Sem.

Marc Roman Fernandez Rogationist of the Heart of Jesus

2nd year A.B Philosophy
Ecce homo
The book ecce homo as written by Nietzsche himself, started and finishes with the content
of the many books he authored, throughout the course of his rational years before being drawn to
the oblivion of madness and insanity. A compilation of his own commentaries on all his works.
The most prominent ones include: thus spoke Zarathustra, beyond good and evil, gay science and
other famous literary works of Nietzsche. Thus, ideas of Nietzsche on God could be perceived in
various sections of the book itself from above mentioned works. As points for speculation, it is
necessary to expose these ideas one by one in answering the question on how it affect one’s idea
of God.
Nietzsche in his book ecce homo allured Luther’s famous hymn,” a mighty fortress is our
God, a good defense and weapon”, using God as the fighting instinct which wears out as the sign
of it is sickness. Here, one is given the idea that God is used as a defense, a last recourse when one
arrives to a dead end particularly in an individual’s rational endeavors. The same with religious
conviction, using the notion of God and faith as a weapon to counter erroneous and self-destructive
rational conclusions. God, then, is offered as an entity irrelevant to rational and scientific
disciplines, a gross answer and even an excuse as Nietzsche would claim. On the contrary it
compels us to delve into faith as a way of understanding some things reason could never fathom.
Further presented God as non-existent, that it is somehow delusionary to conceive that
there is an existent absolute. Quoting Stendhal in his line: “God’s only excuse is that he does not
exist” that, “the greatest objection to existence is God”. In some sense it could be put in another
aspect that is: “God’s existence could not be grasped fully by the limited human intellect”. Thus,
making it easy to fall into misconception about the existence of God and directly conclude that, as
Nietzsche would put it, God’s Existence is an absurdity. Likewise, identifying God as an
“imagining prompted by the bad instincts of sick natures”. A line directed towards the leaders in
the time of Nietzsche; having observed the deadly pact between the church leaders and political
leaders of the time. Expounding that there is a distorted presentation of the God they so believed
in. That there is a certain level of contention between what is preached and what is acted. Thus,
making God as only an idea that is determined by one’s inclinations.
Then Classifying God as the deceiver of humanity stating that “God laid down himself
under the tree of knowledge disguised himself as the serpent: thus recuperated from being God,
He made everything too beautifully- the devil is merely the leisure of God in the seventh day”.
The idea of God that is contradicting to the traditional notion and nature of God as Good. Likewise,
implying that God is a counter concept of life; everything harmful, poisonous, slanderous, the
whole hostility into death against life synthesized in this concept with gruesome unity. Given that
in the world there exists many evils (e.g. gratuitous and horrendous, and natural and moral evils)
there is this tendency to question whether God exist or not, this particular doubt is dubbed as the
existential problem of evil. Holding that people often disbelieve in God due to the existential angst
during times of experiencing evil. However, there are some evils that exist for the good to be
realized evident in the theodicies especially of St. Augustine. Hence, evil could not be used to
debunk the existence of God