Anyone who wants to take philosophical practice and the modern world seriously needs to come to terms with Nietzsche’s pronouncement that “God is Dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” There are many layers to this onion, and I’d like to spend this meditation peeling back just a few of them.

Let me start with my understanding of what Nietzsche means by “God is Dead” and its relationship to both ressentiment and the will to truth. The all too easy interpretation of this phrase is that “God” is the Christian God and what has died is Christianity as dogma — as a codified set of beliefs about God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. If we think that this is what has died, we’ve only gone part way to understanding what this phrase means. This “part way” is what Nietzsche argued against throughout his life as a philologist-philosopher-psychologist. Science only goes part of the way; atheism only goes part of the way; philosophy only goes part of the way. By only going part of the way, these alternatives to Christianity leave in place some fundamental assumptions about the nature of truth and humanity’s relationship to truth that simply reproduce what he called in the Third Essay the “acetic ideals” even while we pretend to overcome them.

To go the whole way is to put our attention on how the “will to truth” and these ascetic ideals became an unspoken assumption about the human condition. This assumption is neither natural nor inevitable. It is historical: it has a beginning, and Nietzsche is tracing its unraveling in the late nineteenth century. Unraveling is a good metaphor for what he is tracking down. There are so many threads and strands that are woven together that it is disingenuous to pull only on one of them. To focus merely on one aspect of this — say, the death of God as the death of Christian dogma or decoupling “will” from “truth” that yields a dangerous “nihilism” — is to leave the rest of the threads untouched though the fabric may be weakened considerably.

When we really take seriously the historical nature of this unspoken assumption — when we go the whole way in untangling the threads — we find that ascetic ideals, God, and the will to truth are woven together as a kind of unholy trinity at the heart of who we think we are and how we go about living our lives. In other words, we find in the God whom we have killed an ideal that is simultaneously at least three things: (1) a source of truth that (2) we must pursue with all of our human will in order to achieve our salvation as individuals and as a species, and (3) we must transform ourselves through ascetic ideals in order for each of us to access the truth that saves us. The birth of this God — and His date of birth is not at all clear though the emergence of Judaism is a candidate (First Essay, Sections 7-8) — brought about a vast and deep reorganization of human life as inescapably and fundamentally a salvational search for meaning:

This is precisely what the ascetic ideal means: that something was lacking, that man was surrounded by a fearful void — he did not know how to justify, to account for, to affirm himself; he suffered from the problem of his meaning. (Third Essay, Section 28; emphasis in Kaufmann’s translation)

To be crystal clear, the ascetic ideal was not the discovery of this lack, it was not the discovery of God. The ascetic ideal created God and embedded it in all of our forms of religion and knowledge since the rise of Christianity. (Ressentiment was and is essential to activating and intensifying the ascetic ideal, but more on that later.) Philosophy, science and religion, in other words, have as their organizing principle the invisible and unspoken belief that the human condition is defined as a search for meaning in the face of a terrifying and original lack. The assumed lack at the heart of human existence is not original nor is it true in any kind of eternal and inevitable sense. The triumph of the ascetic ideal implanted “lack” as a massively powerful organizing principle of the human condition. To reiterate, this is not a story of the discovery of a human condition, but the creation of a way of living and thinking about ourselves that implants a “human condition” as the situation we are all inevitably dealing with. It is a comforting notion because it allows our thoughts about ourselves to come to rest in something eternal and inevitable and common to us all. From this resting point, our struggles can simultaneously find their home and generate new energy and intensity as we deal with them.

Energy and intensity are key to the Genealogy. By implanting the lack-of-meaning as a dynamic at the heart of the human condition — by defining a human condition as this struggle for meaning — something amazing and spectacular happened. The human being attained the ability to increasingly strengthen its will:

But all this notwithstanding — man was saved thereby, he possessed a meaning, he was henceforth no longer like a leaf in the wind, a plaything of nonsense — the “sense-less” — he could now will something: no matter at first to what end, why, with what he willed: the will itself was saved. (GM 3.28)

Now the human being has something to work for (salvation) and to work on (its own self). Here we find askesis as fundamental to the human will to truth. It is a two edged sword of self-transformation. One side cuts ties with the past self while the other looks forward to what one can and should become. Stoicism’s backward looking cut was far less gloomy and less violent than Christianity’s demand for total renunciation of oneself and one’s community. Stoicism’s forward looking cut was more incremental and corrective than Christianity’s total demand for conversion.

To understand this work merely in technical terms (as Foucault’s practices of the self) is to drain it of its intensity and of its emotion — very un-Nietzsche like. Nietzsche respects that intensity and his writing style foregrounds it. His is no mere comparison of the “noble morality” with the “slave morality.” The latter emerges from the former by absorbing the noble’s energy and turning back toward them as a newly created “enemy.” The First Essay, Sections 6 and 7, focus on how the “priestly aristocracy” inaugurated slave morality by taking certain “valuations” that were merely “uncouth, coarse, external, narrow, straightforward, and altogether unsymbolical” and intensify them into much deeper divisions that morally separated good from evil:

… it is clear from the whole nature of an essentially priestly aristocracy why antithetical valuations could in precisely this instance soon become dangerously deepened, sharpened, and internalized; and indeed they finally tore chasms between man and man that a very Achilles of a free spirit would not venture to leap without a shudder. There is from the first something unhealthy in such priestly aristocracies and in the habits ruling in them which turn them away from action and alternate between brooding and emotional explosions… (First Essay, Section 6; emphasis added)

We see in this passage how the turning of merely “antithetical valuations” become intensified (“dangerously deepened” etc.) as the flow of anger and division moves outward toward the Other. As that intensity creates “chasms between man and man” it must turn backward to the individual doing the hating to become a permanent source of “brooding and emotional explosions” necessary to sustain the chasm.

To be clear, this flow of anger and hatred toward the enemy was not possible by only being an outward flow. It had to be reabsorbed into the self so that it could become a regenerating force that could keep the hatred flowing. As this passage makes clear, it emerges from a flight from “action” as the priest turns his and his flock’s “ressentiment” inward on themselves as a continual source of power. The result is the creation of a deep human interiority as a consolation for their inability to act. They are weaker than the externally powerful “blonde beasts,” and they turn this weakness into their own form of power just as they turn the power of the beasts into moral weakness.

This is where we can see Nietzsche’s love/hate relationship with slave morality. On the one hand, it is the consequence of weakness and full of ressentiment as its animating force. It is full of self-loathing as it turns weakness into strength and seeks to create “chasms between man and man.” On the other hand, this newly created power is an historical force that has been so pervasive and so victorious that it is invisible. It simply appears as the human condition that we all must deal with.

We see this ambivalence from Nietzsche in the final sentence of Section 6:

For the priests everything becomes more dangerous, not only cures and remedies, but also arrogance, revenge, acuteness, profligacy, love, lust to rule, virtue, disease — but it is only fair to add that it was on the soil of this essentially dangerous form of human existence, the priestly form, that man first became an interesting animal, that only here did the human soul in a higher sense acquire depth and become evil… (First Essay, Section 6)

So while this interiority is “essentially dangerous” and evil it is also admirable, powerful, and compelling. This is the burden of human interiority at its inception as a key feature of slave morality. It provides an intensity of self-transformative power that we take for granted today. But we must always realize that while we can argue that this interiority is the source of the love of our fellow humans — we all share this interiority and are cut from the same mold — this psychological depth starts as ressentiment, anger, hatred and other powerful emotions that are absorbed, “dangerously deepened, sharpened, and internalized.” Love is not the origin of this interiority, but its byproduct — a byproduct that strengthens the original force. From this “sublimest kind of hatred” the “like of which never existed on earth before — there grew something equally incomparable, a new love, the profoundest and sublimest kind of love — and from what other trunk could it have grown?” (First Essay, Section 8).

It is no wonder, then, that this power of ressentiment that turns hatred into a badge of honor (that is also an ongoing poisoning of the hater) is always on the verge of nihilism. We don’t need to kill off God for us to find nihilism. It was always there within the ascetic ideal, within the slave morality. As it affirms its weakness as its strength. As it embraces the need for a lack that propels the ressentiment-fueled search for meaning (i.e., will to truth), the ascetic ideal holds onto nothingness as its condition of possibility — as the Other that it needs to keep close so as to continually fend it off:

Think, for example, of certain forms of diet (abstinence from meat), of fasting, of sexual continence, of flight “into the wilderness”… add to these the entire antisensualistic metaphysic of the priests that makes men indolent and overrefined, … and finally the only-too-comprehensible satiety with all this, together with the radical cure for it, nothingness (or God — the desire for a unio mystica with God is the desire of the Buddhist for nothingness, Nirvana — and no more!) (First Essay, Section 7)

Here we find in this remarkable passage the equation of God and nothingness. The desire for the union with God is a desire to be fully eradicated as a self. It is the natural and predictable conclusion of a form of self-scrutiny defined by the intensity of its introspective power — so intense that it creates a human interior that is at one and the same time “evil” and “deep.”

Lest we think that this is Nietzsche just being hyperbolic, let me cite one of the greatest and most influential of the Desert Fathers, Evagrius Ponticus, as he offers practical advice for how to achieve a perfectly contemplative state. What he details in the Praktikos and Chapters on Prayer is a progression of the self to a state of nothingness. In doing so, he gives us a remarkably clear demonstration of the ascetic ideal, particularly as it runs up against and embraces a kind of peaceful nihilism of the self. This peaceful nihilism has everything to do with his conception of God as an immaterial and formless Truth. The closer one gets to this Truth through contemplative prayer, the more the self is absorbed into this formless Truth and therefore the more it is eliminated as an entity:

117. Let me repeat this saying of mine that I once expressed on some other occasions. Happy is the spirit that attains to perfect formlessness at the time of prayer.

118. Happy is the spirit which, praying without distraction, goes on increasing its desire for God.

119. Happy is the spirit that becomes free of all matter and is stripped of all at the time of prayer.

120. Happy is the spirit that attains to complete unconsciousness of all sensible experience at the time of prayer.

121. Happy is the man who thinks himself no better than dirt.

The intensity of focus on oneself (in the form of a constant and ever-increasing confrontation with internalized “demons”) is the hallmark of Evagrian prayer. It is founded on very specific ascetic practices, which he details in the Praktikos. These practices, however, are merely the preparatory acts that focus on the passions (see Chapters 78 through 81). They themselves are not sufficient to attain this state. What we have, then, in Evagrian practices is the increasingly intense focus on the self that starts with self-overcoming of the affects and passions — the bodily demons — and progresses to purely mental engagement with God through contemplative prayer. Crucially for Evagrius, the work gets harder and must become more vigilant the more one progresses: “The greater the progress the soul makes the more fearful the adversaries that take over the war against her” (Chapter 59).

The result of Evagrian praktikos is the creation of an interiority as a permanent observational state of oneself. This positive affirmation and creation of interiority, however, drives toward self-extinction when it is at its most intense — i.e., when it is involved in contemplative prayer. It is the cite of one’s struggle with oneself and one’s own demons. The insistence that the struggle be one’s own and that it relentlessly focuses on oneself is also a hallmark of Evagrian praktikos:

61. The spirit would not make progress nor go forth on that happy sojourn with the band of incorporeal beings unless it should correct its interior. This is so because because anxiety arising from interior conflicts is calculated to turn it back upon the things that it has left behind. (Emphasis added)

The demons (there are eight of them specifically that the monk must deal with) are constant companions in the Evagrian sojourn of the self. They transform as the self progresses to launch new attacks that are specific to the individual and the state of progress he or she has attained.

In these chapters from Evagrius, we see clearly the historical creation of the ascetic ideal as a form of self-loathing bordering on self-annihilation. Truth as fullness of God and nothingness of the self are so closely related that the latter becomes a form of perfection and purification (two frequent terms we find in the translation of Evagrius’ works). I will hold off in this meditation from delving into Evagrian “apatheia” and “anachoresis,” which are technical terms he uses for defining the results of these material and contemplative practices of the self. For the moment, it is enough to see how closely aligned interiority (as a constant observational state of oneself) is with self-loathing, salvation, and self-annihilation.

We also see in Evagrius the historical formation of this interiority as an amazingly strong “will to truth.” The praktikos he details are nothing if not the formula for a relentless strengthening of the monk’s will to overcome his demons through a constant and continuous waging of an interior battle. The demons, in fact, are thoughts for Evagrius. (See Chapters 6 and 48 for explicit statements equating demons with thoughts.) The Christian transformation of external demons of the pagan world into internal psychological energies that need to be constantly confronted and overcome is well understood. What I want to focus on is how this relentless self-attention is the making of an ever-strengthening “will” that is energized by its pursuit of Truth. Ascetic practices that overcome the bodily demons (which are the thoughts of “gluttony, then impurity, avarice, sadness, anger” listed in Chapter 6) are merely the starting point for energizing and strengthening one’s will. However, the strength of will that it takes to succeed in the ascetic practices pales in comparison to the strength of will that is required to achieve the perfect and purified self-overcoming and annihilation that is contemplative prayer. By making the move to the desert, only part of the battle is won — the temptations are mitigated because their physical proximity to the monk is eliminated through anachoresis (withdrawal from society). But this physical withdrawal is merely the beginning of a battle with oneself that will increasingly take place on the inside as we have seen. (Peter Brown’s fourth chapter of The Making of Late Antiquity is a marvelously well condensed description of how this process worked for the Egyptian ascetics — Christian and pagan.)

The important point here is that the strengthening of the monk’s will happens when it searches for Truth as God. The will and Truth are historically linked through Evagrian praktikos. We clearly see evidence of the historical creation of this link in the life and works of Evagrius and the Desert Fathers. The energizing forces of that will to Truth are the self-annihilating forces contained within the bodily practices of asceticism and the mental practices of contemplative prayer.

It doesn’t end here for Evagrius. The progression continues as the self-annihilation ends up producing agape — love of mankind. We’ve already seen how Nietzsche found this growth of love from hatred and ressentiment. The Evagrian progression involves spiritually re-connecting the self with others through contemplative prayer. After Chapter 121 where happiness is the realization that we are no better than dirt, the sequence continues:

122. Happy is the man who views the welfare and progress of all men with as much joy as if it were his own.

123. Happy is the man who considers all men as god — after God.

124. A monk is a man who is separated from all and who is in harmony with all.

125. A monk is a man who considers himself one with all men because he seems constantly to see himself in every man.

This all proceeds after Chapter 121 where the joy in others’ progress is the joy in shared self-annihilation. Can we have no better illustration that the ascetic Christian’s love of mankind springs from a deep ressentiment and self-loathing? The connection between man as image of God (123) and as dirt (121) are inseparable. To be purified and perfected is to be annihilated and to take joy in it — for oneself and others.

I want to take a step back here — call it a moment of epoche in the Husserlian sense — and suspend judgement about the exclusively self-destructive forces of Christianity that are obviously on display here. Neither Nietzsche nor Evagrius embraced nihilism as the necessary or desirable end point of their works. Evagrius and Nietzsche are like bookends in the historical alliance between human will and its dogged determination to seek Truth — Truth as divine, transcendent and requiring ascetic ideals for the human mind to attain access to it. Evagrius is driving the alliance through an intensity of praktikos designed to strengthen the human will as a power of self-overcoming. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. It is what Nietzsche found so admirable in the ascetic ideal. For Evagrius, while the monk is a special case, the monk is “human.” One could say that the monk is an idealized human, but I’m not sure that is a necessary reading. Rather, anachoresis, ascetic practices and contemplative prayer are one constellation of practices that can create a self that finds its peace — apatheia. We just need to be cognizant of the dangers involved — dangers that Nietzsche points out but does not fully and completely denigrate. They are dangers that create amazing moral power of self-transformation and self-overcoming. This power requires a certain amount of self-annihilation, otherwise what exactly is one overcoming if not a self that needs radical revision.

A side note: there is no requirement that self-overcoming requires some form of Christian-like self-renunciation as a radical and total break within one’s self. This type of self-overcoming needs nihilism — Augustinian confessions, Evagrian contemplative prayer, retreat into monasteries — to activate the aggressive form of self-overcoming. Stoicism’s brand of self-overcoming was much less radical and more incremental. It involves corrections but not totalizing judgements about one’s underlying truth. There is no Original Sin that needs to be eradicated and put in one’s personal rear view mirror. Stoics just get on with the business of living and correcting faults as they recognize them.

To return to the meditation: On the nineteenth-century bookend of the will to Truth, Nietzsche openly worried about what would happen when the will became decoupled from the search for Truth. He asks at the beginning of the Genealogy of Morals, what is the value of this value? This is the historical question we face when the Death of God is a fait accompli. He does not answer this question. Rather, he leaves it hanging in the air. This is not nihilism. This is an honest asking of an important historical and moral question — what is the value of these values? (See Preface, Sections 3, 5 and 6). It is not, to reiterate, an answer; nor is it the annihilation of any possible productive answers. It is an optimistic question but a terrifying one as well because one of the possible answers is nihilism: “man would rather will nothingness than not will” (the final line of the work). To avoid nihilism as the all too easy answer, we must engage the question honestly, authentically, historically and morally.

Clearly this is not, in my reading, an oversimplified postmodernism characterized as nihilism. It is a subtle point, one worth understanding if only because to clearly understand what Nietzsche is saying to us makes all the difference between seeing the Death of God as inevitably leading to nihilism (a “will to nothingness”) or as the more subtle raising of the question of the value of this value. Let’s see what he actually says:

At this point it is necessary to pause and take careful stock. Science itself henceforth requires justification (which is not to say that there is any such justification). Consider on this question both the earliest and most recent philosophers: they are all oblivious of how much the will to truth first itself requires justification; there is a lacuna in every philosophy — how did this come about? Because the ascetic ideal has hitherto dominated all philosophy, because truth was posited as being, as God, as the highest court of appeal — because truth was not permitted to be a problem at all. Is this “permitted” understood? From the moment that the faith in God of the ascetic ideal is denied, a new problem arises: that of the value of truth. (Third Essay, Section 24)

If Nietzsche was advocating nihilism in any way, this paragraph would be much more judgmental and definitive. It would have been much easier to say “God is dead, and now anything goes. All values are valid.” He doesn’t say that. He says that previously unspoken assumptions — truth as God and as something we are compelled to search out — are now permitted to be problems. When this is admitted, when “faith in God as the ascetic ideal is denied,” we can now begin to engage in re-valuing truth. It is an echo of the opening pages: What is the value of this value? If nihilism were his point, then this wouldn’t be a genuine question; it would be a rhetorical question masking a statement: “This value has no value any longer.” Clearly he doesn’t say this.

If there is postmodernity here — and it is fair to say that there is — it is not a nihilistic one: Nietzsche’s postmodernity is not absent of values. It is not a cynical denial of all values because they aren’t Godlike. It is to make the will to truth into a problem that we must hold onto and investigate as a condition of our modernity. Postmodernity is the willingness — the power of the will — to question at all moments its relationship to truth. There are plenty of truths in Nietzsche. The challenge is to continually ask ourselves, as he does at the Anmerkung appended to the end of the First Essay, “what is the value of this or that table of values and ‘morals’?” This is not a question that begs a nihilist’s answer. Rather, it is a question that requires a diversity of answers from “philologists and historians as well as that of professional philosophers”:

… All the sciences have from now on to prepare the way for the future task of the philosophers: this task understood as the solution of the problem of value, the determination of the order and rank among values.

We misread Nietzsche if we understand this to be a new will to truth — as if at the end of this question we have, once again, a definitive answer where the “order and rank among values” can be truly discovered and clearly stated. This is not a call for a definitive collaboration among the disciplines. This is a call for “the most diverse perspectives; for the problem ‘value for what'?’ cannot be examined too subtly.” Nor can it be examined definitively. We’d need to think of Nietzsche as somehow dropping his guard as a philosopher to so easily allow the will to truth to sneak itself back into the game. No, the will to truth and the Death of God, when raised to the status of an historical problem, become living challenges that are never settled. The problem of truth eternally returns, but never in the same form and never as a transcendence that we are compelled to access and to define.

I find in Nietzsche’s firm stance against nihilism in the face of the Death of God important energy in some of the techniques of askesis that I’ve been interested in in these meditations. Stoic askesis as “stepping back” and as slowing down one’s mental energy to see things clearly becomes a key practice to cultivate and internalize in a world where “the order and rank among values” is an imperative but unanswerable in any Platonic and Christian belief about what truth looks like when it shows up. It does require “the most diverse perspectives,” where any primacy of place in the perspectives is situational at best.