Justified True Belief

(●) The pastor’s son who announced that God is dead, and then spent his life describing the bill. + Friedrich Nietzsche is among the most quoted atheists in Christian apologetics, and the reason is not that he was the fiercest. He was the most honest. Plenty of nineteenth-century men gave up believing in God and went on believing, without a flicker of embarrassment, in human dignity, in the wrongness of cruelty, and in the duty to care for the weak. Nietzsche looked at that arrangement and said it could not last. Take away the God, he insisted, and in time you lose the morality that grew in that soil, and the people who cheerfully dropped the first while keeping the second had simply not thought it through yet. He is on a Christian apologetics site for exactly that reason. When a believer argues that objective moral obligations need a God to be obligations to, the most useful witness is not another believer. It is the atheist who agreed, and who spent his working life saying so at the top of his voice while the comfortable unbelievers of his century told him to calm down. One fact about him a reader will remember: almost nobody read him while he was well enough to know it, and the fame arrived only after he had lost his mind. He paid the printing bill for the last part of his masterpiece himself, had forty copies run off, and, by his sister’s account, found only seven people to give them to. He went insane at forty-four, eleven years before he died, and never knew that the next century would argue about him from one end to the other.

(●) 1844 AD: He was born in a Lutheran parsonage, the son and grandson of pastors. + Röcken is a village in the Prussian province of Saxony, a scatter of farmhouses around a church, and on 15 October 1844 the pastor’s wife gave birth to a boy in the parsonage beside it. His father Carl Ludwig Nietzsche was a Lutheran minister; so was his mother’s father. The boy was named Friedrich Wilhelm after the King of Prussia, whose birthday he shared, which pleased his father a good deal. It is worth sitting with that for a moment before anything else in the life happens. The man who would write The Antichrist learned the Bible the way children of the manse always learn it, in the house, at meals, at family prayers, from a father in the pulpit on Sunday. He knew Luther’s German Bible by ear. A story from his schooldays has the other boys calling him "the little pastor" and asking him to recite Scripture and hymns, which he could reel off by heart. Nothing he later wrote against Christianity is the work of an outsider who never got close enough to see. He grew up inside it.

(●) 1849 AD: His father died when he was four, and he was raised in a household of women. + Carl Ludwig Nietzsche fell ill in 1848 and died in July 1849, at thirty-five, after months of headaches, failing sight, and what the doctors of the day called a softening of the brain. Six months later his baby brother Ludwig Joseph died too, not yet two years old. Friedrich was five when the second coffin went into the ground. The family lost the parsonage, because the parsonage belongs to the next pastor, and moved to the town of Naumburg. There the boy grew up in a house containing his mother, his grandmother, his sister Elisabeth, and two unmarried aunts: five women and one small, extremely serious boy. He was sent at fourteen to Schulpforta, a famous old boarding school in a former Cistercian monastery, where the day began before six and the curriculum was Greek and Latin taken with terrifying seriousness. He was good at it. He was also already suffering the headaches and the eye trouble that would eventually take his working life away, and which he had watched kill his father.

(●) 1864 AD: He went up to Bonn to read theology, and gave it up inside a year. + He enrolled at Bonn in the autumn of 1864 in theology and classical philology. Philology is simply the close study of ancient texts: what the words meant, who wrote them, how the manuscripts came down. It is a discipline that teaches a young man to ask of any document who wrote this, when, and with what interest at stake, and Nietzsche was formidably good at it long before he turned the habit on the Gospels. The theology lasted a single semester. When he came home at Easter 1865 and would not go to communion, there was a scene, and in June he wrote his sister a letter that says the whole of the rest of his life in one sentence: here, he told her, the roads of men divide, and if what you want is peace of soul and happiness, then believe, but if you want to be a disciple of truth, then inquire. He had decided which road he was on at twenty. That autumn he followed his teacher Friedrich Ritschl to Leipzig, and in a secondhand bookshop there he picked up Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation. Schopenhauer was an atheist who thought the world was driven by a blind striving that guaranteed suffering, and Nietzsche said afterwards that he read it as if the book had been written for him. In November 1868 he met Richard Wagner, then the most famous composer in Europe and also a devotee of Schopenhauer, and for eight years the friendship with Wagner was the great fact of his life.

(●) 1869 AD: Basel made him a professor at twenty-four, before he had finished a doctorate. + This does not happen. A university chair goes to a man of forty with a shelf of publications behind him. In February 1869 the University of Basel, in Switzerland, offered a professorship of classical philology to a twenty-four-year-old graduate student on the strength of Ritschl’s reference, and Leipzig hurriedly awarded him a doctorate without examination so that the appointment would look respectable. A year later Basel made him a full professor. To take a post in Switzerland he gave up his Prussian citizenship, and he never took another. He was legally stateless for the remaining thirty-one years of his life. Then he threw it away, and he did it on purpose. In 1870 he served a few weeks as a medical orderly in the war between Prussia and France, caught diphtheria and dysentery in a cattle truck full of wounded men, and came back with his health permanently worse. In 1872 he published The Birth of Tragedy, a book on Greek drama that quoted no manuscripts, argued from feeling, and ended in an advertisement for Wagner’s operas. A brilliant young philologist named Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff published a pamphlet taking it apart, and the profession agreed with him. For the next semester almost no students enrolled in Nietzsche’s lectures. He had become, at twenty-eight, an embarrassment to his own field. The break with Wagner took longer and hurt more. Nietzsche went to the first Bayreuth festival in 1876, found it full of rich Germans in fur, and left early. Then, in 1878, the two of them sent each other parcels, and the parcels ended it. In January Wagner sent him a privately printed copy of the text of Parsifal, an opera about a holy fool and the Grail, signed with the joke title of church councillor. In the spring Nietzsche sent back Human, All Too Human, a book of cool aphorisms that dismantled everything the two of them had shared. Neither man wrote to the other again.

(●) 1879 AD: Illness ended the professorship, and ten years of boarding houses began. + By 1879 he was losing whole weeks to migraine, vomiting, and eyes that could not take daylight. He resigned the chair at thirty-four and Basel, to its credit, granted him a small pension. What followed was a decade of a man with a trunk, moving between cheap rooms as the weather demanded: Genoa, Nice, Rapallo, Turin, and above all the Swiss village of Sils-Maria, high in the Engadine valley, where he walked for hours by a lake and wrote standing up when he could see well enough to write at all. He was very nearly always alone. He ate at the boarding-house table, he took his own medicines, and he wrote letters to a handful of friends who did not entirely understand what he was doing. Then, in 1882, his friend Paul Rée introduced him to a brilliant young Russian named Lou Salomé, and for a few months it looked as though the loneliness might end. He proposed to her twice. The first time he did not do the asking himself; he sent Rée to do it for him. She refused him both times, and when the business was over he had lost her and Rée together. His sister Elisabeth made the collapse as ugly as she could manage, and for a long time afterwards Nietzsche did not speak to his mother or his sister. The winter that followed, spent at Rapallo on the Italian coast, was the lowest of his life. He came out of it in the first weeks of 1883 and wrote the opening part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which he claimed afterwards in Ecce Homo had cost him ten days. The three parts that followed took him until 1885.

(●) 1883 AD: In six years he wrote the books the next century would argue about, and almost nobody bought them. + The pace, for a man who was ill most of the time, is hard to credit. Thus Spoke Zarathustra came out in parts between 1883 and 1885. Beyond Good and Evil followed in 1886 and On the Genealogy of Morality in 1887. Then in the single year 1888 he wrote The Case of Wagner, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, Ecce Homo, and Nietzsche contra Wagner. The sales were humiliating. He paid for the printing of Beyond Good and Evil himself, and ten months after it appeared he sat down and wrote his friend Peter Gast the arithmetic: 114 copies sold, sixty-six more given away to newspapers. When no publisher would take the fourth part of Zarathustra, he had forty copies privately printed, and by the account his sister gave later he presented only seven of them, each recipient sworn to say nothing about what was inside. In Ecce Homo he called Zarathustra the deepest book mankind possesses, which reads as arrogance until you set it beside the sales figures and notice that the man with no readers was not wrong about the book. The last of those books, Ecce Homo, is an autobiography with chapters titled "Why I Am So Wise" and "Why I Write Such Excellent Books." Readers have argued ever since about how much of it is a joke against himself, how much is the old loneliness talking, and how much is the illness already arriving.

(●) 1889 AD: He collapsed in a Turin street at forty-four, and lived eleven more years without writing. + On 3 January 1889 Nietzsche broke down in the street in Turin. The famous version has him throwing his arms around the neck of a cab-horse that was being whipped, and weeping; it is a story worth telling and worth labelling, because it first appears in print eleven years later, third hand, from an unnamed policeman by way of his landlord. What is certain is what he did next. Over the following days he posted short, wild letters to friends and heads of state, signing them "Dionysus" and "The Crucified." Franz Overbeck, the church historian who was his closest friend at Basel, came and took him away by train. What had happened to him is still argued. For most of the twentieth century the diagnosis was tertiary syphilis, meaning the late stage of that infection, which can reach the brain decades after it is first caught. More recent proposals include a slow-growing tumour behind the right eye and an inherited disease of the brain’s small blood vessels, and his father’s death at thirty-five of a brain disorder hangs over all of it. He spent a year in asylums at Basel and Jena, and then his mother took him home to Naumburg and cared for him herself for seven years. When she died in 1897 his sister Elisabeth moved him to Weimar, installed him in a villa, and showed visitors the great philosopher in a white robe. He died on 25 August 1900, aged fifty-five. Three days later Elisabeth had him buried at Röcken, in the family grave beside his father, in the churchyard of the church his father had served and a few steps from the parsonage where he was born. The service she arranged for the author of The Antichrist was a Christian one, with the bells going, a choir singing, and a cross laid on the coffin.

What He Taught

(T1) God is dead, and the people who killed him have not yet heard the news. + The sentence is misread constantly, so start with what it does not mean. Nietzsche is not claiming that a living being has died. He is an atheist; he thinks there was never anyone there. "God is dead" is a claim about European civilisation, not about heaven. It means that belief in God has quietly stopped doing the work it used to do in the culture that was built on it, and that the people standing in the ruins have not looked up yet. He put it in a story, and the story is why the phrase survived. A madman lights a lantern in broad daylight, runs into the market square, and shouts that he is looking for God. The crowd, who do not believe in God either, find this hilarious: has he got lost, has he emigrated? And the madman turns on them and tells them that they killed him, they and the speaker together, and asks how a thing like that gets washed off. Then he looks at their faces, sees that they have understood nothing, throws down his lantern, and says he has come too early. That is the whole argument in miniature, and notice who the target is. It is not the churchgoers. It is the modern people in the square, the reasonable, progressive Europeans who had given up the faith over breakfast and expected the afternoon to go on exactly as before. Nietzsche’s charge against them is that they were living on capital they had not earned and could not replace: the sanctity of the person, the duty to the poor, the conviction that truth matters more than comfort. Cut the root, he said, and it will take a while, but the branch comes down. Christians have been quoting him on that point ever since, because on that point he was arguing their side of the case.

(Q) "God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murderers?" + Source: The Joyful Wisdom (The Gay Science), aphorism 125, "The Madman" (Thomas Common translation, 1910). The madman is answering his own question in the market square. The passage goes on to ask what water could cleanse the killers, and whether the deed is not too great for them, so that they would have to become gods themselves merely to seem worthy of it. He then walks into the churches of the town to sing a requiem for God, and when he is thrown out he says that the churches are now the tombs and monuments of God (T1).

(T2) Christian morality was a revolt of the weak against the strong, and its root is resentment. + Picture two boys in a schoolyard. The bigger one is strong, quick, admired, and pleased with himself, and when he calls the smaller boy names the names mean simply "not like me": feeble, common, dull. The smaller boy cannot fight him. So he does something else instead. He works out, and gets others to agree, that strength itself is wicked, that pride is the worst of sins, that being unable to hit back is not weakness but virtue, and that there will be an accounting later in which the big boy gets what is coming to him. That, in Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality, is where our morality came from. He argued that the older aristocratic peoples had a scale running from good to bad, where "good" meant noble, strong, and fortunate, and "bad" just meant everything else. Over against it a second scale grew up, running from good to evil, invented by people with no other weapon, and on that scale the strong man is not merely different, he is guilty. Nietzsche’s word for the emotion underneath it is the French ressentiment: not a hot flash of anger, which spends itself and is done, but a nursed and patient grudge in someone who cannot act, which turns inventive and starts producing values. He traced the revolt to the priestly caste of Israel, saw it carried into the world by the church, and said its greatest triumph was that its victims came to believe it too. That last claim gets him misread, so it is worth saying what his own record shows. He was not writing as an antisemite, and he detested the ones around him. In March 1887 the antisemitic editor Theodor Fritsch sent him copies of his paper hoping for an ally; Nietzsche thanked him for the look at the muddle of principles behind the movement and asked him not to send any more, in case he lost his patience. When his sister married the antisemitic agitator Bernhard Förster in 1885, Nietzsche did not go to the wedding. His quarrel in the Genealogy is with a moral revolution he thought had happened, and the people he blamed for carrying it were the Christians of Europe. Two things need saying about the argument. The first is that it is not a historical footnote but a live challenge, and Christian writers have taken it seriously precisely where it stings: churches do contain resentment dressed up as holiness, and Jesus said as much about the religious men of his own day. The second is that an account of where a value came from is not yet a verdict on whether the value is true, which is the hinge on which the Christian answer to him turns. Nietzsche knew this objection. He mostly answered it by changing the subject to what the morality had done to the human animal, which is a different argument and a weaker one.

(Q) "The revolt of the slaves in morals begins in the very principle of resentment becoming creative and giving birth to values." + Source: The Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, section 10 (Horace B. Samuel translation, 1913). The sentence continues past the point quoted, describing the resentment as belonging to creatures who are cut off from acting and so take their revenge in imagination instead. Nietzsche’s contrast in the same section is that aristocratic morality begins by saying yes to itself, while slave morality begins by saying no to what is outside itself, so that its first creative act is a refusal (T2).

(T3) Everything alive wants power, and every value people hold is a form of that wanting. + A climber spends a fortnight on a rock face and risks his neck the whole way up, and at the top there is nothing for him to eat. A chess player will not take the easy draw. A soldier goes back for a comrade. Schopenhauer had taught Nietzsche that living things are driven by a blind will to survive, and Nietzsche decided that was not deep enough, because mere survival does not explain a single one of those men. What living things want, he said, is not to keep going but to grow, to master something, to be more than they were, and they will spend life itself to get it. He called this the will to power, and it is worth being careful about the phrase. He does not mean, most of the time, that everybody secretly wants to be a tyrant. He means something closer to the drive to overcome resistance, which shows up in a violinist practising a hard passage as much as in a general taking a city. But he does draw the hard conclusion, and he draws it in The Antichrist, where he asks what is good and answers: whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man; and what is bad, and answers: whatever springs from weakness. That is a genuine rival account of the good, not a shrug about morality, and it is the point at which he stops being a critic and becomes a lawgiver. Christian readers should notice how much of the description is right and how completely the ranking is inverted. Scripture also thinks the human heart is grasping for power and will destroy itself getting it; that is roughly the story of Genesis 3, where the promise that seals the matter is "you will be like God, knowing good and evil" (Genesis 3:5). Nietzsche saw the same drive, named it accurately, and then blessed it.

(Q) "Wherever I found a living thing, there found I Will to Power; and even in the will of the servant found I the will to be master." + Source: Thus Spake Zarathustra, Part II, "Self-Surpassing" (Thomas Common translation, 1909). Zarathustra is reporting what Life herself told him, and the passage presses the claim into the places where it is least welcome: not only the master but the servant, not only conquest but sacrifice, service, and love. Life, he says, is that which must ever surpass itself (T3).

(T4) Man is not the goal but the bridge, and the meaning is in this earth rather than another world. + Having buried God, Nietzsche had to answer the obvious question: then what are people for? His answer arrives in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a strange book written in the cadences of Luther’s Bible, in which a prophet comes down from a mountain after ten years and preaches to a crowd waiting for a tightrope act. What he preaches is the Übermensch, usually put into English as the Superman or the Overman: not a stronger species and not a master race, but whatever a human being might become once it stops taking its instructions from heaven. Man, Zarathustra says, is a rope stretched between the animal and that, over an abyss. To keep such a creature from simply drifting, Nietzsche offered a test, and it is the most searching thing he ever wrote. Imagine a demon slipping into your loneliest night to tell you that this life, exactly as you have lived it, down to the spider and the moonlight in the trees and this very moment, will return to you innumerable times, with nothing new in it ever. Would you throw yourself down and curse him? Or is there one moment in your life for which you would answer that you had never heard anything more divine? He called that thought the heaviest burden, and the idea inside it has a name: the eternal return, the same life coming back exactly as it was, over and over, for ever. It is a demand for a kind of yes to existence that needs no heaven, no second chance, and no repair. The honest thing to say is that this is where his positive project is thinnest, and he half knew it. He never described the Overman in any detail, and the eternal return remains a test of the soul rather than an argument for it. What he does have here is a real accusation against a lazy Christianity, the sort that treats this world as a waiting room. Scripture is not on the side of that Christianity either: the earth is called good in Genesis 1, the promise is a raised body rather than an escaped one, and a faith that despises the creation has misread its own book.

(Q) "I TEACH YOU THE SUPERMAN. Man is something that is to be surpassed. What have ye done to surpass man?" + Source: Thus Spake Zarathustra, Prologue, section 3 (Thomas Common translation, 1909). The capitals are the translator’s, marking the emphasis Nietzsche put in the German. Zarathustra has come down from his mountain into a market town and is speaking to a crowd that has gathered to watch a rope-dancer. A few lines later he adds that the Superman is the meaning of the earth, and tells them to remain true to the earth and not to believe those who speak of hopes beyond it (T4).

(T5) The atheist’s own love of truth is a Christian inheritance, and it is now turning on its parent. + His admirers usually stop before this one, and it is the teaching that makes him indispensable. Why should anyone tell the truth when a lie would work better? A scientist gives up a favourite theory because the data went against it, and nobody outside his own head would ever have known if he had kept quiet. A man tells his wife something that costs him. If you press either of them for a reason, the usual modern answer is that truth is simply better, full stop, and that no further reason is wanted. Nietzsche refused to let that answer alone. If nature is not moral, and life gets on perfectly well by way of appearance, camouflage, and self-flattery, then where did the absolute demand for truth at any cost come from, and why does it feel like a duty rather than a preference? His answer was that it is religious in origin. The unconditional will to truth is the last and most stubborn form of Christian faith, the conviction that God is truth and that the truth is divine, still burning in men who have thrown out everything else. Modern unbelief, on this account, is not the opposite of Christianity but its final act: Christian honesty examined the Christian doctrines and found them wanting, and the same honesty will eventually turn round and ask what warrant it had to be so honest. He wrote that even the godless and the anti-metaphysical still take their fire from that thousand-year-old flame. Christian apologists quote this constantly, and they are not misusing him when they do. He is conceding, in print and on purpose, that the scientific atheist’s deepest commitment is a borrowed one, and that once the lender is gone the loan will eventually be called in.

(Q) "Even we knowing ones of to-day, the godless and anti-metaphysical, still take our fire from the conflagration kindled by a belief a millennium old, the Christian belief, which was also the belief of Plato, that God is truth, that the truth is divine." + Source: The Joyful Wisdom (The Gay Science), Book Fifth, aphorism 344 (Thomas Common translation, 1910). The aphorism argues that science rests on a belief it cannot itself supply, namely that truth matters more than anything else. Nietzsche then asks the question the passage is famous for: what happens when that belief is examined by its own standard, and God himself turns out to be the longest-standing lie (T5).

(Q) "Have you understood me? Dionysus versus Christ." + Source: Ecce Homo, "Why I am a Fatality," section 9, the closing line of the book (Anthony M. Ludovici translation, 1911). Nietzsche’s German names the second figure "the Crucified," and most later translators render it that way. Dionysus was the Greek god of wine, ecstasy, and the life that is torn apart and comes back. Setting him against the Crucified was Nietzsche’s way of saying that the quarrel is not about arguments for God’s existence at all, but about which suffering figure a civilisation will build itself around: the one who affirms life including its cruelty, or the one who bore its cruelty for the guilty. He wrote the line in 1888, weeks before he lost his mind, and it is as clean a statement of the choice as either side has managed.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) Theologians took his diagnosis seriously, and several thought he had read the chart correctly. + The first Christian response, in the decades after 1900, was mostly alarm. The response that lasted was different. Twentieth-century theologians began treating Nietzsche the way a doctor treats a rival’s notes on a patient they share: as a description of European civilisation that might be accurate even though the prescription was wrong. Karl Barth, the Swiss theologian whose commentary on Romans broke over German theology in 1919, set aside a long and respectful excursus for Nietzsche in his Church Dogmatics (III/2, section 45). An excursus is a set-piece digression, the place where a theologian stops the main argument and deals with one figure at length, and Barth used his to argue that in Nietzsche the modern ideal of the self-sufficient individual had finally been stated without disguise, as humanity without the fellow man, and that what such a man cannot bear is precisely the neighbour, the sick and the poor whom the gospel puts in front of him. Henri de Lubac, the French Jesuit, made him one of the three subjects of The Drama of Atheist Humanism in 1944, written under the occupation, and argued that the century’s attempt to keep human dignity after discarding its ground was exactly the incoherence Nietzsche had warned about. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, working on his Ethics in the same years, read him closely enough to quote him, and took the charge that Christianity despises the earth as a rebuke the church had earned and needed. What these readers share is a refusal to treat him as merely an enemy. He had asked what a civilisation looks like once its foundation is quietly removed, and the answer he gave was grim, and the century that followed did not make him look foolish.

(†) Apologists quote him against the cheerful unbeliever who wants the morality without the God. + There is a standard move in the moral argument for God, and Nietzsche is its best witness. The argument runs that if there are real obligations binding on everyone, of the sort that make torturing a child wrong whatever any culture thinks, then something has to make them binding, and a purposeless arrangement of matter is not the sort of thing that can put anyone under an obligation. The usual reply is that morality gets along fine without God. Nietzsche is the atheist who says it does not, and he is quoted for that reason rather than for anything he believed. Alasdair MacIntyre built After Virtue in 1981 around the claim that once the older account of what human beings are for was abandoned, moral language became a set of leftover phrases used to disguise preference, and he framed the resulting choice as Nietzsche or Aristotle: either the moral vocabulary is a mask for the will, or there is a purpose in human nature that our talk about good and evil answers to. C. S. Lewis argued in The Abolition of Man in 1943 that men who cut down the traditional moral law and then appeal to it in the next breath are sawing off the branch they sit on, which is Nietzsche’s complaint in a gentler voice. Contemporary defenders of the moral argument, William Lane Craig among them, cite him in debate for the same purpose: not as an authority on God, but as an honest reporter of the bill. The compliment being paid to him here is real. Nietzsche is the unbeliever who refused the comfortable settlement, and Christians would rather argue with him than with someone who has not noticed there is a problem.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: the empty tomb, the genetic argument, and the ranking of persons. + The respect runs only so far. Where the gospel parts from him it parts entirely, and putting the disagreement softly would do him no honour, since softness in an argument was the thing he despised most. - The death of God is a report about belief, not about God. Nietzsche is describing what has happened to a civilisation’s faith, and about that he may well have been right. It settles nothing about whether God exists, and the Christian claim at issue is not a mood but an event with a date and an address: a tomb outside Jerusalem, found empty, and a body seen afterwards by people who were killed for saying so. Paul stakes everything on that being a matter of fact and invites the reader to call the whole thing off if it is not: "And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins" (1 Corinthians 15:17). Cultural exhaustion is not an argument against a resurrection, and a resurrection is not answered by describing the mood of Europe. - Where a value came from does not settle whether it is true. Arguing from the origin of a belief to its truth is the move philosophers call the genetic fallacy, and it fails whichever way it is pointed. The Genealogy traces Christian morality to the grudges of the powerless, and the tracing may even be partly right about particular people. It still does not follow that mercy is a disease. Arithmetic has an ugly history in the counting houses of slave traders, and two plus two is four regardless. Worse for Nietzsche, the acid dissolves his own position: if every value is a manoeuvre of the will to power, so is his ranking of the noble above the priestly, and he has no ground left to stand on while explaining everyone else’s. - The weak are not a lower grade of human being. This is the flat contradiction, and Scripture makes no attempt to meet him halfway. "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them" (Genesis 1:27). The value is in the image, not in the strength, which is why the sick, the unborn, the enslaved, and the old are covered by it exactly as the healthy are. When Paul writes that God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong (1 Corinthians 1:27), he is not making a virtue of failure; he is saying that the ranking Nietzsche assumed to be obvious is the wrong way up. - Humility is not sickness; it is what God did. Nietzsche read Christian lowliness as the cunning of people who could not fight, and there are counterfeits that fit the description. The original does not. The figure at the centre of the faith had every advantage and put it down on purpose: "who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross" (Philippians 2:6–8). That is not resentment. Resentment cannot do it, because resentment has nothing to give up. The last word belongs to his own honesty. He argued that the modern love of truth is Christian capital being spent down (T5), which is a strange thing to say if the creditor was never there. A man who insists that his own deepest commitment was borrowed from a house he has left has told his readers where to go and knock.