calls for a new religious order – a new myth. Where Hegel and his followers will privilege philosophy and presume it takes precedence over religion, Nietzsche shares with Kierkegaardian existentialism and theological apocalypticism the recognition of the need for the breaking in of a new world order.

His depiction of himself as the singular Antichrist, the marker of a new age on the order of B.C. and A.D., may not be accurate in his sense that he was alone but the work of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, (the French postmodern turn) but also of Martin Heidegger, all take their inspiration, if not their existence, from Nietzsche. He considered himself (as depicted in his autobiographical work Ecce Homo) philosophical dynamite:

I know my lot. One day my name will be linked to the memory of something monstrous—to a crisis like none there has been on earth, to the most profound collision of conscience, to a verdict invoked against everything that until then had been believed, demanded, held sacred. I am no man, I am dynamite.

Whether or not he was the match, the fuse, or the beginning of the explosion, (or is he only, as Bertrand Russell portrayed him, a literary figure) there is no question that the modern world begins to come undone in his wake. It is not just his appropriation by the Nazis, but he is linked with a new form of thought – apocalyptic in its import – (an ironic characterization as he sees religious apocalypticism as the problem). It is this apocalyptic element (the world unchained from its Sun and the need for a new religious myth) that distinguishes him from the mainstream of post-Kantian thinkers.  

What he calls “Socratism” is the refusal to deal with human finitude and his return to mythology, his uber man, his will to power, and especially his myth of eternal recurrence are his attempt to recreate the pre-Socratic dynamism. He recognizes that the success of human artifice – the Apollinarian (culture, art, literature, science) is in direct proportion to its direction and control of the Dionysian (passion, tragedy, emotion, revelry). The rise of the Over Men must freely move “beyond good and evil” with its notion of an objective or divine standard. Violence may be a necessity but the goal is that these new heroes, by whatever means, must lead humankind into accepting they are free spirits who can, of themselves, create a new order.

In his return to Dionysus, obscured by Plato, Nietzsche presumes the Platonic project to control the passions through reason is squelching the power of creativity. The Greek tragedian’s full acknowledgement of the Dionysian was an art form that gave inspiration to the shining light of Apollo. Plato’s reason repressed the tragic Dionysian truth (that we live to die) and simultaneously dismantled the Apollonarian manner of dealing with it in human culture.

Plato pictures passion as a black horse, which the charioteer or reason is to subdue by teaming with the white horse (spirit), the very imagery Freud will deploy in his depiction of the tripartite psyche:

…in its [the ego’s] relation to the id it is like a man on horseback, who hast to hold in check the superior strength of the horse; with this difference, that the rider tries to do so with his own strength while the ego uses borrowed forces (e.g., the superego). The analogy may be carried a little further. Often a rider, if he is not to be parted from his horse, is obliged to guide it where it wants to go; so in the same way the ego is in the habit of transforming the id’s will into action as if it were its own.

 Freudian psychoanalysis is founded upon the notion that the ego, as the center of reason, can gain control over the passions of the id. Though Freud grows less confident in his belief that his “new science” can control the unreasonable idic forces, nonetheless his enterprise of psychoanalysis is dedicated to the prospect that the drives can be manipulated if not subdued. Lacan and Žižek, in this sense, are the true arch-conservative Hegelian-Freudian thinkers as the real of death drive is the final power of good and evil. The emptying out of the Cartesian subject in Marx and Freud takes on a laborious technical odor of politics and the clinic, while Nietzsche represents the call for an apocalyptic break beyond good and evil.

In this he represents the break that inspired the last great metaphysician, Martin Heidegger. Heidegger too presumes authentic existence has to confront the negating power of nothingness and death with a new power of freedom.

Anticipation…unlike inauthentic Being-towards-death, does not evade the fact that death is not to be outstripped; instead, anticipation frees itself for accepting this. When, by anticipation, one becomes free for one’s own death, one is liberated from one’s lostness in those possibilities which may accidentally thrust themselves upon one; and one is liberated in such a way that for the first time one can authentically understand and choose among the factical possibilities lying ahead of that possibility which is not to be outstripped. Anticipation discloses to existence that its uttermost possibility lies in giving itself up, and thus it shatters all one’s tenaciousness to whatever existence one has reached.

Facing the fact of death is transformed by Heidegger into its own metaphysical freedom, which in his taking up of National Socialism demonstrates the bloody aspect of the Nietzschean enterprise he saw Hitler achieving. The Dionysian forces require sacrifice – and as Freud, Lacan and Žižek recognize and Heidegger did not, the rider of the black horse ultimately takes his orders from his mount. I would prefer, if these were the only choices, the more or less self-conscious nihilism of the latter thinkers to Heidegger’s enacted naïve nihilism, which brings us back to Nietzsche’s perception of his project as a resolution to nihilism.

Ironically, Nietzsche located the heart of this nihilism in what he perceived as the apocalyptic approach in Western religion, which set its hope on an ideal world to come or on the otherworldly heavens. For Nietzsche, apocalyptic Christianity was Platonic and he did not know of a Christianity focused on the redemption of this world. But as I have described it (here) this is the very definition of what is now called apocalyptic theology. With its inaugurated this-worldly eschatology, its deceived law of sin and death, and its recognition of God breaking into the world so as to give his own person, in Christ, as the subject of knowledge, apocalyptic theology is now anti-Platonic. Part of this apocalyptic understanding is the recognition that death denied is definitive of sin, and this is the power Christ has come to defeat. The point of this revelation is the realization of freedom from slavery to the controlling principles of the human order. God has invaded the world, not to eventually abandon it, but to reclaim it.

In other words, Nietzsche in his recognition of the pervasive nihilism inherent in Platonic and modern thought, in his focus on the Platonic/Christian obscuring of death, and in his recognition of the need for an apocalyptic break from the prevailing orientation, represents the shift that would give rise to a return to the original New Testament notion of apocalyptic salvation.  

If you would like to learn more register for our upcoming class (June 28th through August 20th), Philosophy for Theology, which will use my book, The Psychotheology of Sin and Salvation, as the text.