As I continue my work on my dissertation, I keep wrestling with the question of whether Christianity is life-affirming or life-denying. Nietzsche’s great claim is that Christianity’s focus on the next world leads it to a hatred of this world and a denial of the earth. We can certainly understand why he would have got that impression. There is much Christian rhetoric, even from the saints, that seems to depreciate this world in favor of the next world. Jesus Himself said that unless you hate father and mother you are not worthy of Him (Luke 14:26).
At the same time, Christian faith is centered on the two mysteries of Trinity and Incarnation, which both affirm the value of the other and of the earth that remain and never collapse or obliterate each other. The Trinity says that God’s very essence is relationship—a Trinity of persons. “Otherness” already exists in God, in the relationship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Otherness with a capital O (that is, within the Trinity) is the condition for the possibility of otherness outside the Trinity (that is, in the created world). God, in His almighty power, establishes a world outside of Himself, a world that will remain in the new heaven and the new earth. Not only that, but God unites this created world to Himself in the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity (the Other in God). This Incarnation dignifies creation in an unheard of way and transforms creatures, welcoming them into the very life of God.
Anything but life-denying.
How, then, can someone like Nietzsche understand Christianity as hatred of the self and of the world? How do we, informed by the Church’s Trinitarian and Incarnational faith, understand those parts of the Tradition that seem to despise this earth and created things, and especially the body?
Two recent (at least for me) books helped me understand these questions more deeply. They are Martin Hägglund’s This Life (2019) and Norman Wirzba’s This Sacred Life (2021). I found out about the Hägglund book through the Wirzba book, whose title seems to be a response to Hägglund’s argument.
That argument, in part, is very close to Nietzsche’s. Hägglund writes that any system of thought that sees finitude as negative will inevitably depreciate this life and therefore be a religious system, whether that system believes in God or not. Nietzsche likewise dedicated himself to this life in his famous phrase “God is dead.” Hägglund (p.48) comments:
Nietzsche’s important argument is that the death of God should not be received as bad news. If one laments the absence of eternal life, one is still in the grip of the religious ideal, even though one does not believe that it can be realized. In contrast, Nietzsche pursues the revaluation of the value of eternal life that would be free from suffering and loss. As Nietzsche emphasizes, it is pernicious to endorse the ideal of eternal life or eternal being, since it leads to a devaluation of the commitment to temporal, finite life.
The death of God leads to a revaluation of this life, no longer held to be “less than” a (non-existent) eternal life.
In This Sacred Life, Wirzba responds that belief in eternity does not necessarily lead to a devaluation of commitment to this life. While agreeing with Hägglund’s social and political proposals about what a commitment to this life would mean (a subject for another blog) as well as agreeing with Hägglund’s critique of much religious thought as world-denying, Wirzba does not believe that religious faith frees us from commitment to this world. In a footnote, he writes:
My disagreement with Hägglund is therefore also a disagreement with religionists who think that God and creation are in competition or at odds with each other, and the for God to be honored, this life must be devalued or even despised. As I will argue, the exact opposite is the case. It is precisely God’s affirmation of creatures and God’s abiding commitment to secure their flourishing in this life that can serve as an inspiration for our own commitment to participate in the healing of this wounded world (p. 137).
I agree with Wirzba and have been really blessed by his writings. I particularly love his use of the thought of Wendell Berry, transposing Berry’s thought into a more theological key.
As I read This Sacred Life, though, I was disappointed that the uniqueness of Christianity was not highlighted more. Wirzba speaks about Christianity as just one option among many religious options that affirm the goodness of the world and our projects within the world, as if it just happens to be the one that he knows best. This level playing field of religions is similar to Hägglund’s and Nietzsche’s lumping of all religions together. Nietzsche, for example, in Beyond Good and Evil, ties Christianity and Buddhism together and then basically says that Buddhism is better than Christianity at denying the world. But what if Christianity was not trying to deny the world in the first place? Wirzba, in the above quote, speaks about “religionists,” when he mostly means, from what I can tell in the rest of the book, “bad Christians.” I would appreciate both Wirzba and Hägglund acknowledging the real differences that exist between religions.
Christianity, as we have seen, in its central dogmas of Trinity and Incarnation, is about as life-affirming as could possibly be. The Church is in a unique position to speak to the contemporary concern for the health of the planet and the flourishing of human life. This is what Gaudium et Spes, from the Second Vatican Council, is getting at when in Paragraph 39 it says:
When we have spread on earth the fruits of our nature and our enterprise—human dignity, sisterly and brotherly communion, and freedom—according to the command of the Lord and in his Spirit, we will find them once again, cleansed this time from the stain of sin, illuminated and transfigured, when Christ presents to his Father an eternal and universal kingdom “of truth and life, a kingdom of holiness and grace, a kingdom of justice, love and peace.” Here on earth the kingdom is mysteriously present; when the Lord comes it will enter into its perfection.
It is understandable why someone like Nietzsche or Hägglund would be baffled by this language, especially when it is belied by the behavior and language of so many Christians. There seems to be a coincidence of opposites (coincidentia oppositorum) going on here. What Hägglund is worried about is that the exaltation of infinity will render finitude meaningless. What can death and pain even mean if they are just a drop in the ocean of infinite bliss? Is it possible for death to be real even when it is swallowed up by life? Or more concretely, is it right to grieve even when I have faith in eternal life? Shouldn’t I be happy for the one who has died?
Hägglund sees something like the death scene of Monica in Augustine’s Confessions as monstrous, inhuman. When Monica says that she does not care where her body is placed, does this mean that Christian faith makes us not care? This is precisely Hägglund’s rejection of Christianity: it makes us not care about this earth. Christianity therefore is life-denying.
I grant that much in Christianity, and in other religions, seems life-denying. It is not easy to hold together (coincidence) the two sides of finitude and infinity (opposites), or of the absolute and the particular. But this is exactly what Christianity calls us to do. To try to collapse the tension between the one and the many, the finite and in the infinite, is to fall into heresy. It sometimes takes heroic mental and spiritual effort to remain in that tension.
As I read Hägglund’s book, an image came to my mind that helped me to grasp more deeply the unique contribution of Christian faith in the “religious” landscape: the wounded hands, feet, and side of the Risen Christ. Jesus has conquered death, but death is still with Him, now transformed, in His glorious wounds. This fact of the Resurrection tells us something of what can only be held together in God: Resurrection not as the opposite of death, but its transformation. And so we arrive at the third central mystery of Christian faith, after the Trinity and the Incarnation: the Paschal Mystery, the Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
These mysteries of faith are a resource for the world that is so broken and needy. They allow us not just to negate the suffering and finitude of the world but to begin, even now, to see their transformation. This life, because of Christ, truly is sacred.
Truly beautiful and a lot to think on!