Nietzsche’s Confrontation with Christianity via the Body and History

Abstract

In this article I argue that Nietzsche understands history as physiological history and that he takes the history of the body that he advances to be a repudiation of Christianity. Nietzsche’s body is the body as a coalition of drives (Triebe); in Antichrist, Nietzsche records Paul’s attempt to write the body out of history. The death of God represents a dawning self-awareness on the part of the body, such that Christianity’s disembodied history becomes untenable, providing an opening for Nietzsche’s form of history to assert itself at Christianity’s expense. However, I challenge the degree to which Nietzsche’s own sense of history is actually anti-Christian. I do this by initiating a dialogue between Nietzsche’s history and that presented in Augustine’s City of God, asking whether The City of God really is guilty of the suppression of the body of which Nietzsche accuses Paul and, by extension, Christianity. Through this intertextual engagement, we see there is a stronger Christian vestige in Nietzsche’s historical outlook than he is willing to admit. For both Nietzsche and Augustine, the truly historical paradigm depends on a certain asceticism that is not only a prescriptive or ethical stance but a deep conviction about the way things are. If we understand Nietzsche on his own terms, he might even be said to have radicalized Augustine’s Christian asceticism in his engagement of the body and history, by making the suffering of the body eternal.