Nietzsche: Three Genealogies of Christianity

Abstract

Nietzsche develops three important genealogies of central aspects of Christianity: one concerning a certain syncretism between Judaism and the cult of Dionysus; a second concerning a “slave revolt in morality”; and a third concerning doctrines about an otherworld (God, an afterlife, etc.). In each case, his genealogy appears implausible or even perverse at first sight, but on closer examination turns out to be very historically plausible, indeed correct.

1. Introduction

As every reader of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) knows,1 Nietzsche employs a historical method of explanation that he calls “genealogy,” and he applies it, among other things, to aspects of Christianity in order to enable a better understanding of Christianity. Accordingly, he writes in The Antichrist (written in 1888, published in 1895) that “Christianity can be understood only in terms of the soil out of which it grew” (A, #24, p. 592).

As I have argued in previous work (Forster 2011a, cf. 2011b), his method of genealogy had its beginning in Herder’s “genetic” method, which was taken over and modified by Hegel, especially in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), before eventually being adopted and further modified by Nietzsche himself in On the Genealogy of Morals. The method essentially rests on a (very plausible) assumption of historicism that is shared by this whole tradition: a conviction that concepts, beliefs, values, and so on change in deep ways over the course of history. The method aims to explain, or to render more comprehensible, some psychological phenomenon or psychologically infused practice (typically, one of our own) by tracing it back to origins before which it did not yet really exist and showing in a naturalistic (i.e., non-religious, non-transcendent) way how it gradually emerged from those origins via a series of transformations. It is essential to the success of the method, in Nietzsche’s view (and, I think, also in fact), that it give a historically true account. Thus, he writes in the Preface of On the Genealogy of Morals, in opposition to the (in his estimation) historically fanciful or inept approach of “English” genealogists of morality (such as Hume) and Paul Rée, and in explanation of his own very different genealogical approach: “The project is to traverse ... the enormous, distant, and so well hidden land of morality—of morality that has actually existed, actually been lived ... My desire ... was to point out ... a better direction in which to look, in the direction of an actual history of morality, and to warn ... against gazing around haphazardly in the blue after the English fashion. For it must be obvious which color is a hundred times more vital for a genealogist of morals than blue; namely gray, that is, what is documented, what can actually be confirmed and has actually existed” (GM, Preface, #7, p. 21).2 For Nietzsche, the method usually carries not only explanatory, but also normative implications—for example, casting the phenomenon or practice in question in a dubious light by showing that it emerged from origins that were disreputable. However, this consequence of the method seems for him to be less direct and fundamental than its explanatory function, even if in the end extremely important. It is also more philosophically problematic (for discussion of this, see Forster 2011b). I shall, therefore, bracket it here in order to focus on the method’s explanatory role.

If one keeps in mind the requirement that a genealogy needs to be historically true in order to be successful (which, incidentally, much of the secondary literature does not), then some of Nietzsche’s genealogies probably have to be judged failures in the end. For example, his genealogy of guilt [Schuld] in the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morals in terms of a supposed origin in the creditor–debtor relationship does not seem very plausible, historically (notice, for example, that the double meaning of the German word Schuld, guilt/debt, on which Nietzsche relies here is absent from the corresponding French word for guilt, culpabilité). However, other genealogies that he develops fare much better in terms of meeting the requirement of historical truth.

In this article, I would in particular like to discuss three genealogies of aspects of Christianity that he develops, which, in my view, do so. In each case, I shall focus on the important earlier stages of the genealogies in question, the stages that concern the relationship of Christianity to ancient Greek and Roman culture, leaving their later stages to one side.

2. Jesus and Dionysus

The first genealogy that I want to discuss will probably be the most surprising of the three for readers of Nietzsche. For it already occurs in Nietzsche’s early work The Birth of Tragedy (1872), before he is usually thought to have even possessed the genealogical method; its presence there is more allusive than explicit, which has often caused it to be overlooked; and he does not repeat it later.

Concerning imputing a version of the method to Nietzsche this early, I suggest that the following may be part of the explanation. Herder had been the first great developer of historicism in the German tradition, and on this basis, he had also invented the “genetic” method, initially applying it to lyric poetry and to language in the 1760s before then going on to develop his most important and famous application of it to moral (and other) values, and indeed to whole cultures, in This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity (1774). Nietzsche would later praise Herder explicitly for his historical sense, especially in connection with morals, in notes from the 1880s. But there is some reason to think that he already in the early 1870s went through a phase of interest in Herder. For example, in The Greek State (published after a fashion in 1872, but written a little earlier in connection with work toward The Birth of Tragedy) he seems to echo Herder’s sentimentalist theory of moral values, like Herder conceiving moral values as “sensations [Empfindungen]”;3 in Homer’s Contest (1872) he challenges an interpretation of Homer as a champion of the value of “humanity” that had been precisely Herder’s interpretation of Homer (for example, in his Letters for the Advancement of Humanity (1793–1797)); and in On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873) he almost exactly reproduces a theory of the fundamentally metaphorical nature of language, and hence thought, that Herder had already developed, especially in his essay Image, Poetry, Fable (1787) (his debt to Herder in this last case being partly mediated by Gustav Gerber’s then recently published book, Die Sprache als Kunst (1871)) (see Forster, forthcoming). So, it seems probable that the historicism and the early form of the genealogical method that one already finds in The Birth of Tragedy likewise largely came from Herder.

Be that as it may, The Birth of Tragedy does pretty clearly contain a sort of genealogy of Christianity. This genealogy has been astutely noticed by Michael Silk and Joseph P. Stern in their excellent commentary on the book (Silk and Stern 1981, esp. pp. 120–21). As Silk and Stern point out, contrary to Nietzsche’s own characterization of the book in the highly self-critical preface that he added to it later in 1886 as anti-Christian, and contrary to the sharp opposition between Christ and Dionysus that he championed at the end of his career in Ecce Homo (written in 1888/89, published in 1908), where he concludes with the slogan “Have I been understood?—Dionysus versus the Crucified.—“ (EH, “Why I Am a Destiny,” #9, p. 335), in the original text of The Birth of Tragedy from 1872, Nietzsche implies the following account: that after Socrates, Euripides, and then Alexandrian culture had suppressed the cult of Dionysus that had flourished previously in the form of ancient tragedy, the cult went underground, turning into Christianity, and that after surviving in this guise for about fifteen hundred years, it then re-emerged in the sixteenth century in the form of Lutheran choral music, thereafter developing further in the mode of later German classical music, in preparation for eventually returning to a full realization in a sort of modern counterpart of ancient tragedy, to wit, Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk. Thus, to focus on the two parts of this account that are most relevant for our present purposes, namely, the claim that after the Dionysian cult was suppressed in antiquity it went underground and turned into Christianity, and the claim that it later resurfaced as Lutheran choral music, which then led to its further development in the form of subsequent German music as well, in section 12 of the book, Nietzsche writes that Socrates “put to flight the powerful god [Dionysus] himself—who, as on his flight from Lycurgus the King of Edoni, sought refuge in the depths of the sea, namely, the mystical flood of a secret cult which gradually covered the earth [i.e., Christianity]” (BT, #12, p. 86; cf. #17, p. 109: “I will not say that the tragic world view was everywhere completely destroyed by this intruding un-Dionysian spirit: we only know that it had to flee from art into the underworld as it were, in the degenerate form of a secret cult”).4 Then in section 23 he adds: “so exuberantly good and tender did this chorale of Luther sound—as the first Dionysian luring call breaking forth from dense thickets at the approach of spring. And in competing echoes, the solemnly exuberant procession of Dionysian revelers responded, to whom we are indebted for German music” (BT, #23, pp. 136–37). Silk and Stern point out that Nietzsche asserts his core thesis of a continuity between the cult of Dionysus and Christianity even more clearly in his Nachlaß from the same period (Silk and Stern 1981, p. 400, n. 114; cf. KGA 3:3, 122, 147). They also note that his favorite poet Hölderlin had already implied a continuity between Dionysian religion and Christianity, especially in his poem Brot und Wein (Silk and Stern 1981, pp. 211, 359). And they speculate, plausibly, that his reluctance to state his continuity thesis more clearly in The Birth of Tragedy than he does is mainly due to the fact that doing so would lend Christianity more prestige than he wants to give it (ibid., p. 287).

I take it that Silk and Stern’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s position in The Birth of Tragedy, as just summarized, is perfectly correct.5 However, I also think that it can and should be developed much further, namely, by noting two additional points.

The first of these is that Nietzsche’s implicit genealogy of the cult of Jesus in The Birth of Tragedy should be seen as only one side of a broader genealogy of the cult that he has in mind there, and that recognizing this fact moreover considerably enhances the historical plausibility of his position. David Friedrich Strauss, author of the groundbreaking critical work on Jesus and the New Testament, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1835/36), later published a second work along similar lines in 1864, The Life of Jesus Examined for the German People (Strauss 1864). Strauss there interpreted the New Testament as having a historical core, but one that was so heavily overlaid with myths generated by the overactive imaginations of its Jewish and early Christian authors that the core in question was vanishingly small and difficult to discern (ibid., esp. pp. 621–24). According to Strauss, these myths were largely motivated by an attempt to represent Jesus as the saving Messiah whom the Jews had long expected and hoped for and who (according to their interpretations of the work) had been prophesied in the Old Testament (ibid., pp. 150–59 and passim). Strauss also pointed out that the presence of Greek and Roman culture in Palestine and Egypt was an important part of the background for the emergence of Christianity (ibid., p. 167). He in particular noted that Greek and Roman culture made several significant contributions to the content of the new religion—including, for example, a certain cosmopolitanism that he attributes to Jesus himself (ibid., pp. 217–22); the idea that a human leader can also be a god (ibid., pp. 247–52); and the ideal of courage that causes the gospel of John to avoid attributing to Jesus the weakness that is implied by the treatment of the Gethsemane episode in the synoptic gospels (ibid., p. 551). But Strauss’s etiology of Christianity nonetheless focused mainly on its aforementioned debts to the Jewish tradition. In particular, it made no mention at all of the cult of Dionysus. Nietzsche bought and read Strauss’s book almost immediately after it was published in 1864, and this contributed to a revolution in his own attitude toward Christianity: from initial sympathy to skepticism and hostility (cf. Young 2010, pp. 56–57). Accordingly, Nietzsche (who was born in 1844) wrote later in The Antichrist: “I too, like every young scholar, slowly drew out the savor of the work of the incomparable Strauss, with the shrewdness of a fine philologist. I was twenty years old then” (A, #28, p. 600). I therefore suggest that at the time when he wrote The Birth of Tragedy in the early 1870s, his full conception of the early genealogy of Christianity must have been, or at least centrally included, a synthesis of Strauss’s thesis of its emergence out of Judaism with the Hölderlin-influenced thesis of its continuity with the cult of Dionysus (the latter as helpfully explained by Silk and Stern). In other words, Nietzsche’s considered view of Christianity at this time must have been that it was the product of a sort of syncretism between Judaism and Dionysian religion.6 This interpretation of Nietzsche’s considered position at the time of The Birth of Tragedy not only attributes to him a significantly fuller genealogy of Christianity, but also a considerably more plausible one, since the main lines of Strauss’s account are extremely plausible as far as they go.

The second additional point that I want to make enhances the plausibility of Nietzsche’s implicit genealogy even further. It is that Nietzsche’s thesis of a measure of continuity between the cult of Dionysus and the cult of Jesus, far from being the arbitrary or even perverse idea that it may initially seem to be, is in fact very credible historically speaking. In order to show this, let me indicate several features of the situation.

First of all, as has sometimes been pointed out, there is a whole series of striking similarities between the god Dionysus and Jesus as he is represented by the New Testament and the early Church. Curiously enough, it turns out that this idea has caught the imagination of the internet, where a number of long and somewhat dubious lists of supposed similarities can be found. However, the genuine ones are numerous and impressive enough. Here are some of the most important of them: (1) Uniquely among pagan Greek gods, Dionysus has a god—indeed the highest god (Zeus)—as his father, but a mortal woman as his mother (Semele); the same is of course true of Jesus. (2) As Nietzsche himself emphasizes in The Birth of Tragedy, again uniquely among the pagan Greek gods, Dionysus, according to an important tradition of myth, was killed and then brought back to life again (cf. Seaford 2006, pp. 73, 111–12); the same is of course true of Jesus. (3) Dionysian mystery cults seem to have centrally involved modeling on that original experience of the god similar hopes of an afterlife for the individual worshiper; the same is of course true of Christian cult. (4) In this connection, Dionysus was commonly given the epithet sotêr, savior; the same is of course true of Jesus. (5) Corn or bread and especially wine played an important role in the ritual celebrations of Dionysus that occurred in mystery cults, including the Eleusinian Mysteries; the same is of course true of Jesus in the New Testament’s story of the Last Supper and in the Catholic Eucharist based upon it. (6) Dionysian religion even went as far as to identify wine with Dionysus (see, for example, Euripides, Bacchae, 284); in the Last Supper and the Eucharist, Christianity likewise identifies wine with the person of Christ. (7) Dionysus was traditionally believed to perform miracles with wine, for example, in a pre-Christian rite at Elis, he would miraculously fill empty containers with wine, and according to Plutarch’s Life of Lysander, he even miraculously turned water into wine; the miracle attributed to Jesus by the gospel of John, chapter 2 of turning water into wine at Cana is strikingly similar. (8) Dionysus is noticeably androgynous in character (cf. Seaford 2006, pp. 53, 60, 89), and is accordingly often depicted that way in visual art as well; similarly, Jesus has character traits that would have seemed typically feminine to contemporaries (e.g., his anxiety in the garden at Gethsemane, his complaint on the cross, his washing of the feet of his disciples, and several of his moral principles, such as the blessedness of the meek and turning the other cheek), and is accordingly often depicted as androgynous in early visual art as well (cf. on this Seaford 2006, pp. 127–28).7 (9) Dionysus strikingly included in his cult not only privileged men, but also the poor, women, and even slaves; the same is true of Jesus as he is depicted in the New Testament. (10) Finally, Dionysus is heavily associated with activities that take place outdoors, with performing miracles, with ships, and with riding on a donkey; the same things are of course true of Jesus in the New Testament.

Admittedly, some of these characteristics of Jesus also have earlier precedents in the Jewish tradition. However, those precedents do not fully explain the specifically Christian versions of them, whereas an influence by Dionysian religion helps to do so. For example, concerning (1), it is true that the expression “son of God” was a traditional Jewish name for holy rulers and for the coming Messiah (cf. Strauss 1864, pp. 223–25). However, in Judaism, the expression was not meant literally as it is in both Dionysian religion and Christianity.8 And concerning (5) and (6), it is true that bread and wine were also part of the Jewish Passover feast that coincided with the Last Supper (cf. ibid., pp. 282–83). However, there was no question in the Passover feast of identifying either of them with the person of a god, as is the case in both Dionysian religion and Christianity.9

Second, as the classicist Richard Seaford has recently argued, the earliest of the authors of the New Testament, Paul, as a Hellenized Jew from the city of Tarsus, which must have had a cult of Dionysus, will have been very familiar with this cult, and accordingly, several features of his version of Christianity—such as his famous statement “now we see through a glass darkly, but then we shall see face to face” (1 Corinthians, 13.12)—probably derive from Dionysian mystery cult (Seaford 2006, p. 123).

Third, as Seaford and another classicist, John Moles, have both plausibly argued, there is also a series of striking parallels between events in the New Testament’s Acts of the Apostles and events in Euripides’ famous play about the god Dionysus, the Bacchae. Seaford writes:

Apparently powerless submission (in the Homeric Hymn to the pirates, in Bacchae to king Pentheus) is transformed into its opposite by epiphany, an emotive transformation that is ... comparable to the release of Paul and Silas in the Acts of the Apostles ... [There is] a similar reversal within the figure of Dionysos himself. Dionysos is chased away or imprisoned by mere mortals, or just disappears ..., but returns in triumph: he is often associated with victory ... [In the Bacchae and a fragment of Plutarch, mystic initiation involves] exhausting runnings around, uncompleted journeys through darkness, fear, trembling, sweat, and then light in the darkness. And they also appear in the description, in the Acts of the Apostles (16.25–29), of the miraculous liberation from prison at Philippi: the missionaries of the new religion, Paul and Silas, are imprisoned, singing to their god in the darkness of midnight when there is a sudden earthquake, and (as at Bacchae 447–48) the doors open and the chains fall away from the prisoners. The gaoler seizes a sword, is reassured by Paul that the prisoners are still there, asks for light, rushes inside, falls trembling at the feet of Paul and Silas, and is converted to Christianity. So too Pentheus seizes a sword, rushes inside into the darkness, and finally collapses, while Dionysos remains calm throughout and reassures Pentheus that he will not escape ... The Bacchae passage is also similar in several respects to the various accounts in Acts of the conversion of Saul on the road to Damascus. Here the persecutor of the new religion is converted ... Divine intervention is sudden (Bacchae 576, Acts 9.3, 16.26). The group hears the voice of the god but does not see him (Bacchae 576–95, Acts 9.7). To the lightning in Bacchae corresponds the description of the light appearing to Saul in terms of lightning (9.3, 22.6). The Dionysiac chorus falls to the ground and Pentheus collapses, and Saul falls to the ground (as does also, at 26.14, the group that accompanies him). The command to rise up, marking the transition, is given by Dionysos to the chorus and by the Lord to Saul. The chorus and Pentheus identify Dionysos with light; Saul saw the Lord ... These similarities are too numerous to be coincidental. How are we to explain them? One possibility is that they derive from knowledge of the Bacchae. Bacchae was indeed well known at this period: for instance, we hear of it being recited in Corinth in the first century AD ... and the literary knowledge of the author of Acts is exemplified by his including a verse of the Hellenistic poet Aratus in Paul’s sermon on the Aeropagus (17.28). Moreover, in one version of the conversion of Saul the lord says to him “It is hard for you to kick against the goads” (26.14). This expression occurs nowhere else in the New Testament, but it does occur in early Greek literature, notably when Dionysos says to his persecutor Pentheus “Do not kick against the goads, a mortal against a god” (Bacchae 796).

(Seaford 2006, pp. 44–45, 124–25; cf. Moles 2006)

Fourth and finally, the historical context in which Christianity arose, namely, Palestine (and Egypt) at around and shortly after the time of Christ, makes such an incorporation of the cult of Dionysus into the new religion completely intelligible. Palestine had been conquered by the Greek imperialist Alexander the Great in 332 BC and had then been ruled out of Egypt by his Greek successors the Ptolemies for over a century. After a period of domination by another of Alexander’s Greek successor dynasties, the Seleucids, followed by a period of relative autonomy, by 63 BC the Romans had taken over this rule. As a result of all this, by the time of Christ, Palestine was thickly dotted with poleis, or cities, whose inhabitants were largely Greek, and was ruled over by the Romans. Now Alexander the Great had himself been a strong devotee of the cult of Dionysus, with the result that this cult had not only become dominant within the Macedonian Empire, but had also spread out over the lands that it had incorporated (cf. Seaford 2006, pp. 57–58), and had moreover subsequently been adopted by the Romans as well (cf. ibid., pp. 58 ff.). Consequently, by the time Christianity began to emerge, the cult of Dionysus already had a strong presence in Palestine (and Egypt) in particular (cf. ibid., pp. 120–21).10 This amply explains the manifest continuities between the cult and the content of the new religion.

In short, David Friedrich Strauss had already argued convincingly that the New Testament largely consists of myths that were motivated by the wishes of the first, Jewish Christians to vindicate Jewish messianic hopes and Jewish prophecy. But Nietzsche, with his Hölderlin-influenced observation concerning continuities between early Christianity and Dionysian cult, contributed an important additional insight, namely, that another strong influence shaped those myths as well: a modeling of the new cult of Jesus on the pre-existing cult of Dionysus.11

Finally, note that this not only helps to explain the character of the new religion (in the ways already sketched above), but also promises to supply an important part of the answer to the pressing and puzzling question—often raised by Nietzsche himself—of how on earth a new cult from an oppressed and despised corner of the Roman Empire was eventually able to take over the whole Empire and then the whole Western world. It was able to do so largely by, as it were, piggy backing on the already deeply rooted and widespread pagan cult of Dionysus.

3. The Slave Revolt in Morality

The second of Nietzsche’s genealogies of Christianity that I would like to discuss will probably be much more familiar to readers of Nietzsche, at least in its general character: the genealogy of the emergence of Christian moral values that he sums up in On the Genealogy of Morals under the concept of “the slave revolt in morality” (GM, First Essay, #7, p. 34; #10, p. 36).

This genealogy essentially holds that the distinctive moral values of Christianity should be understood as a systematic attack, through inversion, on the traditional moral values of the Greeks and Romans, and thereby on the Greeks and Romans themselves, a systematic attack that was initially undertaken mainly by the Jewish masses due to the hatred and resentment that they felt toward Greek and Roman overlords against whom they were not able to take more direct forms of revenge. Thus, in The Antichrist, Nietzsche writes that Christianity’s “morality of ressentiment” was “born of the No” to the “noble morality” of the Greeks and Romans and that “this is the Judeo-Christian morality pure and simple” (A, #24, p. 593). In On the Genealogy of Morals, he observes that this rejection of Greek and Roman morality took the form of a strict inversion of it: “One should ask ... who is evil in the sense of the morality of ressentiment. The answer, in all strictness, is: precisely the ‘good man’ of the other morality, precisely the noble, powerful man, the ruler” (GM, First Essay, #11, p. 40; cf. EH, “Why I Am a Destiny,” #8, pp. 334–35). In the same work, he argues that this “slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of natures that are denied the true reaction, that of deeds, and compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge” (GM, First Essay, #10, p. 36). And in unpublished notes from the same period, he makes it even clearer that this Christian inversion of moral values was aimed not only against Greek and Roman moral values, but also, thereby, against the Greeks and Romans themselves: Christianity’s “mortal enemy is the Roman just as much as the Greek”; “Christianity fights against the [Greek and Roman] political nobility and its ideal” (WP, #195, p. 115; #215, p. 126; cf. #208–9, pp. 123–24).

In The Antichrist, Nietzsche adds the significant further observation that this “slave revolt” was also directed against the Jewish elites who had allied themselves with the Greek and Roman oppressors: “I fail to see against what this rebellion was directed, if it was not the Jewish church ... It was a rebellion against ‘the good and the just,’ ... against the hierarchy of society, ... against caste, privilege, order” (A, #27, pp. 598–99).

This whole account is likely to sound fanciful, or even perverse, at first hearing. However, it in fact has a great deal of historical plausibility. Let us consider each of its working parts in turn.

The general psychological mechanism to which Nietzsche is appealing here, that of reacting against (perceived) oppressors against whom one cannot take more direct forms of revenge by inverting their values, is surely familiar and securely established. Parents of rebellious adolescents will know it well. It is almost equally familiar from cases in which long-suffering children of undisciplined and selfish parents react by growing up to be strictly self-disciplined and principled. It can be seen in the Marquis de Sade, who, after having been imprisoned by Christian society for his crimes, then went about systematically inverting its values in his writings. It can be found in many black “rappers” in the USA today, who, in reaction to a white society that they experience as oppressive, systematically invert its official values. And the reader will no doubt be able to think of many further examples as well.

The remaining pillars on which the plausibility of Nietzsche’s explanation depends are his assumption that the first Christians felt hatred and resentment against a Greek and Roman order that they perceived to be oppressing them (including collaborators with it from their own community) and his assumption that their moral values take the form of a systematic inversion of the ones accepted by that order. But in both of these cases, Nietzsche’s account again turns out to be very credible on closer examination. Let us consider each of them in turn.

Concerning, first, his idea that the inventors of Christianity felt resentment against a Greek and Roman order that they perceived as oppressing them (and against collaborators with it from their own community), in order to verify this idea, it suffices to call to mind a bit more fully the historical situation in which Jesus lived and in which the texts of the New Testament were generated. Palestine had fallen to the armies of the Greek Alexander the Great in 332 BC, and after his death had remained under the dominion of his Greek successors the Ptolemies, who had ruled it out of Egypt, for over a century. There had then followed a period of domination by another of Alexander’s Greek successor dynasties, the Seleucid kings of Syria, which began in 200 BC. Following a short interval of relative autonomy, by 63 BC Palestine had been brought under Roman control, and remained so for the rest of the period in which we are interested. Therefore, the history of the area was essentially one of subordination of the native Jewish population by first Greek and then Roman imperialists. Moreover, by the time of the events depicted in the New Testament, this history had left profound marks on the whole landscape and society of Palestine. Palestine was dotted with a large number of predominantly Greek poleis, including coastal ones, such as Tyre, Sidon, Caesarea, Ascalon, and Gaza; Sepphoris and Tiberias in Galilee; Samaria/Sebaste between Galilee and Judaea; the 10 poleis of the Decapolis region to the east and southwest of Galilee and to the northeast of Judea; and Caesarea Paneas to the north of lake Galilee (see De Ste. Croix 1975, pp. 3–4). The native Jewish population was therefore largely reduced to the role of serving the Greeks in these poleis—a fact that, although somewhat obscured in the four gospels, is brought out vividly by a passage in the Acts of the Apostles in which we are told that the Greeks at one point got angry with the apostolic community “because their [the Greeks’] widows were neglected in the daily ministration” and that the 12 leaders of the apostolic community in reaction resolved defiantly that “it is not reason that we should leave the word of God, and serve tables” (Acts, 6:1–2). Moreover, within Jewish society itself, a powerful minority, largely members of the urban ruling class, had embraced Greek and Roman authority and culture, a prime example of this being the King Herod who plays such a central role in the gospels, the depths of whose collaboration with the Romans is only very incompletely reflected in the gospels themselves (the Romans granted him kingship over his fellow Jews toward the end of the 1st century BC, he issued edicts praising his Roman overlords, he followed Greek and Roman fashions in architecture and lifestyle, and so on) (see Romer 1988, pp. 129–30). Other examples were the chief priests in Jerusalem, who in the gospels argue in favor of executing Jesus on the grounds that “whoever maketh himself a king [as Jesus allegedly had] speaketh against Caesar ... We have no king but Caesar” (John, 19:12–15). Given this whole situation, it almost goes without saying that the mass of the Jewish population of Palestine, among whom Christianity arose, must have felt profound resentment against their Greek and Roman overlords, and against those from the upper echelons of their own society who collaborated with them (what population under such circumstances would not have?). And that this was in fact the case is amply shown by several sorts of evidence: pre-Christian Jewish texts, such as the Books of the Maccabees and the Book of Daniel; the New Testament itself, for example, Jesus’s comparison there of Jews and Greeks with, respectively, children and dogs (Mark, 7:27) and (as Nietzsche himself points out at GM, First Essay, #16, p. 53) the bitterly anti-Roman tract Revelation of St. John the Divine; the history of Jewish revolts against the Greeks and Romans from the whole period (beginning with the Maccabean revolt against the Seleucids in the second century BC and ending with the Jewish war against the Romans that started in 66 AD and led to the catastrophes of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD and Masada in 73/74 AD); and now in addition the Dead Sea Scrolls (written over an extended period ending in about 40 AD), which are full of hatred of the Greeks and Romans and their collaborators as well as hopes of revenge against them.12

Concerning Nietzsche’s final supporting pillar—his idea that Christianity’s moral values constitute a systematic inversion of those of the Greeks and Romans13—this is perhaps where his account turns out to be most brilliantly perceptive. For the central moral values of the New Testament really do constitute a systematic inversion of those that had predominated in Greek and Roman society since at least the time of Homer.14

Nietzsche himself alludes to virtually all of the relevant examples of this at one point or another in writings such as Human, all too Human (1878–80), Daybreak (1881), The Gay Science (1882/87), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), The Antichrist (1888/95), and his unpublished fragments. The following passage in an unpublished fragment from 1887–88 is concise and representative: “What values are negated by [the Christian ideal]? What does its counter-ideal comprise?—Pride, pathos of distance, great responsibility, exuberance, splendid animality, the instincts that delight in war and conquest, the deification of passion, of revenge, of cunning, of anger, of voluptuousness, of adventure, of knowledge—; the noble ideal is negated” (WP, #221, p. 129).

In order to try to bring out the historical plausibility of Nietzsche’s point as clearly as possible, let me focus on seven specific examples of such an inversion of moral values and present them in my own terms rather than his: (i) Homer, and in his train the predominant Greek and Roman tradition, had greatly admired honor [timê] and renown [kleos], but had despised people who lacked these. By contrast, for the New Testament: “Blessed are ye when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil,” but “Woe unto you, when men shall speak well of you” (Luke, 6:22, 26). (ii) Homer, and in his train the predominant Greek and Roman tradition, had admired the warlike and the brave but had despised the weak. By contrast, for the New Testament: “Blessed are the peacemakers”; “Blessed are the poor in spirit ... Blessed are the meek” (Matthew, 5:9, 3–5). (iii) Homer, and in his train the predominant Greek and Roman tradition, had admired the politically powerful but despised the politically powerless. By contrast, for the New Testament: “Whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted”; “The kings of the gentiles exercise lordship over them; and they that exercise authority upon them are called doers of good [euergetai]. But ye shall not be so: but he that is greatest among you, let him be as the younger; and he that is chief, as he that does serve” (Luke, 14:11, 22:25–26). (iv) Homer, and in his train the predominant Greek and Roman tradition, had admired the rich and despised the poor. By contrast, for the New Testament: “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven”; “Blessed be ye poor ... Blessed are ye that hunger,” but “Woe unto you that are rich! ... Woe unto you that are full!”; “It is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God” (Matthew, 6:19–20; Luke, 6:20–25, 18:25). (v) Homer, and in his train the predominant Greek and Roman tradition, had admired the man who took revenge on those who transgressed against him but despised the man who failed to do so (think of the central plots of the Iliad and the Odyssey, for example). By contrast, for the New Testament: “Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you. Bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you. And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other” (Luke, 6:27–29). (vi) Homer, and in his train the predominant Greek and Roman tradition, had admired those who are adept at deception and lying (for example, Odysseus) but had tended to despise those who lack this skill.15 By contrast, the New Testament pits against the Roman Pontius Pilate’s question in the spirit of that tradition “What is truth?” Jesus’s description of himself as a witness to the truth (John, 18:37–38); and for the New Testament, we “have renounced the hidden things of dishonesty, not walking in craftiness, nor handling the word of God deceitfully; but by manifestation of the truth, commending ourselves to every man’s conscience in the sight of God” (2 Corinthians, 4:2). (vii) Homer, and in his train the predominant Greek and Roman tradition, had admired the enjoyment of bodily pleasure, for example sexual pleasure, but had despised the failure to achieve it (think, for instance, of the lament of Achilles’ disembodied shade in the Odyssey that he would rather be the serf of a poor man on earth than king over all in Hades). By contrast, for the New Testament: “To be carnally minded is death; ... the carnal mind is enmity against God ...; they that are in the flesh cannot please God” (Romans, 8:6–8).

Moreover, that this striking systematic inversion of Greek and Roman values really was motivated by hatred and resentment felt against the ruling Greeks and Romans, as Nietzsche holds, rather than, say, just being accidental or stemming from quite different motives, is confirmed by many passages of the New Testament, including several that we have already encountered. (As a classical philologist reading the New Testament in the original Greek, Nietzsche will have been well aware of this sort of supporting evidence, even in cases where he does not himself cite it.) For example, as Nietzsche himself explicitly points out in this connection (A, #45, p. 624; #51, p. 634), the letters of Paul contain the following famous and revealing statement: “God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and ... the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty ... And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are” (1 Corinthians, 1:27–28). Again, in the passage that I recently quoted from Luke concerning “the kings of the gentiles,” the reference is to the rulers of the Greeks and Romans, and the passage’s repudiation of the Greeks’ and Romans’ praise of their rulers as “doers of good [euergetai]” contains a clear allusion to Alexander the Great’s successor Ptolemy Euergetês, who was the first Greek ruler of Palestine out of Egypt. Again, the passage I quoted from Matthew, “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven,” contains an allusion to, and sharp repudiation of, the Greek poet Pindar, one of the greatest literary champions of wealth as a positive value (for example, in the second Olympian Ode), who had written in a poem: “Gold is a child of Zeus; neither moth nor rust devoureth it” (Pindar 1978, p. 613, no. 222). Again, consider the stunningly simple reason that Jesus gives for rejecting certain values in the following passage: “Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? For after all these things do the gentiles seek [i.e., the Greeks and Romans]” (Matthew, 6:31–32).

In addition, one should consider in this connection a closely related inversion of valuations targeted against the Greeks and Romans that the New Testament undertakes in the area of properly religious belief. Nietzsche remarks in The Antichrist: “The same instinct that prompts the subjugated to reduce their god to the ‘good-in-itself’ also prompts them to eliminate all the good qualities from the god of their conquerors; they take revenge on their masters by turning their god into the devil” (A, #17, p. 584). This brief remark may sound obscure and implausible at first hearing, but in fact it contains volumes of philological learning and insight. The word daimôn had served the Greeks and Romans as their most generic term for the gods whom they honored as well as for those gods’ hero-offspring (see, for example, Socrates’ explanation of the word at Plato’s Apology, 26c–28a), and it was therefore very positively valorized by them. However, in the Greek New Testament, the word instead acquires its more modern meaning “demon,” with all of the powerful negative connotations that this word still has for us today. Furthermore (adding insult to that injury, as it were), the New Testament’s famous narrative of the Gadarene Swine, which is present in each of the synoptic gospels and within which the word daimôn plays a central role (in a verbal form), depicts Jesus as not only expelling daimones from a human victim whom they have afflicted, but moreover expelling them into pigs—for the Jewish community, the most despised of all animals.

Admittedly, Nietzsche’s explanation of the source of Christian values in terms of an inversion motivated by resentment against the Greeks and Romans requires certain qualifications. However, they are only qualifications, and moreover they are largely ones that he makes himself.

A first need for qualification arises from the fact that older phases of Judaism had already anticipated some of the new values in question here. For example, there are already statements in favor of respecting the poor in the Book of Amos; pronouncements in favor of poverty and humility in Psalms, Isaiah, Proverbs, and Job; and proscriptions of deception and lying in Leviticus.

However, Nietzsche himself points out that such anticipations occurred within earlier Judaism, especially in The Antichrist (A, #24–25, pp. 592–95; #27, pp. 598–99; cf. BGE, #195, p. 108). And he attempts to account for them there by offering an explanation of them that is generically similar in character to the one that he applies to the Christian era: he cites oppression of the Jews by such peoples as the Assyrians, and the resentment that this had caused in them (A, #25, pp. 594–95). Moreover, this explanation has at least some historical plausibility: The Book of Amos probably dates from the late 8th century BC, when the Assyrians had in fact just invaded and subjugated Samaria (namely in 722 BC). Furthermore, subsequent subjugations of the Jewish people by the Babylonians at the start of the 6th century BC and by other oppressors could, with at least some plausibility, be adduced to explain additional occurrences of proto-Christian values in the Jewish tradition in a similar way.

A second need for qualification arises due to the fact that certain strands of Greek and Roman literature and philosophy, including the great tragedians and Socrates in the fifth century BC, had already begun a strikingly similar inversion of values to the one that Nietzsche identifies in Christianity. In fact, anticipations of all seven of the value-inversions that I listed above can already be found in fifth-century tragedy and in Socrates/Plato. For example, concerning (i) (honor and renown), see Sophocles’ Antigone and Plato’s Apology, 29e. Concerning (ii) (warlikeness and bravery), see Sophocles’ Ajax, Plato’s Crito, 49a–d, and Phaedo, 66b–c. Concerning (iii) (political power), see Sophocles’ Antigone and Plato’s Apology, 31b–d, 36b. Concerning (iv) (wealth), see Euripides’ Electra and Plato’s Apology, 19c–d, 23b–c, 29d–e, 30a–b, etc. Concerning (v) (revenge), see Aeschylus’s Oresteia, Sophocles’ Electra, and Plato’s Crito, 49a–d. Concerning (vi) (deception and lying), see Sophocles’ Philoctetes and Plato’s Apology, 17b–18a, 29e, etc. And concerning (vii) (bodily pleasure), see Sophocles’ Antigone, Plato’s Apology, 30a–b, and Phaedo, 64d–67a.

However, here again Nietzsche himself notes that anticipations of the sort in question occurred. And here again he in addition offers supplementary explanations of them that are at least somewhat plausible. For example, in Beyond Good and Evil, he points out that a transition took place from the sort of positive moral evaluation of such traits as rapacity, lust to rule, vengefulness, and craftiness that is found in Homeric culture to a certain preference for contrary virtues in later Greek antiquity (i.e., roughly the classical period onwards). And he attempts to explain this transition in terms of the fact that whereas the traits just mentioned were necessary in the context of Homeric society in order to defend the community against attack from outside, in later Greek antiquity the community had attained a measure of security against destruction from outside, so that such traits were no longer as necessary to it, and moreover were likely to be redirected inwards in socially destructive ways now that their expression outwards had been blocked or reduced, with the consequence that the community’s well-being henceforth mainly depended on inhibiting such intra-communal aggression, and contrary, gentler virtues therefore became socially functional instead (BGE, #201, p. 113; cf. WP, #150, pp. 94–95). Similarly, in Twilight of the Idols (1888) and elsewhere, he points out Socrates’ (and Plato’s) anticipations of Christian moral values (T, “The Problem of Socrates,” #1–12, pp. 473–79; “What I Owe to the Ancients,” #2–3, pp. 557–60; cf. WP, #202, p. 118; #274, p. 156; #412, p. 222; #429, p. 234; #438, p. 242; #443, p. 245). And in this case (as in his treatment of early Judaism’s anticipations) he offers an explanation of them that is similar to the one he gives of Christianity’s espousal of the same values—in particular, accounting for Socrates’ role in inverting previous values as the result of a social resentment that he felt because he was a relatively poor Athenian socializing with rich aristocrats (T, “The Problem of Socrates,” #3–7, pp. 474–76). Both of these explanations have considerable historical plausibility. In particular, the former one in terms of changes in social structure is very plausible indeed (though no doubt in need of some refinement, such as it has since received in the work of the classicist Arthur Adkins; see Adkins 1975).16 And the second explanation has some plausibility as well: Socrates did indeed have a relatively low social status among the other citizens in Athens, especially in comparison with most of his associates (as Nietzsche implies), and while there is little evidence in the ancient sources that this low social status led him to feel social resentment consciously (in fact, quite a lot of evidence that it did not), it should be kept in mind here that Nietzsche very much includes unconscious mental attitudes and processes among the explanatory factors to which he appeals.

Nor does the concession of such positive Greek influences on the inversion of moral values that took place in the New Testament render Nietzsche’s account of it as a “slave revolt in morality” redundant. For even if the newer moral values from fifth-century Greece were already exercising a significant influence among Greeks and Romans in Palestine by the period in question, the central role that Homer is known to have continued to play in Greek education until well into the Christian era and the massive preponderance of texts of Homer over other literary/philosophical texts found in Near-Eastern archeological excavations strongly suggest that Homeric values must have continued to predominate among the general Greek and Roman populace of the area.

Moreover, and importantly, whether or not Nietzsche’s specific supplementary explanations of these Jewish and Greek anticipations of Christian values are adequate, the occurrence of such anticipations and the consequent need for supplementary explanations do not pose a serious threat to his genealogy of Christian values for the following reason. As both his overall account of the origins of modern morality in On the Genealogy of Morals and his briefer account of the history of punishment in the second essay of the same work show, his method of genealogy in principle allows, and indeed usually insists, that the psychological phenomenon or practice under consideration has arisen due to a confluence of multiple explanatory causes (a point that has been rightly emphasized by Foucault 1977 and Geuss 1999). There is, therefore, no real reason for him to resist the more specific possibility that in certain cases a full account of the emergence of such a phenomenon or practice will involve various sorts of causal repetition or over-determination. Indeed, I would myself suggest that some of the most powerful changes in morality that have taken place over the course of history have done so when and because two or more different cultural traditions have more or less independently and coincidentally come to a similar position on some moral value or principle and their independently arrived at commitments to it have then converged to co-influence a new epoch or culture. One good example of this phenomenon is precisely the “slave revolt in morality.” Another is the emergence of the notion of free will in late antiquity (concerning which, see Forster 2019).17

In short, Nietzsche’s genealogical explanation of the emergence of Christian moral values in terms of a hatred and resentment that Christianity’s inventors felt toward their oppressors, the Greeks and Romans, and an inversion of the latter’s values that this produced ultimately seems very plausible.

4. Christianity’s Otherworldism

Finally, let us consider Nietzsche’s genealogy of Christianity’s otherworldism. By this I mean such doctrines as that there exists a perfect, omnipotent, omniscient God; a heaven; a resurrection of the person or survival of his/her soul; and a coming “kingdom of God.”

Over the course of his career, Nietzsche developed a complex genealogical explanation of this Christian otherworldism that combines several different strands—all of which, though, share the common feature of drawing on his historical insight into the miserable, oppressed condition of Christianity’s original inventors under Greek and Roman imperialism.

A first such strand had already been developed clearly by Hegel in The Positivity of the Christian Religion (1796) (though Nietzsche could not have known this since the work was not published until the end of the nineteenth century) and then hinted at in his later works as well, had subsequently been continued by Feuerbach in The Essence of Christianity (1841) (with which Nietzsche no doubt was familiar), and had also played a prominent role in Strauss’s The Life of Jesus Examined for the German People (which Nietzsche had certainly read carefully) (see Strauss 1864, pp. 185–87). The explanation in question is basically that the miserable, oppressed condition of the first Christians within the Roman Empire was so severe that it motivated them to fantasize their way out of it, to resort to imaginary forms of escape and consolation. As Nietzsche already puts this idea in Human, all too Human (1878–80), “Christianity came into existence in order to lighten the heart” (HH, #119, p. 67). Or as he elaborates on it later in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–85), “It was suffering and incapacity that created all afterworlds ... Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and afterworlds”; to adopt religion is to “bury one’s head in the sand of heavenly things”; “It was the sick and decaying who despised the body and earth and invented the heavenly realm ... They wanted to escape their own misery, and the stars were too far for them. So they sighed: ‘Would that there were heavenly ways to sneak into another state of being and happiness!’” (Z, “On the Afterworldly,” pp. 143–44).18

However, Nietzsche also complements this explanation of Christianity’s otherworldism with a further one for which he is better known (or if its two parts are counted separately, two further ones). The core of this further explanation had again been anticipated by Hegel, this time especially in the “Unhappy Consciousness” section of the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), as well as by Feuerbach in The Essence of Christianity, who had obviously taken it over from the Phenomenology. It was basically that one of Christianity’s main motives for adopting otherworldly doctrines of the sort that I recently mentioned lay in the fact that the positive value they ascribed to the (in Nietzsche’s and his predecessors’ view, of course merely imaginary) supernatural beings, conditions, and processes they posited entailed a corresponding devaluation, or denigration, of the natural world and of humankind as a part of it. Thus, Nietzsche writes in Ecce Homo that in Christianity we have “The concept ‘God’ invented as a counter-concept of life ... The concept of the ‘beyond,’ the ‘true world’ invented in order to devaluate the only world there is ... The concept of the ‘soul’ ... finally even ‘immortal soul,’ invented in order to despise the body” (EH, #8, p. 334; cf. WP, #245, p. 141).

Nietzsche indicates two significantly different, but compatible and complementary, reasons why the original inventors of Christianity felt inclined to undertake such a denigration of the natural world and of humankind as a part of it. One reason was simply that their miserable, oppressed condition in the Roman Empire caused them to feel a deep disaffection with the world in which they found themselves, what Nietzsche in The Antichrist calls an “instinctive hatred of reality” (A, #39, p. 613), which motivated them to represent it to themselves in a correspondingly negative way—a sort of ‘sour grapes’ reaction. As he puts the point in the same work: “Once the concept of ‘nature’ had been invented as the opposite of ‘God,’ ‘natural’ had to become a synonym of ‘reprehensible’: this whole world of fiction is rooted in hatred of the natural (of reality) ... But this explains everything. Who alone has reason to lie his way out of reality? He who suffers from it. But to suffer from reality is to be a piece of reality that has come to grief” (A, #15, p. 582).

The second, and perhaps less obvious, reason is that the first Christians’ Greek and Roman oppressors had ascribed great positive value to this-worldly goods (think, for example, of the high value already placed on them in Homer), so that the first Christians also had a reason to denigrate them as part of their broader project of systematically attacking Greek and Roman values through inversion and thereby attacking the Greeks and Romans themselves. Nietzsche implies this reason when he includes the denigration of nature among his examples of Christianity’s resentment-based inversions of Greek and Roman values in passages such as the following one from The Antichrist, where he writes concerning Judeo-Christianity’s “morality of ressentiment ... born of the No to [noble morality]”: “So that it could say No to everything on earth that represents the ascending tendency of life, to that which has turned out well, to power, to beauty, to self-affirmation, the instinct of ressentiment ... had to invent another world from whose point of view this affirmation of life appeared as evil, as the reprehensible as such” (A, #24, p. 593).

In short, over the course of his career, Nietzsche develops a two- or three-part genealogical explanation of Christian otherworldism. It is a fundamental assumption common to each of the parts that the first Christians, living as they did under the imperialistic thumb of the Greeks and Romans, were oppressed and miserable. This motivated them, first, to fantasize imaginary otherworldly escapes and consolations. It motivated them, second, to denigrate this world that had so badly disappointed them by projecting all value onto an otherworld, and thereby making this world appear valueless by comparison (a sort of ‘sour grapes’ reaction). And it motivated them, third, to hit back at their oppressors by thus denigrating a world on which their oppressors themselves placed great positive value.

This three-part explanation once again seems very plausible. Concerning the assumption shared by all three of its parts that the lives of the first Christians in the Roman Empire were oppressed and miserable, we have already seen good reason to think this true. Concerning the first of the three strands of explanation specifically, both the general idea of a psychological mechanism that seeks to alleviate deep misery by imagining illusory escapes and consolations and the application of this idea to the particular historical case in question seem plausible. Concerning the second and the third strands of explanation specifically, Nietzsche’s idea that Christianity’s positive valorization of the otherworldly entities, conditions, and processes in question implied a denigration of the this-worldly can easily be confirmed by surveying some of the New Testament’s statements about the otherworldly (a few of which we have already encountered). For example, about God, we read there, “The foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men” (1 Corinthians, 1:25). About the soul, we read there, “What is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul” (Matthew, 16:26). About heaven, we read there, “Lay not up for yourself treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal” (Matthew, 6:19–21). And about the kingdom of God, we read there, “Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? Or, What shall we drink? Or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? ... But seek ye first the kingdom of God” (Matthew, 6:31–33). Concerning the second strand of explanation specifically again, both the general idea that people tend to indulge in such ‘sour grapes’ reactions to deep disappointment and the application of this general idea to the specific historical case in question seem very plausible. Finally, concerning the third strand of explanation specifically again, namely, that such a denigration of this world was also in part motivated by its contribution to the first Christians’ broader project of inverting Greek and Roman values and thereby attacking the Greeks and Romans themselves out of a motive of ressentiment, we have already seen that the first Christians were indeed involved in such a project both in connection with moral values and in their more properly religious re-conception of daimones. And if any further evidence be needed that the same motive moved them to extend this inversion to the Greeks’ and Romans’ positive evaluation of this-worldly goods, then we need only recall the continuation of the passage from Matthew that I recently quoted in which Jesus instructs his followers not to lay up treasures on earth and not to take thought of food, drink, or clothing. For, as we noted in passing earlier, he goes on there to give the following stunningly simple and revealing reason for not doing so: “For after all these things do the gentiles seek [i.e., the Greeks and Romans]” (Matthew, 6:32).

As in the case of “the slave revolt in morality,” this whole explanation of Christianity’s otherworldism admittedly requires certain qualifications. However, again as in that case, they are qualifications of which Nietzsche is himself well aware and which do not undermine his explanation. These qualifications again concern earlier precedents for the outlook in question that can be found among both the Jews and the Greeks. For example, Judaism anticipated and prepared the way for Christianity’s otherworldism with its own conceptions of God and individual resurrection and its own messianic expectations of a coming kingdom of God. And among the Greeks, Plato did so as well with his conceptions of an otherworld of eternal forms and of the soul’s separability from the body, survival of death, and prospects of happiness in an afterlife. But Nietzsche is again well aware of these anticipations. For example, in The Antichrist he takes the Jewish versions of them (which had already been discussed in some detail by Strauss in The Life of Jesus Examined for the German People) to be obvious (see esp. A, #24–27, pp. 592–98). And in Twilight of the Idols, he characterizes Plato as a proto-Christian mainly because of his invention of exactly the sorts of anticipations of Christianity’s otherworldism that were just mentioned, indeed attributing to him a similar psychological motivation for them as in the Christian case, namely, a motivation consisting in his disappointment with the real world, especially due to various forms of socio-political oppression that seemed to him to dominate it (in particular, both radical democracy and tyranny). Moreover, for reasons analogous to those that I mentioned previously in connection with the moral case, these qualifications should be seen, not as conflicting with Nietzsche’s core explanation, but instead as complementing and complicating it.

In sum, Nietzsche’s two- or three-part genealogical explanation of Christianity’s otherworldism again seems very plausible.

5. Conclusions

These, then, are three genealogies of central aspects of Christianity that Nietzsche develops during his career. In each case, the genealogy in question has later historical phases from which I have essentially abstracted here in order to focus on the early phase in which a transition from Greek and Roman culture to Christianity occurs. For example, in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche’s Dionysian genealogy of Christianity has later phases that involve Lutheran church music, subsequent classical music in Germany, and eventually Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk (as I mentioned in passing before); in Beyond Good and Evil and elsewhere, his genealogy of Christian moral values has later phases that involve not only later Christianity itself, but also modern moral–political standpoints, such as Kantianism, utilitarianism, liberal democracy, and socialism, all of which he sees as further developments and variants of Christian moral values; and in the section of Twilight of the Idols titled “How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable,” Christian otherworldism appears as just one relatively early phase of a genealogy that includes (not only an even earlier anticipation by Platonism, as has already been mentioned, but also) such later phases as Kant’s otherworldism in the critical philosophy. So, the sort of investigation of these genealogies that I have undertaken in this article could very well be extended further forward in time.

Still, the parts of them on which I have focused here—namely, those concerned with the original emergence of Christianity from a Greek and Roman background—are already extremely interesting and illuminating in their own right. In each case, the partial genealogy in question is likely to strike readers as rather implausible, or even perverse, at first sight. However, as I have argued, on closer inspection of the relevant evidence, this initial implausibility always disappears and each of these partial genealogies on the contrary turns out to be very credible, indeed I would go as far as to say correct—a genuine contribution to a better understanding of the nature of Christianity.