Nietzsche's Achievement

Christianity

Nietzsche understood Christianity as the culmination of a moral revolution begun in priestly Judaism, in which the powerless transformed their frustration into a system that condemned strength, nobility, and earthly flourishing. Yet Christianity was not merely a historical mistake.

Master morality perceived rank, beauty, and achievement, but tended to overlook the richness of individual people and the networks of loyalty and dependence through which human life actually developed. By breaking the immediate identification of worth with victory, it forced humanity to discover conscience, inwardness, suffering, personal singularity, and the subtle reality of relationships.

Christianity therefore made the European soul deeper and more psychologically complex, even as it eventually turned that depth against power and sanctified weakness. The Christian period could thus be understood as an education in dimensions of humanity that the original aristocratic world had not adequately seen.

Nietzsche imagined the next stage as a synthesis of Jewish “money and patience” and “intellect and intellectuality” with the Prussian “hereditary art of commanding and obeying,” directed toward what he called “the rearing of a new ruling caste for Europe.” But while his end was aristocratic, the means depended on the very sense of human distinctiveness, character and interrelatedness that Christianity had brought into view.