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Nietzsche’s Protestant Fathers Nietzsche was famously an atheist, despite coming from a strongly Protestant family. This heritage influenced much of his thought, but was it in fact the very thing that led him to his atheism? This work provides a radical re-assessment of Protestantism by documenting and extrapolating Nietzsche’s view that Christianity dies from the head down; that is, through Protestantism’s inherent anarchy. In this book, Nietzsche is put into conversation with the initiatives of several powerful thinking writers: Luther, Boehme, Leibniz, and Lessing. Using Nietzsche as a critical guide to the evolution of Protestant thinking, each is shown to violate, warp, or ignore gospel injunctions, and otherwise pose hazards to the primacy of Christian ethics. Demonstrating that a responsible understanding of Protestantism as a historical movement needs to engage with its inherent flaws, this is a text that will engage scholars of philosophy, theology, and religious studies alike. Thomas R. Nevin is Professor Emeritus at John Carroll University, USA, and a Life Member of Clare Hall at Cambridge University, UK. His previous books include The Last Years of Saint Therese (2013) and Therese of Lisieux (2006). Nietzsche’s Protestant Fathers A Study in Prodigal Christianity Thomas R. Nevin First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Thomas R. Nevin The right of Thomas R. Nevin to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-138-39120-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-42287-4 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC For Tim, Mira and Neerja, for Stephanie, Sara and Ken Forthi loke thow lovye as longe as thow durest, For is no science under sonne so sovereyn for the soule. Contents ContentsContents Preface ix Introduction: Nietzsche, companion and commentator 1 1 Martin Luther denies love to God 6 I Backgrounds and foregrounds 6 II Approaching Luther 8 III What the Theologia Deutsch told Luther about love 15 IV Grace, the slavish will, impossible love 17 V The earlier Luther on love 26 VI Loveless, Luther faces Islam 32 VII Luther on true and false Jews 38 VIII The Finnish re-make: putting a best face onto Luther 49 IX Nietzsche on Luther 52 2 The evil in God: Jacob Boehme finds the cosmos 78 I Sebastian Franck shows Boehme the way 79 II The legacy of Theophrastus von Hohenheim, known as Paracelsus 91 III God the good son, God the evil father 97 IV Boehme’s ontotheology: from nothing to nothing 105 V Boehme in and out of the Lutherans’ dock 107 VI Nietzsche, Boehme, and the metaphysics of suffering 115 3 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz presumes to scan God 140 I Leibniz thinking for his dukes 141 II Pre-establishing harmony 147 III Working for Christian concord 151 viii Contents IV Toward the theodicy 160 V Monads, briefly 162 VI Of damnation and extra-terrestrial piety 167 VII Pierre Bayle as witness for the prosecution of God and Leibniz 171 VIII Leibniz and Bayle on Christian mystery 179 IX Nietzsche (and Goethe) on Leibniz 187 4 The prodigality of reason: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing 202 I What was enlightenment? 203 II An assassin of God? 208 III Adornments for the half-religious: “The Free Thinker” (1749) and “Vindications” (1754) 212 IV The Reimarus controversy and Hauptpastor Goeze (1778) 218 V Nathan der Weise (1779) 228 VI Lessing’s Jesus, Leibniz’s optimism 234 VII Educating humanity with Spinoza 241 VIII Nietzsche seduced by Lessing 247 Conclusion: Nietzsche facing Christianity 260 Index 277 Preface PrefacePreface The Reformation’s five hundredth anniversary in October 2017 has occa- sioned re-thinking the Christian heritage that has informed Europe and the world for more than two thousand years. This book is meant to share in that task. It begins after Nietzsche’s familiar words about God being dead, the less cited “We have killed Him, you and I! We are all His murderers!”1 It glosses four involuntary murderers of God, four prodigious Protestant writers who by their pens moved toward the secularization that characterizes modern cultures. Nietzsche succeeds them as God’s coroner. My choice of Nietzsche to occupy an initial and terminal position is prompted by a remark he made about being in succession: “I’m admitting what I’d now very much wish, that sometime another man might compose a kind of résumé of my conclusions and bring me in that way into comparison with previous thinkers.”2 My writing is addressed chiefly to Christians, but not exclusively. To those for whom the very name of Nietzsche begets so great an antipathy as to pre- clude attention to him, I suggest that he need not be feared, and should not be dismissed. Nor should he be ignored, as though he had nothing to teach us, we who are Christians, about ourselves. A venerable Jesuit teacher of philosophy once told me that Nietzsche is too dangerous for Christians to read. I believe that is not necessarily so. It is true that his insights have the force of a scourge. He rebukes the Christian Church in harsh terms. He despises Paul, the exemplary “eternal Jew.” He grows in his perspective upon Jesus himself. It might be said that he theolo- gizes with a hammer. Bewitched by pagan antiquity, or rather by his stylized version of it, he would like to run away to it. Much of his vituperation, his famous rhetorical excess, derives from dismay and contempt for his own time, which he found unbearably flaccid and unheroic. Being an academi- cian did not help him on that score. I wonder how he would have responded to Georges Bernanos’s plaint: the great pity of our time is not that there are so many unbelievers, but that we are such mediocre Christians. An Anglican of the “middle way,” I regard Protestantism as innately cen- trifugal and hence inclined to individualist byways (chaos), and Catholicism as centripetal. Nietzsche’s contention that Christianity dies from the head