I saw this post on X a few days ago:
I thought it was interesting, since Nietzsche was trying to destroy Christianity and return the world to paganism. It’s like asking, “Mixing water & oil… who’s working on this?” “Anyone successfully cultivating any oxymorons?”
But, the question did get me thinking: who actually has tried to mix them? Turns out I already had the answer in my personal Philosophy of History flowchart.
The Philosophy of History
One of my hobbies is maintaining & updating a chart on the philosophy of history. I keep it in Microsoft OneNote. Great app. The flowchart originally started out as my attempt to map out the history of secular religion, but quickly grew past that initial scope.
This is what it currently looks like, birds eye view:
So, who is (was) working on Nietzschian Christianity? It turns out a lot of people. And, I think we can break them into two main groups. One group that already tried and failed, and another group currently giving it a go.
The First (Political) Guys
The first group of guys trying to smoosh together Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 - 1900) and the Bible were :
George Sorel (1847-1922)
Adolf Hitler (1889 -1945)
Benito Mussolini (1883 - 1945)
How were they trying to do it? Politically. Did they succeed? No.
George Sorel gave us something called Syndicalism. This took the idea of religious myths and stories and hollowed them out so that they could be used for social change. He was all about the utility of religious myths. Syndicalism tried to give the idea of the general strike a veneer of religion. It gave us scientific socialism and propounded on the importance of a revolutionary elite. It was born out of Nietzsche’s “Will to Power,” which in turn was informed by Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation.
Hitler and Mussolini took influence from syndicalism (as well as a myriad of other things) mixed it with Christianity (much to their chagrin) and gave us National Socialism (Nazism) and Fascism. Mussolini was a self-avowed anti-Christian & socialist apostate. But, Italy was stubbornly catholic at the time (hence the Lateran Pacts), and so Mussolini had to make concessions and integrate Christianity into his destructive ideology, or at the very least in his implementation of it.
Hitler was also not able to completely separate himself or his movement from Christianity, though he wanted to, and so was forced to use it for his own purposes. He took the Christian-influenced racism of Count Arthur de Gobineau (1816 - 1882) to help him stir up a national hatred towards the Jews. He also took the ideas of Georg Ritter von Schonerer (1842 - 1921), who was trying to convince people that Protestantism was a pagan form of Christianity.
Nazism, Fascism, and Syndicalism are still around to varying degrees. We’ve got Nazis in Ukraine. Or, did. I don’t know if Putin got rid of them all yet. Fascism is a slur now, so I don’t know there’s a lot of people waving that banner anymore. Syndicalism seems to have survived the best, functioning as the foundational ethos of modern day protest movements. Greta Thunberg seems to be playing in the world of syndicalism.
Also, the George Floyd Protests which brought us CHAZ & CHOP.
The Second (Spiritual) Guys
The next group of guys trying to mix that water & oil
aren't trying to do massive political movements. They’re going the spiritual route at pushing Nietzsche and Christianity together.
Here’s a few of them:
Robert Eisler (1882 - 1949)
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881 - 1955)1
Teilhard2, a Jesuit priest, was all about Nietzsche. Teilhard took Nietzsche’s idea of the Übermensch and translated it into the idea of an ultra-human. An ultra-human is not an individual person, but an entire body of people connected into a planetary consciousness. Teilhard called this the Noosphere.
This is an idea which would become very influential in science fiction. Arthur C. Clarke took Teilhard’s idea of a Noosphere, called it the Overmind, and put it as a central feature of his book Childhood’s End.
Arthur C. Clarke pulls from Nietzsche, too, in 2001: A Space Odyssey. This is a film he wrote with Stanley Kubrick which basically takes its entire premise from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 2001: A Space Odyssey starts with apes, goes through AI, and ends with a star child being born. It mimics Nietzsche’s concepts of non-Christian ascension and salvation, and echoes the words of the prophet Zarathustra from the beginning of Nietzsche’s book:
What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the Ubermensch: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment.
The song playing at the end of Kubrick’s film, as the Ubermensch ascends, is Also sprach Zarathustra, Op. 30 by Richard Strauss, which title also comes from, and whose music engages with, Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra.
Robert Eisler is a guy who, kind of like George Sorel, was attempting to take religious myths and reappropriate them. In his book Orpheus the Fisher he tries to take the symbolism and stories of Christianity and, with a little Comparative Mythology, present them as pagan & Dionysian. In The Messiah, Jesus, and John the Baptist, he presents Jesus & his cousin as revolutionary leaders & political rebels.
The Problem
The problem with trying to squeeze this oil & water together can best be summarized, I think, by something that the angel Moroni told Joseph Smith when he was 14 years old, which is that the professors of religion have, “a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof” (Joseph Smith—History 1:19).
I am fascinated by this phrase, and I think about it all the time, “having a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof.” It can be applied out to everyone, not just professors of religion. Filmmakers, philosophers, authors, environmental activists…
This idea is especially applicable here because, everyone we’ve talked about in this article, are literally trying to strip out the interior of Christianity, leave it as a mythic structure, leave it as a framework, leave it is a shape, and then fill it with Nietzsche. It’s calculated and intentional.
I mean, I’ll grant you, I’m sure Greta Thunberg isn’t sitting around thinking about how George Sorel was trying to strip the engine out of Christianity and fill its husk with the moral imperatives of revolutionaries. She just inherited this idea. But, Stanley Kubrick was intentional about it. He was doing it on purpose.
But, I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. I wrote about this quote given to Joseph Smith in an old substack post on the Submission of Will where I wondered if George Lucas, when he wrote Star Wars, was intentionally trying to use “a form of godliness, and deny the power thereof,” when he crafted the idea of the Force, and Star Wars, and all that stuff. Was George Lucas as intentional as Stanley Kubrick? I’ll tell you who probably was, the guy that George Lucas got inspiration from.
George Lucas drew heavily on Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. And, Joseph Campbell was an Esalen guy. He was influenced by Jung just like Eisler was influenced by Jung. He was playing in the same field of ideas and philosophies as a lot of these guys.
So, Nietzschean Christianity… who’s working on this? Apparently, a lot of people.
One of the things you’ll notice about these guys is that Hitler, Mussolini, Eisler, and Chardin were all born in the 1880s. Nietzsche died a monumental philosophical figure when all these guys were between the ages of 19 and 11. So, his influence on their lives makes sense.
Teilhard, I would argue, is massively influential nowadays, and an important guy to understand. His concept of the Noosphere, mixed with Catholic ideas of salvation, have been taken by devotees and distilled into environmental activism, the Simulation Hypothesis, transhumanism (of which there is a Mormon Transhumanist Association), and major portions of UFO studies.