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Reconciling Nietzsche with Christianity | Jerm Warfare · UK Column Radio

• 0:30
  Speaker 1: My name is Jim.
• 0:31
  Speaker 2: This is Jim Warfare The Battle of Ideas. Chris Waldberger.
• 0:35
  Speaker 2: Thank you for joining me in the Strangers.
• 0:38
  Speaker 3: Thanks for having me, Jeremy. Good to be back.
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah, dude.
• 0:42
  Speaker 2: So the last few guests on my UK column show,
• 0:45
  Speaker 2: which is British, have been South African, so you are
• 0:48
  Speaker 2: adding to the mix, although you're not in South Africa.
• 0:52
  Speaker 4: No very much South African, but I'm still in Africa,
• 0:55
  Speaker 4: but East Africa. So up here in Kenya and very
• 1:01
  Speaker 4: rural part of Kenya actually, but we've got good internet
• 1:04
  Speaker 4: and powers on, so glad to be with you.
• 1:09
  Speaker 2: I was just chatting to another guest, P D. Lawton,
• 1:12
  Speaker 2: and she was talking about a high speed railway network
• 1:16
  Speaker 2: that is underway around the African continent with some Chinese help,
• 1:20
  Speaker 2: and I think Kenya actually already has elements of that
• 1:24
  Speaker 2: infrastructure built.
• 1:25
  Speaker 3: Yeah, we've been on it a few times.
• 1:27
  Speaker 4: There's a what's it called the Mataraki Express from Nairobi
• 1:35
  Speaker 4: to Mombasa with stops on the way.
• 1:39
  Speaker 3: And very impressive.
• 1:41
  Speaker 4: It's super clean, runs on time. It's not high speed,
• 1:49
  Speaker 4: but it's faster than driving, but that's mostly because of
• 1:52
  Speaker 4: the highways, but quite cheap and then when you get
• 1:55
  Speaker 4: to the Mombasa station there's a big statue of a
• 1:59
  Speaker 4: Chinese explorer who apparently reached East Africa a thousand years
• 2:04
  Speaker 4: ago or something like that. But yeah, that's that's really good.
• 2:07
  Speaker 4: I think the latest thing, I think they might be
• 2:09
  Speaker 4: helping with building a with building a new highway which
• 2:13
  Speaker 4: you go to a double carriage highway from Nicu up
• 2:17
  Speaker 4: Inland to some of the bigger towns Inland. And hopefully
• 2:23
  Speaker 4: that gets finished quickly because the country really really needs
• 2:26
  Speaker 4: a proper hire in this kind of busy, busy corridor.
• 2:29
  Speaker 4: But yeah, elements of that, of that, those train stations
• 2:33
  Speaker 4: and the train itself, it wasn't that too similar from Switzerland,
• 2:37
  Speaker 4: to be honest. It's just people are noisier in Africa
• 2:41
  Speaker 4: and Switzerland. Everyone's quiet and you get stared at if
• 2:43
  Speaker 4: your child makes a noise and all of that.
• 2:46
  Speaker 3: But but no, it's really good.
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: I love living in Africa, don't you.
• 2:51
  Speaker 4: Yeah, that's why I spent one year in Switzerland and
• 2:53
  Speaker 4: then then I came back.
• 2:55
  Speaker 3: I mostly read every now and again.
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  Speaker 4: I do feel I do feel the pull towards first
• 3:01
  Speaker 4: world comforts. Not that I'm not comfortable, but you know,
• 3:06
  Speaker 4: like litter on the streets and that kind of thing.
• 3:08
  Speaker 3: But that probably is more to do with me than
• 3:11
  Speaker 3: in Africa.
• 3:12
  Speaker 4: I'm part of Swiss and so hence the one year
• 3:16
  Speaker 4: in Switzerland. My father's side comes from Switzerland, and I
• 3:20
  Speaker 4: think I've got that Swiss obsession with cleanliness, always ready
• 3:24
  Speaker 4: to break out.
• 3:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I was accused after I went to
• 3:27
  Speaker 2: China last year for almost a month. I came back
• 3:30
  Speaker 2: saying a bunch of good things about the country, And
• 3:33
  Speaker 2: how dare you say good things about that Totalityaran hell hole,
• 3:36
  Speaker 2: You just you must only trash that country. But my
• 3:40
  Speaker 2: point is is that I wouldn't leave Africa. You have
• 3:43
  Speaker 2: to live here to kind of understand it. It's difficult
• 3:45
  Speaker 2: to explain to somebody who doesn't come from the continent.
• 3:49
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I think how I put it, and it's got
• 3:52
  Speaker 4: a little bit Jordan Peterson esque, so forgive me.
• 3:55
  Speaker 3: When I lived in Switzerland was that.
• 4:00
  Speaker 4: It's like the Yen and the Yang of order and chaos,
• 4:04
  Speaker 4: and you feel like there's some countries.
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  Speaker 3: Particularly in the so called First World, that are just.
• 4:09
  Speaker 4: Too much too much order, and then you get Africa,
• 4:13
  Speaker 4: which which is largely too much chaos.
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  Speaker 3: But if you could position yourself well, you can balance
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  Speaker 3: it nicely.
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  Speaker 4: That you that you feel you don't feel this kind
• 4:23
  Speaker 4: of bureaucracy breathing down your neck. And then if you
• 4:27
  Speaker 4: can navigate a little bit way, take a bit of
• 4:29
  Speaker 4: a take, take, take the opportunities that chaos brings, then
• 4:35
  Speaker 4: you can you can live a great life.
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: Yes, that's what I've been trying to say.
• 4:40
  Speaker 2: That's what I've been trying to say, Like there is
• 4:41
  Speaker 2: a there's a sense of freedom in the chaos on
• 4:44
  Speaker 2: the African continent. Look, it's a very big continent. And
• 4:46
  Speaker 2: when we talk about Africa, I mainly mean sub Saharan.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, that's not even like north of Sahara.
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  Speaker 3: I don't think do they even consider themselves African.
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  Speaker 4: I mean I think they're like they look really even Ethiopians.
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  Speaker 4: I don't know if they concer of themselves part of
• 5:03
  Speaker 4: part of the of the continents. But yeah, I think
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  Speaker 4: there's some people who depends on your circumstances in life,
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  Speaker 4: there's some people who can't. If you can't shield yourself
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  Speaker 4: enough from the chaos in Africa, then it could be
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  Speaker 4: a good option for you not to be here.
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  Speaker 3: So I think of South Africans.
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  Speaker 4: You know, if you're just in a say you're in
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  Speaker 4: like Benoni, and you're struggling to cover your expenses and
• 5:31
  Speaker 4: you don't have a good community spirits, you don't.
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  Speaker 3: Have you know, you're not you're not you're not shielded
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  Speaker 3: from like all the.
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  Speaker 4: Mayhem, then then I totally I mean I would always
• 5:40
  Speaker 4: tell somebody never go to Australia, but Canada. Canada sounds
• 5:45
  Speaker 4: even worse. But I can understand, you know, what people
• 5:48
  Speaker 4: would be negative about Africa in that in that situation.
• 5:51
  Speaker 4: But what what I've found living in another African country
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  Speaker 4: besides South Africa is is I think a lot of
• 5:57
  Speaker 4: South Africans don't realize first of all, how wealthy South
• 6:03
  Speaker 4: Africa is. There's like so much wealth and luxury, how
• 6:07
  Speaker 4: good the food is. It's like there's nothing like it
• 6:11
  Speaker 4: in the whole world. And then also I don't think
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  Speaker 4: a lot of a lot of South Africans don't realize
• 6:16
  Speaker 4: that that the rest of Africa doesn't have nearly the
• 6:21
  Speaker 4: same levels of violence on average. So that's also another
• 6:26
  Speaker 4: interesting thing about Africa is that actually, if you're not
• 6:29
  Speaker 4: living in that and it's true of South Africa too,
• 6:32
  Speaker 4: if you're not living in an absolute worst part, and
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  Speaker 4: if your country is not engaged in a low grade
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  Speaker 4: civil war, it's it's a lot safer than many many
• 6:41
  Speaker 4: places in America.
• 6:42
  Speaker 3: For example, as.
• 6:45
  Speaker 2: We're talking, I'm trying to find a smart segue into
• 6:49
  Speaker 2: your book each and.
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: I think I found the segue.
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  Speaker 2: So Nietzsche was famous for God is Dead, and I
• 6:56
  Speaker 2: think it's fair to say that God is not dead
• 6:58
  Speaker 2: in Africa.
• 7:01
  Speaker 4: Yeah, And you know, I was actually the book The
• 7:05
  Speaker 4: Word and the Flame, reconciling Nietzsche with christ is I've
• 7:08
  Speaker 4: just released. It's a quiet I'm doing a quite slow
• 7:12
  Speaker 4: and steady release, but I have written about Sorry, the
• 7:18
  Speaker 4: sun just came out on me here. I have written
• 7:20
  Speaker 4: about Nietzsche and his connection with Christianity a few times,
• 7:26
  Speaker 4: and I've spoken about a few times. I was actually
• 7:29
  Speaker 4: with Andrew Fanzel, I think it was last year, and
• 7:32
  Speaker 4: we discussed the issue of Nietzsche and Christianity and how
• 7:36
  Speaker 4: the relationship therein people think is quite simple.
• 7:39
  Speaker 3: God is dead. You know, I am the Antichrist.
• 7:43
  Speaker 4: But anytime somebody's being that vociferous about being anti something,
• 7:47
  Speaker 4: there's usually something more complicated there. But one of the
• 7:50
  Speaker 4: things one of the connections we've found between Nietzsche and Africa.
• 7:53
  Speaker 4: And I actually didn't think to keep to keep the
• 7:57
  Speaker 4: quote up. Was there's a moment where Need just says
• 8:00
  Speaker 4: he's talking about the issue of socialism in Europe and
• 8:04
  Speaker 4: the threat socialism is.
• 8:08
  Speaker 3: It's green to Europe, and this is in nineteenth century,
• 8:12
  Speaker 3: and he.
• 8:12
  Speaker 4: Actually says, well, look, if we have too many unemployed people,
• 8:17
  Speaker 4: far easier than engaging in any kind of social revolution
• 8:21
  Speaker 4: is for people to leave and not necessarily never to
• 8:26
  Speaker 4: come back.
• 8:27
  Speaker 3: But there's something outside of Europe.
• 8:30
  Speaker 4: If you leave Europe, you can almost recover those old
• 8:33
  Speaker 4: European values because you're at a distance from it, and
• 8:36
  Speaker 4: you can awaken some of that old, that old European spirit.
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  Speaker 4: There's old virtues which have been lost upon layers of
• 8:45
  Speaker 4: bureaucracy and statism. And so it's quite interesting because if
• 8:51
  Speaker 4: you're you know, speaking to conscious Caricle, you know obviously
• 8:55
  Speaker 4: very much, you know, fighting for his people.
• 8:59
  Speaker 3: The Africans.
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  Speaker 4: And if you compare the Africaners to the Dutch, or
• 9:03
  Speaker 4: to the French, or to the Germans, they're kind of
• 9:05
  Speaker 4: ancestral forbears. You think about, you think about how much
• 9:09
  Speaker 4: more like some of those, you know, the old values
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  Speaker 4: of Christianity and family and all of that have stayed
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  Speaker 4: more live in Africa than they have in the mother country,
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  Speaker 4: the mother and you know, people said the same thing
• 9:23
  Speaker 4: about the Rhodesians in the sixties and seventies. They were
• 9:26
  Speaker 4: more British than the British. So it is interesting how
• 9:31
  Speaker 4: you can make that connection between Nietzsche and will to
• 9:34
  Speaker 4: power and the space that perhaps Africa provides or places
• 9:39
  Speaker 4: outside of the modern liberal empire that gives you a
• 9:45
  Speaker 4: little bit of space and freedom to breathe.
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  Speaker 3: And I think that's when Nietzsche.
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  Speaker 4: Famously said, I actually actually had it in front of
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  Speaker 4: me because I thought this would come up. He wrote,
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  Speaker 4: and he described the state in this way, and this
• 10:00
  Speaker 4: remembers in the nineteenth century. This is not twentieth century
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  Speaker 4: welfare state. This is not twentieth century surveillance state. This
• 10:08
  Speaker 4: is political correctness. Hasn't like nobody, nobody's heard of it.
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  Speaker 4: There's no Bolsheviks yet, you know, Europe is still people
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  Speaker 4: would recognize that as Europe there's no World War One.
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  Speaker 4: And he wrote this and thus spoke Zarathustra. The state
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  Speaker 4: is the coldest of all cold monsters. It is a
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  Speaker 4: sin against law and customs. Its great lie is that
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  Speaker 4: the state is the people. And then he talks about
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  Speaker 4: there being a great conflict between destroyers who are the
• 10:37
  Speaker 4: bureaucrats of this modern state, and what they do is
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  Speaker 4: hang a sword and one hundred cravings upon the people
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  Speaker 4: versus the creators as opposed to the destroyers who create
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  Speaker 4: peoples and hang faith and love over them.
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  Speaker 3: And he kind of foreshadows both.
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  Speaker 4: George, all there there's a sword over the people and
• 11:02
  Speaker 4: elders Huxley, you you threaten the people with one hundred
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  Speaker 4: cravings of consumerism and pornography and all that to kind
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  Speaker 4: of deaden them, versus people who actually connected with their
• 11:15
  Speaker 4: own kin, with their own with their own people who
• 11:19
  Speaker 4: and this is where it's interesting. He says that those
• 11:22
  Speaker 4: creators have faith and love as as the emblems of
• 11:28
  Speaker 4: their community.
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  Speaker 3: And again, right.
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  Speaker 4: There you see, and we'll probably get there later. You
• 11:34
  Speaker 4: see something about by nature being more complex when it
• 11:38
  Speaker 4: comes to when it comes to his relationship with Christianity
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  Speaker 4: than I think many people realize.
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  Speaker 2: Okay, so your book is effectively arguing that Nietzsche spent
• 11:52
  Speaker 2: his life trying to overcome nihilism while ultimately fighting the
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  Speaker 2: cause for Christianity, and.
• 12:04
  Speaker 4: That's a very yeah. I suppose you could say that.
• 12:09
  Speaker 4: I wouldn't put it quiet like that. So so my
• 12:12
  Speaker 4: argument is that is that it is possible to reconcile
• 12:17
  Speaker 4: Nietzsche with Christ, and a close reading of Nietzsche demonstrates
• 12:23
  Speaker 4: that his antagonism towards Christianity is far more complex than
• 12:28
  Speaker 4: people think.
• 12:30
  Speaker 3: So start with God is dead.
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  Speaker 4: Okay, there's a biographer of Nietzsche's or a philosopher, Henry
• 12:39
  Speaker 4: de Luback, famous Catholic philosophy, points out that Nietzsche probably
• 12:42
  Speaker 4: got that phrase from a Lutheran him that would have
• 12:45
  Speaker 4: been sung at at his local church. His father was
• 12:49
  Speaker 4: a I was a Lutheran minister. God is dead, you know,
• 12:52
  Speaker 4: Jesus is God. Jesus dies on the Christ. God is
• 12:54
  Speaker 4: dead is actually Christian doctrine. So even there there's a
• 12:58
  Speaker 4: little bit of complex And of course that's not quite
• 13:00
  Speaker 4: what he's saying. I understand that, but that just shows
• 13:02
  Speaker 4: you there's a little bit of complexity there. When you know,
• 13:06
  Speaker 4: people often talk about how you know Niets is presented
• 13:10
  Speaker 4: as an a moral philosopher.
• 13:13
  Speaker 3: He says, you know, Mite is right and you can.
• 13:16
  Speaker 3: You can see elements of that.
• 13:18
  Speaker 4: Certainly, I'm not I'm not saying that that's a completely
• 13:21
  Speaker 4: wrong reading of nietzsure, but it's not that simple about
• 13:25
  Speaker 4: what what is beyond good and evil?
• 13:27
  Speaker 3: He wrote a famous book called What Is you Know?
• 13:29
  Speaker 3: Called Beyond Good and Evil? Which is? Which is? You Know?
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  Speaker 4: Often considered his most important book, it serves as almost
• 13:37
  Speaker 4: like a commentary upon his more poetic worker that spoke Sarathustra,
• 13:43
  Speaker 4: But what is beyond good and evil? Actually the book
• 13:45
  Speaker 4: says what is beyond good and evil?
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  Speaker 3: It's love. So I don't think people realize, you know,
• 13:50
  Speaker 3: I was reading it.
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  Speaker 4: I'm thinking to myself, this doesn't sound like this, doesn't
• 13:56
  Speaker 4: sound like this a maniac, per isn't in Jack Bootsy
• 14:01
  Speaker 4: suggests we just like trample the weak and hurd all
• 14:04
  Speaker 4: the dead we as we go along, He actually said,
• 14:08
  Speaker 4: and we've already looked at faith and love or what
• 14:10
  Speaker 4: people who creators are those who imbue those around them
• 14:14
  Speaker 4: with faith and love. And if you think about good
• 14:18
  Speaker 4: and evil, the other thing which I would point out
• 14:20
  Speaker 4: is similarly to God is dead. The first kind of
• 14:23
  Speaker 4: instance in ancient literature of where we see good and
• 14:26
  Speaker 4: evil is in Genesis where it says that's where the
• 14:30
  Speaker 4: forbidden the forbidden fruit was on the tree of the
• 14:34
  Speaker 4: knowledge of good and evil. There was something negative about
• 14:37
  Speaker 4: good and evil suggested there. And what was the other
• 14:41
  Speaker 4: tree which they lost the right to? It was the
• 14:43
  Speaker 4: tree of life. And I think that sums up a
• 14:46
  Speaker 4: lot of our nature was trying to say. He was
• 14:48
  Speaker 4: trying to say that so much of our morality doesn't
• 14:52
  Speaker 4: give life to us, and that's nihilism. For him, God
• 14:58
  Speaker 4: is dead, there's no ultimate meaning anymore. But a few
• 15:01
  Speaker 4: of us who's strong enough to see into this, we
• 15:04
  Speaker 4: can overcome that by seizing, by living, by by trumscending
• 15:08
  Speaker 4: almost and becoming uber mentioned by becoming over men or superman.
• 15:13
  Speaker 4: And that gets kind of simplified as well. But the
• 15:17
  Speaker 4: idea being is that you create value and you and
• 15:21
  Speaker 4: you and you live, you become who you are.
• 15:25
  Speaker 3: Nah.
• 15:26
  Speaker 4: He did believe that modern nihilism was complicit with Christianity.
• 15:31
  Speaker 4: He believed that that that Christianity had was Platonism for
• 15:38
  Speaker 4: the people, is what he called it. So it was
• 15:40
  Speaker 4: really just a riff on ancient Greek philosophers, who he
• 15:44
  Speaker 4: wasn't a big fan of. He liked the Presocratics, he
• 15:47
  Speaker 4: loved Homer, he loved Hellenism.
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: But he donated Plato.
• 15:52
  Speaker 4: Yeah, Socrates and Plato these are not good dudes because
• 15:55
  Speaker 4: they posit that there's an ideal world beyond, and so
• 15:59
  Speaker 4: he's they negate this world, which, interestingly Aristotle I.
• 16:04
  Speaker 3: Think corrects, and I think.
• 16:07
  Speaker 4: Maybe also we make what is in Platonism is not
• 16:12
  Speaker 4: necessarily always what's in Plato. I think it's more complicated
• 16:16
  Speaker 4: in Plato than those who systematize after him made it
• 16:20
  Speaker 4: out to be.
• 16:21
  Speaker 3: And then Christianity extends that.
• 16:23
  Speaker 4: He has a big argument against, you know, the concept
• 16:27
  Speaker 4: of sexual purity, or the concept of heaven, or the
• 16:31
  Speaker 4: concept of self sacrifice or dying, dying to yourself. The
• 16:35
  Speaker 4: whole cross is anathema to him. But my position in
• 16:40
  Speaker 4: the book is that is that when you actually read
• 16:46
  Speaker 4: meet you closely. First of all, he is not so
• 16:50
  Speaker 4: simplistically against mercy and love and charity, as I've already
• 16:54
  Speaker 4: pointed out. He makes a comment that he respects people
• 16:58
  Speaker 4: who have mercy and love their neighbors if they have clause,
• 17:03
  Speaker 4: meaning if you're not doing it out of a position
• 17:05
  Speaker 4: of weakness, if you're not doing it at a position
• 17:08
  Speaker 4: of self righteousness, but there's a genuine, from a position
• 17:14
  Speaker 4: of strength you're doing it. And I think that's I
• 17:17
  Speaker 4: don't think there's a I think there's a lot of
• 17:19
  Speaker 4: overlap there with a genuine reading of Christianity and a
• 17:24
  Speaker 4: classical reading of Christianity. And so my big thesis, to
• 17:28
  Speaker 4: put it more poetically, is that is that the God
• 17:32
  Speaker 4: that Nietzsche is destroying or fighting against, or is just
• 17:36
  Speaker 4: proclaiming his death, he's, you.
• 17:38
  Speaker 3: Know, he doesn't believe God is real.
• 17:39
  Speaker 4: He's just saying, now, the truth of that's going to
• 17:42
  Speaker 4: catch up with us, and we're entering this great, risky.
• 17:45
  Speaker 3: Time of nihilism.
• 17:47
  Speaker 4: What I think he's actually doing without knowing it, except
• 17:50
  Speaker 4: maybe at the end when something real, you know, his
• 17:52
  Speaker 4: breakdown is really strange, at the end of his life.
• 17:55
  Speaker 4: What I think he's doing is he is actually allowing
• 18:00
  Speaker 4: he's opening up a space for us to bury not God,
• 18:04
  Speaker 4: but an abstraction of the Christian God, a god, an
• 18:09
  Speaker 4: idol of the Christian God that we had built to
• 18:12
  Speaker 4: put between us, as in the European world, and God,
• 18:18
  Speaker 4: so that we can control our own little, bureaucratic, little
• 18:22
  Speaker 4: lives and lived nice conventional happy lives and he and
• 18:26
  Speaker 4: he's actually allowing us to look at that and saying, well,
• 18:28
  Speaker 4: maybe that isn't God, and maybe he should that God
• 18:32
  Speaker 4: and inverted commas should die.
• 18:34
  Speaker 3: And he has a he says.
• 18:35
  Speaker 4: At one point, only where there are tombs are their resurrections. Again,
• 18:39
  Speaker 4: a very interesting thing for a guy who proclaims himself
• 18:43
  Speaker 4: to be the Antichrist to say, and I think, I
• 18:46
  Speaker 4: think young, I think maybe I can understand Nietzsche's work
• 18:49
  Speaker 4: as a tomb.
• 18:52
  Speaker 2: But he he also spoke about slave morality, and that's
• 18:59
  Speaker 2: that's what he paralleled Christianity worth.
• 19:05
  Speaker 3: Yeah, So the basic idea.
• 19:06
  Speaker 4: There is is you have slaves and masters, but you
• 19:13
  Speaker 4: can understand aristocrats and peasants or however you want to
• 19:16
  Speaker 4: put it. And the master has succeeded the master's strength,
• 19:24
  Speaker 4: the master has wealth, the master is good looking, the
• 19:29
  Speaker 4: master is able to overcome kind of the bonds of
• 19:35
  Speaker 4: menial labor and all of that.
• 19:37
  Speaker 3: So what is the slave's response.
• 19:39
  Speaker 4: And he made this kind of most clear in the
• 19:41
  Speaker 4: book The Genealogy of Morals, which he says morality is
• 19:47
  Speaker 4: constructed out of the resentment of the slave. Now, the
• 19:52
  Speaker 4: slave can't defeat the Master, so he has to think
• 19:54
  Speaker 4: of it or not directly, so he thinks of an
• 19:57
  Speaker 4: indirect way to defeed the Master.
• 20:00
  Speaker 3: So he makes.
• 20:00
  Speaker 4: Himself into a kind of priest, and he says, you
• 20:03
  Speaker 4: know what, what the Master is is bad. It's people
• 20:08
  Speaker 4: like us, the down trodden. We are going to inherit
• 20:11
  Speaker 4: the kingdom of God. The rich, the powerful.
• 20:15
  Speaker 3: You are.
• 20:16
  Speaker 4: You are not the chosen, You are not saved. And
• 20:19
  Speaker 4: slowly the priesthood of the slave gains power over time,
• 20:26
  Speaker 4: as as kind of religion seeks into society, and then
• 20:31
  Speaker 4: eventually this slave morality comes to be seen as as
• 20:36
  Speaker 4: true metaphysical reality, that that is how morals work. But
• 20:42
  Speaker 4: when actually, in actual fact, all along it's been it's
• 20:46
  Speaker 4: been the ploy of the slaves.
• 20:48
  Speaker 3: To gain power.
• 20:48
  Speaker 4: Now you can see why there's a massive criticism against
• 20:53
  Speaker 4: Christianity built in there, because you worship a crucified Jesus.
• 20:58
  Speaker 4: Jesus says, blessed or the poor, blessed of the meek,
• 21:01
  Speaker 4: turning out the cheek, Love your neighbor, love your enemy, lay.
• 21:05
  Speaker 3: Down your life for others. And you can see why.
• 21:08
  Speaker 4: You can see that that for nature would be slave
• 21:11
  Speaker 4: slave morality. That I think what he misses is that's
• 21:15
  Speaker 4: not where Christianity stops. It's not the point of the cross.
• 21:21
  Speaker 4: The Christ doesn't make any sense without the resurrection in Christianity.
• 21:26
  Speaker 4: So like the and and there's many passages in the
• 21:28
  Speaker 4: New Testament where where it speaks about how it was
• 21:32
  Speaker 4: for it was for the sake of the glory that
• 21:34
  Speaker 4: would come, or or for the joy that was said
• 21:36
  Speaker 4: before him that Jesus, that Jesus carried his Christ, that
• 21:41
  Speaker 4: Jesus went to went to the graves because he saw
• 21:43
  Speaker 4: what came out of that. And we see Nietzsche and
• 21:48
  Speaker 4: if you read thus book Zarathustra, he has similar ideas
• 21:52
  Speaker 4: where where he talks about the way to the ultimate metamorphosis,
• 21:58
  Speaker 4: that that a person who wants who wants to go
• 22:01
  Speaker 4: along the path of the overman or the uber mensh
• 22:05
  Speaker 4: should should undergo. Is you need to become the camel,
• 22:09
  Speaker 4: carry a burden, and then that means you can become
• 22:11
  Speaker 4: the lion because you've overcome the burden. And then eventually
• 22:15
  Speaker 4: you can become the child because you're.
• 22:17
  Speaker 3: Free to live and joy.
• 22:19
  Speaker 4: And that mirrors quite closely actually what the Christian journey
• 22:22
  Speaker 4: is meant to be. You go through the desert, yes,
• 22:25
  Speaker 4: but it's to get to the Promised Land. So I
• 22:29
  Speaker 4: think he misses a whole aspect of the classical Christian
• 22:35
  Speaker 4: faith and the importance of resurrection and the fact that
• 22:40
  Speaker 4: that power is not suspect when it's within God himself.
• 22:45
  Speaker 3: That the apostles are told by Jesus.
• 22:46
  Speaker 4: They're going to sit on the thrones of Israel, that
• 22:51
  Speaker 4: the New Testament of believers are told by Paul that
• 22:53
  Speaker 4: the universe belongs.
• 22:54
  Speaker 3: To them, and they will judge the angels.
• 22:57
  Speaker 4: Even so, sometimes I wonder if some of these guys
• 22:59
  Speaker 4: didn't actually spend another You assume you know what the
• 23:02
  Speaker 4: Bible says, but then when you go and read it, actually, oh,
• 23:05
  Speaker 4: I hadn't read that part before. Nobody's told me about
• 23:08
  Speaker 4: that part before. So where I think the value of
• 23:11
  Speaker 4: Nietzsche for Christians comes in is that is that there
• 23:15
  Speaker 4: are in terms of modern Christendom and where we're at,
• 23:20
  Speaker 4: and especially in Nietzsche's time, there's a lot of slave
• 23:24
  Speaker 4: morality within the Christian world, within the Church, a lot
• 23:30
  Speaker 4: of I will just die and let my culture perish.
• 23:36
  Speaker 4: And you know what, it doesn't even matter if the church, guys,
• 23:39
  Speaker 4: I'm going to just let you know, let myself and
• 23:43
  Speaker 4: my identity and my faith be trampled upon, because that's
• 23:47
  Speaker 4: the loving thing to do. Because we are egalitarians now,
• 23:51
  Speaker 4: and we're not going to worry about great Christian saints anymore.
• 23:55
  Speaker 4: We're going to worship Martin Luther King and George Floyd,
• 23:58
  Speaker 4: for example.
• 23:59
  Speaker 3: And and he's right, you know, when.
• 24:02
  Speaker 4: In so far as so far as Christians do live
• 24:05
  Speaker 4: like that and embrace what I think is a false
• 24:08
  Speaker 4: reading of the New Testament and embrace kind of the
• 24:11
  Speaker 4: slave morality identified, he's a useful antidote. And the parallel
• 24:15
  Speaker 4: there is how Thomas Aquine has looked at Aristotle to
• 24:18
  Speaker 4: correct some of some of the some of the erroneous
• 24:24
  Speaker 4: tendencies in the medieval Church, which was to disdain the body,
• 24:28
  Speaker 4: to to disdain the material world because it's not the
• 24:33
  Speaker 4: ideal world. And Aristotle, in responsiblady said, no, the forms
• 24:39
  Speaker 4: are not in some other like third place. The forms
• 24:42
  Speaker 4: are in the things themselves.
• 24:45
  Speaker 3: Meaning is in us our soul. The soul is the
• 24:48
  Speaker 3: form of the body. The soul belongs with the body.
• 24:50
  Speaker 4: And just as Thomas Aquine has looked at Aristotle said,
• 24:53
  Speaker 4: you know what what he said is a Greek pagan
• 24:58
  Speaker 4: It's true, it makes sense for us. And I think
• 25:01
  Speaker 4: that Nietzsche's almost can be seen as if.
• 25:05
  Speaker 3: Aristotle was like a pre Christian thinker.
• 25:07
  Speaker 4: I think of Nietzsche as being a useful post Christian
• 25:11
  Speaker 4: thinker because.
• 25:12
  Speaker 3: He sees this issue of slave morality clearly.
• 25:18
  Speaker 2: Interestingly, you mentioned Martin Luther King. Now Martin Luther is
• 25:22
  Speaker 2: somebody for whom he had no time. I mean, he
• 25:25
  Speaker 2: thought that the Reformation was a complete disaster and it
• 25:29
  Speaker 2: fragmented the grandeur and the aristocratic hierarchy of the Catholic Church,
• 25:34
  Speaker 2: which I believe he did admire to some degree.
• 25:38
  Speaker 4: No, he actually he did have He did respect Martin
• 25:41
  Speaker 4: Luther to some extent. He did kind of see him
• 25:46
  Speaker 4: as as some kind of like a Germanic genius. He
• 25:52
  Speaker 4: was very opposed to monasticism, so he was he was
• 26:02
  Speaker 4: very so that would have made him unsympathetic to the
• 26:05
  Speaker 4: Catholic Church. The Pope features as a character in one
• 26:08
  Speaker 4: of his books, and he's kind of lampooned. What he
• 26:12
  Speaker 4: did say was that Jesus was the last Christian, and
• 26:17
  Speaker 4: he kind of he promulgated an idea which didn't begin
• 26:20
  Speaker 4: with him, was that Saint Paul invented Christianity and Jesus
• 26:24
  Speaker 4: was something different, and that's like been a common idea
• 26:27
  Speaker 4: throughout history. People still say today that Jesus didn't come
• 26:30
  Speaker 4: to establish a church or a religion and Paul systematized it,
• 26:36
  Speaker 4: which is again it's it's it's modern theologians looking for
• 26:43
  Speaker 4: something original to say, who've kind of who've.
• 26:46
  Speaker 3: Built, who've built that like strange edifice.
• 26:49
  Speaker 4: That there's this massive contradiction between between Jesus and Paul.
• 26:54
  Speaker 3: So yeah, he is interesting. On the question of Jesus.
• 26:57
  Speaker 4: Something I say in the book because he says his
• 26:59
  Speaker 4: ideal type, his ideal, his ideal man.
• 27:02
  Speaker 3: Would be Caesar with the soul of Christ.
• 27:06
  Speaker 4: And and and I point out with that actually is Christ.
• 27:10
  Speaker 4: That that's exactly Jesus.
• 27:12
  Speaker 3: Jesus is the king of kings.
• 27:14
  Speaker 4: And lord of lords, but he's humble and he has
• 27:18
  Speaker 4: you know, he is the purity of God himself because
• 27:22
  Speaker 4: he is God himself. So he is Caesar with the
• 27:24
  Speaker 4: soul of Christ. He is the Emperor, the imperator. And
• 27:28
  Speaker 4: maybe it's because Christians stopped thinking of of God and
• 27:32
  Speaker 4: the Trinity in hierarchical ways that that Nietzsa didn't didn't
• 27:37
  Speaker 4: quite see that, and I think that's probably one of
• 27:42
  Speaker 4: one of the that's one of the reasons why I
• 27:44
  Speaker 4: think we should reconcile Niatzsua with Christ is because he
• 27:47
  Speaker 4: reminds us that there is hierarchy in life, that that
• 27:52
  Speaker 4: if a Christian goes so looks at the doctrine of
• 27:56
  Speaker 4: image O day, God has made in man's image and
• 27:59
  Speaker 4: says therefore that everybody is completely equal, therefore everybody must
• 28:04
  Speaker 4: be treated exactly the same. They're they're wrong, they're heretics,
• 28:08
  Speaker 4: and Nietzsche's right.
• 28:09
  Speaker 3: To say, no, Actually, there is hierarchy.
• 28:12
  Speaker 4: Obviously, there has to be, because there's some who are
• 28:14
  Speaker 4: baptized and there's some who are not. There's some who
• 28:16
  Speaker 4: set apart for it for different ministries. There's some who
• 28:20
  Speaker 4: set apart to be kings and princes and so forth on.
• 28:23
  Speaker 4: The Bible endorses all of those, all of those things.
• 28:27
  Speaker 4: So yeah, I think I think there is a there
• 28:34
  Speaker 4: is a great deal of complexity there.
• 28:36
  Speaker 2: That statement of his God is dead obviously wasn't a celebration,
• 28:41
  Speaker 2: It was a diagnosis. He was commenting on where society
• 28:45
  Speaker 2: was at and where it was going, and Yeah, something interesting.
• 28:48
  Speaker 2: When I was in Amsterdam just a few years ago,
• 28:52
  Speaker 2: we were traveling around with a Christian friend and she
• 28:56
  Speaker 2: was showing us all the empty churches.
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: I mean they were just empty.
• 29:01
  Speaker 2: They were just museums and places you couldn't go and
• 29:03
  Speaker 2: have a look at from antiquity. And I asked her
• 29:08
  Speaker 2: what happened to Christianity and her response to me was
• 29:14
  Speaker 2: we killed God.
• 29:15
  Speaker 4: And he also predicted what the ramifications would be of
• 29:20
  Speaker 4: this nihilism, and so did Dostayevsky, who I also write
• 29:24
  Speaker 4: about a great deal in the book to show traditionally
• 29:27
  Speaker 4: we think of them as being people who face the
• 29:30
  Speaker 4: same issue of modern nihilism and came to different conclusions,
• 29:34
  Speaker 4: and I show that actually I think they came to
• 29:38
  Speaker 4: conclusions which are more similar, but using slightly and not
• 29:42
  Speaker 4: even always different language.
• 29:45
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so that comes.
• 29:46
  Speaker 4: From there's a there's a passage in The mad Man
• 29:50
  Speaker 4: where where the passage is called the mad Man? Where
• 29:53
  Speaker 4: where from the from the Joyful Science where a madman
• 29:57
  Speaker 4: arrives at the public square and he says God is
• 29:59
  Speaker 4: dead and everybody.
• 30:00
  Speaker 3: Ignores them and what are you talking about?
• 30:02
  Speaker 4: And he says, I've come to early but God is dead,
• 30:06
  Speaker 4: and we have killed him.
• 30:09
  Speaker 3: And yeah, this point was exactly right. Wasn't a celebration,
• 30:12
  Speaker 3: it was a diagnosis that, well.
• 30:15
  Speaker 4: It was more a rare revelation that actually nobody believes
• 30:21
  Speaker 4: in God anymore.
• 30:23
  Speaker 3: We say we do, but it's just convention.
• 30:25
  Speaker 4: And give it a few years, give it a little
• 30:28
  Speaker 4: bit of time, and we're going to realize we don't
• 30:31
  Speaker 4: believe in God.
• 30:32
  Speaker 3: And then the question is going to be what do
• 30:35
  Speaker 3: we believe in?
• 30:36
  Speaker 4: And Nietzsche said, well, it'll probably results in a lot
• 30:40
  Speaker 4: of violence, but it's also going to result in what
• 30:44
  Speaker 4: he calls the last man. And the last man is
• 30:50
  Speaker 4: the person who wants to be part of the herd,
• 30:53
  Speaker 4: the person who wants to wear the mask and get
• 30:55
  Speaker 4: the vaccine, the person who wants to remain comfortable.
• 30:58
  Speaker 3: And if anyone writtens.
• 31:00
  Speaker 4: That comfort, then then that person needs to be got
• 31:04
  Speaker 4: rid of and needs to be excommunicated. But in the
• 31:08
  Speaker 4: midst of that, there was the possibility of a new
• 31:11
  Speaker 4: path opening up. People who could look into the abyss
• 31:15
  Speaker 4: but not let the abyss look into them, who could
• 31:18
  Speaker 4: who could wrestle the monster and not and not not
• 31:22
  Speaker 4: be killed by the monster, do not and the slaying
• 31:25
  Speaker 4: the monster.
• 31:26
  Speaker 3: You do not let the monster slay you.
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: It's interesting what you're saying.
• 31:30
  Speaker 2: I mean, I know a lot of Christians throughout my
• 31:33
  Speaker 2: life who have had this eternal battle with meaning and
• 31:38
  Speaker 2: purpose despite being Christians. And I can see the meed
• 31:42
  Speaker 2: a parallel with Nietzsche. He also was having this this
• 31:45
  Speaker 2: sort of existential tug of war.
• 31:49
  Speaker 5: Yeah, at one point it's it's one of the women
• 31:55
  Speaker 5: who rejected his proposals, I think more than once, low
• 32:00
  Speaker 5: slone who becomes one of if I'm correct, becomes one
• 32:03
  Speaker 5: of Freud's first first passions.
• 32:06
  Speaker 3: I mean, bizarre. Couldn't really think what a horrible man. Yeah, disgusting.
• 32:14
  Speaker 4: But she said that Nietzsche just was obsessed with God,
• 32:17
  Speaker 4: that he spoke about God continuously.
• 32:21
  Speaker 2: In other words, in other words, he spoke more about
• 32:24
  Speaker 2: God than an average Christian.
• 32:27
  Speaker 4: Probably probably that is, and especially at that time where
• 32:32
  Speaker 4: you know, he was very he was very critical of
• 32:36
  Speaker 4: the German Reich, which was the second Rite, which you
• 32:39
  Speaker 4: know started learned to Bismarck and Wilhelm the first, and
• 32:42
  Speaker 4: he was very critical of its conventionalism, of its but
• 32:48
  Speaker 4: he called like an anti culture of it. It was
• 32:51
  Speaker 4: it was bourgeois. It was a capitalist in the worst sense,
• 32:56
  Speaker 4: and he wasn't proud of actually being a German rare,
• 33:00
  Speaker 4: which is, you know, countrary to what people what people think.
• 33:04
  Speaker 4: But but yeah, he you know, like so many people today,
• 33:08
  Speaker 4: the ones who you know, what what marks somebody is
• 33:12
  Speaker 4: as different and as radical, is willing to look, willing
• 33:16
  Speaker 4: to open their eyes and see, well, what what's that
• 33:18
  Speaker 4: stake in our age? And like I said, Dostaevsky did
• 33:21
  Speaker 4: the same. You know, one of the characters and the brothers,
• 33:24
  Speaker 4: Caraman says, I if there's no God, then then there's
• 33:27
  Speaker 4: no good or evil. Then we can do as we wish.
• 33:29
  Speaker 4: And we've got to deal with that question. I mean
• 33:32
  Speaker 4: not just say no, we'll just be good Englishmen and
• 33:34
  Speaker 4: good Germans.
• 33:38
  Speaker 3: Sorren Kirker.
• 33:39
  Speaker 4: God is doing the same thing in his own Protestant,
• 33:42
  Speaker 4: interestingly Lutheran society in Denmark, saying this is not Christian
• 33:48
  Speaker 4: faith has to be like something really transcendent and terrifying
• 33:52
  Speaker 4: rather than something comfortable and and just like good manners.
• 33:58
  Speaker 4: And so I think Nietzsure, by asking these questions and
• 34:04
  Speaker 4: through his diagnosis of what society actually was, is a
• 34:08
  Speaker 4: really helpful thinker because he forces you back to the ultimate.
• 34:13
  Speaker 2: What you're talking about, though, is something that I think
• 34:17
  Speaker 2: humans have always thought about, and I don't think necessary
• 34:20
  Speaker 2: Nietzsche was unique. We are always thinking about why we
• 34:26
  Speaker 2: wake up in the morning.
• 34:28
  Speaker 3: I think I think that is that's true.
• 34:31
  Speaker 4: But I think there are certain periods in history where
• 34:37
  Speaker 4: where people can kind of just join in the machinery
• 34:42
  Speaker 4: of society and can and and you know, become the
• 34:47
  Speaker 4: last men.
• 34:48
  Speaker 3: You just see comfort. You just wake up and you.
• 34:53
  Speaker 4: Go to your crap job and your wife sharps at
• 34:58
  Speaker 4: you on the way.
• 34:58
  Speaker 3: Out or something.
• 34:59
  Speaker 4: And then and you pick up your kids and you're
• 35:02
  Speaker 4: in dad's and you watch Netflix. So I guess your
• 35:07
  Speaker 4: place holder there, like you said, is just consumerism.
• 35:12
  Speaker 3: It's just it's just comfort.
• 35:16
  Speaker 4: And he was pointing out that he was pointing that
• 35:19
  Speaker 4: out in the nineteenth century.
• 35:21
  Speaker 3: Can you imagine what he would think today.
• 35:23
  Speaker 4: I often say the same thing about Heidegger, you know,
• 35:26
  Speaker 4: comes after Nietzsche, and he's complaining about this perverse relationship
• 35:30
  Speaker 4: we have with technology in the.
• 35:32
  Speaker 3: Early twentieth century, And imagine imagine what you would think now.
• 35:36
  Speaker 4: So you know, even elders actually, I think, would be
• 35:39
  Speaker 4: shocked by how we've managed to achieve or amuse ourselves
• 35:45
  Speaker 4: to death or you know what he talks about. Nietzsche
• 35:48
  Speaker 4: says about we've you know, the people are seduced with
• 35:51
  Speaker 4: one hundred cravings that they that they don't need. There's
• 35:54
  Speaker 4: no willingness to actually experience pain, to actually to actually
• 35:59
  Speaker 4: experience a sense of crisis. So I think what makes
• 36:04
  Speaker 4: Nietzsche important is that at a certain time in history
• 36:07
  Speaker 4: he sees.
• 36:10
  Speaker 3: He sees this.
• 36:10
  Speaker 4: Happening in a concentrated form, that this is a unique
• 36:15
  Speaker 4: moment in the history of particularly Europe. He always caught himself,
• 36:19
  Speaker 4: I'm a good European that and for him, he believed
• 36:24
  Speaker 4: that actually we could capture something which we'd lost from
• 36:28
  Speaker 4: the ancient Greeks, capture their like love for life and
• 36:32
  Speaker 4: strength and glory.
• 36:35
  Speaker 3: And that was kind of his ideal.
• 36:37
  Speaker 4: Whereas when I look at Nietzsche, and I look at
• 36:39
  Speaker 4: it closely, and I think to myself, and especially when
• 36:41
  Speaker 4: I do, I overlay him with Dostaevsky in the book,
• 36:45
  Speaker 4: I look at novels from Dostaevsky compared with the figure
• 36:48
  Speaker 4: of Zarathustra, which is Nietzsche's kind of alter ego that
• 36:52
  Speaker 4: he that he writes about. And I think that that
• 36:56
  Speaker 4: what Nietzsch, what Nietzsch is what the solution to modern
• 37:00
  Speaker 4: nihilism was, and what he alludes to without having maybe
• 37:03
  Speaker 4: the language to get at it.
• 37:05
  Speaker 3: Is.
• 37:07
  Speaker 4: That the will to power. You know, it's famous doctrine
• 37:11
  Speaker 4: that everything is the will to power. All life is
• 37:13
  Speaker 4: a function of the will to power. And your will
• 37:15
  Speaker 4: to power can go sick, can grow sick and unhealthy
• 37:18
  Speaker 4: and resentful, or you can let it. It can become healthy,
• 37:23
  Speaker 4: and it can it can draw in multiple drives and
• 37:27
  Speaker 4: rise up in complexity, and chaos can give birth to
• 37:30
  Speaker 4: a dancing star, as he puts it. I think that
• 37:35
  Speaker 4: all of that is actually is actually precisely what the
• 37:41
  Speaker 4: Christian revelation was centuries before, was that the world is
• 37:47
  Speaker 4: there is there is a principle, there is a core,
• 37:49
  Speaker 4: There is a fire at the heart of this world
• 37:51
  Speaker 4: which is now available to us to live in and
• 37:54
  Speaker 4: to escape kind of the sickness that we're prone to,
• 37:58
  Speaker 4: whether it be slave morality or bovine identity. And so
• 38:05
  Speaker 4: the book's title is the Word and the Flame, and
• 38:08
  Speaker 4: the Word is a reference to the logos which you
• 38:11
  Speaker 4: you know in John's Gospel, and the beginning was the word,
• 38:14
  Speaker 4: or in the beginning was the logos, and the logos
• 38:16
  Speaker 4: was worth God, and the logos was God, and the
• 38:18
  Speaker 4: logos takes on flesh and dwells among us. And that's
• 38:20
  Speaker 4: Christ is the Word of God. And for Nietzsche and
• 38:26
  Speaker 4: for many kind of modern right pagan neo Nietzschian dissidents.
• 38:32
  Speaker 4: So you read you kind of see on the dissidence basis,
• 38:34
  Speaker 4: especially on X. You know, if you think of a
• 38:37
  Speaker 4: Garic Bronze Age pervert being kind of the archetype of that,
• 38:42
  Speaker 4: they're very skeptical of any they call them, you know,
• 38:45
  Speaker 4: like word cells instead of in cells.
• 38:47
  Speaker 3: People who who.
• 38:49
  Speaker 4: Who want to put labels on things, you want to
• 38:52
  Speaker 4: be philosophers and categorize things. And that gets associated with
• 38:56
  Speaker 4: Christianity because Christianity is the word. You know, you have
• 39:00
  Speaker 4: the Bible, Jesus is described as as the Word of God.
• 39:04
  Speaker 4: And what I wanted to show was that actually the
• 39:07
  Speaker 4: word and the flame are one. That that the fire,
• 39:10
  Speaker 4: that the intensity, that that the power we want to
• 39:14
  Speaker 4: experience in life, that we feel is at the core
• 39:17
  Speaker 4: of life. That is the word that the word is
• 39:21
  Speaker 4: the is the living vitality that that that that brings
• 39:26
  Speaker 4: everything into being and keeps everything into being, and so
• 39:29
  Speaker 4: ultimately the will to powers, the will to Christ. Now
• 39:34
  Speaker 4: I go, there's a long route that I take to
• 39:37
  Speaker 4: get there.
• 39:38
  Speaker 3: So so that's why I encourage people to read the book.
• 39:41
  Speaker 4: I can just hintality it's quite it's a bit of
• 39:43
  Speaker 4: a philosophical treatise, but I think it does well.
• 39:47
  Speaker 3: I hope it rewards the reader.
• 39:50
  Speaker 2: And of course the undercurrent, I mean, based on what
• 39:52
  Speaker 2: you were just saying now, is that Nietzsche was right
• 39:58
  Speaker 2: to attack the weak, feeble heard like pretty soaked Christianity
• 40:06
  Speaker 2: that we can see around us, and not even just
• 40:09
  Speaker 2: in Christianity. But it's the it's the it's the postmodern
• 40:14
  Speaker 2: feminized version of society where men are no longer men
• 40:21
  Speaker 2: and power is seen as a bad thing.
• 40:26
  Speaker 3: Mm hmm.
• 40:27
  Speaker 4: Yeah. It's kind of like liquid liquid modernity where everything
• 40:33
  Speaker 4: must be conformed into like a sludge. Egalitarianism, Yeah, egalitarianism.
• 40:40
  Speaker 4: There's there's no hierarchy. And that's the reason why we
• 40:44
  Speaker 4: see so much like terrible modern art music is because
• 40:48
  Speaker 4: beauty is essentially hierarchical.
• 40:52
  Speaker 3: Is the great lover of music.
• 40:54
  Speaker 2: For that and men who and and men want to
• 40:56
  Speaker 2: be women or just men who are just heavily feminine.
• 41:01
  Speaker 6: Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, like eat the soy and you know, yeah,
• 41:09
  Speaker 6: vote for Kirs Starmer.
• 41:11
  Speaker 4: And you know, I think what Worke a lot of
• 41:13
  Speaker 4: people up to this was was was twenty twenty. And
• 41:19
  Speaker 4: I think that's why, and I do point to that
• 41:22
  Speaker 4: in the introduction to the book as as twenty twenty.
• 41:26
  Speaker 3: But before you kind of see a lot.
• 41:29
  Speaker 4: Of Nichean themes all of a sudden, and you can
• 41:33
  Speaker 4: even argue that Trump being elected. Now I'm just talking
• 41:36
  Speaker 4: about Trump as a symbol here, not as an actual person,
• 41:40
  Speaker 4: because you could spend hours criticizing the actual person, but
• 41:44
  Speaker 4: as a symbol. What Trump was was kind of a
• 41:48
  Speaker 4: rejection of neo conservatism, of like good Christian man like
• 41:54
  Speaker 4: George Bush. You know, he's busy bombing Christians in Iraq
• 41:57
  Speaker 4: and Syrian and.
• 41:58
  Speaker 3: All of that.
• 42:00
  Speaker 4: It was like a rise of a of a tougher,
• 42:02
  Speaker 4: more secular I say, right, but it's.
• 42:05
  Speaker 3: Not really right wing. It's nineties liberalism.
• 42:08
  Speaker 4: So there was like a you know, there was Brexit,
• 42:11
  Speaker 4: and and all of these things are best understood as
• 42:13
  Speaker 4: symbols because they actually weren't the things maybe we thought
• 42:17
  Speaker 4: they were, or we hoped they would be, but they
• 42:19
  Speaker 4: did represent something in the zeitgeist, I think. And so
• 42:23
  Speaker 4: there was this like turn against the political correctness, like
• 42:27
  Speaker 4: like that was so kind of embodied by like a
• 42:29
  Speaker 4: figure like Barack Obama and even like a George Bush
• 42:33
  Speaker 4: or and and so you got Johnson, Boris Johnson, David Cameron, Tony.
• 42:40
  Speaker 3: Blair, that whole like that whole world.
• 42:43
  Speaker 4: Of like I suppose the best well of saying it is,
• 42:47
  Speaker 4: you know, you call it neoliberalism.
• 42:48
  Speaker 3: You could call it neo conservatism.
• 42:50
  Speaker 4: It's like Trotsky is almost you could call it a
• 42:53
  Speaker 4: lot of these guys have a fascination.
• 42:55
  Speaker 3: With with with Trotsky, which is which is interesting. And
• 43:00
  Speaker 3: all of a.
• 43:00
  Speaker 4: Sudden people realize, actually, I don't care if people call
• 43:03
  Speaker 4: me racist. I don't care if if Trump says the
• 43:08
  Speaker 4: most outrageous things.
• 43:11
  Speaker 3: I'm done with that anymore.
• 43:13
  Speaker 4: And then you and so there was this kind of
• 43:15
  Speaker 4: like undercurrent of actually, I want, I want, I want
• 43:18
  Speaker 4: to defend my home. I don't care if people mark
• 43:20
  Speaker 4: me for owning a gun. I don't care if I
• 43:23
  Speaker 4: say the word gay in a bad way. I'm done
• 43:26
  Speaker 4: with that. And then of course you got twenty twenty,
• 43:29
  Speaker 4: which then just pushed it even further where you had
• 43:32
  Speaker 4: like the uts insanity of of you know what we
• 43:38
  Speaker 4: could call the therapeutic state, you know, the nanny state.
• 43:41
  Speaker 3: It's called nanny for a reason, not guard now or anything.
• 43:44
  Speaker 4: It's it's a feminine figure. It's a matriarchy coming to
• 43:48
  Speaker 4: zenith in masks and social distancing and look after Granny.
• 43:53
  Speaker 3: And then right in the middle of that you got
• 43:56
  Speaker 3: George Floyd.
• 43:58
  Speaker 4: And there was there's this moment and Beyond Good and
• 44:02
  Speaker 4: Evil I've actually got in front of me, so I'll
• 44:04
  Speaker 4: read it where I just thought to myself, needs to
• 44:08
  Speaker 4: saw George Floyd and he wrote this in Beyond Good
• 44:11
  Speaker 4: and Evil two o one. We have been led to
• 44:13
  Speaker 4: a point in the history of society when it becomes
• 44:16
  Speaker 4: so pathologically soft and tender that, among other things, its
• 44:21
  Speaker 4: sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does
• 44:25
  Speaker 4: this quite seriously and honestly. And so we've seen that
• 44:30
  Speaker 4: play out in gender politics, immigration and secularism, in policing.
• 44:38
  Speaker 4: Not that I'm a big fan of the police, and
• 44:40
  Speaker 4: I'm kind of like want police on my door and
• 44:42
  Speaker 4: patrolling the streets, but kind of in worshiping George Floyd,
• 44:46
  Speaker 4: I think that taught us a lot about you tell
• 44:49
  Speaker 4: us society about what it worships. And George Floyd was
• 44:52
  Speaker 4: the savior We've known for a while. Hitler, Stayton, Modern
• 44:56
  Speaker 4: Luther King and Mandela maybe compete for Jesus.
• 44:59
  Speaker 3: But then George Floyd it just went.
• 45:01
  Speaker 4: To the maximal degree where actually, now we find a
• 45:05
  Speaker 4: guy who was like a porn star, a bouncer, was
• 45:08
  Speaker 4: on drugs. It's like in and out of jail, he
• 45:12
  Speaker 4: is God and so and so you can see why
• 45:17
  Speaker 4: Niatzure became popular then. And that's one reason why I
• 45:19
  Speaker 4: started writing about Nietzschure, and actually the book comes.
• 45:22
  Speaker 3: Out of a doctoral dissertation.
• 45:24
  Speaker 4: Was I thought to myself, there's so much that's write
• 45:26
  Speaker 4: about Nietzsure, and there's so much that connects with me
• 45:30
  Speaker 4: and friends of mine who opposed this kind of modern
• 45:34
  Speaker 4: therapeuticism and statism. But we're Christians, and so what's the
• 45:40
  Speaker 4: issue here between why do we feel so much kinship
• 45:44
  Speaker 4: with this philosopher and some of his ideas and when
• 45:46
  Speaker 4: we read it, we're like spot on, that's it. And
• 45:50
  Speaker 4: so that was me, Actually, well, let me go and
• 45:51
  Speaker 4: read Nietzsure closely and let me go and read the
• 45:55
  Speaker 4: New Testament again closely, and let me read some of
• 45:58
  Speaker 4: the Church Fathers again closely. And let's cut away some
• 46:01
  Speaker 4: of the stuff that was happening around the Enlightenment and
• 46:04
  Speaker 4: around Nietzche's time, and then let's look at nature with Darstaevsky,
• 46:09
  Speaker 4: who's who's you know, who's kind of dealing with the
• 46:12
  Speaker 4: exact same issues, and let's see what comes out. And
• 46:16
  Speaker 4: what came out was, no, we can reconcile nature with.
• 46:19
  Speaker 2: Christ at the risk of derailing and otherwise brilliant conversation.
• 46:27
  Speaker 2: You said, I thought to myself, and I've often wondered,
• 46:29
  Speaker 2: why do we say that? I mean, can you think
• 46:32
  Speaker 2: to I thought, I thought to my wife.
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: Well, it's strange.
• 46:37
  Speaker 4: It's strange some of us in evential monologue because we
• 46:42
  Speaker 4: high IQ and some of us so we had a
• 46:45
  Speaker 4: conversation with ourselves.
• 46:49
  Speaker 2: It's like that that adage about a frog in a
• 46:52
  Speaker 2: boiling part. I mean, I wonder if anybody's actually ever
• 46:55
  Speaker 2: boiled a frog to see what would happen.
• 46:57
  Speaker 1: That might not even be true. I don't know anyone.
• 47:02
  Speaker 4: Who bore the problem, Yeah, who discovered that?
• 47:09
  Speaker 2: So, I mean the moral of the story, yeah, is
• 47:13
  Speaker 2: that there's no need to be or to take offense
• 47:19
  Speaker 2: at Nietzsche's work. If you are a Christian, you can
• 47:21
  Speaker 2: actually find many overlaps.
• 47:25
  Speaker 7: Yeah, And I think the one of the big advantages
• 47:32
  Speaker 7: is needsure cut through this kind of you know, this dead,
• 47:37
  Speaker 7: this dead conventional Christianity.
• 47:40
  Speaker 3: You know, you think of like modern politicians who.
• 47:42
  Speaker 4: You know, talk about Christian values of Christian ethos and
• 47:46
  Speaker 4: and it's all just bullshit. It's like it's it's just
• 47:49
  Speaker 4: a parade of of virtues that borrowed from Christianity and
• 47:54
  Speaker 4: kind of like wrapped it around their own vacuity.
• 48:00
  Speaker 3: Nature helps to cut through that.
• 48:01
  Speaker 4: And if you think about when Christianity arrives and when
• 48:04
  Speaker 4: it spreads like wildfire, it's over the pagan world, which
• 48:08
  Speaker 4: had similar values to two Niature values that it were
• 48:11
  Speaker 4: dying in the kind of like a Roman empire, which
• 48:15
  Speaker 4: was also effeminist and soft and and diverse at that
• 48:23
  Speaker 4: stage with not they didn't print money, but they you know,
• 48:26
  Speaker 4: they had fake money that easy debt, just like just
• 48:31
  Speaker 4: like we do today. And it's quite interesting that Christianity
• 48:35
  Speaker 4: caughts so quickly on those people, because it works best
• 48:40
  Speaker 4: on people who have a healthy view of humanity. So
• 48:43
  Speaker 4: people who recognize strength is good, it's good too.
• 48:46
  Speaker 3: It's good to.
• 48:48
  Speaker 4: The good things in this life are good, that sex
• 48:52
  Speaker 4: is good, that a powerful ruler ruling wisely and justly
• 48:59
  Speaker 4: is good, Beautiful art is good. And then Christianity says yes,
• 49:04
  Speaker 4: and these points of God. And so when a person
• 49:07
  Speaker 4: is baptized, the person doesn't disappear, but the person is
• 49:13
  Speaker 4: Grace perfects nature. That's something Thomas aquin has famously said,
• 49:18
  Speaker 4: Grace presupposes nature. And so I think the one of
• 49:21
  Speaker 4: the things that many people look to Nietzsche is is
• 49:24
  Speaker 4: to go back to a positive view of nature. That
• 49:29
  Speaker 4: actually the heroes of the pagan past, the classical man
• 49:35
  Speaker 4: you can call him, that is a good thing, but
• 49:38
  Speaker 4: it's incomplete. C. S.
• 49:39
  Speaker 3: Lewis.
• 49:40
  Speaker 4: Funnily enough, he said something similar. He said, first, first
• 49:43
  Speaker 4: we make the younger generation Pagans, and then we can
• 49:45
  Speaker 4: make them Christian, you know, speaking as a as a
• 49:48
  Speaker 4: Christian apologist. And I said, well, that's what Nietzsche is doing.
• 49:52
  Speaker 4: He's saying, let's clear away all of this. But then
• 49:55
  Speaker 4: one of the points I make, and this kind of
• 49:57
  Speaker 4: maybe gives some context into why keep bringing up to
• 50:00
  Speaker 4: Stayevsky is there's the famous story that most people know
• 50:05
  Speaker 4: about Nietzsche, besides the philosophy, besides the writings, is his breakdown.
• 50:12
  Speaker 2: So before at the end of his life, when he
• 50:17
  Speaker 2: was looked after by other people.
• 50:18
  Speaker 4: Yeah, so he's looked after by his mother, then his sister,
• 50:22
  Speaker 4: his friend of his is called to the city of Turin.
• 50:26
  Speaker 3: To to come and to come and take charge of him.
• 50:30
  Speaker 4: He's writing these crazy letters in which he describes himself
• 50:33
  Speaker 4: as the crucified. Interestingly, and and he's had this breakdown.
• 50:40
  Speaker 4: He lives for on another five years, if I'm correct,
• 50:44
  Speaker 4: in these conditions of being nothing that looks like an ubermension.
• 50:49
  Speaker 4: And but the breakdown is very interesting. It happens in
• 50:53
  Speaker 4: the city of Turin, and he sees a horse being
• 50:58
  Speaker 4: flogged on the streets to win, and he runs to
• 51:02
  Speaker 4: the horse and embraces it, and then falls down on
• 51:06
  Speaker 4: the street and is carried into an end. It's a
• 51:08
  Speaker 4: little bit apocryphal. We're not sure how true it is,
• 51:11
  Speaker 4: but it's the story. It's part of the mythos of Nietzsche.
• 51:14
  Speaker 4: It's like a very important part of the mythos of Nietzsche.
• 51:17
  Speaker 3: Now, a lot of people don't point this out. I'm
• 51:20
  Speaker 3: sure I've probably just missed it.
• 51:22
  Speaker 4: But that breakdown is following a script, and the script
• 51:29
  Speaker 4: comes from Dostoyevsky. In Crime and Punishment, the main character Raskolnikov,
• 51:35
  Speaker 4: and he's the character who decides, I'm going to murder
• 51:37
  Speaker 4: this usurious money lender, and I'm going to use the money,
• 51:41
  Speaker 4: and I'm going to use this crime as a stepping
• 51:44
  Speaker 4: stone to becoming a person beyond normal morality, like Napoleon
• 51:49
  Speaker 4: that sometimes achievement is more important than petty morality.
• 51:52
  Speaker 3: So I'm going to murder this this lady.
• 51:55
  Speaker 4: And eventually it does, and he has a breakdown and
• 51:58
  Speaker 4: he ends up confessing because he can't shoulder the burden
• 52:01
  Speaker 4: of this anymore. But before he does that, before he
• 52:06
  Speaker 4: takes the final step in murdering this old woman, he
• 52:10
  Speaker 4: has a dream when he's a young boy and he
• 52:13
  Speaker 4: sees a horse being flogged and he tries to stop
• 52:17
  Speaker 4: it and embrace it, and the peasants who are beating
• 52:19
  Speaker 4: this flogging and whipping this horse kind of push him off,
• 52:22
  Speaker 4: and his father takes him away. And Nietzsche said of Darstayevski,
• 52:28
  Speaker 4: he's the only psychologist from whom I have learned anything
• 52:31
  Speaker 4: and described him as a psychologists, not in the kind
• 52:33
  Speaker 4: of the modern sense of the word. But my instincts,
• 52:35
  Speaker 4: my deepest instincts, go against it. So there's something like
• 52:40
  Speaker 4: there's something ambivalent between him and Dostaevsky.
• 52:43
  Speaker 3: And then his working life, his.
• 52:48
  Speaker 4: Public life, not that he was a public person, but
• 52:51
  Speaker 4: he was honest, he was becoming it at the end,
• 52:54
  Speaker 4: he is he breaks down and is such a similar
• 52:58
  Speaker 4: situation as something that came out of dostayevskyme and I said,
• 53:02
  Speaker 4: what if he realizes, And I'm sure some hard Nietzscheans
• 53:07
  Speaker 4: are going to hate me for this, but what if
• 53:09
  Speaker 4: he realizes that that true power finds its completion in compassion,
• 53:16
  Speaker 4: in suffering. What if the world to power is the logos,
• 53:22
  Speaker 4: and the logos is the creator who comes down and.
• 53:27
  Speaker 3: To sends to suffer.
• 53:29
  Speaker 4: And Nietzsche was also a great fan, like I am,
• 53:32
  Speaker 4: of a presocratic Greek philosophy called hair client Is. And
• 53:35
  Speaker 4: here a Clienters said, the way up and the way
• 53:37
  Speaker 4: down is the same. And what if you have to
• 53:41
  Speaker 4: go down to go up?
• 53:42
  Speaker 3: And what if you need a tomb to have.
• 53:43
  Speaker 4: A resurrection, as Nita himself said, So then I go
• 53:48
  Speaker 4: into Dostayevsky, and I wonder could we find the uber
• 53:51
  Speaker 4: menh in Dostaevsky and I go through the different characters
• 53:55
  Speaker 4: like Raskolnikov, and I try to show that that actually
• 54:00
  Speaker 4: they were on the same mission, and they they complete.
• 54:04
  Speaker 3: The same mission.
• 54:06
  Speaker 4: They don't affect a massive change in the world, but
• 54:08
  Speaker 4: a seed is planted, and Andre's those are seeds which
• 54:12
  Speaker 4: we can use today.
• 54:15
  Speaker 2: The man who declared God has dead couldn't stop talking
• 54:18
  Speaker 2: about God.
• 54:20
  Speaker 4: Yeah, and if we wanted to do some some analysis
• 54:23
  Speaker 4: of Nietzsche, what we remember is his father as a
• 54:25
  Speaker 4: Lutheran pastor, and his father died when he was young,
• 54:30
  Speaker 4: and so and so, Like so many intellectuals, he's kind
• 54:35
  Speaker 4: of raised by his mother.
• 54:36
  Speaker 3: He's got an older sister.
• 54:38
  Speaker 4: So you wonder, how much, you know, are we dealing
• 54:40
  Speaker 4: with like a Hamlet like figure here, and he's he's
• 54:44
  Speaker 4: wrestling with the ghost ghost of his father, Carl jung Is.
• 54:48
  Speaker 3: Also, you know, his father was also in Switzerland.
• 54:52
  Speaker 4: It wasn't Lutheran, it was a reformed pastor and also
• 54:56
  Speaker 4: had a difficult relationship with boy. His father didn't die
• 55:00
  Speaker 4: as far as I'm concerned, as far as I can remember,
• 55:02
  Speaker 4: but it is interesting these kind of relationships with fathers
• 55:05
  Speaker 4: that that must have had some some impact on.
• 55:09
  Speaker 3: That to be To be sure, he's not he's not.
• 55:11
  Speaker 4: Always talking about God directly or addressing Christianity directly. He's
• 55:17
  Speaker 4: criticizing the modern state a great deal. He's criticizing the
• 55:21
  Speaker 4: Enlightenment a great deal. He you know, he calls a
• 55:25
  Speaker 4: person like Emmanuel Can't a catastrophic spider, and he goes
• 55:29
  Speaker 4: into he goes into all of that. He criticizes Plato
• 55:32
  Speaker 4: and Socrates a great deal. But he very much does
• 55:35
  Speaker 4: see Christianity as as kind of complicit, as the as
• 55:40
  Speaker 4: the thing which which needs to which needs to be overcome.
• 55:44
  Speaker 3: At one point, I think he.
• 55:45
  Speaker 4: Says, we need to like just go to Jerusalem and
• 55:48
  Speaker 4: destroy it and just put snakes on it and salt
• 55:51
  Speaker 4: it and just put snakes on it, because we won't
• 55:54
  Speaker 4: be free until we're rid of that. We won't be
• 55:55
  Speaker 4: truly European until until until we rid of that. But
• 55:59
  Speaker 4: then why you know even and sorry I'm rambling on
• 56:04
  Speaker 4: a bit here, but he says at one point it's
• 56:07
  Speaker 4: good that we've had Plata and the Jews and Christianity
• 56:11
  Speaker 4: because they've made life more interesting, and they've created like
• 56:14
  Speaker 4: they've brought a creative tension. So even even directly, he
• 56:18
  Speaker 4: kind of recognizes the value of Christianity as a challenge,
• 56:23
  Speaker 4: but he does believe, or he does state it's a
• 56:26
  Speaker 4: challenge that has to be overcome. But what I argue
• 56:29
  Speaker 4: is that overcoming the challenge just leads you to an
• 56:32
  Speaker 4: old and more genuine form of Christianity.
• 56:36
  Speaker 2: Okay, so your book The Word in the Flame, reconciling
• 56:39
  Speaker 2: Nietzsche with Christ.
• 56:42
  Speaker 1: How can I get your book?
• 56:44
  Speaker 4: So Amazon, if you if you read on Kindle, you
• 56:50
  Speaker 4: can get it with one click and it delivers to
• 56:53
  Speaker 4: your Kindle as sure. Kindle readers all know you can
• 56:58
  Speaker 4: get a paperback on Amazon too, if the tricky.
• 57:03
  Speaker 3: I'm not sure if this is still true in.
• 57:04
  Speaker 4: South Africa, because you know, I've got Amazon, dot Co,
• 57:07
  Speaker 4: dot Za. But for South Africans, I think it can
• 57:10
  Speaker 4: be tricky to get the paperback from Amazon.
• 57:13
  Speaker 3: So you can.
• 57:14
  Speaker 4: You can go in too take a Lot, and you
• 57:16
  Speaker 4: can order the paperback via via Take a Lot too.
• 57:20
  Speaker 3: So I'm on substack.
• 57:21
  Speaker 4: I I've I've left social media for better or for worse,
• 57:27
  Speaker 4: but I think it just gives me a little bit
• 57:29
  Speaker 4: more focus at the stage and kind of I'm based
• 57:33
  Speaker 4: on substack, and what I realized is substack is.
• 57:35
  Speaker 3: Dead on on X.
• 57:37
  Speaker 4: Like Elon hates substack for some reason. This kind of
• 57:41
  Speaker 4: believes where everyone's going to start writing on X, but
• 57:44
  Speaker 4: it's not happening. So I haven't bothered with that. So yeah,
• 57:48
  Speaker 4: Chris Waldburger dot substack dot com is where you can
• 57:50
  Speaker 4: find my work and paid subscribers get a free copy
• 57:54
  Speaker 4: of the book.
• 57:56
  Speaker 1: Chris Alberger, thank you for joining me in the drenches.
• 57:59
  Speaker 3: Thanks so much. Driving