Overcoming Ressentiment: Belief Versus Practice

In Nietzsche & Philosophy, Deleuze provides a footnote to his section on the Death of God:

AC 33, 34, 35, 40. The true Christ, according to Nietzsche, does not appeal to belief, he provides a practice: “The Savior was nothing else than this practice, his death too was nothing else . . . He does not resist, he does not defend his rights, he takes no steps to avert the worst that can happen to him — more, he provokes it. And he entreats, he suffers, he loves with those, in those who are doing evil to him . . . Not to defend oneself, not to grow angry, not to make responsible . . . But not to resist even the evil man — to love him . . . Jesus himself could have desired nothing by his death but publicly to offer the sternest test, the proof of his teaching.

Here, again, is a passage that struck me from the outside — as an aesthetic, spiritual, and attentive experience of reading — that I must attend to as I continue to grapple with the question, “Am I a Christian?” What does it mean to think about Jesus as providing new spiritual practices rather than founding a church? I want to spend this meditation unpacking this passage from Deleuze (which is mostly a long quote from Nietzsche), not so that I can definitively answer the question, but to better shed light on a different way to frame this question: What happens when I see the legacy of Jesus as a set of spiritual practices and not the founding of the Catholic Church and all its offshoots and (internal) competitors? What happens to the words “Christian” and “Christianity”? Any answer to “Am I a Christian?” must hinge on how one answers Matthew’s question, “Who do you say that I am?” How does one answer this question when the answer is not about Truth but about spiritual practice?

To begin, I will start with revisiting where I think the vertical-orientation of the Christian soul limits our ability to embrace the horizontal as a full-fledged and valuable dimension. The clearest statement of these problems comes from Nietzsche’s Anti-Christ, chapter 43:

When one places life’s center of gravity not in life but in the “beyond” — in nothingness — one deprives life of its center of gravity altogether. The great lie of personal immortality destroys all reason, everything natural in the instincts — whatever in the instincts is beneficent and life-promoting or guarantees a future arouses a mistrust. To live so, that there is no longer any sense in living, that now becomes the “sense” of life. Why communal sense, why any further gratitude for descent and ancestors, why cooperate, trust, promote, and envisage any common welfare? Just as many “temptations,” just as many distractions from the “right path” — “one thing is needful.”

This was Paul’s sin. This was his corruption and perversion of Jesus as a practitioner of how to live life in the world without anger and without ressentiment. Paul redirected “Christianity” out of the world and into a “beyond.” He offered a promise of an immortal life outside of the fallen world around us. For Pauline Christianity, we need not care about this world because our salvation is elsewhere. “Why communal sense, why any further gratitude for descent and ancestors, why cooperate, trust, promote, and envisage any common welfare?” In short, why give two shits about what is happening here as long as you are “right with God” to use the common refrain of the modern Pauline Christian.

No doubt, Nietzsche’s reading is more than a little harsh and certainly fueled by his own ressentiment, but he has put his finger on the legacy of Pauline Christianity when it comes to the orientation of the soul. If your reward is elsewhere, your relationship to this world is, at best, incidental to salvation. Your Christian practices of the soul will emphasize your vertical and atomized relationship to God. Renunciation and ascetic denial will be the fundamental dispositions you have to this world. The monk is not only a special form of Christian spiritual practitioner; he is a more perfected, intense, and radicalized version of Pauline Christianity. As such, he demonstrates to others the proper orientation and care of the soul. Renunciation and denial (the horizontal orientation) is merely the preparation for a more intense vertical orientation.

While Nietzsche’s reading of the vertical soul of Pauline Christianity rings true for me and my experience of Catholicism growing up, it is certainly one dimensional. To be fair to Nietzsche, this is all provocation and not the work of a rigorous historian. Like his pre-Socratic hero, Heraclitus, Nietzsche uses provocation to jar us out of a sense of complacency about what we passively accept as unquestionably true. So we shouldn’t read Nietzsche as replacing Paul’s truth of Jesus with his own. Instead, he wants us to separate the work of Paul — which was to found a Church — from the work of Jesus — which was to demonstrate spiritual practices. Opening one’s thought to the possibility that there is no direct and unbroken line connecting Jesus to Paul is to begin the process of the “revaluation of all values.” It is therefore a Heraclitean provocation, but also a Christ-like one.

Of course, I am taking this provocation seriously, even though I have plenty of friends and family members who claim to be Christian and are quite kind and compassionate in their horizontal relationship with the world. I would be there for them, and I’m sure they would be there for me without the urging of their faith as the prime motivator. Yet there is always a boundary that is difficult to cross in these relationships. When will the moment come when the question “Who do you say that I am?” is posed to me by a friend or family member? In serious Pauline Christianity, this question hovers unspoken as the Rubicon that one crosses only when one is assured of the answer on the other side.

Simone Weil poses a different question: “What is your malheur?” Malheur is often translated in English as “affliction,” but this is rather inadequate. Malheur in French, according to her translator, Richard Reis, “has a sense of inevitability and doom” (Waiting for God, Routledge, 88). In other words, there’s a strong sense of nihilism at the heart of malheur that is only hinted at in “affliction.”

“What is your malheur?” is very different than “Who do you say that I am?” on a number of levels. I’m forced to ask myself why would I want to compare these two very different questions. “Different” isn’t the best way to describe these questions. Lyotard’s term “incommensurable” is probably a better way to frame the comparison. To oversimplify, Lyotard’s term basically means the refusal to measure things by the same yardstick. The same yardstick allows one to state differences in terms of an underlying sameness that allows difference to be described and understood. With respect to the two questions I am comparing, both operate within the sphere of Christianity, but if we try to reduce them to the same measure of Christianity, we violate the incommensurability of the questions. In other words, if we try to make them different questions within a univocal Christianity, we miss how both questions, when juxtaposed, highlight very different understandings of what Christianity is. That is the incommensurability — the refusal to be measured by the same yardstick — I wish to push through by comparing the two questions.

To dig into this incommensurability is, I think, to inhabit Nietzsche’s provocative attempt to separate Paul from Jesus. It is to break through Pauline Christianity as the measure of all Christianities. This measuring stick will reach outward as it attempts to differentiate heretical forms of Christianity from the orthodox. Augustine will wage orthodox holy war against heretical Pelagians and Donatists. For 1800 years, we will mostly know of Gnosticism through Irenaeus’ late second-century work Against Heresies — his manual for learning how to separate the true/good from the false/evil. The demand for orthodoxy will also reach backwards as it aligns its Truth with a revisionist history of Jesus and his role as Messiah. Early Church Fathers like Origen will be condemned posthumously as heretics even though their influence throughout the Christian world was formidable. Christianity’s wars are almost always civil wars.

Let me first start with Matthew’s question, “Who do you say that I am?” From a Pauline perspective, this question has a definitive answer. Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God who was sent here to redeem us for our sins. The answer to the question, in other words, is expressed as belief in a set of doctrinal Truths. It is, in Nietzsche’s own words, “To reduce being a Christian, Christianism, to a matter of considering something true, to a mere phenomenon of consciousness…” (Anti-Christ 39). There is nothing more required of the answerer than to say yes to this doctrine. One’s salvation — conceived of as immortality — hinges on the answer to this question. Fundamentally, the Pauline version of the question “Who do you say that I am?” is a test. You will either pass or you will fail based on your answer. Passing or failing is everything — eternal life or eternal damnation is at stake.

Of course, this makes Christian salvation all too easy. Is it really just a matter of saying yes to the doctrine and then going about your business comfortably knowing that your salvation is assured with this simple oath? Yet, Christian salvation is difficult in the extreme. To ask me to believe in these doctrinal truths without questioning them is to ask me to give up my “intellectual conscience” to borrow Nietzsche’s phrase. To be a Christian, it seems that I must agree to a boundary: “Here is the intellectual Rubicon you shall not pass.” It is a difficult boundary for someone with an active curiosity about what it means to be a human being on this planet with other human beings. Christian faith has always hovered in this weird space between its all too easy right of entry and the difficulty of setting aside my self-respect to accept beliefs that seem more than a bit whacked. Is this the price Paul felt needed to be paid to grow a Church on a worldwide scale? It all seems way too shallow.

Nietzsche of course confronts this, especially in Anti-Christ 35 through 38. To scale, Christianity must become a “church.” To become a church, it moves away from its origins as a practice to become expressions of faith in a doctrine. It is easier to draw converts by reducing it to a set of beliefs. The practice of Christianity is actually hard. It demands a due respect to suffering as a condition of existence. It demands the hard work of revaluing all values and turning away from the easy emotions of hatred and anger toward the world. It is lived experience: “not to ‘redeem men’ but to show how one must live”:

This practice is his legacy to mankind: his behavior before the judges, before the catch poles, before the accusers and all kinds of slander and scorn — his behavior on the cross. He does not resist, he does not defend his right, he takes no step which might ward off the worst; on the contrary, he provokes it. And he begs, he suffers, he loves with those, in those, who do him evil. Not to resist, not to be angry, not to hold responsible — but to resist not even the evil one — to love him. (Anti-Christ 35)

This “legacy to mankind” is a profound integrity to live our values thoroughly and completely. It is a provocation that comes with a demonstration of the life as lived. This integrity, provocation and demonstration has been lost according to Nietzsche. The intellectual difficulties of Christianity as a profession of belief in doctrines can no longer be set aside in our own time: “Our time knows better.” Yet, we keep up appearances: “Everybody knows this, and yet everything continues as before.”

This lack of integrity is built into Pauline Christianity. It is its power and weakness at the same time. By reducing salvation to a profession of belief, Pauline Christianity untethers itself from any essential commitment to practice. It is no longer a way of living, though it retains those vestiges. It is a shallow commitment to doctrinal beliefs that no longer requires the ability to revalue our values, that no longer requires defusing our ressentiment, that discourages an intellectual curiosity about the history of these beliefs. In fact, all of this is cut off so that Christian salvation can remain easy because it is merely nominal.

This is not a non-sequitur: The Tubes — who always provoked us into confronting our late-twentieth century nihilism — captured the spirit of this nominal Christianity: “What do you want from life? To try and be happy while you do the nasty things you must?” This seems profoundly Nietzschean. Nominal Christianity affords us the shallow happiness of salvation by demanding we give up our integrity. In exchange, you can “be happy while you do the nasty things you must.” Once we take the profound step of setting aside our intellectual consciences so that we can profess belief in doctrines that are logically and historically dubious — once this step is taken — the rest is easy. Your conscience is clear because you profess the belief. By reducing Christianity to a profession of beliefs, it isn’t too difficult from there to compartmentalize one’s Christianity away from all the other aspects of our lives. You’ve already set aside your most important spiritual capacity — the capacity to align your behavior with your values. The rest is easy, and can even been seen as recompense for the initial sacrifice of one’s self-respect. “Who do you say that I am?” is not a challenge to revalue your values and to live with integrity to those values. Instead, it is a test that is easy to pass — and designed to be so.

For Weil, there is no predefined answer to her question, “What is your malheur?” If it is a test, it is not the same kind of test with a right answer. It is a test of oneself and our ability to “empty our souls” at the moment of asking the question. To receive the other’s answer requires a disposition that sets aside all prejudices so that the other can communicate, and their message — their whole message, not just their words — can be received honestly and completely:

The soul empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his truth. (Waiting for God, 70)

This is the “fullness of the love of neighbor” that was taught by Jesus. But it clearly is not a doctrine. It is a practice. She is asking for a disposition, an orientation, that empties oneself at the moment of asking this question so that the answer can be received without prejudice — in the sense of pre-judging the answer. This can only be described as a spiritual practice that is activated at the moment of encountering another’s experience of malheur. If there is “belief” here, it is not belief in a doctrine. It is belief that love — a love that does not pre-judge or even pre-frame the other’s answer — is possible and that it can help. It is a love that can connect two individuals across an incommensurable boundary without reducing them both to predefined selves in search of the same vertical salvation.

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Intentionally or not, Weil seems to be recovering what Nietzsche saw in Jesus as a practitioner rather than the founder of a Church. The recovery is important, and I’d like to spend some time understanding it in the context of Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche’s Death of God. This is important to me because that reading is part of Deleuze’s protracted analysis of ressentiment — a concept that I have been trying to come to terms with in my recent meditations. In Deleuze’s reading, Jesus marks “the absence of all ressentiment and of all spirit of revenge” (155). What is important in this understanding of Jesus is that he occupies a time between the outward-facing ressentiment of the “Jewish priest” and Paul’s reinvigoration and redirection of ressentiment as “bad conscience” and permanent guilt.

To understand this, we must first understand the Death of God as a sequence of moves — it is not a singular event. I’m going to cover the first two moves in this meditation because those are the important ones related Jesus’s spiritual practice as defusing ressentiment. This was his practice and his demonstration of how to live. This practice did not come from a pure outside, from a Platonic realm of Forms unrelated to the culture in which he lived. His practice, as the defusing of ressentiment, emerged from with a culture that valued ressentiment. To revalue its values, he had to embrace hatred and the desire for revenge if only to drain them of their power over himself and others. Like all “overmen,” he takes the culture he inhabits and works within its values to expose them and revalue them. Hate, revenge, and ressentiment are the values at stake in the gospel that Nietzsche tells.

The first Death of God occurs on the cross. It is the God of the Old Testament putting himself to death. But this death is not the death of propositional content — not the death of the Truth of the Laws Moses brought down from the mountain. It is the death of a particular sublimation of the will to power. This sublimation starts as hatred. This is an outward-facing hatred that expresses a powerful need for revenge against all the oppressors of a people. It is a hatred that imagines the Messiah as a warrior king who will come into this world and effect that revenge.

This worldview requires, however, a “love of life” that loves its weakness, that loves its status as a perpetual victim. This not anti-Semitic. Quite the opposite for Deleuze (and Nietzsche). On the one hand, this is just an illustration of Eternal Recurrence of a dynamic of nihilism, which I will save for a later meditation. On the other hand, for Deleuze and Nietzsche there was a profound awareness of this dynamic as the “Judaic consciousness of the consciousness of ressentiment” (152). The profound admiration here is the ability of this consciousness to recognize the need to kill off its ressentiment by killing off its desire for revenge. This means killing off the long-standing vision of God as the promisor of a Messiah as vengeful warrior king. This is the first Death of God that happened on the cross. The upshot is crucial: the will to power that makes “love to be the consequence of hate” is undone. In other words, love becomes untethered from its origin in hate:

The Judaic consciousness puts God to death in the person of the Son: it invents a God of love who would prefer to suffer from hate rather than find its premise and principle there. (153)

This is not a reversal of the relationship between ressentiment and love. It is not merely to flip the binary, which is what Paul will do in the third Death of God. It is to genuinely come to terms with ressentiment and attempt, through spiritual practices, to rescue love from its origins in a desire for revenge. It is the beginning of a revaluation of all values that must start with overcoming ressentiment.

This rescuing of love from ressentiment has two important aspects. First, it is a rescuing of love from an historically specific ressentiment that was a legitimate reaction of a people to its long-standing oppression by others. This ressentiment was always the universal premise that could bring people together under a common worldview. That worldview needed a way of living that could be tolerated as the people awaits its redeemer. This took the form of the love of a weak status. Without embracing oneself is a victim, the desire for revenge loses its power. This is what gets undone on the cross — love of life as the consequence of hate. Again, it would be ungenerous to find anti-Semitism here. This is an admiration for how a people creates its values and how those values are ultimately “revalued” as they play out over time.

The second aspect of this rescuing of love from hate is perhaps the most important for the subsequent 2000 years. By rescuing love from an historically specific desire for revenge, love becomes “cosmopolitan”:

The Christian God is therefore the Jewish God, but the Jewish God becomes cosmopolitan — a conclusion separate from its premises. On the cross Jesus ceases to appear as a Jew. Moreover, on the cross, it is the old God who dies and the new God who is born.

Again, this is not flipping the binary such that love simply takes the place of hate. The operative term in Deleuze’s reading is “a conclusion separate from its premises.” We have, on the cross, the separation of love from hatred as its origin, not a reversal. This love is “the undoing of hate” — it does not yet have positive content; it is a negation of hate and the draining of its energy:

This is the second sense of the Death of God: the Father dies, the Son creates another God for us. The Son asks only that we believe in him, that we love him as he loves us, that we become reactive in order to avoid hate. Instead of a father who makes us afraid, we have a son who asks for a little confidence, a little belief. Apparently detached from its hateful premises the love of the reactive life must be valid in itself and must become the universal for the Christian consciousness. (153, emphasis added)

This is the moment where I clearly understand Deleuze’s and Nietzsche’s readings of Jesus as a spiritual practitioner rather than the founder of a Church. The “belief” that is asked for, the “little confidence” that is asked for, is not yet a propositional truth. It is the minimum belief that doubling down on love as a way to undo an originating hate can “detach” love from hate.

This is a practical belief, not a doctrinal one. It is valued for its practical effects in dealing with ressentiment. This love does not and cannot have propositional content at this moment. Rather, to understand the heart of this practice, I must return to an italicized phrase Deleuze uses in a sentence I cited earlier: “The Judaic consciousness… invents a God of love who would prefer to suffer from hate rather than find its premises and principles there” (153). This love is a Nietzschean reactive force that cuts off the active force of a desire for revenge. To do so, this reactive force cannot just say “No” to the active forces of hatred and revenge. What would motivate this hard No if not a new expression of ressentiment — the hatred of hatred? “It is not by enmity that enmity is ended” (Anti-Christ 20). To detach itself, this love must embrace and absorb ressentiment in order to defuse it.

The trick is to turn ressentiment into suffering. This makes all the difference, and it is what makes Jesus more of a Buddhist than a Christian (Deleuze, 155). This is the spiritual practice he taught.