A Critique of the Vitalist Phenomenon
The Lord Jesus, in the Gospel of John, says, “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.” (John 10:10). But today, there is a growing movement on the right that begs to differ. Inspired by the dynamic writings of Nietzche, parts of the dissident right consider the life of Jesus and the teachings of Christianity, the triumph of “the great slave revolt” against the Roman empire’s values of hierarchy, aristocracy, and honor. For Nietzche and the vitalists, the aristocratic values of Rome and Ancient Greece reflect conformity to nature and her hierarchy. Christianity, on the other hand, is the attempt of the slaves, the poor, the weak, and those lower, to revolt against nature. In an act stemming from deep-seated resentment, they claim that Christians reject natural realities as sinful. As one author, Semmelweis, says in Man’s World, “If nature is fallen…then nature must not be obeyed. Man must turn away from nature, from ‘the world’, and look only to God, obey only God.” Christianity’s intense refusal of the most basic natural sensibilities borders the verge of masochism. He continues – “The law of nature is lex talionis—an eye for an eye, says the Old Testament; blood spilled cries out for blood, says Aeschylus. But the law of God laid down by Jesus Christ is: if someone strikes you, turn the other cheek and let him strike you again. Resist, not evil. Love your enemy.” To them, the God of the Old Testament might be strong, but Jesus is a beautiful loser. Christianity is nothing but a machine for manufacturing self-loathing hypocrites. In short, Christianity creates people like Ned Flanders, who are uptight, glorified pushovers. Christianity and life are fundamentally opposed.
On the surface, the vitalist claim appears compelling. An undeniable transformation of values took place before and after Christianity. For instance, modesty and humility, according to Aristotle, are not virtues but vices, and pride is the mean when it comes to honor.1 Christianity instead lauds humility as the greatest virtue; Paul exhorts Christians to be as humble as Christ: “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God…emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant” (Phil 2:5-7). Augustine, the man who stood between medieval Christendom and antiquity, is quoted as saying: “”When a certain rhetorician was asked what was the chief rule in eloquence, he replied, ‘Delivery’; what was the second rule, ‘Delivery’; what was the third rule, ‘Delivery’; so if you ask me concerning the precepts of the Christian religion, first, second, third, and always I would answer, ‘Humility.’”2
For Aristotle and the Greco-Roman world, the paradigm of the great man is the one who strives for greatness and who exists in the great struggle for honor. Max Scheler suggests that this paradigm of virtue stems from a conception of love that strives from the lower to the higher, from the “ “unformed” toward the “formed,”… “appearance” towards “essence,” “ignorance” towards “knowledge.””3 Man stands between animality and divinity, and his desire for fullness spurns him to struggle to reach the gods. Whether it is the athlete’s struggle to win in the Olympics or the soldier who bravely fights in battle, all of life is conceived as a cosmic “agon”, a struggle for fullness. Consequently, pride is the virtue in the man who accomplishes and acknowledges great things. Hence, Aristotle says: “Pride, then, seems to be a sort of crown of the virtues; for it makes them greater, and it is not found without them…it is hard to be truly proud; for it is impossible without nobility and goodness of character.”4 The proud man strives and accomplishes greatness and knows it. He loves the struggle and wins the competition for greatness.
In contrast, for Paul, Augustine, and Christianity, love is not a movement from the lower to the higher but from the higher to the lower. Love is not the aspiration to greatness but the condescension of the great to the weak. The very quotation offered above in Paul is paradigmatic – God descended as a man, became a servant, and died on the cross to redeem mankind and rehabilitate his weakness. This is the very essence of God – He who sees, He who cares, He who loves. Scheler captures this reversal, “God is no longer the eternal unmoving goal -Now the very essence of God is to love and serve.”5 Love is now the very act of sharing life and life abundantly. Even the act of creation is an act of God’s love – His desire to spread His fullness and plenitude and share it with creatures. Thomas, commentating on Pseudo-Dionysius, captures this thought in its most sophisticated form: “The cause of all itself …according to the abundance of his goodness by which he loves things, is made outside himself, inasmuch as he provides for all existing things through his goodness and love or charity and in a certain way is drawn (bewitched) and pulled down (deposed) in a certain way from his excellence.”6 God’s love is so bursting out of the seams to be shared that He can’t help but get outside Himself and give His goodness to creatures in the act of creation. Christians follow this pattern of God’s prodigal love by imparting life to others. Paul asks, “What do you have that you did not receive?” (1 Corinthians 4:7). – Nothing! There is no honor to be gained in receiving a gift. The only response is humility. Christian morality is simply participation and imitation of God’s overflowing love.
Thus, the vitalists do not exaggerate the chasm between pagan and Christian values. These two conceptions diametrically oppose each other, leaving man at a crossroads -“Choose this day whom you will serve” (Josh 24:15). But this description alone does not cover the case vitalists have litigated against Christian thought. The central claim has always been that this theological morality has been a slave morality – a morality conceived by the losers who just couldn’t cut it. Consequently, this reversal of love is borne out of what Neitzche calls ressentiment. He claims, at its root, love for the weaker, compassion for the enemy, and so on, is not borne of a positive love for these things but an underlying hatred of greatness. Aesop’s Fable of the Fox and the Grapes illustrates this logic – There are the sweet grapes tempting the fox, but they are out of his reach. The fox tries and tries, leaping up and up, to get some, but he fails. The fox gives up trying. When he leaves, he convinces himself that those grapes were not sweet but sour. The value judgment the fox makes is due to his own impotence. Similarly, Neittzche says Christian morality is a rejection of aristocratic morality, of the ethics of pride, by an impotence of the losers. Moreover, just as the grapes were always sweet, so aristocratic morality conforms to the nature of things. Hence, “Christianity teaches men that nonviolence is the highest good in a predatory world in which it is necessary…to defend oneself from the violence of others, and perhaps sometimes even to initiate violence against others, to be the aggressor.” Practically, since this denial of nature is functionally impossible, Christianity practically creates impotence. It leads men astray by denying them the desire for greatness and instead to mediocrity. It creates something akin to Nietzche’s Last Man, who values comfort and convenience but not greatness. To him, “Everything superhuman appears to man as illness and madness.”7 Elsewhere, he writes, “We can see nothing today that wants to grow greater, we suspect that things will continue to go down, down, to become thinner, more good-natured, more prudent, more comfortable, more mediocre, more indifferent … more Christian”8 So, then, there are two central concerns that form the heart of the vitalist argument – the idea of love comes from ressentiment and that it is unsustainable to live out in the world. Christianity was created by losers and makes you a loser.
The accusation of ressentiment is the most devastating critique vitalists can lay – because it accuses the Christian mind of being essentially poisoned. Hatred of the rich and powerful sublates into a twisted, upside-down morality. What lies behind Christianity’s positive morals is really a series of negations of the pagan greatness. Humility is praised and affirmed not for its intrinsic quality, but because it’s not pride! To be sure, the “slave morality” does indeed actually exist today in our institutions and culture. Wherever we see a focus on righting past inequities, centering the “margins”, and reversing and turning the hierarchies – ressentiment lurks in the corner. However, none of this means that this moral consciousness comes from Christianity itself! The claim Christianity makes is that the strong love the weak, the more perfect help the “less perfect”, because of the immense life, strength, and security that those closer to God enjoy. Coming from God’s own self-plenitude, which results in creation and salvation, Christian life aims for development, expansion, and abundance.
In contrast, love as striving conceives life as self-preservation with anxiety at its heart. Jesus tells us not to worry because weakness lies underneath being solely concerned with one’s physical well-being, “one’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions” (Luke 12:15). The rich man can store all his treasures. Still, when he dies, nothing is left (Luke 12:20). Is this not vanity? A striving after the wind? (Ecclesiastes 1:14:). A life concentrated on bodily well-being, with worry and anxiety, hinders life and its natural vigor. In contrast, when one rests in the ultimate life, there is natural spontaneity to share life and increase it. Sacrifice is natural- A mother sacrifices her own well-being when she gives birth to a child. A father might sacrifice his own life to protect his family. Sacrifice can be done not for the sake of self-hatred but to further life. So, at first, we must say that Christianity claims a life higher than the mere material, a fact that is borne out in the natural actions of men. Consequently, Christ tells us to love the poor, the widowed, and the orphan, the weak, to gain this spiritual life. Sacrifice acknowledges our original dependence on God and shares the abundant life He has provided.
Moreover, the Christian logic of sacrifice depends not on its material utility but on the intensity of love. The woman who gave a penny at the altar gave more than all the rich people combined because she gave all that she had (Mark 12:41-44). Her actions reveal more love in her than in the rich, who gave what they could afford to lose. Consider this still: Mary took a jar of expensive ointment and washed the feet of Christ. Judas responds to this and says, “Why was this ointment not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor?” (John 12:5). Christ dismisses Judas and replies, “For the poor you always have with you, but you do not always have me.” Mary’s sacrifice was not the most effective. Rather, she gives all that she has in response to the great love of Christ she has received. She transforms her material possessions into an act of life which is now remembered in all times and in all places (Mark 14:9). In the logic of the gift – there is more benefit to the giver than the receiver because love itself enraptures and elevates the person. Sacrifice is an adequate expression of love, but it is not the goal of love. The amount of welfare does not matter. What matters is the elevation of the soul in this act because love is an imitation of God’s essence. The sick, poor, and less than are loved not because their sickness or poorness bestows a positive value, but rather in them lies an opportunity for the fullness of life to elevate and repair them. As Scheler says, “He does not love sickness and poverty, but what is behind them, and his help is direct against these evils.”9 Love triumphs over human wickedness, even human evil. Even the command to, “Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you, bless them that curse you” (Matthew 5:44), stems from a love of goodness that stops the Christian from letting his actions be mere reactions to others. The love that he has and the life he has is so great that to return injury for injury in the same would lower him to the level of the enemy. Christ rejects reactive activity that comes from mere self-perseveration. The Christian is called to a love that can turn the enemy into a friend, lest his own soul be corrupted by injury. Love does not negate the demand for justice but preserves the purity and life of the soul against all evil. “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Cor 13:7).
There is no hint of ressentiment in this account. Rather, it is a confrontation with the deepest reality – the essence of God is love. To God, we are the poor, the indigent, the weak. His boundless strength gives us life. Even the materially rich are spiritually poor if their life is governed by self-perseveration, anxiety, and struggle. God does not struggle. His world is not primordial violence but a fundamental peace, a peace which we cultivate, expand, and nourish on this earth. This is vigor! To be granted, there is a way of bending down to the common and poor that pulses with ressentiment. This version of “love” comes from primordial hatred of one’s weakness and spurs one to go outside himself – to flee his own sight of himself. This type of love does not come from a newfound discovered value in the act of love, but itself, the soul: “Afraid of seeing itself and its inferiority, it is driven to give itself to the other — not because of his worth, but merely for the sake of his “otherness.” This type of love is not love but hatred. This parallels the motivation John gives to Judas in his protest of Mary’s lack of altruism – “He said this, not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief” (John 12:6). Here a dividing line between Christian love and ressentiment love is drawn: Christ calls us to “love your neighbor as yourself.” (Mark 12:31). Loving neighbor presupposes a love of self. Christ rules out ressentiment by definition.
Here, the vitalists might ask where such a moral consciousness comes from, if not from Christianity. This historical point is outside the scope of this essay, but suffice it to say that it’s easy to separate Christianity’s effects of love from its theological underpinning. This is, in effect, what happened by the advent of bourgeois morality, culminating in the French Revolution. This type of love, which is called “humanitarianism” or “altruism”, stems from self-hatred and a vision of life constrained to the physical dissolution of inequality. Christian morality flourished at the height of the medieval era, which had, at the same time, the feudal system, chivalry, and ecclesiastical hierarchy. In contrast, Scheler notes that “Humanitarian love is from the outset an egalitarian force which demands the dissolution of the feudal and aristocratic hierarchy.” If there is any ressentiment morality, it comes from this morality that emerged after the enlightenment, romanticism, by the displacement of Christian revelation by radical skepticism. In fact, if the French Revolution is illustrative for us, the humanitarian “love of mankind” in general is a form of a ressentiment! Revolt against God and His providence underlies ressentiment morality.
Likewise, we might say that the position of the vitalists falls prey to their own ressentiment. In On German Nihilism, Leo Strauss describes the situation of the vitalists of his day. They rejected the conception of an “Open Society” – “a world in which everyone would be happy and satisfied, in which everyone would have his little pleasure by day and his little pleasure by night, a world in which no great heart could beat, and no great soul could breathe, a world without real, unmetaphoric, sacrifice, i.e. a world without blood, sweat, and tears.”10 They rejected the dream of the communists and saw in them the advent of the Last Man. However, in their rejection, they could not articulate what they wanted instead. All they knew was that, “the present world and all the potentialities of the present world as such, must be destroyed in order to prevent the otherwise necessary coming of the communist final order: literally anything… the jungle, the Wild West, the Hobbesian state of nature, seemed to them infinitely better than the communist anarchist-pacifist future.” In short, they engaged in civilizational nihilism. The same specter haunts the vitalists today, who want to escape the same iron prison of mediocrity the young Germans found themselves in. Consequently, the logic of the vitalists – including their rejection of Christianity – has as its core not a love of life but a rejection of communist uniformity. This rejection is bound to dominate the actions of the vitalists, and while they may succeed in facilitating an escape from the prison, like the German nihilists, they cannot imagine what life is like once free.
But here we come to the issue of Christianity’s viability in the world. Christianity might not spring from ressentiment, and vitalism, as it stands, might also come from ressentiment, but if Christianity is still self-hating and practically mediocre, then this point would be in vain. It would be the equivalent of escaping the mediocre prison to end up in another one. Yet, our analysis of Christianity’s love does not consign one to self-abasement. The man turns the other cheek not because he hates his own life or counts it as nothing. Rather, he turns the other cheek. He is stronger than all merely reactive activity. Christianity renounces the mimetic cycle of violence. Abundant life will triumph over injury- this is the truth in nature that will live out in the world. The necessity of self-defense, protection, and even war are not rejected. (For one, Christianity has a great tradition of just war theory!). Rather, the corruption of one’s soul is prevented. No doubt, this seems unnatural, but only because of the great temptation to live a life of self-perseveration, a life without God’s provision. But the soul’s embrace of God is conformity to nature in its truest sense. Moreover, the call for the soul to remain pure and to imitate God is the highest call to greatness. Christianity’s call is available to all, but it is not mediocre! “Narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life” (Matt 7:14). Christianity can make any man great by reordering his life to be attuned to the God who sustains and provides for him. The quarrel the vitalists will have with the Christians is between the call to surrender his own claim on life. But Christ promises that the greatest form of flourishing lies in leaving the prison of anxiety. “For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matt 16:25).
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