Was Nietzsche a Christian?

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Was Nietzsche a Christian? Anonymous Thu Dec 3 18:10:37 2015 No.7418319 [Reply] [Original]

Wagner says that he confessed to him about weeping to a monk. Wagner was a Romanticist, and Nietzsche was a classical philhellene, so it's possible he was trying to slander him for artistic purposes. But at the same time, Christianity is a reoccurring subject in Nietzsche's work, and we're all probably familiar with the infamous chapter in "Antichrist".

One account of this is mentioned in one of Nietzsche's biographies. If I recall correctly, so the story goes, there was a kindly Orthodox monk (I believe perhaps an archimandrite , or somewhere in that eminence range) who was being severely persecuted by the Lutheran Church or state, and he wrote an article on his behalf that led to the monk being exonerated by her. Some time afterward, he saw him in the street and prayed with him, and well, you can guess the rest. Later, he calls on Wagner, who I believe was a bitter enemy of his at the time, to come to his house and he confesses all this to him. Wagner was disgusted, and when Nietzsche saw the look on his face, he said something like "you cannot possibly love me as much as I love you!" From what I remember, the biographer seemed to believe this confession took place but thought Nietzsche was lying about it because of some weird pious complex he has, which seems like a stretch to me. I don't know whether or not he actually confessed this to Wagner, but if he did, I'm inclined to believe he was telling the truth. I mean, who the fuck lies about weeping to a monk?

Another thing... I recognize this has a lot less credibility, but probably like 6 or 7 years ago, I read a post on reddit from some guy claiming to be in contact with people from Kierkegaard''s estate and supposedly they had letters or diaries backing up the claim that he had confessed his sins. According to him, Nietzsche had some weird belief that being absolved by a priest "cleansed" him in some way. I assumed this guy was lying, but the only reason I didn't totally write him off is because when I messaged him for more info, he sent me a link to a translated version of some Danish website where Lou Andreas-Salomé (1st ever female Russian psychoanalyst, who supposedly rejected a marriage proposal by Nietzsche) claims he talked about doing this during a walk. This sounds like a very slavish thing to do, but at the time, confession wasn't viewed the same as it is today, and in particular, the confession to someone from a higher power wouldn't have been viewed as backward (see the depiction of the confession of the the Apostle Paul, Jew, a former Pharisee, in "The Dawn"), so a bunch of philosophers/philologists talking about during a midday walk wouldn't have been that unusual given their value system.

What do you guys think? Have you heard anything about this?

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