Smashing Idols: Friedrich Nietzsche

[Dimmesdale]

"The Antichrist" by Friedrich Nietzsche, was one of those books that I read as a teenager, and took to heart immediately, as the truth, period.

I rode on the insight that it was true, based upon my acquaintance with Nietzsche, as well as other writers, that it could not but be true.... That it was intuitively true.

Notwithstanding, all the evidence before me that pointed that it was NOT true. For example, the idea that Christianity did not wholesale dispose of the body. Or that Jesus, was in all respects not an interiorist. Many of the things in this book that I took as intuitively true, prove to run aground when scrutinized with logic, which I had long ago disposed of.

Logic. How could the Absolute Truth have anything to do with such a limited and mundane tool such as logic, which was simply mechanical?

No, real truth was... intuitive, phenomenological, artistic, divine.....

And so I swallowed wholesale Nietzsche's rhapsodic poetry. For poetry had more to do with truth than dry logic.

[Dimmesdale]

Nietzsche.... I thought that he, had the strongest grasp of Life... of the Life Force, of what it meant to Live.....

Religion, at least false religion, represented the diminution of Life, the lack of Life, the incapacity of life. Life was the True, the Good, and the Beautiful.

Even, when I felt myself apart from life, when I Myself hated life... I could not But appreciate the Life-Vision that Nietzsche espoused.

Reading The Antichrist, then, I thought I could find a compromise, with Nietzsche's Vision of Life, and my own.... hang ups about Life. That Life could find a way in... through the right door... through the door that I MYSELF would allow.....

But, that was false. That was wrong and a lie. Life stands on its own. It doesn't need a director such as myself.

[Dimmesdale]

At the same time, Nietzsche wasn't the soul director of Life (and death) Either.... No. God alone is the presider over life and death. And without Mercy who of us has a right to any life?