 

Nietzsche’s Masks
Philosophy and Religion in Beyond Good and Evil
Robert B. Pippin

My main interest in the following lies in demonstrating something that

sounds extremely simple, even simplistic: that a great deal in our under-
standing of Nietzsche will change if we read him as he asked to be read –
very slowly and very closely. In the  preface to Morgenröthe (Dawn),
he wrote that, whatever he wanted to say, he wanted to say it slowly, and
that he and his books are “friends of the lento,” and: “It is not for nothing
that one has been a philologist, perhaps one is a philologist still, that is a
teacher of slow reading [ein Lehrer des langsamen Lesens]” and that it had
become his habit and taste “no longer to write anything which does not
reduce to despair every sort of man who is in a hurry.” He asks of
his readers only, “Learn to read me well! [Lernt mich gut lesen!]” And
he emphasizes the same quality, which he also calls “rumination [Wieder-
käuen]” at the end of the preface to On the Genealogy of Morality.
So, there is no secret or key to reading him as he meant to be read. We
simply need to pay attention to what he tells us and proceed accordingly.
But that, it will turn out, is easier said than done. Noticing what one
notices when one does slow way down makes everything a good deal more
puzzling, and makes one’s own writing “slower.” But doing so is critically
important for one theme especially: Nietzsche’s conception of philosophy.
(There is surely a deep connection between anyone’s conception of what
philosophy is, and how one thinks it is to be written.) With some sense of
how he wants his work to be approached, I also want to show what
difference that might make for understanding one of his central topics:
religion.
Accordingly, if the question concerns Nietzsche’s understanding of phil-
osophy, or his “metaphilosophy,” then surely some significant dimensions


“Nichts mehr zu schreiben, womit nicht jede Art Mensch, die ‘Eile hat’, zur Verzweiflung gebracht
wird” (KGW V/: p. ). My translation.
 
Ibid. KGW VI/: p. . My translation.


 Nietzsche’s Masks 
of the answer should be available in a book subtitled, “Prelude [Vorspiel ]
to a Philosophy of the Future”; that is, in Beyond Good and Evil. And we
do find there a wealth of details, often expressed in elaborate similes,
metaphors, and allusions, about what he seems to think has gone wrong
in the philosophical tradition. Most prominent is that very way of
introducing the problem – historically. Future philosophy must be differ-
ent; something has happened that makes unavailable the past philosoph-
ical tradition that extends from pre-Socratics to Schopenhauer. A hasty
conclusion about what Nietzsche thinks might have happened would be
that philosophy has been exposed as fraudulent, that we now realize there
just is no such thing, in the same way in which it would be foolish to ask
for a better version of astrology or alchemy. There is no such better or
even alternate version, because there never was such a thing as astrology or
alchemy. So, accordingly, we should be doing something else, like natural
science or depth psychology. But, according to Nietzsche, what we clearly
need in the future is still “philosophy.” And, in the first two parts of the
book, Nietzsche has quite a bit to say about how philosophy failed us, and
he offers some, but much less, detail about what a new philosophy must
look like.
Here are some obvious features of the philosophy of future. Its relation
to truth will be different. It will not be committed to truth “in itself,”
where committed means not committed to the importance of such a
search; as he says, it will not be committed to the value of truth. (Status
of commitment is the question; not the nature of truth.) A hasty conclu-
sion, drawn by many, might be that Nietzsche is, self-defeatingly, rejecting
the possibility of objective truth at all. There are passages where it has
seemed to some that this is what he is claiming. But, in the very first
paragraph of the book, he is quite clear that his interest lies in challenging
the value of truth. He wants to show us that whatever we think we know
will not do for us, will not be transformative, in the way Socrates
promised.
It will be a philosophy that understands that “psychology is again the
path to the fundamental problems [Denn Psychologie ist nunmehr der Weg
zu den Grundproblemen]” (BGE ). He does not mean that the new
philosophy will simply concentrate on problems of human motivation,
on psychological explanations of thought and action. Psychology will be


I defend this emphasis more thoroughly in Pippin (a: –).

The following translations are used: BGE (); D (); GM (); GS ().
  . 
“the queen of [all the] the sciences [Herrin der Wissenschaften],” displacing
first philosophy or metaphysics.
From the perspective of the philosophy of the future, past philosophy
appears “a long actual [eigentlich] tragedy,” and one that has “come to an
end” (BGE ). He does not explain what such a tragedy is, and, typically,
even such a straightforward-sounding claim is subject to a qualification
that can seem gratuitous, as Nietzsche adds, “assuming that every philoso-
phy was in its origin, a long tragedy [vorausgesetzt, dass jede Philosophie im
Entstehen eine lange Tragödie war].”
The new philosophy will involve a novel mode of valuation, a mode not
committed to “opposite values,” but rather will acknowledge a “gradation
in values [wo es nur Grade und mancherlei Feinheit der Stufen giebt].” Given
the title of the book, it would be reasonable to think that he most of all
means that future philosophy will be beyond any commitment to the
strictly opposing values of good and evil, and will encourage us to see them
too in terms of gradation. But this can be puzzling, since he also seems to
mean “beyond” the distinction entirely, rejecting any valuation formulated
in terms of considerations of egoism and selflessness, rather than seeing the
pair as part of one continuum and so linked with each other and still
indispensable. (In actual treatment, it is the latter, continuum view that
predominates, but there are more radical sounding passages.)
There are other characterizations, scattered throughout the first part on
the “Prejudices of Philosophers.” We learn that the new philosophy will
realize its instinctual origins (BGE ) and come to see itself as what it has
always been, the rationalization of wishes (BGE ). It will understand that
it has been the involuntary confessions of its authors, revealing unacknow-
ledged noble and ignoble intentions as what it strives to satisfy (BGE ).
Philosophers have been actors, and sycophants to the powerful (BGE ),
and self-deceived (BGE ).
But the most complicating aspect of the philosophy of the future is
introduced in the preface and emphasized again in BGE  of the second
part on “The Free Spirit.” That aspect is the esoteric character of
philosophy, both in the past and in the future. (This is clearly one of the
strong points of continuity between past and future philosophy.) In the


Pippin ().

Is this supposed to be a qualification, a way of suggesting that philosophy might not be a long
tragedy, or that it might only be one, or not be one, in its arising, “im Enstehen”? What would be the
point of that warning, as it were?

This problem was posed for me by Chris Janaway. I have more to say about the issue and about the
general question of Nietzsche’s figurative style, in Pippin ().
 Nietzsche’s Masks 
preface, he had said that “all great things, in order to inscribe eternal
demands in the heart of humanity, must first wander the earth under
monstrous and terrifying masks” and that dogmatic philosophy was such
a mask or grimace (Fratze). This sort of formulation is already an example
of a kind of rhetoric that I would like to spend some time exploring,
especially because it is also a first principle of the kind of writing being
proposed for a philosophy of the future. It is especially important because,
apart from commentators influenced by the hermeneutics of Leo Strauss
(Stanley Rosen [], Laurence Lampert [], Heinrich Meier
[]), it is not taken all that seriously, and this for an understandable
reason. Given the great passion and energy of Nietzsche’s polemical
writing, his readers are often tempted to race through passages, as if that
passion requires, to do it justice, such speed. But much of what is actually
said is, and is meant to be, puzzling, and that puzzlement, properly
attended to, slows one down. Dogmatic philosophy (that is, all prior
philosophy), he insists, should be understood to be one of the “great
things” that have striven to “inscribe eternal demands in the human heart.”
And then the slow down starts. What does this mean? Why call the
demands “eternal”? What demands in particular? Does he mean Plato’s
invention of the pure spirit and the Good in itself that he mentions in the
very next sentence? But these are not “demands.” Perhaps Plato, he is
suggesting, wanted to inscribe an aspiration for purity of spirit and for the
good in itself in the human heart, but, if he did, he did not seem optimistic
about such an aspiration for the vast majority of human hearts, and rather
than “inscribe” such demands in hearts, he seemed more interested in
simply convincing a few people of their truth. What should inscribe such
demands is the elenchus itself, not any Fratze. And even if we could sort all
this out, just why would it be possible to do so only if masked, or “making a
face, grimacing”? And, even more puzzling, why would the mask have to be
monstrous and terrifying? Was Plato’s mask or visage monstrous? Does
Nietzsche mean that the Platonic view of the human passions as so unruly
and dangerous was only a pose (not his true view), and meant to frighten
his readers, so that they would accept the demand for purity of spirit and
the good in itself? How exactly would that go? And even if all this were so,


“Es scheint, dass alle grossen Dinge, um der Menschheit sich mit ewigen Forderungen in das Herz
einzuschreiben, erst als ungeheure und furchteinflössende Fratzen über die Erde hinwandeln müssen:
eine solche Fratze war die dogmatische Philosophie.” A Fratze here might just mean a grimace or
grotesque face; all great things first appear terrifying. But the passage needs to be read together with
BGE . Judith Norman does translate it as “grimace” when Fratze appears in BGE .
  . 
why would such a pose be necessary, the only way to inscribe such
demands?
So the philosophy of future can be summarized as having these charac-
teristics: () no over-valuation of the value of truth. () Prior philosophy
ended as a tragedy; the new philosophy will not be tragic. () There will
be a new emphasis on psychology as the new first philosophy. () There
are no strictly oppositional values, like either good or evil; or, perhaps,
to anticipate, either religious or nonreligious. () There will be a new
self-awareness of the “instinctual” origins of philosophy. () There is one
mark of continuity with the old philosophy: it was esoteric and the new
philosophy will be esoteric also.
This complexity is even more prominent in his other characterizations
of the esoteric character of philosophy. In BGE , he famously writes that
“Everything deep [tief ] loves masks; the deepest things even hate images
and likenesses.” Surely he considers his own philosophy deep, profound;
so it would be crucial to know why he makes this claim, even insisting that
the love for masks is so intense that the deepest things hate even images
and likenesses; that is, anything not the original, but that, like an image,
still reveals the original. The mask, apparently, must completely conceal
the original or what is masked. If we ask why this should be, he does not
(not here anyway) suggest an answer familiar in esoteric traditions; such
as, to protect the author from political danger or because the unwise, the
many, will misunderstand what is written, and might even be demoralized
and left in confusion if the writing did not speak to two audiences at once.
Nietzsche tells us here that the deepest things love masks for a strikingly
unusual reason, one paradigmatic for the stylistic elements that slow us
down. He writes, “Wouldn’t just the opposite be the proper disguise for
the shame of a god [Sollte nicht erst der Gegensatz die rechte Verkleidung
sein, in der der Scham eines Gottes einhergienge]?” He appears to mean “the
opposite” of image and likeness, or a completely disguising mask, but the
reference to shame, and the shame of a god at that, is quite unexpected,
and, as far as I know, not discussed in the literature. This is surprising
because shame is certainly a major theme in the book, interwoven
throughout, especially in the epigrams and interludes (where there are


This is not to say that these declarations about past philosophy as a tragedy that has ended provide a
complete picture of Nietzsche’s views of tragedy, especially of Greek tragic poetry or of Zarathustra.

“Alles, was tief ist, liebt die Maske; die allertiefsten Dinge haben sogar einen Hass auf Bild und
Gleichniss.”

He does suggest something like the second reason in BGE  and BGE . See the discussion of the
latter later in this chapter.
 Nietzsche’s Masks 
seven aphorisms about shame) and it figures very prominently in his
frequent discussions of women (a crucial theme for many reasons, not
least because the book began by suggesting that truth is a woman, and
philosophers clumsy lovers).
Moreover, the penultimate paragraph of the book (BGE ) reminds
us that there was a god without shame, Dionysus, but when, in such
shamelessness, he proposed helping humans be “stronger, more evil, more
profound . . . more beautiful,” (or exactly what many believe Nietzsche
wants to help us become) Nietzsche in effect responds in our voice by
reminding Dionysus and us that such a god lacks more than shame and he
could learn a thing or two from human beings, who are, after all, “more
human” than the god.
None of this is clear; most of it is actually mysterious, and none of it has
been much attended to. It appears that Nietzsche is suggesting at the close
of the book that the connection between “the shame of a god” and writing
“masked” should not be abandoned; there remain good reasons to be
ashamed, but it is not clear why. I would suggest as a provisional inter-
pretation that Nietzsche is first comparing all past philosophers to gods, or
at least mortals who have striven for centuries for eternal and so divine
truth, who have thought of themselves as god-like (that is certainly an
image used by Plato), and, in the current age, the enlightened age, have
now become ashamed, as he notes in BGE , that their thinking has
succeeded only in playing the greatest joke (den allergrössten Schabernack)
on them, has made philosophers into the biggest fools (das Wesen, welches
bisher auf Erden immer am besten genarrt worden ist), and that such a
situation is shameful. (There is also, of course, shame in being exposed as
“clumsy lovers [linkische Liebhaber],” to revert to the book’s opening
image.) I would suggest, finally, that the connection between shame and
writing in a masked way stems essentially from an anxiety that whatever
one writes that addresses philosophical topics will be interpreted as another
chapter in a tradition that has been exposed as, at its worst, a “joke” or
foolish; that any philosophy of the future will inevitably be read as an
episode in traditional philosophy. (This is, of course, overwhelmingly what
has happened.) Another way of writing is necessary to prevent this, and
Beyond Good and Evil appears to be an example of such a new style.


Cf. Pippin (b).

Nietzsche offers no reason for characterizing Dionysus as without shame, but he presumably takes it
as obvious that Dionysian, orgiastic revels alone make the point.

“stärker, böser, tiefer.”
  . 
But he goes farther and suggests that, in the current age, the philosopher
(and he seems to mean the true philosopher of the future) is ashamed of
“acts of love and extravagant generosity [Handlungen der Liebe und einer
ausschweifenden Grossmuth]” that he has something “precious and vulner-
able [etwas Kostbares und Verletzliches]” that he wants to hide even from his
good friends (BGE ). This is because he knows that what he is hiding
will very likely be badly misinterpreted, and indeed his own reception has
not been focused on anything like Nietzsche’s acts of “love and generos-
ity,” or anything “precious” and especially “vulnerable.” In fact, the crude
misinterpretations will insure, whether he intends it or not, that “a mask is
constantly growing around every profound spirit, thanks to the consist-
ently false (which is to say shallow) interpretation of every word, every step,
every sign of life he displays” (BGE ).
This is itself a fascinating contemporary topic. Let us call it: the hidden
shame of philosophers about their own past tradition, a kind of embarrass-
ment about ancient thought and scholasticism prominent in Descartes and
Hobbes at the beginning of modernity, and reaching a revolutionary point
in Kant’s explicit suggestion that, in the face of the accomplishments of
Newtonian physics especially, philosophers should be ashamed that cen-
turies of speculation have produced no consensus, can point to no
progress. It is an even more interesting issue in the current climate
surrounding university education and the humanities especially. The
suspicion that in such disciplines and even in philosophy, supposedly the
most rigorous and ambitious of the humanistic disciplines, not only is
nothing professionally useful known, but that nothing is known at all, has
become a more and more acceptable charge, not least by some philoso-
phers themselves. From the Nietzschean point of view we have just begun
to sketch, this is all understandable and not at all bad; there can be, he
writes, a subtlety (Feinheit) and something deep, profound (Tiefe) in
shame (BGE ), but, in the contemporary case from Nietzsche’s point
of view, ultimately the shame stems from a complete misunderstanding of
the enterprise of philosophy itself. I suggest that in the book as a whole he
is suggesting the deeper source of such shame is not that we have failed to
accomplish philosophical progress, but that we ever thought that philoso-
phy was such as to “progress” systematically. This is why his philosophical


“Jeder tiefe Geist braucht eine Maske: mehr noch, um jeden tiefen Geist wächst fortwährend eine
Maske, Dank der beständig falschen, nämlich f l a c h e n Auslegung jedes Wortes, jedes Schrittes,
jedes Lebens-Zeichens, das er giebt.”
 Nietzsche’s Masks 
heroes are Heraclitus, Thucydides, Montaigne, Machiavelli, Shakespeare,
Goethe, and for a time, Wagner and Schopenhauer.
But why will the philosopher of the future still be subject to such
constant misinterpretation? Why will his “acts of love and generosity,”
whatever he has that is “precious and vulnerable,” be so misinterpreted,
and what exactly are these things anyway? I think the answer has some-
thing to do with the fact that Nietzsche, for all of the famous supposed
doctrinal claims in epistemology, like perspectivism, or in metaphysics, like
the eternal return or the will to power, is not a traditional doctrinal
philosopher, but one much more interested in a completely different
way of thinking about the central element in his philosophy, valuing –
the main reason that what he is doing is still “philosophy” – and so a
completely different way of coming to understand higher and lower values,
and that all means that he wants to portray a “life properly valued” in a
different way. I mean a way not first built on some rationally defensible
standard of what ought to be valued, and then, therefore, accepted. Such a
traditional account of the structure of value would simply already express a
highest value (what can be rationally defended), and not help us under-
stand the role of value in a life. That would already presuppose a specific
value (rationality) and it being valuable. Of course, any such provisional
summary already sounds like a doctrine that should be available to
demands for argument, evidence and the like, and that is why these masks
keep obscuring what is masked.
As we have seen, in all of this, Nietzsche is always proceeding in
heightened anxiety that nothing he writes will be understood properly,
that what he offers in “love and generosity,” something “precious and
vulnerable,” will be misinterpreted, and he gives us to believe, will be
badly misinterpreted, most likely as the opposite of these things, as
mean-spirited and uncharitable, dismissive, contemptuous. So our task
in what follows lies in trying to observe his metastylistic principles and
so to understand what lies behind the mask offered to an anonymous
reading public, and that of course means trying to see rightly the mask
itself. If we take a further statement of Nietzschean hermeneutics in
BGE  to heart, one of the most extraordinary in his corpus, the
task becomes exponentially more difficult, perhaps even impossible,
because he goes so far as to suggest that behind any such masks we
find only further masks, that “Every philosophy conceals a philosophy
too: every opinion is also a hiding place; every word is also a mask
[ Jede Philosophie verbirgt auch eine Philosophie; jede Meinung ist auch ein
Versteck, jedes Wort auch eine Maske].” There is thus no final position
  . 
available to the philosopher – underneath every explored cave, there is
yet another cave.
But first things first. How might a new philosophy of the future,
committed to the “account-giving and writing” principles and haunted
by the anxiety that Nietzsche has expressed, account for and evaluate its
rival for a claim to wisdom about the highest or first things, the most
important values - religion?
We should note first that Beyond Good and Evil has an obvious struc-
ture. There are first three parts (Hauptstücke) on varieties of the intellectual
or theoretical, reflective life: philosophers, free spirits (or “intellectuals”),
and the religious type. There is then a kind of caesura, the “Epigrams and
Interludes (Sprüche und Zwischenspiele), and then five parts dealing with
practical life, the life of action: a natural history of morals, the life of the
scholar, especially the scientist (viewed as a way of life), virtues, peoples
and fatherlands, or politics, and the nature of nobility. It is not clear if this
structure is supposed to imply that the active life depends on what is settled
about value in a more theoretical life, that it depends on being theoretically
convinced that one way of life is more valuable than another. But that is
unlikely. Nietzsche makes clear that he thinks there is no way to isolate the
theoretical life from the practical; any theoretical enterprise already reflects
a practical commitment, and any practical commitment is reflective, has an
intellectual conscience. Still, the structure must reflect some sort of real,
not completely illusory, hierarchy and dependence. After all, Nietzsche led
a reflective, not an active, life.
In the first three parts, most of the topics addressed have to do with why
such lives are valuable to those committed to them, and the assumptions
about value, especially about “the highest values,” from which such com-
mitments descend. The commitments of traditional philosophers are
exposed as “prejudices,” commitments assumed without reflection, with
a lack of sufficient self-consciousness about why the values are valued
(especially the value of truth). (It is not clear what for Nietzsche would
entitle one to any such commitment to value, if anything, if this, entitle-
ment, is even the right question.) In the free spirits part, free spirits, as
precursors and, to some extent, avatars of the philosophers of the future
are, if Nietzsche finds something promising in them, named – the Abbé
Galiani, Diderot, Voltaire, Aristophanes, Petronius, Lessing, Machiavelli –
and the qualities of the true free spirits (the kind of free spirit the
philosopher of the future will be, even though a philosopher is also

See Pippin ().
 Nietzsche’s Masks 
“something more, higher, greater, and fundamentally different” than a free
spirit) are distinguished from merely apparent free spirits or intellectuals,
the “libre-penseurs, liberi pensatori, Freidenker” (BGE ). That the phil-
osophers of the future will be more recognizably like the free spirits than
dogmatic philosophers or doctrinal philosophers (does Diderot have a
“doctrine”?) seems to be part of the point of this aphorism. And then
Nietzsche turns to what is, for most people, the source of their most basic
commitments or values, religion.
If we keep in mind what has been highlighted, we are somewhat
prepared for the initial strangeness of the third part of Beyond Good and
Evil, “The Religious Essence [Das religiöse Wesen].” Such a title is puzzling
because the idea of an “essence,” and with it the idea of necessity, or the
necessary properties that it requires, does not seem a very Nietzschean
notion. The very capable English translator for the Cambridge University
Press version of the book, Judith Norman, translates the title as, “The
Religious Character,” at once giving a psychological character to the
inquiry (itself not at all inappropriate, especially given that Nietzsche says
in BGE  that he calls the “religious neurosis” the “religious essence,”
Wesen) and that title suggests rightly a logically much looser set of
requirements for identifying a character. But Nietzsche’s title still seems
to express some sort of irony that is lost if we do not, yet again, slow down
and wonder why he does not simply say that he wants to understand why
people are religious, which is certainly also an interest of his and prominent
in the part. (It is unlikely that he thinks there is a religiosity in common
between ancient Greek religion and Protestant Christianity, for example.
Or even between the Hebrew and Christian bible.)
Several of the aphorisms present religiosity in the “naturalistic” fashion
familiar to readers of Nietzsche’s other texts. That is, the dependence of
any concrete religiosity on such things as geography, climate, history, and
so forth is presupposed. Early Christianity, viewed as a form of existence
rather than just a set of beliefs, was not the “simple, rude, peon’s faith
[treuherzige und bärbeissige Untertanen-Glaube]” of Luther or Cromwell or
any other northern barbarian version, and was closer to Pascal’s agonized
appreciation of the suffering and sacrifice required by Christianity, its
“protracted suicide of reason [Selbstmorde der Vernunft],” its “self-derision
[Selbst-Verhöhnung]” and “self-mutilation [Selbst-Vertstümmelung]” (BGE
). With the exception of the Celts, the Northern European races have
little talent for religiosity (BGE ).
Ancient Greek religion is distinguished by its gratitude (Dankbarkeit); it
was only when such gratitude was overgrown with fear that Christianity
  . 
was on the horizon (BGE ). And it is useful to pause and note that this
aspect, gratitude, is the characteristic of religiosity that Nietzsche is not
only interested in, but uses in his evaluation of religion, and even of his
own apparent religiosity (Nietzsche also mentions his own Dankbarkeit at
the beginning of Ecce Homo). I mean by his own “religiosity” that it cannot
be incidental to our topic that he calls himself “the last disciple and initiate
of the god Dionysus [der letzter Jünger und Eingeweihte des Gottes Dio-
nysus]” (BGE ; see Pippin ; Strauss ), nor irrelevant that he
mocks his modern readers’ suspicion of religiosity in general: “I have been
told that you do not like believing in God and gods these days [den ihr
glaubt heute ungern, wie man mir verrathen hat, an Gott und Götter]” and
he writes that he will have to take “frankness [Freimütigkeit]” farther in his
religious allegiance and his divergence to shock them out of this compla-
cency. This, the positive character of religion we will return to later, but
Nietzsche, in his own voice, explains what he means by his own religion of
gratitude in a familiar way in BGE . He wants to affirm an ideal other
than the pessimism in Christianity, Schopenhauer, and Buddhism, “the
ideal of the most high-spirited, vital, world-affirming individual, who has
learned not just to go along with what was and what is, but who wants
it again just as it was through all eternity.” But this affirmation of
Zarathustra’s eternal return of the same is given a fascinating twist by
Nietzsche’s invocation of the theater, that such a person affirms not just
“the play [Stück]” he is in and not just his “performance [Schauspiel]” in it,
but affirms “da capo,” from the beginning, in order that, he writes (slowing
everything down again), he will affirm all this “to the one who needs
precisely [nötig hat] this performance – and makes it necessary: because
again and again he needs himself – and makes himself necessary. – What?
And that wouldn’t be – circulus vitiosus deus?” (BGE ).


In Ecce Homo, where he calls Beyond Good and Evil “critique of modernity,” and emphasizes its
negative task, he uses such religious imagery, and in a way that indicates the book is not wholly
“beyond the good-evil” distinction, but, as with all moral opposition, Nietzsche wishes to
complicate their relationship. He writes: “Theologically speaking – and listen carefully because
I do not speak like a theologian very often – it was God himself who assumed the form of a serpent
and lay under the tree of knowledge at the end of his day’s work: this is how he recuperated from
being God . . . He had made everything too nice . . . the devil is just God’s leisure every seventh day”
(EH “Books” BGE:).

“das Ideal des übermüthigsten lebendigsten und weltbejahndsten Menschen, der sich nicht nur mit
dem, was war und ist, abgefunden und vertragen gelernt hat, sondern es, so wie es war und ist,
wieder haben will, in alle Ewigkeit hinaus.”

“und nicht nur zu einem Schauspiele, sondern im Grunde zu Dem, der gerade dies Schauspiel
nöthig hat – und nöthig macht: weil er immer wieder sich nöthig hat – und nöthig macht Wie?
Und dies wäre nicht – circulus vitiosus deus?”
 Nietzsche’s Masks 
This is the reanimation of the religion of gratitude for existence that
Nietzsche had extolled in the Greeks, here affirmed, apparently in his own
name. This curious logic though – he affirms everything to himself,
because he needs himself and makes himself necessary, is far from clear.
The eternal return image is circular itself. If everything that is happening
now has happened before and will happen again in just this way, then
whether I now appear to affirm this repetition or not is irrelevant; it has
already happened or not, already will happen or not. But in something like
his own religiosity, Nietzsche is clearly affirming the possible “performance”
of the affirmation; he must make himself necessary, affirm (or even
“perform the affirmation”) of what will happen anyway because in doing
so he manages to affirm himself to himself, express to himself a gratitude
for existence that would not be his if the doctrine were just a sideways-on
expression of a metaphysical claim. Its performative aspect is everything.
The great mystery of course is how to come to be in a position where one
wants to make such an affirmation, even if primarily performative. It
appears that one must already be in such a state of reconciliation to be
able to affirm it. The affirming, it would appear, must affirm something
taken to be affirmable. It cannot be made affirmable by affirming it, or
what is affirmed and what is not would be wholly arbitrary. Nietzsche
chooses not to work any of this out here and is happy enough to leave us
with this image of gratitude, and its suggestion of God as a causa sui, as an
image of our own self-affirmation (as if we affirm the affirmability), and so
a vicious circle. It is as typical of anything else in his writing of what sort of
philosophy the philosopher of the future will express. (That is, this reading
may not be correct, but a good hermeneutical principle should be: go no
further in Beyond Good and Evil until this formulation is understood or
least probed with some seriousness.)
He goes on, making several individual points. There is nothing in
modern Christianity adequate for understanding the grandeur of the
Hebrew bible; putting it together in one book with the New Testament
is a “sin against the spirit” that literary Europe has on its conscience (BGE
). Modern philosophy is anti-Christian but not anti-religious. Likewise,
Nietzsche notes that, in the modern world, the religious instinct (der
religiöse Instinkt) is growing but it rejects any theistic gratification (BGE
). (These last two claims are not much explained.)
But there are two general characterizations that raise the deepest ques-
tion. First, Nietzsche insists that the reason religion is so interesting for the
philosopher, presumably the philosopher of the future, lies in its central
paradox, self-sacrifice, or the saint – especially the phenomenon of
  . 
momentary conversion. How could a base soul, in one instant of trans-
formation, become and live out life as redeemed, saved, virtuous, and so
on. Second, he has a number of things to say about in what way and why
religion has not been well understood, and, in laying this out, he also notes
several positive features of religion and the religious life, even while he
concludes “The Religious Essence” part on a thunderously polemical note.
The paradox of the saint or radical conversion (phenomena of interest,
he notes, because they manifest a power, ultimately the will to power, “a
strength and pleasure in domination” that gave the powerful of the world
“a new fear” [BGE ]) is addressed in a way consistent with what he had
said was one of, if not the, main feature of the philosopher of the future –
his avoiding any commitment to strictly bipolar dualisms, and his toler-
ance both for gradations and even the mutual dependence of what appear
to be pairs of opposites. That is, such phenomena look paradoxical because
psychology up to now “had put itself under the dominance of morality,
because it actually believed in opposing moral values, and saw, read, and
interpreted these opposites into texts and into facts.” The psychological
logic Nietzsche is referring to here, where something that appears to be the
opposite of a given virtue, or state of mind, or principle is actually in the
service of, inseparable from, its supposed opposite, is familiar in many
contexts in Nietzsche and is one of his most important proto-Freudian
contributions. Pity for others is actually a way of asserting superiority and
exercising dominance over others, not the selfless concern it appears to be;
humility is actually the expression of great pride; other-regarding virtues in
the morality tradition are really self-regarding; and so forth. In this case,
self-sacrifice, or any form of self-denial, is actually that “strength and
pleasure in domination” noted earlier, and so what appears to be a
paradoxical switch from self-satisfaction to self-denial is actually a more
subtle form of self-satisfaction. In the period of morality, the paradoxical
pleasure in sacrificing the strongest human instincts to their god can be
understood by seeing the “joy of this particular festival” that “shines in the
cruel eyes of the ascetic” (BGE ). (This aphorism concludes with
the most puzzling paradox of all in “the great ladder of religious cruelty”:
“to sacrifice God for nothingness – that paradoxical mystery of the final
cruelty has been reserved for the race that is now approaching; by now we


“weil sie sich unter die Herrschaft der Moral gestellt hatte, weil sie an die moralischen Werth-
Gegensätze selbst glaubte, und diese Gegensätze in den Text und Thatbestand hineinsah, hineinlas,
hineindeutete.”

“diese Festfreude glänzt im grausamen Blicke des Asketen, des begeisterten “Wider-Natürlichen.”
 Nietzsche’s Masks 
all know something about this.” That is, Nietzsche seems to promise that
we can understand this paradox in the same way as that of the saint, and
that would mean that “God” and “nothingness” are only apparent oppos-
ites, are actually not opposed, and so the “sacrifice” is something other
than a sacrifice, although he simply leaves us hanging with that last ironic
phrase, as if we all now understand how that could be. And leaving us
hanging like this, often with a question or a strange address to the reader, is
as effective a way of slowing our reading down as any other.)
Finally, it is in his comments about misunderstanding religion, and in
his attempts to correct that misunderstanding and reveal the positive
aspects of religion, that we can see most clearly what he had meant in
BGE  about the “delicate matters [zarter Art]” that would invite misin-
terpretation, that require some sort of mask. Some of those positive aspects
deal with religion’s usefulness, especially its political usefulness, primarily
for the philosopher, who, we are told, will make use of religion for
“breeding and education work [Zuchtungs-und Erziehungswerke]” (BGE
). But, this, as the lawyers say, “assumes facts not in evidence”; that
any philosophers anywhere or at any time were ever in any position to
function like the philosopher kings of Plato’s Republic, to which this is
obviously a reference, or that any could ever plausibly be in any imaginable
future. Plato’s philosopher-kings may have had to know “the marriage
number,” exactly the right time to “breed” new citizens, but this just
builds implausibility on outlandish implausibility, something not denied
by Socrates. Nietzsche’s irony is perhaps suggested by the conditional of
sorts that begins the aphorism: “The philosopher as we understand him
[and the implication of his emphasis seems to be only as we understand
him], we free spirits - as the man with the most overall comprehensive
responsibility, whose conscience bears the weight of the overall develop-
ment of humanity.” But a philosopher is not a literal or political ruler,
and there is no suggestion about philosopher kings in Nietzsche. So,
understood in this way, the philosopher could only be a teacher of some
sort, not a literal “breeder.” And education is mostly the emphasis for the


“Für das Nichts Gott opfern – dieses paradoxe Mysterium der letzten Grausamkeit blieb dem
Geschlechte, welches jetzt eben herauf kommt, aufgespart: wir Alle kennen schon etwas davon.”
This way of formulating the issue should bear on the meaning of the famous claim that “God is
dead” made by der tolle Mensch in GS; that is, that God’s death is really our sacrifice of him for the
sake of the “the nothing.” The literary dimensions of the latter announcement are as important as
the so-called doctrine about the death of God. See Pippin .

“Der Philosoph, wie wir ihn verstehen, wir freien Geister – , als der Mensch der umfänglichsten
Verantwortlichkeit, der das Gewissen für die Gesammt-Entwicklung des Menschen hat.”
  . 
rest of the aphorism, suggesting that the breeding in question is not literal,
but generative in a more pedagogical sense (and in that sense a kind of
rule). And religion’s positive role in BGE  is couched in these terms, as
ennobling, elevating, reconciling, sanctifying, and justifying. In this
sense asceticism and Puritanism are said to be “almost indispensable
means” of such ennobling, and he writes that “there is nothing more
venerable [ehrwürdig]” about Christianity than its ability to situate “even
the lowliest” in a “higher order of things.”
However, yet another means of confounding the reader involves some-
how combining such laudation with their contraries and asking the reader
to work to make the pairing intelligible. For, in the closing aphorism of the
third part, BGE , Nietzsche writes or rather suggests that all of these
benefits from religion, even the actual historical religions named, Puritanism,
Christianity, Buddhism, cannot justify ascribing such benefits to religion,
even though Nietzsche just did ascribe them, all primarily because all
religions have always insisted on being sovereign, rejected any rule by
philosophy. So, in speaking of the “invaluable service” religions have
provided, while he will say “who is so richly endowed with gratitude as
not to grow poor in the face of everything that, for instance, the ‘spiritual
men’ of Christianity have done for Europe so far,” he also closes the part
on religion with his most polemical accusations yet. Christianity is respon-
sible for the inversion of values (elevating the low and reducing the high),
the deterioration of the human race, inverting love of the earth into hatred
of the earth; it has been dominated by the “will to turn humanity into a
sublime monstrosity [Missgeburt],” finally creating “a stunted, almost ridicu-
lous type [eine verkleinerte, fast lächerliche Art], a herd animal . . . sickly . . .
mediocre . . . the European of today.”
Of course, it is logically possible that religion could simply be under-
stood to be both, both pedagogically valuable and yet also responsible for
the “deterioration of the human race.” But it is baffling to think through
concretely how this could be anything other than a mere logical possibility,
and such a possibility faces an even more difficult complication. In BGE
, as noted, Nietzsche has switched gears and now claims that all of these
positive features are possible only if religion does not claim to be “sovereign
[souverän],” and accepts its secondary role in “breeding and education,”
does not insist, apparently, on setting itself the goals of education. But, as


“wer ist reich genug an Dankbarkeit, um nicht vor alle dem arm zu werden, was zum Beispiel die
„geistlichen Menschen” des Christenthums bisher für Europa gethan haben!”

“an der Verschlechterung der europäischen Rasse.”
 Nietzsche’s Masks 
we saw, he has insisted that all religions that have ever existed have been
sovereign, and, rather than elevate, have done nothing of what he just
praised religions for doing, and instead have kept humans on a lower level.
It is after this claim (about universal historical “sovereignty”) that the
polemic heats up and is unremittingly hostile.
There is no way to make the passages as written consistent, and it would
be fatuous and sophomoric to note that sometimes Nietzsche was just
inconsistent or he didn’t care about consistency. The suspicion grows
that one of those approaches is a mask, a grimace or disguise. And, at first
glance, it is the polemic that appears to be what the preface called
“monstrous and terrifying” disguises.
In general, then, it is his insistence on the “delicacy” of his account of
religion, an account I think he considers an “act of love and generosity,” a
genuine attempt to understand religion from both the inside, as the
“religious men [homines religiosi]” experience themselves, and from out-
side, in terms of its effects, that makes his writing so “vulnerable” to the
“masks” of misinterpretation growing inevitably around it. Consider just
how “delicate” the account is, if we read slowly. For we noticed that the
“condition” of sorts that qualifies his praise of religion’s usefulness is that
the philosopher will make use of religion, but the philosopher “as we
understand him, we free spirits.” Why introduce that characterization?
Well, in aphorism BGE , Nietzsche returns to the issue and says,
For free spirits, for the “pious men of knowledge” – the pia fraus [pious
fraud] offends taste (offends their “piety”) more than the impia fraus
[impious fraud]. This explains their profound failure to understand the
church, which is typical of “free spirits” – as their un-freedom.
We have already seen that in the “Free Spirits” part, Nietzsche appears
to distinguish between the free spirit as he, or “we,” understand him, and
the Freidenker, as that type is usually understood. (This is in BGE ,
which concludes with a staggering, tour de force, thirty-line sentence
describing in rich, dense, figurative language what sort of free spirit he
means.) That appears to be in force in this extraordinarily complicated
aphorism. Let us assume that Nietzsche means the conventional free spirits,
the ones he wished to distinguish himself (and the free spirit element of the


The only thing more fatuous would be the claim that the text, predictably, unavoidably, like all
texts, deconstructs itself.

“Dem freien Geiste, dem „Frommen der Erkenntniss – geht die pia fraus noch mehr wider den
Geschmack (wider seine ‘Frömmigkeit’) als die impia fraus. Daher sein tiefer Unverstand gegen die
Kirche, wie er zum Typus „freier Geist gehört, – als seine Unfreiheit.”
  . 
philosophers of the future) from in BGE . His mentioning their “piety”
certainly suggests that. This is further indicated by the limitation of the
free spirits – that they fail to understand the church because of their
“unfreedom.” These free spirits are offended by “pious frauds,” supposedly
something like religious hypocrites, much more than they are by secular,
impious frauds, run-of-the-mill hypocrites perhaps. The clear implication
is: this is a limitation. The faint suggestion, and it is quite faint, is that these
critics of religion do not appreciate how necessary religion, with all its self-
deceit and fraudulence, is, perhaps how important a certain sort of fraudu-
lence is in human life. (And not just for the sake of order or docility, but
for the ennobling function stressed in the first half of BGE .) This would
further support the claim that the polemical excesses in BGE  are a
performance of sorts and, in that sense a mask, an enactment of a crude
rejection of the significance of religion that could perhaps have as its goal
such a thorough alienation of the conventionally religious that they will
dismiss the Nietzschean critique, and so their religion can continue to play
whatever positive role Nietzsche really wants it to play. I do not mean that
Nietzsche does not believe that religion in general, and Christianity in
particular, have been harmful, but one way of making the inconsistency of
BGE  comprehensible is to see the heated rhetoric of the last half as a
“Fratze,” a grimace, a mask, which has as its end preserving the possibility
of the beneficial effects of religion. (None of the “positive” characteriza-
tions would look positive to a believer. They have nothing to do with
redemption, forgiveness, salvation, etc., but on the value of religion in a
collective Bildung.) The last thing Nietzsche wants, under this reading, is
for everyone to be convinced by his polemic and give up religion.
Finally, that this is the right way to read these passages is further
suggested by a long aphorism, BGE , in which he both notes and clearly
laments what he claims is the true cause of the decline of religiosity.
And has anyone noticed that, consequently, it is the modern, noisy, time-
consuming, self-satisfied, stupidly proud industriousness which, more than
anything else, gives people an education and preparation in “un-belief”?
All of these features of modern life are objects of sarcasm throughout the
passage, which could have been written about the indifference and lassi-
tude of “German Protestants” by a German Kierkegaard. And again
Nietzsche’s account of the state of religiosity and the lamentable character


“Und dass folglich die moderne, lärmende, Zeit-auskaufende, auf sich stolze, dumm-stolze
Arbeitsamkeit, mehr als alles Übrige, gerade zum ‘Unglauben’ erzieht und vorbereitet?”
 Nietzsche’s Masks 
of that state is addressed much more by this sarcasm, irony, and staged
indignation, rather than by any empirical or directly psychological
account. The one type who is possibly able to approach religion with the
necessary “reverential seriousness [ehrfurchtsvollen Ernste],” the scholar, is
mocked for his air of “superior, almost gracious amusement [zu einer
überlegenen, beinahe gültigen Heiterkeit],” and again, typically, as we
approach the end of the paragraph, the rhetoric heats up dramatically,
and Nietzsche mocks the presumed superiority of the nonreligious as
unbearably pretentious, calling such a scholar a “presumptuous little dwarf
and rabble-man, a brisk and busy brain and handiworker of ‘ideas’, of
‘modern ideas’.”
Where does all of this leave the reader? Perhaps on the verge of
understanding something of Nietzsche’s own religiosity, a reverential
orientation in life that, typically, cannot be captured in a discursive
account, but only in an image like the affirmation of the eternal return
or in an aphorism like BGE , which itself can also stand as a fine
example of Nietzschean hermeneutics:
Jesus said to his Jews: “The law was for servants, – love God as I do, as his
son! Why should we care about morals, we sons of God?”


“er, der kleine anmaassliche Zwerg und Pöbelmann, der fleissig-flinke Kopf- und Handarbeiter der
‘Ideen’, der ‘modernen Ideen’!”

“Jesus sagte zu seinen Juden: „das Gesetz war für Knechte, – liebt Gott, wie ich ihn liebe, als sein
Sohn! Was geht uns Söhne Gottes die Moral an!”