In _Church Dogmatics_ III.2 Barth devotes pages 231-242 (in small print!) to Nietzsche.

 

Barth's main thesis is: "Nietzsche was the prophet of that humanity without the fellow-man" (page 232).

 

Barth writes (page 239):

 

"What is the absolutely intolerable and unequivocally perverted element which Nietzsche thinks that he has discovered, and must fight to the death, in Christian morality, and in this as the secret essence of all morality? Why is it that he must finally act in this matter as if there were no other foe upon earth, and no more urgent task than to vanquish it? The answer is given by Nietzsche himself with a hundred variations and nuances the complicated pattern of which we cannot follow, but the content of which is perfectly clear. It is because Christianity is not really a faith, and is not really 'bound to any of its shameless dogmas", and does not basically need either metaphysics, asceticism, or 'Christian' natural science, but is at root a practice, and is always possible as such, that Nietzsche encounters it as the last enemy on his own true field. For he himself is finally concerned about a definite practice; he is decisively an ethicist.

 

"An he encounters it as an enemy because it opposes to Zarathustra or Dionysius, the lonely, noble, strong, proud, natural, healthy, wise, outstanding, splendid man, the superman, a type which is the very reverse, and so far has managed to do this successfully with its blatant claim that the only true man is the man who is little, poor and sick, the man who is weak and not strong, who does not evoke  admiration but sympathy, who is not solitary but gregarious--the mass man.

 

"It goes so far as to speak of a crucified God, and therefore to identify God Himself with this human type, and consequently to demand of all men not merely sympathy with others but that they themselves should be those who excite sympathy and not admiration."

 

Then on page 240:

 

"The new thing in Nietzsche was the fact that the development of humanity without the fellow-man, which secretly had been the humanity of the Olympian Goethe and other classical figures [Kant, Fichte, Schelling--and we will leave Hegel out of this] as well as the more mediocre [Feuerbach and Strauss], reached in him a much more advanced, explosive, dangerous and yet also vulnerable stage--possibly its last.

 

"The new thing in Nietzsche was the man of 'azure isolation', six thousand feet above time and man, the man to whom a fellow-creature drinking at the same well is quite dreadful and insufferable; the man who is utterly inaccessible to others, having no friends and despising women; the man who is at home only with the eagles and strong winds; the man whose only possible environment is desert and wintry landscape; the man beyond good and evil, who can exist only as a consuming fire."

 

Then on page 241:

 

"These predecessors [from Goethe to Feuerbach and Strauss] had not seen how serious the matter was or how much was a stake. They could not do so, because, at bottom, they really knew nothing of the 'auzure isolation' of the superman. They had been left far, far behind by Zarathustra. They still crept along the ground, having only an inkling of the proximity of the eagles and strong winds in which alone real man can breath. How could they see the true danger in Christianity? How could they fail either to reach a frivolous compromise with this enemy, or, if they knew and attacked it as such, to commit the serious error of leaving it intact where it was really dangerous? Nietzsche, however, was consistent on this positive side. He trod the way of humanity without the fellow-man to the bitter end. And this enabled him, and him alone, to see the true danger at this point."

 

Barth continues:

 

"And the true danger in Christianity, which he alone saw at the climax of that tradition, and on account of which he had to attack it with unprecedented resolution and passion--and with all the greater resolution and passion because he was alone--was that Christianity--what he called Christian morality--confronts real man, the superman, this necessary, supreme and mature fruit of the whole development of true humanity, with a form of man which necessarily questions and disturbes and destroys and kills him at the very root. That is to say, it confronts him with the figure of suffering man. It demands that he should see this man, that he should accept his presence, that he should not be man without him but with him, that he must drink with him at the same source.

 

"Christianity places before the superman the Crucified, Jesus, as the Neighbor, and in the person of Jesus a whole host of others who are wholly and utterly ignoble and despised in the eyes of the world, the hungry and thirsty and naked and sick and captive, a whole ocean of human meanness and painfulness.

 

"Nor does it merely place the Crucified and His host before his eyes. It does not merely will that he see Him and them. It wills that he should recognize in them his neighbors and himself. It aims to bring him down from his hight, to put him in the ranks which begin with the Crucuified, in the midst of His host."

 

Continuing:

 

"Dionysius-Zarathustra is thus called to live for others and not himself. Here are his brothers and sisters who belong to him and to whom he belongs. In this Crucified, and therefore in fellowship with this mean and painful host of His people, he has thus to see his salvation, and his true humanity in the fact that he belongs to Him and therefore to them."

 

Barth, then, asks a question:

 

"We might well ask how it was that all their life long even Strauss and Feuerbach found it necessary to keep hammering away at what they declared to be so bankrupt a thing as Christianity, especially in a century when it no longer cut a very imposing figure outwardly, and the battle against it had long since ceased to be a heroic war of liberation.

 

"But we have certainly to ask why Nietzsche was guilty of the Donquixotry of acting in the age of Bismarck as if the Christian morality of 1Cor.1 constituted the great danger by which humanity necessarily found itself most severely imperiled at every turn. Yet the fact remains that Nietzsche did take up arms against Christianity, and especially the Christianity of 1Cor.1, as if it were a serious threat and no mere folly."

 

So 1Cor.1 27f is: "But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; and base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are."

 

Continuing on page 242:

 

"The one who as the heir, disciple and prophet of the Renaissance and its progeny  discovered the superman was quite unable to overlook the fact that in Western culture, in face of every repudiation, reinterpretation or assault, persisting in spite of every evacuation, there existed at least in the form of the Greek New Testament such a thing as Christianity, so that from the pages of the New Testament he was inevitably confronted by that figure, and could only recognize in that figure the direct opposite of his own ideal and that of the tradition which culminated in him, and was forced to protest and fight against it with the resolution and passion which we find in Nietzsche, not as against asininity, but with the final resolution which is reserved for a mortal threat."

 

Then to conclude:

 

"And of this attack we have to say that it was well aimed, that it centered on the point which was vital for Nietzsche as the most consistent champion and prophet of humanity without the fellow-man.

 

"It is another matter, and one that objectively considered is to the praise of Nietzsche, that he thus hurled himself against the strongest and not the weakest point in the opposing front. With his discovery of the Crucified and His host he discovered the Gospel itself in a form which was missed even by the majority of its champions, let alone its opponents, in the 19th century. And by having to attack it in this form, he has done us the good office of bringing before us the fact that we have to keep to this form as unconditionally as he rejected it, in self-evident antithesis not only to him, but to the whole tradition on behalf of which he made this final hopeless sally."

 

So the question Barth asks is where did Nietzsche get this idea of Christianity which is so foreign to the liberal, middle-class Christianity of his day? As I tried to show earlier, it is really Schopenhauer's version of Christianity that Nietzsche accepts as a definitive description of Christianity--a Christianity, then, that Nietzsche opposes just as much as he opposes Schopenhauer.

 

John