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even the fact that such
problems had ever existed disappeared from view
. Then and only then could
the problems that remained, less amenable to quick solution by Christian
doctrine, come to occupy a central place in the consciousness of the West—
come to motivate, for example, the development of science, aimed at
resolving the corporeal, material suffering that was still all-too-painfully
extant within successfully Christianized societies. The fact that automobiles
pollute only becomes a problem of sufficient magnitude to attract public
attention when the far worse problems that the internal combustion engine
solves has vanished from view. People stricken with poverty don’t care about
carbon dioxide. It’s not precisely that CO2 levels are irrelevant. It’s that
they’re irrelevant when you’re working yourself to death, starving, scraping a
bare living from the stony, unyielding, thorn-and-thistle-infested ground. It’s
that they’re irrelevant until after the tractor is invented and hundreds of
millions stop starving. In any case, by the time Nietzsche entered the picture,
in the late nineteenth century, the problems Christianity had left unsolved had
become paramount.
Nietzsche described himself, with no serious overstatement, as
philosophizing with a hammer.
142
His devastating critique of Christianity—
already weakened by its conflict with the very science to which it had given
rise—involved two main lines of attack. Nietzsche claimed, first, that it was
precisely the sense of truth developed in the highest sense by Christianity
itself that ultimately came to question and then to undermine the fundamental
presuppositions of the faith. That was partly because the difference between
moral or narrative truth and objective truth had not yet been fully
comprehended (and so an opposition was presumed where none necessarily
exists)—but that does not bely the point. Even when the modern atheists
opposed to Christianity belittle fundamentalists for insisting, for example,
that the creation account in Genesis is objectively true, they are using their
sense of truth, highly developed over the centuries of Christian culture, to
engage in such argumentation. Carl Jung continued to develop Nietzsche’s
arguments decades later, pointing out that Europe awoke, during the
Enlightenment, as if from a Christian dream, noticing that everything it had
heretofore taken for granted could and should be questioned. “God is dead,”
said Nietzsche. “God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we,
murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest
and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under
our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us?”
143
The central dogmas of the Western faith were no longer credible,
according to Nietzsche, given what the Western mind now considered truth.
But it was his second attack—on the removal of the true moral burden of
Christianity during the development of the Church—that was most
devastating. The hammer-wielding philosopher mounted an assault on an
early-established and then highly influential line of Christian thinking:
that
Christianity meant accepting the proposition that Christ’s sacrifice, and only
that sacrifice, had redeemed humanity
. This did not mean, absolutely, that a
Christian who believed that Christ died on the cross for the salvation of
mankind was thereby freed from any and all personal moral obligation. But it
did strongly imply that the primary responsibility for redemption had already
been borne by the Saviour, and that nothing too important to do remained for
all-too-fallen human individuals.
Nietzsche believed that Paul, and later the Protestants following Luther,
had removed moral responsibility from Christ’s followers. They had watered
down the idea of
the imitation of Christ
. This imitation was the sacred duty of
the believer not to adhere (or merely to mouth) a set of statements about
abstract belief but instead to actually manifest the spirit of the Saviour in the
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