Soc (2008) 45:368–374
DOI 10.1007/s12115-008-9106-4
CULTURE AND SOCIETY
Nietzsche on Love
M. A. Casey
Published online: 24 June 2008
# Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2008
The Christian understanding of love emerged in human
history as something new and distinct, and it set culture and
human life on a radically different bearing. Pope Benedict
XVI seemed to have this in mind when he opened his first
encyclical. Deus caritas est (DCE) was published in 2006
and begins with special emphasis on these words from the
First Letter of St. John: “We have come to believe in God’s
love”. Coming to believe in God’s love, to experience the
reality of this love, takes us to the heart of what it means to
be Christian. “Being Christian is not the result of an ethical
choice or a lofty idea, but the result of an encounter with an
event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a
decisive direction” (DCE n. 1)—not only for individuals,
but for entire civilizations.
Christianity’s enemies have always understood this at
some level, either acutely or dimly, attacking its claim to be
a religion of love precisely as the most powerful way of
discrediting it. Benedict XVI cites Friedrich Nietzsche as a
representative example of this sort of attack, referring to
Nietzsche’s accusation: “Christianity gave Eros poison to
drink:—he did not die from it but degenerated into a vice”
(BGE 72; cf. DCE n. 3). Nietzsche claimed in his
notebooks that “I have never desecrated the holy name of
love” (LN p 65). But his understanding of love is
antithetical to that of Benedict XVI.
Benedict gives us only a one-and-a-half line epigram
from Nietzsche in Deus caritas est, but behind its lies an
entire world. Many of the features of this world are
returning to prominence with the re-paganization of
Present address:
M. A. Casey (*)
133 Liverpool St,
Sydney NSW 2000, Australia
e-mail: mcasey@ado.syd.catholic.org.au
Western culture, especially in the area of sexuality, the
realm of eros and love. For this reason Australian scholars
Tracey Rowland and Nicholas Tonti-Filippini have sug-
gested that it is interesting to think of Nietzsche as one of
the periti or advisers who contributed to Deus caritas est.
Certainly it is illuminating to approach the encyclical as a
guide to understanding the strange world which Nietzsche
created for himself, and perhaps for us as well, in his
tortured efforts to deal with the nature and meaning of love.
In the early pages of the Deus caritas est Benedict
speaks of the love between man and woman “where body
and soul are inseparably joined and human beings glimpse
an apparently irresistible promise of happiness”. This
vision, the promise and reality of one flesh, would seem
to be “the very epitome of love” (DCE n. 2). Nietzsche, in
contrast, takes a very different view. For him, the two sexes
“co–exist in a state of perpetual conflict interrupted only
occasionally by periods of reconciliation” (BT 14). “Does
anyone have ears for my definition of love?” Nietzsche
asks in his autobiography, Ecce Homo (written in 1888):
“Love—its method is warfare, its foundation is the deadly
hatred between the sexes” (EH 106).
Between the sexes and beyond them, love for Nietzsche
is a means of attaining domination of the other. “Everyone
thinks that people in love are selfless because they want to
advance the interest of another person, often at their own
expense. But in return they want to possess that other
person... Even God is no exception here. He is far from
thinking ‘what difference does it make to you if I love
you?’ He becomes terrible if you do not love him in return”
(CW 236). Love of God in particular is an absurdity for
Nietzsche, something simply unbelievable. “What? A god
who loves men provided that they believe in him and who
casts evil gazes and threats at anyone who does not believe
in his love? What? A love hemmed in by conditions has the
feeling of an almighty god? A love that has not even
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mastered the feeling of honor and roused vengefulness?
How oriental this all is! ‘If I love you, what does that
concern you?’ is surely a sufficient critique of all of
Christianity” (GS 127).
In other cases, between individuals rather than between
God and his people, “love is a subtler parasitism, one soul’s
dangerous and unscrupulous nesting in another soul—or
occasionally in the flesh... oh! at what cost to the ‘host’!”
(LN 215–216). Women in particular “would like to believe
that love makes all things possible,—this is their true
superstition. Oh, those who know hearts can guess how
impoverished, helpless, presumptuous, and mistaken even
the best and deepest love really is—how much more likely
it is to destroy than to rescue” (NCW 279; cf BGE 166).
It would be a mistake to dismiss all this as mere
cynicism on Nietzsche’s part. Between his idea of love and
the Christian understanding of love as expressed in Deus
caritas est is an unbridgeable philosophical gulf. Benedict
XVI and Nietzsche operate from very different conclusions
about what comes first. Benedict makes it clear that loves
comes first. It is “primordial”, the elemental human
phenomenon (DCE n. 58). For Nietzsche, however, the
will (or “the will to power”, as he called it to underscore its
nature) is primordial. “Life itself is essentially a process of
appropriating, injuring, overpowering the alien and the
weaker, oppressing, being harsh,... and at least, the very
least, exploiting”. This is not a corruption or an imperfec-
tion of the human condition, but “belongs to the essence of
being alive”. It is “the primal fact of all history” (BGE
153). Will comes first, and because of this everything in
human life is an expression of our desire to dominate
others, working itself out either openly or secretly, often
disguised even from ourselves.
Love in this context becomes “a craving for a new
property”, particularly when it comes to “sexual love”.
“The lover wants unconditional and sole possession of the
longed-for person; he wants a power over her soul as
unconditional as his power over her body; he wants to be
the only beloved, to live and to rule in the other soul as that
which is supreme and most desirable”. The lover wants to
exclude “the whole world from a precious good”, to
impoverish and deprive all competitors, and becomes like
“a dragon guarding his golden horde... the most inconsid-
erate and selfish of all conquerors and exploiters”. If ones
considers all this, Nietzsche argues, it is amazing that “this
love has furnished the concept of love as the opposite of
egoism when it may in fact be the most candid expression
of egoism” (GS 40).
Nietzsche’s idea of love between man and woman does
not go beyond the idea of eros as possessive love. But the
relationship between eros and love is deeper, goes further,
than this. As Pope Benedict observes, “even if eros is at
first mainly covetous” out of “a fascination for the great
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promise of happiness”, in drawing near to the other it
becomes “less and less concerned with itself and increas-
ingly seeks the happiness of the other”, wanting “to ‘be
there for’ the other”. Agape enters to prevent eros from
being denatured, in part through the deepening of
reciprocity. The individual cannot live by love of the
other alone. “He cannot always give, he must also receive.
Anyone who wishes to give love must also receive love as
a gift” (DCE n. 7).
Nietzsche has nothing but scorn for the concept of
reciprocity: “‘Reciprocity’ is a great piece of vulgarity”
(LN 226). Reciprocity assumes equality and in Nietzsche
mind there is no such thing, particularly between men and
women. Each sex “has its own prejudices about love”:
I will never admit talk of equal rights for man and
woman in love: there are none. For man and woman
have different conceptions of love—and it belongs to
the conditions of love in each sex that neither
presupposes the same feeling, the same concept of
‘love’ in the other. What woman means by love is
clear enough: total devotion (and not mere surrender)
with soul and body, without any consideration or
reserve... her love is a faith: woman has no other. Man,
when he loves a woman, wants precisely this love
from her and is thus himself as far as can be from the
presupposition of female love.
Nietzsche goes on to mock the idea of reciprocity in
these terms:
The passion of a woman, in its unconditional renunci-
ation of her own rights, presupposes precisely that on
the other side there is not an equal pathos, not an equal
will to renunciation; for if both should renounce
themselves from love, the result would be—well, I
don’t know, maybe an empty space? Woman wants to
be taken, adopted as a possession, wants to be
absorbed in the concept ‘possession’, ‘possessed’;
consequently, she wants someone who takes, who
does not himself give or give himself away; who on
the contrary is supposed precisely to be made richer in
‘himself’—through the increase in strength, happiness
and faith given him by the woman who gives herself.
Woman gives herself away; man takes more.
In Nietzsche’s view, there is nothing that can be done,
either through socialization or education, to “correct” this
dynamic between the sexes. Appeals to justice and equality
are pointless, “for love, when one considers it in its perfect,
fully developed state, is nature, and nature is eternally
‘immoral’” (GS 227–28). “Whatever is done out of love
takes place beyond good and evil” (BGE 70). Dominating
and being dominated become for Nietzsche the source of
what passes for love’s happiness and fulfillment.
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Compare this diminished view of love between man and
woman, and of eros and sexual love, with the brief
treatment of marriage in Deus caritas est. Part of “the
novelty of biblical faith” is its image of man. Although
given dominion over creation he is “somehow incomplete,
driven by nature to seek in another the part that can make
him whole”. “Only in communion with the opposite sex
can he become ‘complete’”. Eros “directs man towards
marriage, to a bond which is unique and definitive”. In this,
eros fulfils “its deepest purpose”. Pope Benedict tells us
that “this close connection between eros and marriage” has
practically no equivalent outside the bible (DCE n. 11). It
appeared, first with the Jewish people, as something new
for human civilization and culture.
More typical was the understanding of marriage and
society in pagan or “aristocratic” cultures, on which
Nietzsche provides a particular perspective. Marriage
“[hasn’t] the least to do with love—no kind of institution
can be made from love”. Its basis as an institution is “the
social permission given to two people to satisfy their sexual
desires with each other, of course under certain conditions
but such conditions as have the interests of society in view”
(LN 102). Basing marriage on love has made it “completely
irrational”:
The rationality of marriage lay in the fact that the
husband had sole juridical responsibility: this gave
marriage a centre of balance, while today it limps on
both legs. The rationality of marriage lay in its
principled indissolubility, which gave it an accent that
knew how to be heard above the accidents of feeling,
passion and the distractions of the moment. The
rationality also lay in the family’s responsibility for
choosing a spouse. With the growing indulgence of
love matches, the whole basis of marriage has been
eliminated, the very thing that made it an institution in
the first place. You never, ever base an institution on
an idiosyncrasy, and, as I have said, you do not base
marriage on ‘love’,—you base it on sex drive; on the
drive for property (woman and child as property); on
the drive to dominate that keeps organizing the family
(the smallest unit of domination), that needs children
and heirs in order to maintain... the measure of power,
influence and wealth that has been achieved.
The modern mind having forgotten or abandoned these
purposes, “marriage has stopped making sense. Modern
marriage has lost its meaning,—consequently it is being
abolished” (TI 215). As well it may be, but perhaps entirely
not for the reasons Nietzsche adduces.
An important theme in Deus caritas est is the realism of
love. Benedict XVI takes us far beyond the Greek concept
of eros as intoxication to the deep reality and the meaning
of love; beyond the idea of merely submitting to instinct, of
Soc (2008) 45:368–374
being overcome, to fulfilling the deepest purposes of
human life (DCE nn. 4–6). For Nietzsche, however, love
is a “redemptive illusion”. It is meant to deceive us about
the reality of existence, and for this purpose intoxication is
indispensable. Love is “the most astonishing proof” of how
far “the transfigurative force of intoxication can go”. The
intoxication of love “gets the better of reality”, obliterates
the horrors of existence and makes life seem good and
meaningful. For Nietzsche this is a deception, a necessary
deception, which serves as “life’s greatest stimulus” (LN
255–256). “Love is the state in which people are most
prone to see things the way that they are not. The force of
illusion reaches a high point here as so do the forces that
sweeten and transfigure. People in love will tolerate more
than they usually do, they will put up with anything. A
religion had to be invented where people could love: it gets
them through the worst in life—they stop noticing the bad
aspects completely” (AC 20). People resort to belief in
“love as the only, the final possibility of life” to hide from
the pain of existence (AC 27).
Love keeps us alive then, but not in the sense in which
we might normally understand that phrase. It helps us to
keep choosing to live against the horror and absurdity of
life which might otherwise overwhelm us, not by revealing
reality, but by obscuring it with illusions. Nietzsche praises
love for this, and in doing so expressly praises “love’s
power to lie” (LN 256). He identifies the life giving
dimensions of love, but is unable to accept that the meaning
and happiness it brings is real, true. “How do truthfulness,
love, justice relate to the real world? Not at all!” (LN 85).
Nietzsche takes a similar view of love of neighbor. He
acknowledges freely the light that Christianity brought to
the dark heart of Rome in its love and service and of those
in need, a strange and shameful idea to the Roman mind.
But for Nietzsche this was at once a therapeutic measure to
contain and direct the resentment of the “weak” (GM 105–
107 and LN 204), and a “transvaluation” or reversal of
values which gave them a sense of being higher, superior,
to those they served and those who persecuted them (GM
18–19 and 28–31). Christianity created “a new love” which
enabled it to conquer and dominate the strong (GM 19–20).
Love of neighbor is also about possession, about
“craving for a new property”:
We slowly grow tired of the old, of what we safely
possess...: possession usually diminishes the posses-
sion. The pleasure we take in ourselves tries to
preserve itself by time and again changing something
new into ourselves—that is simply what possession
means. To grow tired of a possession is to grow tired
of ourselves.... When we see someone suffering we
like to use this opportunity to take possession of him;
that is for example what those who have become his
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benefactors or those who have compassion for him do,
and they call the lust for new possessions that is
awakened in them ‘love’ (GS 40).
Rather than being an act of love, service may just as well
be an arbitrary assertion of power. “Every once in a while, a
love of humanity will inspire us to embrace some arbitrary
person (because we cannot embrace every one): but that is
precisely what we cannot let the arbitrary person know”
(BGE 72).
But as Benedict XVI teaches in Deus caritas est, “love
of neighbor is inscribed by the Creator in man's very
nature” (DCE n. 31). Without God we see only the hostile
“other” in people and close ourselves to the “encounter
with [our] neighbor” (DCE n. 18). Resistance to this
encounter with our neighbor deepens our resistance to the
encounter with God (DCE n. 16). Taking the will, rather
than love, as primordial gives us over not only to despair
and hardness of heart, but leads us to regard those around
us with fear rather than openness, as Nietzsche in his very
different way well understood (BGE 88–89).
There are two other revealing points of comparison.
Deus caritas est speaks of love being “open–ended... never
‘finished’ and complete” (DCE n. 17). For Nietzsche,
however, love ends with possession. When possession is
complete so does love finish, although sometimes to avoid
this a man may continue to believe that a woman still has
more “to give up” to him, even “after surrender”, so that his
love may endure a little longer (GS 228).
Deus caritas est also reminds us that “love is free; it is
not practiced as a way of achieving other ends” (DCE
n.31). But for Nietzsche love is “a taking”, or at most a
giving away “out of an impulse generated by the over-
abundance of power”. To see love as “a giving of oneself”
is to falsify it (BGE 154 and LN 167).
Nietzsche was not entirely dead to the reality of love and
its deeper dimensions. His preferred alternative form of love
was the “noble” type of “passion” produced by the “coercion
and privation” of early “aristocratic” cultures (LN 103). The
constraints of pre–modern culture produced “greatness” by
forcing feelings and desires into channels which were narrow
but deep (BGE 151–52). In modernity, however, all is
diffused, and with it the capacity for great “passion” (BGE
158–60). Ultimately, passion and greatness for Nietzsche are
products of the unencumbered and triumphant will of the
“strong” or “noble” to dominate others (BGE 153–56). Even
in its “aristocratic” forms, love reduces to power.
More interestingly, Nietzsche seems to understand that
love, at least in some circumstances, is something we have
to learn, even decide for:
One must learn to love. This happens to us in music:
first one must learn to hear a figure and melody at all,
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to detect and distinguish it, to isolate and delimit it as a
life in itself; then one needs effort and good will to
stand it despite its strangeness; patience with its
appearance and expression, and kindheartedness
about its oddity. Finally comes a moment when we
are used to it; when we expect it; when we sense that
we’d miss it if it were missing; and now it continues
relentlessly to compel and enchant us until we have
become its humble and enraptured lovers, who no
longer want anything better from the world than it
and it again. But this happens to us not only in music:
it is in just this way that we have learned to love
everything we now love. We are always rewarded in
the end for our good will, our patience, our fair-
mindedness and gentleness with what is strange, as it
gradually casts off its veil and presents itself as a new
and indescribable beauty. That is its thanks for our
hospitality. Even he who loves himself will have
learned it this way—there is no other way. Love, too,
must be learned (GS 186–187).
Nietzsche speaks of love here in a jarringly different way
to most other places in his work. So much so that one might
be forgiven for wondering if he is speaking merely of love
of things or ideas or, at most, of oneself, rather than of other
people. But there are rare moments in his work when his
massive resistance to love and transcendence slips—only a
little—and this may be one of them.
Truer to form are his observations on love and the pursuit
of knowledge and understanding: “‘Selflessness’ has no
value in heaven or on earth: all great problems demand great
love, and only strong, round, secure minds who have a firm
grip on themselves are capable of that” (GS 202). This is
part of Nietzsche’s attack on disinterestedness in 19th
Century philosophy and science (cf. BGE 155), and again
we have the assumption that “great love” is something only
for the rare few rather than a calling for every human being.
He understands that to be fully engaged, with a person or
problem, we have to be personally interested in them, but
draws different conclusions from it.
Nietzsche is an unusual choice for a peritus to a major
church document, and he would not have welcomed being
cited in a papal encyclical: “as if the Pope did not represent
a deadly hostility to life!” (EH 98). Writing about
Christianity and morality in his notebook in 1888 he
declared: “I abhor Christianity with a deadly hatred because
it created the sublime words and gestures to wrap a horrible
reality in the cloak of right, of virtue, of divinity” (LN 259).
It is not difficult then to understand the astonishment that
Pope Benedict XVI caused in some quarters by quoting
Nietzsche in his first encyclical – and by listing one of his
works as its first footnote. Reflecting on his life and
writings in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche claimed that:
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I only attack things where there is no question of
personal differences, where there has not been a
history of bad experiences. On the contrary, for me
an attack is proof of good will or even gratitude under
some circumstances. I do something or someone
honour, I confer distinction on it when I associate
my name with it: for or against—this is not important
to me. I have the right to wage war on Christianity,
because I have never been put out or harmed by it,—
the most serious Christians have always been well
disposed towards me. I myself, a de rigueur opponent
of Christianity, will certainly not hold individuals to
blame for the disaster of millennia (EH 83).
The editor of the Cambridge University Press edition of
Ecce Homo feels compelled to describe Nietzsche’s denial
of any “personal differences” as a “clear lie” (EH xxii). We
do not have to look too far to see why.
At the conclusion of The Anti-Christ (1889), Nietzsche
sums up his indictment of Christianity:
Now I have come to the end and I pronounce my
judgment. I condemn Christianity, I indict the Christian
church on the most terrible charges an accuser has ever
had in his mouth. I consider it the greatness corruption
conceivable, it had the will to the last possible
corruption. The Christian church has not left anything
untouched by its corruption, it has made an un-value
out of every value, a lie out of every truth, a malice of
the soul out of every piece of integrity.
He goes on in this vein for a page or so, saying among
other things: “I call Christianity the one great curse, the one
great innermost corruption, the one great instinct of revenge
that does not consider any method to be poisonous, secret,
subterranean, petty enough,—I call it the one immortal blot
on humanity” (AC 65–66).
Nietzsche concludes this tirade (a word that can be used
justly in this context) with a series of “Laws against
Christianity”. One of them is a decree that “priests are not
to be reasoned, with they are to be locked up”. There are
doubtless some in our own times who, either secretly or not
so secretly, would regard this as a reasonable proposition.
More interestingly, another “law” stipulates that “one
should be harsher with Protestants than with Catholics,
harsher with liberal Protestants than with orthodox ones.
The criminality of being Christian increases with your
proximity to science”. At the bottom of this decree, the very
end of this book, Nietzsche signs himself “The Anti-Christ”
(AC 66–67). It is perhaps important to note that in works
published only a year or two before The Anti-Christ
Nietzsche did not identify himself with this figure, although
he longed for his emergence (GM 71). An “awakening” of
some sort had obviously occurred in the interim.
Soc (2008) 45:368–374
Not surprisingly Nietzsche also hates the figure of Jesus,
although at some points in his work he seems ambivalent,
perhaps out of pity for a “suicide by martyrdom”:
It is possible that one of the most painful cases of the
martyrdom of knowledge about love lies hidden under
the holy fable and disguise of the life of Jesus: the
martyrdom of the most innocent and wishful of hearts,
who never had enough of human love, who asked for
nothing other than to love and be loved, but who asked
it with harshness, with madness, with horrible out-
bursts against anyone refusing to love him; the story of
a poor man who was unsatisfied and insatiable in love,
who had to invent hell for there to be somewhere to
send people who did not want to love him,—and who,
in the end, having learned about human love, had to
invent a God who was all love and all ability to love,—
who had mercy on human love for being so desperately
poor and ignorant!—Anyone who feels this way,
anyone who knows this about love—will look for
death (BGE 166).
In Deus caritas est Pope Benedict speaks of how “the real
novelty of the New Testament lies not so much in new ideas
as in the figure of Christ himself, who gives flesh and blood
to these concepts—an unprecedented realism” (DCE n. 12).
Nietzsche instead speaks of “the strange, sick world that the
Gospels introduce to us—a world like a Russian novel,
where the dregs of society, nerve cases, and ‘childlike’
idiocy all seem to converge” (AC 28). He mocks Ernest
Renan as a “buffoon” for describing Jesus (in his own de-
Christianizing efforts) as a “hero” or “genius”, when “the
rigorous language of physiology would use a different word
here: the word ‘idiot’” (AC 26–27). For Nietzsche, Jesus
represents a degenerate or decaying “human type”, and “it is
a pity that there was no Dostoevsky living near this most
interesting decadent, I mean someone with an eye for the
distinctive charm this sort of mixture of sublimity, sickness,
and childishness has to offer” (AC 28).
In his treatment of love and Christianity Nietzsche
exemplifies the warning of Deus caritas est “that disdain
for love is disdain for God and man alike”. Disdain for love
is in fact “an attempt to do without God” (DCE n. 31). This
is particularly apposite in Nietzsche’s case. His work and
philosophy are a vast and tortured attempt to do without
God, to overcome and put an end to the need for love and
the transcendent. Nietzsche's ambition in this is to liberate
and recreate man, to bring into being a new human type, in
whom the need for meaning—and for love—never occurs.
But not surprisingly Pope Benedict is wiser: “whoever
wants to eliminate love is preparing to eliminate man”
(DCE n. 28). Nietzsche's assault on transcendence sub-
ordinates everything in human life, including love, to the
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will to power, to the eternal struggle for domination. It
fatally diminishes man and prepares the ground, precisely
as Nietzsche intended, for the strong to eliminate the weak,
“for the ruthless extermination of everything degenerate
and parasitical” (EH 110). For Nietzsche, the “first
principle of our love for humanity” is that “the weak and
the failures should perish”, and be given every assistance to
do so (AC 4).
Although in some places it can sharpen the focus all too
well, for the most part Nietzsche’s overblown prose can
distract us from the extent to which ideas of domination and
the will to power have displaced love, service and solidarity
over the century since his death. Nietzsche is obviously not
the sole cause of this, but he has certainly been an influence
in the wrong direction. Our age betrays an abundance of
signs of the return of the Roman, and none of us should wish
to see the revival of this dark human type.
Nietzsche’s bluster is also distracting from the human
tragedy that was Friedrich Nietzsche’s life. It is not to
psychologize his work to observe that the major facts of his
life—often ill, highly sensitive, deeply lonely, constantly
disappointed in his search for love and intimacy—are
discernible influences within his writings. One of his favorite
maxims was from Stendhal’s novel The Red and the Black
(1830): “difference engenders hatred” (différence engendre
haine—BGE 160). This points to the nature of human
resentment and how we can hate what eludes us even as we
deny how much we long to have it (or “take possession” of
it). Nietzsche developed his theory of resentment as one of
the foundations of his analysis of both Western culture and
Christianity, and understood all too well how it worked (GM
21–22 and 29–31). Despite this, or perhaps consistent with it,
that resentment powerfully informs his own approach to
Christianity and to love.
But in addition to resentment there is also resistance.
Nietzsche was a compassionate and soft-hearted man who
raged against compassion and pity in his work, reacting
against it particularly in himself. One of his biographers
speaks of Nietzsche’s “almost osmotic sympathy” for
others, and in a letter written to a friend in 1883 he
complained that pity “has always been the major source of
problems in my life”. His reaction against his own natural
human feelings took bizarre and extreme form, a typical
fragment from his notebooks claiming that “I love the
magnificent exuberance of a young beast of prey that plays
gracefully and, as its plays, dismembers” (LN 65).
Attacks on compassion and pity run throughout
Nietzsche’s work, often focused on Christianity: “Chris-
tianity is called the religion of pity.—Pity is the opposite of
the tonic affects that heighten the energy of vital feelings:
pity has a depressive effect. You loose strength when you
pity. And pity further intensifies and multiplies the loss of
strength which in itself brings suffering to life. Pity makes
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suffering into something infectious”. More importantly for
Nietzsche, “pity runs counter to the law of development
which is the law of selection. Pity preserves things that are
ripe for decline, it defends things that have been disowned
and condemned by life, and it gives a depressive and
questionable character to life itself by keeping alive an
abundance of failures of every type” (AC 6).
The irony here is that Nietzsche ended his active existence
trying to defend something that had been “disowned and
condemned by life”, and to keep alive one such “failure of a
type”. On the January 3, 1889, he saw a coachman whipping
his broken-down horse in the Piazza Carlo Alberto in Turin.
He ran to the horse, threw his arms around its neck to protect it
and then collapsed to the ground, the scene reminiscent, as
others have remarked, of a nightmare in Dostoevsky’s novel
Crime and Punishment (1866). Nietzsche suffered complete
mental disintegration and never recovered. The theorist of
“overcoming” and the superman ended up briefly at a clinic
in Jena where he was displayed to medical students as an
interesting case, not least for the peculiarities of his gait.
Love calls us to greatness, to a greatness that we would
sometimes rather not have, and much of human history and
individual biography can be seen as the drama of the call to
love and our elaborate and ramified resistance to it. In his
notebooks Nietzsche wrote about the need to defend oneself
against love with suspicion (LN 132). In this as in many other
things he foresaw the way the culture was tending well in
advance. Against this, as Deus caritas est teaches us, we must
continue to love. “The best defense of God and man consists
precisely in love”, even when it is silent (DCE n. 31).
“Love is the light—and in the end, the only light” (DCE
n. 39). We have only to open our eyes.
Abbreviations for Nietzsche Citations
(NB all references in the text are to page numbers)
AC Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ (1889), in
Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman (eds.), The Anti-
Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other
Writings, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005).
BGE Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
(1886), eds. Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Judith
Norman, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002).
BT Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), in
Raymond Guess and Ronald Speirs (eds.), The Birth
of Tragedy and Other Writings, trans. Ronald Speirs
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
CW Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner (1888),
in Ridley and Norman (eds.), The Anti-Christ, Ecce
Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings.
374
EH Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (1908), in Ridley
and Norman (eds.), The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo,
Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings.
GM Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality
(1887), ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
GS Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882), ed.
Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff and
Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001).
LN Friedrich Nietzsche, Writings from the Late
Notebooks, ed. Rüdiger Bittner, trans. Kate Sturge
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
NCW Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche contra Wagner
(1895), in Ridley and Norman (eds.), The Anti-
Soc (2008) 45:368–374
Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other
Writings.
TI Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (1889), in
Ridley and Norman (eds.), The Anti-Christ, Ecce
Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings.
Michael Casey is Permanent Fellow in Sociology and Politics at the
Australian campus of the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and
Family, and a sociologist on the staff of the Catholic Archbishop of
Sydney. This paper was delivered in July 2007 to a colloquium on
Deus caritas est sponsored by the John Paul II Institute in Melbourne,
Australia.