Categories
Academic

The Power of Myth: Hegel, Nietzsche, and Christianity

by Justin Tejeda

This does not signal however, an irredeemable failure on the part of Christianity. The Christian religion, despite caging the truth within a form that cannot be properly understood by consciousness as a truth about itself, still possesses the truth. Indeed, to Hegel, the very arch of history bends towards the very truth expressed in the Christian faith—that Spirit is. What we must do then is simply transpose this eternally valuable truth into a form that is adequately presentable to consciousness: we must preserve Christianity’s content while doing away with the inadequate picture-thoughts in which they are rendered. “The content of this picture-thinking is absolute Spirit; and all that now remains to be done is to supersede this mere form.”16 What is the proper form in which these truths are to be expressed? To Hegel, it is the bare simplicity of “the Notion.”17 Instead of burying the truth inside the confusing labyrinth of stories, myths, and parables of religion—forms that are “something other than consciousness”—we must strip the truth down to its barest essential, to mere thought: to the Notion.18 The Notion is something immediately present to consciousness once thought because consciousness is thought and thought is consciousness. The Notion thus, when thought by consciousness, is understood as “not anything distinct from itself.”19 Hegel is trying to eliminate the obtrusive barriers that impede consciousness from truly grasping the Notion as part of itself, and ultimately then, as true of itself. With “the case of a picture-thought,” consciousness has to “bear in mind that this is its picture-thought,” that it is not itself.20 Oppositely, the Notion, once thought, “is for me straight away my Notion.”21 The arbitrary barrier between what is thought and what is thinking is torn down by Hegel, and with it, the obscuring mist of picture-thought is overcome: the truth is rendered in a form that is precisely the same as that which knows it.

This, for Hegel, is the final step necessary for Spirit’s realization of itself as itself. The truth, having been unraveled by the dialectical movement of History, is now naked before us: Spirit is reality itself. However, this Notion must be freed from the cage of religious picture-thought in which it has been rendered in order to be comprehended properly by Spirit. Only then can Spirit fully mature and come to terms with its true nature. Thus, the assertion that Hegel appropriates the content of Christianity while rejecting its form should not be taken as a matter of trivial formality—it is rather, the core of Hegel’s entire philosophy. Indeed, it could be said that all Hegel really accomplishes in The Phenomenology of Spirit is the presentation of Christian content anew. Hegel is a secular surrogate for the truths of Christianity, a keen detective who uncovers the conceptual truths lurking behind the obscure fog of religious imagery and leads us to the purest form of truth: the Notion, which now made one with consciousness in thought, is internalized by Spirit as true of itself.

Nietzsche’s repudiation of Hegel’s doctrine should, therefore, come as a surprise to no one; after all, there could perhaps not be a more savage critic of the Christian faith than Nietzsche. To say that Nietzsche disapproves of the content in Christianity is a radical understatement. Labelling himself the Anti-Christ and writing an entire book of the same name, Nietzsche took it upon himself to “wage war” against the Christian “theologian”;22 it was, after all, Christianity who had “waged war against” the “higher type of man” and had sided with “ all that is weak and base.”23 The Christian faith, to Nietzsche, was a life denying ethos: it was a cancerous scourge upon the whole of man, a disease which inevitably gnaws at the vitality of life. Born of resentment and perpetuated by guilt, Christianity was a religion made by and for slaves, the common herd, and the weak; indeed, the Christian is described by Nietzsche in The Anti-Christ as being a “domestic animal,” a “herd animal,” and a “sick human animal”.24 Hegel then, being a sort of self-proclaimed pseudo-Christian, was, suffice it to say, a natural enemy of Nietzsche’s.