Many know little about Friedrich Nietzsche beyond “God is dead” and that his writings allegedly anticipated Nazism. For their part, conservative Christians tend to dismiss him not only as an atheist but also as a misanthrope and—strangely, given his imputed connection to the far right—the intellectual father of a radical leftist ideology. Nietzsche’s writing, as Bishop Robert Barron puts it, centers on a “self-assertive will” that is destined to lead to “warfare.” This reductive dismissal fails to do justice to the complexity of Nietzsche’s thought, especially about religion.
To be sure, it would also be a stretch to see Nietzsche as a “God-seeker in secret,” as the German theologian Eugen Biser has argued. Nietzsche did, after all, set out to destroy Christianity; the title of his book The Antichrist: Curse on Christianity says it all. Still, despite those intentions, Christians may find that some of Nietzsche’s provocative religious criticisms are potentially constructive: they can emphasize the authentic core of the Christian faith—namely, unconditional love.
Moreover, Catholic readers may be surprised to discover that Nietzsche even had a certain sympathy for Christian monasticism. He acknowledged the vital role monks played in preserving the intellectual heritage of the West, and he was deeply moved by the scenic and architectural beauty of monastic sites—beginning with his own boarding school, Schulpforta, a former Cistercian abbey in Thuringia. Remarkably, the self-declared “Antichrist” dreamed of founding new monasteries: “We will need new monasteries, and we are going to be the first fratres,” he wrote to his friend Erwin Rohde in July 1870.
Nietzsche was only twenty-four years old when, in 1869, he was appointed professor of classical philology at the University of Basel. But it soon became obvious that he was more interested in philosophy. His first book, The Birth of Tragedy, in which he speculated about a “Dionysian,” life-affirming spirit in ancient Greece, garnered harsh criticism from his classicist peers. At the same time, Nietzsche increasingly suffered from health issues like chronic migraines, severe eye disease, and digestive disorders, which ultimately forced him to resign from his professorship in 1879. His pension, combined with a modest, almost ascetic, lifestyle, enabled him to live a “wanderer’s” life, dividing his time between the Swiss Alps and the French and Italian Riviera. Nietzsche experienced those vagrant years as both a curse—the constant search for an agreeable climate left him unrooted—and a blessing: he had finally gained the freedom to write his influential books on philosophy, all of which were completed between 1878 and 1888.
In 1883, Nietzsche considered establishing a summer residence at the Tuscan abbey of Vallombrosa—finally realizing his “monastic dream” of founding a “new order” and “new convents.” Since Vallombrosa had been secularized and now housed the Italian Forest Service school, Nietzsche planned to stay at the nearby hotel La Foresta, the monastery’s former guesthouse, now co-owned by his admirer Paul Lanzky.
Nietzsche was captivated by the story of St. John Gualbert—the Florentine nobleman who, dismayed by corruption among Church leaders, left the city for a solitary and ascetic life and founded Vallombrosa Abbey in 1039. The prospect of living on the so-called paradisino hill, renowned for its spectacular views and once home to St. John himself, particularly thrilled Nietzsche. That Dante Alighieri had visited Vallombrosa and John Milton had mentioned it in Paradise Lost only added to the site’s allure. With his deep sense of history and affinity for symbolic parallels, Nietzsche imagined himself as a kindred soul—a “holy eremite” in pursuit of paradise on earth, “making a nest for my philosophy in this wonderful, beautiful corner.”
Even more promising was what he described in a letter to his mother: “The day after tomorrow we withdraw to the forest-, mountain-, and monastery-solitude of Vallombrosa. The best room is being prepared for me; it will be quiet…elevation about 3,000 feet, which means fresh air.” Withdrawal, solitude, quiet, shade, and long walks in scenic surroundings—these were the essential conditions Nietzsche required for reading and writing.
Unfortunately, Nietzsche also needed ideal weather and climatic stability due to his poor eyesight and chronic migraines. He had studied Vallombrosa’s climate and already had some doubts about its suitability. Indeed, when he arrived on a cold and rainy November day in 1885, he found it intolerable. The Vallombrosa project collapsed after just two days.
Beyond the weather, another reason for this failure was Lanzky himself. For one thing, it seems that Nietzsche wasn’t confident that the writer and former editor of La Rivista Europea could provide the practical support Nietzsche needed. For, while a withdrawn life was an important aspect of Nietzsche’s monastic vision, he needed helpers to manage practical affairs—such as his sister Elisabeth or his friend and disciple Heinrich Köselitz. More importantly, though he adored Nietzsche, Lanzky could not provide the intellectual companionship Nietzsche needed. He envisioned “solitude” as life shared with a small group of like-minded individuals. Lanzky, whom Nietzsche later described as “boring” and superficial, could not fill that role.
Community life had been central to Nietzsche’s “monastic dream” from the beginning. His “new monasteries” were meant to be a response to the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1), which Nietzsche saw as a threat to European culture. His antidote was a new philosophy, first lived out in small communities and ultimately capable of transforming and saving civilized society. In contrast to the parody of the “holy eremite” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra—who lives in isolation, wholly devoted to God but disdainful of people—Nietzsche saw this philosophy as a “new gospel” and “gift to humankind.” His goal was to educate, uplift, and help individuals become “free spirits,” or, as he puts it in Ecce Homo, to “become what one is.”
This seriously challenges the claim, made by Christians and non-Christians alike, that Nietzsche was personally “incapable of love and compassion,” as Bertrand Russell put it. In fact, what Nietzsche called his “love for humankind” plays a prominent role in his philosophy, serving as a standard in his religious criticism.
That love should serve as a guiding principle in Nietzsche’s philosophy may seem paradoxical, especially in light of his strong rejection of the Christian virtue of compassion. While some aspects of Nietzsche’s moral philosophy are truly alarming and—I would argue—ultimately unacceptable, it is important to recall that contradiction itself is a philosophical and pedagogical principle for Nietzsche. At times, he does indeed maintain irreconcilable views due to the experimental nature of his philosophy, the intentionally provocative character of his writings, and what he regarded as the inner torn-ness of human nature.
Nietzsche rejects pity, but not out of misanthropy or a love of callousness. Instead, he criticizes it—in the original German sense of Mitleid (literally, “co-suffering”)—because he doesn’t think suffering should be amplified by sharing or emotionally identifying with it. His life-affirming, “yes-saying” philosophy embraces existence with all its hardship. Even pain, in this framework, is no reason for suffering or despair. Nietzsche urges his followers to love life—and laugh at it, or “laugh anyway”; he promotes “amor fati” (“love of fate”) (The Gay Science).
More crucially, it is the lack of love that Nietzsche repeatedly exposes in his attacks on Christianity—a religion that ought to be centered on the love Jesus proclaimed. Nietzsche objects to moral systems that gain “transcendence” by projecting an all-too-human conception of retributive justice and the dichotomy of reward and punishment into pseudotheological notions of heaven and hell, thereby motivating moral behavior through a kind of “divine carrot and stick,” as American philosopher Daniel Dennett put it. Such systems can, at best, produce “saints from fear,” writes Bertrand Russell, not morally autonomous individuals.
Even more striking is a theological argument Nietzsche makes: a God who condemns his creatures to hell cannot be both loving and omnipotent—for hell is not the defeat of evil but its eternal preservation. This point was first made by early church fathers such as Clement of Alexandria and Gregory of Nyssa. Nietzsche is particularly scandalized by the traditional teaching (endorsed by Thomas Aquinas and Tertullian, among others) that “in heaven the blessed will see the punishment of the damned and will derive pleasure from it.” In The Antichrist, Nietzsche cites numerous biblical passages that, in his view, contradict Christ’s message of unconditional, fatherly love.
At the heart of Nietzsche’s critique is the concept of guilt. For him, any system that keeps believers in constant fear of having failed in the eyes of God cannot reflect a divine love but must rather be seen as a form of “cruelty.” Sacrificial theology, rigid moralism, and a transcendent penal framework lead to inner conflict, spiritual “enslavement, self-derision, and self-mutilation”—to the point where one might feel, as Pedro Calderón de la Barca wrote, that “the greatest guilt of man is that he was born.” A central concern here is sexual morality. Nietzsche claims that Christianity “gave Eros poison to drink—so he degenerated into a vice.”
Must we not concede that certain moral teachings of the past have indeed been problematic? Pope Francis addressed the Church’s (often politicized) preoccupation with sexual morality. Shortly after his election, he denounced what he called a Catholic “obsession” with issues such as homosexuality, abortion, divorce, and contraception. And in 2014, he convened the Extraordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops to establish a “new balance” in Catholic moral theology that takes into account Christ’s message of God’s unconditional love for everyone.
This idea of an all-embracing divine love is reflected in the ideal of life in loving communities, which inspires both Christian monasticism and Nietzsche’s vision. Yet, as Nietzsche contends in Human, All Too Human, Christian sexual morality has often been linked to the doctrine of “eternal damnation,” exposing a contradiction between Christianity’s claim to universal love and the common yet loveless desire of some believers to exclude perceived “sexual sinners” from the community of souls in heaven.
Before Vallombrosa, an earlier idea for a monastery had emerged in 1876 when Nietzsche accepted an invitation from his motherly friend Malwida von Meysenbug—a writer and women’s-rights advocate—to spend the winter in Sorrento with her, the philosopher Paul Rée, and Nietzsche’s student Alfred Brenner. As recounted in Paolo D’Iorio’s book Nietzsche’s Journey to Sorrento, the group stayed at the Hotel Villa Rubinacci, Meysenbug’s chambermaid and the hotel staff handled daily logistics, and Brenner acted as a “secretary.” Life was leisurely, with ample time for walking, enjoying the landscape, common reading, and working in solitude. “Life is organized comfortably,” Nietzsche gladly remarked. The regularity and simplicity of the group’s daily routine bordered on the monastic. Each day ended with “animated conversation and communal readings after dinner.” Nietzsche wrote: “Our little circle brings together much meditation and friendship and a great deal of happiness.” It almost felt like an “ideal family.”
That experience inspired both Meysenbug and Nietzsche to imagine founding a “school of educators” in an abandoned Capuchin monastery, complete with grottoes for open-air classes on the Sorrento beach. Meysenbug envisioned “a mission house for adults of both sexes toward the free development of the noblest intellectual life, so that they could go back into the world and spread the seeds of a new and spiritual culture,” and reported that “Nietzsche and Rée were equally prepared to participate as teachers.” Nietzsche thought of an “institute for about forty people” and referred to it as a “monastery of free spirits” in a letter to his sister, trying to enlist her as the administrator of the place. He also called it a “modern monastery, ideal colony, free university.”
Though the Sorrento plans were ultimately abandoned, Nietzsche continued to consider “establishing my monastery,” and his vision remained rooted in the idea of a “school of educators” because, as he put it, “our educators are themselves uneducated.” The idea was to develop a form of education that could rebalance European culture. In Nietzsche’s view, education had become fragmented and detached from life. Even the humanistic education of his day, with which he was so intimately familiar, had declined into a merely theoretical study of the classics. Nietzsche sought more—a holistic philosophy or art of living, modeled after the Greeks. He was, of course, aware that Christian monasticism drew on the traditions of the ancient philosophical schools, and so his vision of “new monasteries” represented an attempt to synthesize the classical academy and the Christian monastery—not in service of God, but in service of a new culture, first inspired by Arthur Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner, and later by his own philosophy.
At times, Nietzsche imagined wealthy benefactors supporting those in search of a spiritual, intellectual, or artistic life—much like the medieval noblemen and noblewomen who had become patrons of monastic life by founding and endowing Christian abbeys. As he put it: “He who wishes to use his money as a free spirit should found institutions on the model of monasteries, to make it possible for people who want nothing more to do with the world to live a communal life amicably and in the greatest simplicity.” Yet more often, his vision of communal life and academic fellowship was guided by a pedagogical mission. This is the “missionary” element of Nietzsche’s monasteries—they were meant to serve a philosophy that sought to liberate the human spirit.
For Nietzsche, this liberation was ultimately to result in the moral autonomy of “the overman.” Despite its obvious problematic aspects, this figure serves above all as a symbol of self-responsibility not wholly incompatible with Christianity’s own understanding of moral maturity.
Nietzsche’s moral philosophy can at times be confusing, in part because he operates on multiple levels. On the one hand, he proposes a specific, disputable form of morality: a system grounded in what he sees as life-affirming, body-centered, this-worldly, and anti-metaphysical principles. On the other hand, he focuses on moral and motivational psychology and metaethics: that is, on how human beings relate to their moral values. Several key passages in Thus Spoke Zarathustra fall into this category—for example: “Are you able to be the judge of your own deeds?” or “Thus speak and stammer: That is my good, that do I love, thus does it please me entirely, thus only do I desire the good.”
These do not necessarily express moral relativism. Rather, they describe the moral autonomy of the overman—someone who no longer needs God, divine commandments and threats, or other external sources of moral authority, in order to be good. Nietzsche is not an apostle of evil, selfishness, or disrespect. On the contrary, he calls on human beings to pursue the good for its own sake—not out of fear, self-interest, or submission to an ambivalent and punitive God.
Christians, too, need this kind of “overhuman” moral maturity—though grounded in proper theology—especially when they hold on to an all-too-human belief in a heaven and hell where God’s restorative justice is confused with retributive justice modeled on human standards. Nietzsche’s criticism can help Christians cultivate a more mature faith and recover the high ground that Jesus and St. Paul had claimed when they conceived of divine justice as justification: the salvific act of making sinners just and righteous through the grace and love of an omnipotent God (Romans 5:20). Christians should seriously reconsider commercial- or reward-based theories of justice and atonement—according to which humans must bargain with God and earn salvation through moral performance and personal merit—as well as the threatening image of God that fuels the fire-and-brimstone sermons Nietzsche so vehemently opposed. Can these really have a place in authentic Christian theology?
The Gospel message of unconditional love is, at its core, a liberating one—intended to affirm life, not death. On this “good news,” Jesus and Nietzsche are, perhaps unexpectedly, in agreement.
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