An Examination of Karl Barth’s Response to Friedrich Nietzsche

Today’s blog is a paper I just finished for seminary…enjoy!

Introduction to Nietzsche

In the late 1800’s, Friedrich Nietzsche pronounced his famously controversial phrase, “God is dead” in his book The Gay Science. It has often been misunderstood, misquoted, and given many Christians the false impression that Nietzsche was some uneducated simpleton who thought he was some conquering victor who had defeated a deity. One theologian in the following century who gave Nietzsche his due response was Karl Barth, who sought to understand what Nietzsche meant with this enigmatic statement, as well as the context in which it was uttered, and the man himself. This paper will first attempt to understand what was meant by Nietzsche when he penned the statement, then examine and evaluate Barth’s response to Nietzsche and share how this reflects the Christian thought of his day.

“God is dead.”

Nietzsche rapidly developed a reputation for being blunt — more of a sledgehammer than a philosopher. His ego seemed to expand to fill rooms, evidenced by things he wrote such as: “it is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book.” If his goal was to get people talking for the next two centuries, he succeeded. Part of Nietzsche’s strategy for staying alive in the world of philosophical conversations comes from the fact that he often chose to write through parable or prosaic verse rather than in direct philosophical description. So, when he penned those three most famous words, they were in the context of a story, a conversation between two characters, which affects the way the statement is understood. To many modern Christians specifically, the statement comes off as a pithy pronouncement of the triumph of atheism over religion, rather than what it really was — a foretelling, or even a warning of the crumbling morals of religion and a prophecy of coming chaos. And Nietzsche was right: with the rise of secular governments came the bloodiest century in human history. It seems fitting that Nietzsche died in 1900, the dawn of this new age where to the popular mind, God was as good as dead, and human progress had taken the throne.

After all, atheism was nothing new by the time of Nietzsche, even if it was still controversial and a minority view. The system has simply been “represented with less restraint and we might almost say with greater honesty by Nietzsche.” So what Nietzsche observed could be described, not as the birth of atheism, but as the prediction of its logical end.

To better understand the phrase, one must first put it in context and summarize the full anecdote. A madman approaches “many of those who did not believe in God” who were standing around together, and says he is looking for God. The group seem to be haughty and scoffs at the madman, mocking him. It soon becomes apparent that the madman is a representative for Nietzsche himself, who turns out to know more than the cynical, laughing atheists, and end up being the prophet instead of the fool. It’s also interesting that Nietzsche seems to admit that he, via the proxy of the madman, has also been searching for God. In other words, he may be saying that he initially set out to find God, not destroy the idea of Him.

After the mocking from the atheists, the madman launches into his poetic tirade:

‘Where is God?’ he cried; ‘I’ll tell you! We killed him, you and I! We are all his murderers. But how did we do this? How were we able to drink up the sea?…What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun?…Where are we moving to? Away from all suns?…Is there still an up and a down? Aren’t we straying as though through an infinite nothing?…God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How can we console ourselves, the murderers of all murderers! The holiest and the mightiest thing the world has ever possessed has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood from us? With what water could we clean ourselves?…”

The madman in the story clearly has a better grasp on the implications of the removal of God from reality — or at the very least, the removal of a deity from the popular subconscious which bound together social principles and the morals and ethics along which they lived — than the laughing mob of casual atheists. Nietzsche seems to paint the atheists in this story as fools or scoffers who lack the full ability to comprehend the depth of where this shift will take the world.

As is often the case in didactic tales like these, the madman is really the one with a grasp on the truth, and he is able to see how the tectonic shifts of this removal of God from the world is leading to a lack of unity, orientation, et al. Perhaps Nietzsche, and others who employ a similar narrative approach, paint the sayer of truth as the madman, not because they are mad, but because they seem mad to the larger populace, when in reality they are the only ones who can see a bigger picture (as is the case with nearly every prophet in the Bible, starting with Noah, who were thought to be fools by everyone in their time). This is bolstered by what happens after the madman’s rant: he is met with silence, throws down his lantern, and says that he came too early; the people can’t see what they’ve done to themselves, as it is still too far off.

It is apparent that what Nietzsche is communicating through this parable is not a triumphal proclamation of man’s defeat of the divine, or a discarding of their need for him. Rather, it is a solemn warning about what is coming because they thought that way. Nietzsche spends several sentences pounding in the fact that humans have untethered themselves from anything that gives them a sense of orientation or solidity, and that now, they are adrift. None of the repercussions for ‘killing God’ listed off by the madman are positive. Therefore, it is all the more foolish to read this passage and come to the conclusion that Nietzsche was happy or optimistic about the death of God in the popular mind — very much the opposite. He may have been an atheist, and believed truly that there is no God, but he fully acknowledged that this is a dangerous truth, and the future would prove to be vastly different, not necessarily in a good way, as a result.

Wrestling with Nietzsche’s statement is tough to decipher, because while he appears as a grave prophet for what humanity has done in their rejection of God, he was also a staunch atheist and critic of religion, especially Christianity. In The Antichrist, he wrote that Christianity is the “one immortal blemish upon the human race.” Perhaps one could say that, while he himself rejected the idea of God on philosophic, moral, or even emotional grounds, he still could see the doom this unmooring spelled for the coming century(s). One modern commentator opined that, “When Nietzsche says that God is dead he doesn’t just mean that the Christian God is dead; God here doesn’t refer to the narrow religious definition but to the broader idea of universal and transcendent truth. A more accurate expression of what he meant [may] be ‘Truth is dead.’” This interpretation would certainly align with Nietzsche’s prose about the loss of direction and gravity and anything that could possibly unify humans toward a common goal or good. Many philosophers may see the two as interchangeable, at least in this context: If there is no universal truth, there is no way that humans can unite for a common purpose. This seat was held by God, according to Nietzsche and his ilk, for millennia, but now He is gone, and the result will be disastrous.

Barth’s Response

Barth’s initial response to the quickly-spreading idea that God had passed away seems lighthearted and jovial, almost dismissive. In a letter to a friend, he wrote:

“Be cheerful and of good courage. The statement that God is dead comes from Nietzsche and has recently been discovered and trumpeted abroad by some German and American theologians and now by certain schoolboys. But the good Lord has not died of this; he who dwells in heaven laughs at them. This is all I have to say on the matter.”

Fortunately, it was not all he had to say on the matter. Barth was certainly smart enough to know that Nietzsche was deeper than an insult-hurling child, and was making a far more profound observation. Initially, however, in the third volume of his Dogmatics, one of the first things Barth writes regarding Nietzsche, as stated above, is his own self-involvement: “Nietzsche never spoke except about himself… [things] interested him only as a paradigm and symbol, or, to use his own expression, a projection of himself.” Or that, “Nietzsche was of the opinion that with his Zarathustra he had given humanity a greater gift than any so far given.” Barth seems to almost feel sorry for Nietzsche, as he talks about him being lonely and loveless, isolated from anyone who would want to share life with him. Barth writes: “His only impulse towards man is that of the hammer to the stone.”

Barth adopts Nietzsche’s autonym of the “anti-donkey,” because he found himself repeatedly opposing anything and everything he could, with the culmination of this being him becoming a manifestation of the Antichrist, or, one who is against the greatest being mankind has produced, the one who is the image and heart of the Western art, ethics, philosophy, and society which he fought, and resulting in his book of the same title. The climax of Nietzsche’s book Ecce Homo, according to Barth, is the single sentence: “Am I understood — Dionysius against the Crucified,” with Dionysius as a stand-in for his egoistic self. Barth goes on to explain that this was Nietzsche’s contention of himself, his own will, ‘the will to power,’ against all the Christian ethics which he saw as weak and therefore, bad. “According to Nietzsche‘s Thus Spake Zarathustra, an individual, asserting himself, should raise himself above the masses of humanity to overcome man, to be a god unto himself.” Christianity, exemplified in the life and teaching of Jesus, is opposed to this attitude. It says, in Barth‘s words, that the individual is not God but a man, and therefore under the cross of the Crucified and one of its host.” Christianity confronts the individual with the ‘suffering man,’ Jesus, and, “demands that he should see the man, that he should accept his presence, that he should not be man without him but with him, that he must drink with him at the same source.” Perhaps it was because Christ calls humans to suffer, and Nietzsche didn’t like the idea of the existence of humanity to be one of mere suffering until death. Whatever the reason for his repulsion, his opposition to Christian ethics was absolute. Writes Barth:

“What is the absolutely intolerable and unequivocally perverted element which Nietzsche thinks that he has discovered, and must fight to the death, in Christian morality, and in this as the secret essence of all morality?… It is because Christianity is not really a faith, and is not really “bound to any of its shameless dogmas,” and does not basically need either metaphysics, asceticism, or “Christian” natural science, but is at root a practice, and is always possible as such, and in the strict sense has its “God” in this practice.”

Barth sees Nietzsche first and foremost as an ethicist, and the ethics of Christianity clashed with his own. According to Barth, Nietzsche preferred man to be “lonely, noble, strong, proud, natural, healthy, wise, outstanding, splendid man, the superman,” all of which — on the surface at least — run contrary to the morals taught by Christ. Although he was incredibly well-versed in the Bible, Barth seems to say that Nietzsche did not see it as having any sort of authority or input on any metaphysical or epistemological levels — it only played in the arena of ethics, and it was these ethics which bothered Nietzsche endlessly. Nietzsche’s ethic was to raise oneself over others — made evident even in the name he gave his ideal man: the overman. Rising above is built into the naming of his ideal, an ideal which is fundamentally at odds with Christianity.

Response & Evaluation

Both men were incredibly influential thinkers: Nietzsche as both an advocate for atheism and the prophet of its own collateral damage, and Barth as a thoughtful Christian theologian who helped adapt Christianity to be more relevant in the 20th century. Neither Barth nor Nietzsche were slouches on any intellectual front — both were incredibly well-read and aware of history as well as the times in which they lived, plus Barth aware of Nietzsche’s life and times. So it is surprising then, that Barth treats Nietzsche with a somewhat dismissive attitude. Toward the end of his extended notes about the German philologist, Barth wrote:

“Those who try to fight the Gospel always make caricatures, and they are then forced to fight these caricatures. Nietzsche’s caricature consists in his (not very original) historical derivation of Christianity from a revolt on the part of slaves or the proletariat…We all grasp at such aids as are available.”

Someone as intelligent as Barth would have known that Nietzsche was not simply a dull hammer, swinging at anything that he didn’t like, or that didn’t feel good to him. Saying that Nietzsche only disagreed with Christianity on ethical grounds is a bit trite, and doesn’t give Nietzsche the full response he may deserve. Perhaps, however, Barth is assuming that it is Nietzsche who is not taking Christianity seriously enough; maybe he assumes that Nietzsche can’t take Christianity seriously simply because it does not fit into his paradigm of power as the creator of ethics. After all, the founder of Christianity embraced weakness and suffering, and then died for his enemies — voluntarily lowering Himself below everyone else, or, becoming the untermensch. It seems to continually baffle Nietzsche that the religion of a man who chose to humble “himself by becoming obedient to death — even death on a cross” is the one that overtook the world, even becoming a dominant ‘power’ in the West. Christianity is so contrary to Nietzsche’s ethic that it never should have worked. By his definition, Christ is the übermensch, as He won all these Christians over to His way of thinking and living — His ethics. Yet, Christ continually resists this categorization in the gospels, continually resisting power and choosing humility.

As Nietzsche constructed his own ethical system, Christianity is the one paradigm that throws a wrench into his way of thinking. Even Islam fits neatly into his understanding of the world, as it was founded by a powerful warlord who forced his beliefs upon masses. I can almost hear Nietzsche fondly admiring Mohammed: ‘He would have made a fine übermensch.’

Yet Barth does not seem to give Nietzsche his due analysis. As stated above, Barth seems rather dismissive of Nietzsche and labels him as a mere ethicist, without wrestling — in his writings at least — with many of Nietzsche’s metaphysical arguments. I would have liked to see Barth go deeper into analyzing Nietzsche’s own philosophy, instead of just responding to Nietzsche’s critiques of Christianity. What he does give us, however, is a Christian insight into the functional ethics of many atheists of his time, much of which is still helpful in understanding that way of thinking today.

Day 19 of 100 days of blogging

Bibliography

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Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844–1900 and Walter Kaufmann. The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. New York, Vintage Books, 1974.

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