“Testing faith:
redeeming Christians from themselves”

A Reflective
Review of Lucy Huskinson’s Introduction to Nietzsche

 

Nietzsche’s Test
of Faith

 In Lucy Huskinson’s brilliant,
all too brief missive, An Introduction to Nietzsche (SPCK 2009), she assesses and affirms the value of
engaging Friedrich Nietzsche’s thought for Christianity. Huskinson’s Introduction prepares readers who hope to dip into Nietzsche by
avoiding reductionist caricatures that naively paint this great philosopher as
either the devil incarnate or some sort of closet Christian. She maximizes what
we might learn from Nietzsche by reminding us not to simply react to his
provocations, but rather, to observe and diagnose our own instinctual responses
to them.

Her final chapter is titled “Testing
faith: redeeming Christians from themselves.” I wish that SPCK had used this
chapter title on the book’s cover, for it is a great contribution to an urgent
need of the day. In it, Huskinson sees Nietzsche’s primary target audience as
Christians, provoking them to test the strength of their faith. By opening
ourselves to Christianity’s harshest critic and facing into his deepest
questioning, ones faith is ‘salted with fire—but salt is good’ and ought to be
internalized (Mark 9:49-50). After Nietzsche’s fire tests the Christian heart,
will any faith remain? He is doubtful.

Herein, we shall recount Dr.
Huskinson’s clear explanation of Nietzsche’s ‘God is dead’ test, then proceed
to testing the test for its criteria and assumptions—not to avoid it but to
stoke it and shape it for those Nietzsche calls ‘the most serious
Christians’—with one such Christian in mind. Namely, the early 20^th
century French philosopher-activist-mystic, Simone Weil.[1]

 Excerpt from
Huskinson’s Nietzsche 

Nietzsche thinks
Christians are not only deluding themselves into thinking that life is simply a
waiting room for a free ticket away from suffering, they are also offending
humanity in the process. Our human life, Nietzsche says, is something to
celebrate and own, and this includes its every struggle and pain. Nietzsche
calls us out of the waiting room and ‘into the wilderness’ to confront out
suffering and, as we saw earlier, to test ourselves and to force us into
learning how to become spiritually stronger and self-sufficient. The Christian
who fails to take responsibility for his or her suffering is weak and a slave
to suffering. Such a person will not only live a sick and stagnant life but
will also create great injustice through their resultant ressentiment. (Huskinson, Nietzsche 89)

Nietzsche’s
writings call upon us to test ourselves in order to ascertain whether the way
we fashion our lives enables us to realize our potential, and whether our
beliefs are in the service of our lives or dictate our lives to us. One very
effective way to carry out this test is to see how well we cope without our
beliefs… [The death of God] provides superb test conditions to assess the
strength of a Christian’s faith. Nietzsche describes the test of Christian
faith as ‘the needful sacrifice.’…

These serious,
excellent, upright, deeply sensitive people who are still Christians from the
very heart: they owe it to themselves to try for once the experiment of living
for some length of time without Christianity; they owe it to their faith in this way for once to sojourn ‘in the
wilderness’—if only to win for themselves the right to voice on the question
whether Christianity is necessary. (Nietzsche, Daybreak 61) 

Nietzsche’s test

To review, Nietzsche’s test
consists of a context, a condition, and several possible consequences:

Context of the test: a
wilderness sojourn 

According to Nietzsche, the
necessary context of this test must be
a wilderness trial, a confrontation with the ‘suffering and horror of life.’
Nietzsche knew this wilderness, having suffered the trauma of war and its
wounds in his body and psyche. He knew the excruciation of a fatherless
childhood, spurned love, betrayal, and isolation. 

That Nietzsche should prescribe
this context for the refiner’s fire is appropriate because affliction (what
Simone Weil calls ‘malheur’—non-redemptive suffering) quickly exposes those
aspects of faith that are actually less than faith or pseudo-faith: benign
mental assent to doctrinal creeds, inherited religious rituals, flaccid
moralism, or a host of fantastical ‘god’ projections of our own making.

However, the context of
Nietzsche’s test suffers two serious (though not insurmountable) limitations.
First, he describes the wilderness sojourn as if this were an experimental
suffering that is chosen or willed. Second, he assumes that faith in such a
wilderness is voluntarily embraced or relinquished. But to what degree is
affliction or faith a matter of the will?

Nietzsche had not volunteered for
his own exposure to heart-breaking affliction. Nor does the vast majority of
humanity for whom the wilderness is not so much a chosen sojourn as an
inescapable state of debilitating and demoralizing tragedy and/or injustice.
Some imagined capacity for romantic, mythical heroism may work in Classical
Greek tragedy—but in the darkness of historical slave-galleys or modern
genocide, necessity’s cruelty separates faith from thought experiments. In the
context of the Hebrews’ exile or Hitler’s ovens, faith may be present or
absent. But the suffering itself and whatever faith remains in its wake is not
so much chosen or relinquished as given or lost / taken.

But to be fair, Nietzsche isn’t
addressing the poor of the poor in the third world or industrial age factories.
He is rightly challenging the nominal faith of the bourgeois herds that merely
believe they believe. That their faith might amount to merely playing,
pretending, and delusion was of great concern to Nietzsche, not least because
that form of Christianity unchecked is oppressive, repressive, and ultimately
breeds injustice—a worry shared by his contemporary, Soren Kierkegaard. Both
philosophers sought to initiate a purge of this pitiful and petty (yet
altogether dangerous) religiosity.

Yet how is such a class of
comfortable, oblivious churchgoers—whether in Nietzsche’s Lutheran Europe of
the 19^th century or the contemporary Bible Belt of America—to find
their way into a wilderness of their own choosing that exceeds mere simulation?
Are we to suppose that the well to do could manufacture a sufficient forge of
faith for themselves? One can well imagine the insignificant pseudo-trials that
Nietzsche’s target crowd might compose. Would these truly provide the authentic
context required for the test? Upon reflection, we might conclude that
‘wilderness’ sojourns are typically too difficult (for the destitute) or too
easy (for the privileged) to be effective for Nietzsche’s test of faith.

However, Simone Weil might be
cited as one example of how the advantaged can pass through the fire without
being disingenuous (notwithstanding the fact that she entered her trials
without faith to begin with). As the daughter of wealthy secularized French
Jews, Weil chose to immerse herself in the sufferings of the poor and
afflicted. Her life suggests three motives that create a potentially valid
context of suffering for Nietzsche’s challenge:

(i) First, one can voluntarily
descend into the darkness of the fray for an ideological conviction, as Weil’s anti-fascism compelled her to participate
in the Spanish Civil war. (ii) Second, one can voluntarily stand in
solidarity as an advocate among an
oppressed people-group that suffers involuntarily, as we see in Weil’s year in
the factory and long-term involvement with the French labour movement. (iii)
And third, when faced with life-and-death danger where there exists an option to flee—as with the
Nazi occupation of France—one can stay and face into the storm, though Weil’s
attempts to do so were stymied.

Still, even if one can use Weil’s
motivations to embark into a wilderness pilgrimage, how or why would laying
down one’s faith provide a valid trial for faith’s veracity? Is faith not
tested by how it stands up under pressure, more so than how we stand up without
it? Nietzsche did not think so. This leads us to his prescribed condition: the
God is dead test.

Condition of the test: living
for a time without Christianity

Presumably, if one can live for a
time as if God is dead, one might
discover whether their Christian faith is genuine or necessary. “Let it go and
if it comes back to you…”? Of course, the condition of the test
is rather loaded with assumptions or at least begs certain questions.

How does one for whom
Christianity is ‘serious’ and ‘from the heart’ decide to ‘live without
Christianity’? What must this abandonment of faith include or entail in real
life?

(i) Ritually, we might easily imagine withdrawing from religious
services and gatherings and ceasing the practice of Scripture reading and
prayer for an extended period. An extended fast from those venues and meetings where
indoctrination and religious habits are reinforced could be of great benefit to
those who need to face the world outside their artificial religious bubbles.
But for serious, from-the-heart Christians, these elements comprise only
externals that spiritual imposters can mimic without faith.

(ii) Socially, Nietzsche might expect the Christian to lay aside
Christian fellowship for a time and to relate as friends only to agnostics and
atheists. Where this is possible, it is perhaps also necessary in terms of
detoxification from the language and groupthink of the herd, though we might
ask after those friends and family members we are apparently meant to abandon.
Nietzsche’s wanderings from city to city do present relocation as a viable
option to facilitate socialization outside the Christian camp.

(iii) Does Nietzsche also require
faith examinees to lay down their Christian ethics and morals? For a time, are we to refrain from love and forgiveness, from
patience and kindness, from humility and goodness? One might argue that these
are conditions common to humanity, and not specifically Christian mores. But
for Nietzsche, these traditional virtues are peculiar to the slave mindset of Christianity.
Nietzsche is not about calling Christians into liberal secular humanism.
Rather, he invites them to freedom from a moralistic slave-ethic to something
bolder, amoral or immoral, and more life-affirming.

This aspect of the test would be
problematic for those Christians who believe that the ‘Jesus Way’ of the Gospels
is prescriptive of an abundant life
rather than the stuffy Victorian pietism of Nietzsche’s experience. If
Christianity was always meant to move beyond the tree of the knowledge of good
and evil (i.e. withering moralism)—back to the tree of life—then laying down
moralistic religiosity is as truly ‘Christian’ as it is Nietzschian. I.e., we
ought to be in sync with Nietzsche’s life-affirming instigations.

(iv) Finally, at the level of belief
or faith, Nietzsche would have the serious Christian attempt
to lay down Christian belief per se—not just assent to creeds and dogma, but
the very belief that God exists. This seems simple enough to one who has
already lost faith. Nietzsche abandoned faith because it was no longer
believable to him. He may not realize how involuntarily his anti-conversion
was. He came to see things in a new way—he had a metanoia—a change of heart and mind that left him unable to
believe. Asking him to live for a time as if God does
exist may have worked as a test of his atheism, but could he have genuinely
self-generated sufficient faith to make the test authentic? The same difficulty
(or impossibility?) exists in reverse for the convinced believer.

In the West, Christianity has
often emphasized choice, commitment, or decision. We choose to trust in the
word and person of God in Christ. And there is something to this
faith-as-response of the will. But for Weil—as for Christians, Platonists,
Hindus, or Buddhists—the further one travels East in thought, the more faith is
an awakening, an enlightenment, an encounter. Revelation births faith. Simone
Weil’s Christian Platonism puts it this way: “Faith is the experience of the
intelligence illumined by love.” We ‘see the light.’ To lay aside faith on
purpose would be like closing one’s eyes, hoping that this might extinguish the
sun or at least one’s memory of it. Not so simple.

Author and minister Brian Zahnd
tells of a time when he sought to appropriate the ‘God is dead’ test, quite a
risk for an active church leader if done in earnest. His experience was that
while he was able to make the mental shift from ‘God is’ to ‘God is not,’ what
did not change was his struggle with doubt. He merely converted from a believer
who doubted his faith to an unbeliever who doubted his doubt. Such are the limits
of converting by choice.

Still,
Nietzsche’s serious Christian might be
able to arouse lingering doubts that would lead to practical agnosticism or
full-fledged unbelief. He or she might especially ponder honestly the real
contradictions posed by a good God and an afflicted world. In the case of
Simone Weil, this meant refusing to rationalize her way to a palatable
theodicy. She said a firm no to spinning worldly evils into a greater
providential good. Like Nietzsche, she embraces necessity (amor fati) and says of the universe, warts and all, ‘It is
what it is.’ But rather than negating faith, when Weil gazes into the darkness,
she finds faith (or it finds her)
in the Cross. The crucifixion of Jesus, for Weil, represents the sole
intersection of ultimate goodness and affliction—the cruciform bridge across
the eternal chasm between God and the world.

Further, Weil chose strategies to
avoid creating a god of her own projection OR in the churches’ image. When she
finally and reluctantly began to pray, she restricted herself to the “Our
Father” in Koine Greek and refused baptism into church membership. Her motto
was that if you tried to pursue God, you would create a projection. But if you
pursued Truth wholeheartedly, you would find God. In the end, she did find an
image – the Cross of Christ  – that
resonated within her and generated faith in the midst of trauma.

Consequences of the test … and
what is being tested?

If the Christian successfully
enters the wilderness and lays aside Christianity for a time, Nietzsche sees a
number of possible outcomes ensue. Huskinson lays them out:

Nietzsche is in
effect calling Christians to assess both the value and limits of their faith by
sacrificing it in order to see whether it is strong enough to return. Such a
sacrifice can occur only in the solitude of wilderness—which is to say, when
the person is confronted with the suffering and horror of life. The test is to
see whether the person can joyfully affirm his or her suffering as part of a
blessed life (and wish its eternal recurrence); or, by contrast, either wish
for his or her escape from it (by seeking comfort in a compassionate God), or
feel the need to belittle it (by regarding it as a means to a higher end, such
as divine retribution). If Christians can endure the former, then they have
successfully lived without recourse to their God and can subsequently pass
judgment on whether Christianity is necessary for the living of their life. If
they still maintain it is indeed necessary, their faith will subsequently be
reborn in strengthened form, as a genuine or ‘more serious’ faith. If it is not
strong enough to return, they are released from an unnecessary restraint on the
living of their lives. (Huskinson, Nietzsche 81-82) 

If I hear Huskinson’s Nietzsche
correctly, we can summarize the possible results of the our faith-test as
follows.

1. Some might have the courage to joyfully endure and
   affirm suffering (without recourse to faith) as part of life, in which
   case God is proven unnecessary.
2. Some will be unable to endure affliction in their own
   strength, wishing only to fly back to God for consolation and reprieve
   (Paul in 2 Cor. 1:1-9).
3. Some will minimize suffering by looking beyond it or
   making sense of it through some redemptive / retributive outcome (e.g.
   Paul in 2 Cor. 4:17 or Jesus in Heb. 12:2).
4. A very few may endure the suffering and earn the
   right to judge faith as still necessary, in which case faith may return in
   a purer and stronger form.

Again, I see a few cracks in the
foundation of the test as it stands. First, it appears that Nietzsche may be
establishing a double bind. After experiencing the wilderness trial, (i) if I
find that I didn’t need my faith in God,
it proves that Christianity was an unnecessary crutch, and can be discarded.
But (ii) if I find that I did
need God, it proves that my Christianity is nothing more than a crutch, and should be discarded as escapist (not life-affirming).
Presumably, the ‘serious Christian’ will not need his or her faith, but will nevertheless deem it
necessary (but why?) and be free not
to discard it. In other words, the faith worth keeping after affliction is that
which was unnecessary in affliction.

I may be misunderstanding or
misrepresenting Nietzsche here, but it is exceedingly important not to miss his
fair concerns re: Christian faith. First, if our faith drives us into denial or triumphalism, rather than taking up the Cross that Christ has offered, it is toxic.
Second, if our faith uses God to flee from life as it is into a Christian ghetto or gnosti super-spirituality,
rather than affirming and living life as Christ did, it is worse than useless.

Assenting to these points, a few
others are problematic. First, I wonder: is Nietzsche’s test of faith more
correctly a test of faithlessness. I.e., isn’t it rather a test of one’s
capacity to live without faith? Or more
positively, is this really a test of one’s ego- or soul-strength apart from
faith, simply a Zarathustran version of the sorting the sheep from the goats?
The righteous are those who embrace fate without faith. The unrighteous are
those who must resort to faith in an imagined cosmic manager in order to
function.

The hidden and unproven
assumptions therein include the following:

1.     Nietzsche
appears to assume that the ability or
inability to sustain and embrace life without faith falsifies faith. But does
it? We may or may not have the personal courage to face suffering. Some endure
great suffering with courage to the bitter end. Others cannot. But then is the
necessity of faith being measured or simply the capacity of one’s will power? 

2.  Another assumption:
Faith’s veracity is tested by its usefulness. Or is it? Is faith entirely
utilitarian? Or does the truth or reality of faith’s object also critically
important. If faith in a lie ‘works’ somehow, does the usefulness of that faith
justify trusting in the lie (like some universal placebo effect)? Or may my
faith, however weak and prone I am to vacillating in my willing, nevertheless
be well founded because the anchor of truth holds even when I do not?  

3.  A third premise: Faith
is falsified by one’s need to run to God for comfort. Or is it? One might argue
that fleeing into the arms of God or leaning on him as a crutch is by
definition faith and the very point of faith. Human willing when tested to the
limits does come to a terminus after which we either fall into the arms of God
or into the madness of the abyss. Short of that, we have not ventured far
enough into the wilderness. We may not need faith to that point because life is
still coddling us. 

Friedrich Nietzsche and Simone
Weil represent polar opposites in terms of apparent atheism versus Christian
faith. But they share some major commonalities. Both embrace suffering within
their broader affirmation of life. They were equally committed to a doctrine of
amor fati (love of fate—not fatalism), rejecting Hegelian progressivism for the
reality of necessity in the world. They both looked into the abyss. Weil saw a
crucified man. What did Nietzsche see? In the end, perhaps both Weil and
Nietzsche also became martyrs of their own wilful sojourns. It is not fair to
presume how much of Nietzsche’s final illness should be attributed to his
philosophy. In Weil’s case, her desire for the eradication of self looked at
times rather self-absorbed and possibly fatal. For better or worse, I do find
it likely that Nietzsche would have seen in Weil his rare but ‘serious
Christian.’

The final demise of both these
monumental philosophers gives us pause re: the advisability of Nietzsche’s test
as is. But I believe their lives make a strong case for the needfulness of some
such examination in these days of anemic faith among the Christian herd. At the
first, are we willing to hear Nietzsche’s concerns or shall we recoil in
defensiveness? To hear Nietzsche is to risk examining oneself, a test to which
Dr. Huskinson has wisely alerted her readers. I commend her book as essential
reading to those who would not only know Nietzsche, but themselves more deeply.

---

[1] French philosopher, activist,
and religious searcher, whose death in 1943 was hastened by starvation. Weil
published during her lifetime only a few poems and articles. With her
posthumous works – 16 volumes, edited by André A. Devaux and Florence de Lussy
– Weil has earned a reputation as one of the most original thinkers of her era.
T.S. Eliot described her as "a woman of genius, of a kind of genius akin
to that of the saints.” (Petri Liukkonen, http://kirjasto.sci.fi/weil.htm).