Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 48:2 (NA 1997)
Article: Dionysus Against The Crucified: Nietzsche Contra Christianity, Part 1
Author: Stephen N. Williams

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Dionysus Against The Crucified:
Nietzsche Contra Christianity, Part 1

Stephen N. Williams

Summary

This is the first part of a two-part study of Nietzsche and Christianity. Nietzsche’s phrase ‘Dionysus against the Crucified’ is used as a kind of text for the articles. ‘Dionysus’ is the principle of life: raw, tragic, joyful, but real, subject to no extraneous principle. ‘The Crucified’ is the principle of death: anti-natural, symbolising consciousness of sin and foreboding authority of God, imposing a morbid principle on life. This part is strictly descriptive and although it outlines some elements in Nietzsche’s philosophy, it suggests that philosophy as such will not provide an adequate response.

I. Introducing Nietzsche

Wherever there are walls, I shall ascribe this eternal accusation against Christianity upon them - I can write in letters which make even the blind see… I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct for revenge for which no expedient is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, petty—I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind…

So ends, but for a phrase or two, Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Antichrist, written in 1888.1 Not long afterwards, he collapsed in the piazza Carlo

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Alberto in Turin, sobbing, arms thrown around a carthorse that was being flogged. He never recovered sanity and died eleven years later, in 1900.

The words quoted, together with the closing words of his literary autobiography, Ecce Homo, which was produced soon afterwards, fittingly brought to its climax Nietzsche’s authorship. Ecce Homo closes: ‘Have I been understood?—Dionysos against the Crucified…’ (p. 134). I shall take the words of The Antichrist as a barometer of Nietzsche’s sentiment and the words of Ecce Homo as a text for this lecture.2 Before trying to expound the text, four preliminary observations are in order.

(1) Although we confine our attention to Nietzsche contra Christianity, it is misleading to suppose that we can appreciate the full import of his attack by considering Christianity in isolation. Nietzsche was, in a fashion, contra woman; contra Germans; sometimes, it seems, contra most other things too. In the final year of his sane life

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he put together, in addition to the writings mentioned, the posthumously published Nietzsche contra Wagner, following up The Case Against Wagner w...

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