Part Three of Beyond Good and Evil covers sections 45 through 62, and is about 17 pages
long in the Kaufmann translation.
Kaufmann’s title of this part, “What is Religious,” suggests a parallel with the
title of Part Nine, “What is Noble,” but the parallel is not there in German.
The German title of Part Three is das religiöse Wesen, meaning the religious character or manner.
Here Nietzsche will give his thoughts on the psychology of religious belief, its origins
and cultural effects.
This video will cover three main themes in Part Three: the character of the saint, the
tension between religious life and modern society (in which Nietzsche surprisingly seems
to favor religion), and the effects of Christianity, both positive and negative.
In section 47, Nietzsche confronts the psychological case of the saint, the holy man who suffers
and denies himself for the sake of God.
How is such a human character possible?
One reason we find the saint-ascetic so interesting, says Nietzsche, is his union of opposites.
We often see a bad man transformed into a good and holy man.
(Think here of St. Augustine, for example.)
Thus the saint seems to be a type of overcoming the opposed values that are a major theme
of this work.
Powerful men have often bowed before the saint’s “riddle of self-conquest,” writes Nietzsche.
This is because they recognize in the saint a strong will, eager for the challenge of self-overcoming.
In praising and honoring the saints, powerful spirits praise and honor these same qualities
in themselves.
This is the will to power.
Similarly, the fear that powerful men feel when looking on the saint, the fear that the
saint has discerned some hidden truth about reality, some hidden danger of which the powerful
are ignorant; this also reflects their awareness of will to power.
So according to Nietzsche, both the saint’s strength of will and the admiration he inspires
are due to his instantiating the will to power even in his self-discipline and asceticism.
In section 54, Nietzsche notes that modern philosophy, especially following Descartes,
aims to abolish the old concept of the soul, and as such is by its very nature anti-Christian.
But if modernity is opposed to Christianity, this does not make Nietzsche automatically pro-modern.
In section 58, he roasts a certain type of condescending German biblical scholarship.
A religious life of prayer and devotion to God requires leisure and an aristocratic attitude
toward work, writes Nietzsche.
And modern, industrialized, democratic Europe, “our modern, noisy time-consuming industriousness,
proud of itself, stupidly proud,” is incompatible with religious life.
Rather, modern society trains and educates people for unbelief.
But Nietzsche does not approve of this new modern atheism.
Among such ignorant and proud moderns, he identifies one type for special scorn: people
who have lost all religious instincts, and no longer know what purpose religion ever served.
They just marvel at its persistence as they go about their business and their pleasure.
Nietzsche places “the great majority of German middle-class Protestants” in this
class of people, and his description of this group contains some elements of the Last Man
he describes in Zarathustra’s Prologue.
Perhaps these moderns who have forgotten the spiritual ambitions of religion are a sort
of proto-Last-Man, perhaps we could call them Penultimate Men.
In the second half of section 58, Nietzsche rips into the German critical scholars of
religion, who take a smug superior attitude toward the beliefs and believers they study
and “explain.”
I think Nietzsche here is condemning the shallow, bourgeois critics of Christianity, who underestimate
both its ambition and its value.
They live in a religion-less world, a spiritually flat world.
And this world without greatness is not a future Nietzsche wants for human culture,
as we will see later in the book.
In the final two sections of Part Three, Nietzsche catalogs the positive and negative effects
of religion on European culture and psychology.
Religion has been helpful in governing peoples and bringing them to more advanced levels
of cultural and spiritual development.
It has promoted self-possession, silence, and self-overcoming, all things Nietzsche
praises in his own positive vision for man.
However, the negative effects of religion are substantial, he claims.
In relieving suffering and preserving the weak, it has worsened the human race, short-
circuiting what we might call the natural selection cycle.
It has also inverted the values of strong and weak into good and evil, which he will
say more about in Part Nine.
Nietzsche calls Christianity “the most calamitous kind of arrogance yet,” for it is not hard
enough to give the world new exceptional individuals, Overmen.
Instead, it has (so to speak) kept the European spirit on a low simmer, allowing the pernicious
egalitarian spirit of modernity to infect mankind.
The result is the sickly, mediocre herd animal type of man, and the decline of strong and
masterful human types.
Nietzsche sees this effect on the psychology of modern man as Christianity’s greatest crime.
This concludes my commentary on Part Three of Beyond Good and Evil.
We will turn to Part Four next.
Thanks for watching today; goodbye.