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Paul Gosselin's avatar

In his 1889 essay Twilight of the Idols (ix.5), Nietzsche cynically remarked:

"G. Eliot. They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality. That is an English consistency; we do not wish to hold it against little moralistic females à la Eliot. In England one must rehabilitate oneself after every little emancipation from theology by showing in a veritably awe-inspiring manner what a moral fanatic one is. That is the penance they pay there.

"We others hold otherwise. When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet . This morality is by no means self-evident: this point has to be exhibited again and again, despite the English flatheads. Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one's hands. Christianity presupposes that man does not know, cannot know, what is good for him, what evil: he believes in God, who alone knows it. Christian morality is a command; its origin is transcendent; it is beyond all criticism, all right to criticism; it has truth only if God is the truth ⎯ it stands or falls with faith in God.

"When the English actually believe that they know 'intuitively' what is good and evil, when they therefore suppose that they no longer require Christianity as the guarantee of morality, we merely witness the effects of the dominion of the Christian value judgment and an expression of the strength and depth of this dominion: such that the origin of English morality has been forgotten, such that the very conditional character of its right to existence is no longer felt. For the English, morality is not yet a problem."

Oddly enough CS Lewis made comparable observations. In his autobiography (Surprised by Joy), Lewis observed that shortly after WWI when he began his university studies little had changed since Nietzsche’s initial observations (1955 : 209-210)

“But there were in those days all sorts of blankets, insulators, and insurances which enabled one to get all the conveniences of Theism, without believing in God. The English Hegelians, writers like T. H. Green, Bradley, and Bosanquet (then mighty names), dealt in precisely such wares. The Absolute Mind — better still, the Absolute — was impersonal, or it knew itself (but not us?) only in us, and it was so absolute that it wasn't really much more like a mind than anything else. And anyway, the more muddled one got about it and the more contradictions one committed, the more this proved that our discursive thought moved only on the level of "Appearance", and "Reality" must be somewhere else. And where else but, of course, in the Absolute? There, not here, was "the fuller splendour" behind the "sensuous curtain". The emotion that went with all this was certainly religious. But this was a religion that cost nothing. We could talk religiously about the Absolute: but there was no danger of Its doing anything about us. It was "there"; safely and immovably "there". It would never come "here", never (to be blunt) make a nuisance of Itself. This quasi-religion was all a one-way street; all eros (as Dr. Nygren would say) steaming up, but no agape darting down. There was nothing to fear; better still, nothing to obey.”

This “discovery” leads to the question, had Lewis by any chance read and commented about Nietzsche? Nietzsche’s works were of course translated by the 1920s and Lewis could manage reading German though not write in German. I checked the “Chronologically Lewis” file and found nothing. I also checked “The collected letters of CS Lewis”

https://jwkeena.github.io/csl-letters/

But this only turned up brief comments literary comments, such as “Nietzsche was a better poet than a philosopher.”... In any case, both Nietzsche and Lewis expose the fact that both morals and rights require a foundation. A foundation that the Enlightenment (and all it’s derivative modern ideologies) can NOT supply. In the end, both Stalin’s Constitution and the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights are there for marketing purposes and nothing else... Perhaps such thougths led to TS Eliot writing his poem “The Wasteland”...

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Frank Rowley's avatar

So that WAS your brother on Prom Night😂... yeah I'm just thinking out loud as is usual...shallow and wide not deep and narrow that's my motto😉... anyway just thinking about whether or not Job had any inalienable rights? As I read the story God gave the devil the right to fuck with him. Does that make God a human rights Violator? Seems to me the idea of human rights is a modern invention... since modern man thinks of himself as the highest Authority I guess it's just a post Enlightenment way of throwing up some (spiritual but not religious) guardrails so that things don't get too out of hand. Of course we've seen how well that works. As The Bard says "God's bodkin, man, much better: use every man after his desert, and who shall scape whipping? Use them after your own honor and dignity -- the less they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty"... so I guess the only thing we have a right to is whipping...😂...I love what you do brother. I keep promising to come down and see you at the table. God willing...one day....

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