Christian Bad Conscience
By the time Nietzsche reaches the end of his narrative and his true analysandum—the moralized Christian form of bad conscience which is a pervasive guilt-consciousness—it is clear that the subject of this state is indeed a self-punisher. The Christian has a concept of God as judge and executioner, which fulfils 'the will of man to find himself guilty and reprehensible to the point that it cannot be atoned for; his will to imagine himself punished without the possibility of the punishment ever becoming equivalent to the guilt' (GM II. 22). This God is part of a very ambitious interpretation of suffering: one punishes oneself because one interprets one's self-cruelty as a punishment that one deserves for being inherently unworthy in the sight of an absolute being. On this theistic interpretation there exists a world-order containing a divine or absolute being of whom we are not worthy, and before whom we are wrongdoers; so we will always do wrong, so we will always feel guilty. Nietzsche reverses the direction of explanation: we need to be cruel to ourselves, so we invent the notion of ourselves as wrongdoers in order to legitimize the self-cruelty; then in order to sustain the notion of ourselves as wrongdoers we resort to a metaphysical picture in which we are bound to transgress against something absolute that is placed there for that very purpose. Cruelty is the base: the
rest is interpretation in the service of giving meaning to the suffering we cannot help giving ourselves once society boxes us in.
Section 19 of the Second Treatise begins a final assault on the development of the 'sickness' of bad conscience, promising to explain how it reached its 'most terrible and most sublime pinnacle'. Nietzsche takes up the debtor-creditor relation again, and tells how in earlier times human communities interpreted themselves as indebted to figures in their distant past, the ancestors who founded their clan. Over time these ancestors are conceived as ever more powerful and the clan's indebtedness to them as greater and harder to pay off. The ancestor eventually becomes transfigured into a god. Nietzsche then presents the Christian god as the end-point of this process: 'The rise of the Christian god as the maximum god that has been attained thus far [...] also brought a maximum of Schuldgefühl into appearance on earth.'18
Even now Nietzsche alerts us that we do not yet have an account of the 'moralization' of 'the concepts "Schuld" and ''duty'' V Nietzsche's glosses on 'moralization' are brief and confusing, so that it is much easier to describe the end-result of this process than the process itself. He does appear, however, to make the maximal Christian God a presupposition of the process.201 have already referred to section 22's devastating description of Christian self-torment. The end-result of moralization is that God is conceived as an absolute and all-powerful being to whom one is indebted for everything, but to whom it is impossible to discharge one's obligations or make adequate reparation. In Christianity man 'erect[s] an ideal—that of the ''holy God''—in order, in the face of the same, to be tangibly certain of his absolute unworthiness'. In particular, man's 'actual and inescapable animal instincts' are the antithesis of the perfect God. As Risse puts it, 'man's nature is full of dispositions to violate the divine order'.21 In this
18 GM II. 20. Schuldgefühl is most naturally translated as 'feelings of guilt', as by Clark and Swensen. Risse (2001: 61 —2) urges the translation 'feelings of indebtedness', because of his view that feelings of guilt do not pre-date the Christian God for Nietzsche—but see the discussion below.
19 GM II. 21. Clark and Swensen have 'guilt' for Schuld here. Risse argues for 'debt' as the right translation—again, see below.
20 See GM II. 21: moralization of the concepts Schuld and Pflicht is 'their being pushed back into conscience, more precisely the entanglement of bad conscience with the concept of god'; and 'faith in our ''creditor,'' in God' is a 'presupposition' of the moralized concepts. On 'moralization' and the elusive notion of'pushing back', see Risse (2001: 63 ff.) and May (1999: 70 ff.).
conception it belongs to the human essence to be transgressive against absolute values, and so the consciousness of guilt is inbuilt, perpetual, and profound.22
Section 22 marks a magnificent rhetorical climax to the essay (presumably this is what Nietzsche later meant in Ecce Homo by the tempo feroce of this treatise, 'in which everything rushes ahead in a tremendous tension'); but notice too how carefully Nietzsche recapitulates the earlier features of his psychological narrative and incorporates them in the picture of the Christian self-torturer:
that will to self-torment, that suppressed cruelty of the animal-human who had been made inward, scared back into himself [...] who invented the bad conscience in order to cause himself pain after the more natural outlet for this desire to cause pain was blocked, —this man of bad conscience has taken over the religious presupposition in order to drive his self-torture to its most gruesome severity and sharpness. Guilt before God: this thought becomes an instrument of torture for him.
There is still the standing tendency towards pleasure-in-cruelty. But we must inflict suffering on ourselves, because our drive to cruelty has undergone internalization. But in order to continue inflicting suffering on ourselves meaningfully, we must interpret ourselves as transgressors in a debtor—creditor relationship who are granted the permission rightfully to despise and maltreat ourselves, to inflict self-punishment. And in order thus to interpret ourselves we must fabricate a creditor residing in another realm of values which absolutely guarantees that we continue to deserve punishment. In short, we use the invention of God as an elaborate and disguised way of being intensely cruel in perpetuity.
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