did strongly imply that the primary responsibility for redemption had already
been borne by the Saviour, and that nothing too important to do remained for
all-too-fallen human individuals.
Nietzsche believed that Paul, and later the Protestants following Luther,
had removed moral responsibility from Christ’s followers. They had watered
down the idea of the imitation of Christ. This imitation was the sacred duty of
the believer not to adhere (or merely to mouth) a set of statements about
abstract belief but instead to actually manifest the spirit of the Saviour in the
particular, specific conditions of his or her life—to realize or incarnate the
archetype, as Jung had it; to clothe the eternal pattern in flesh. Nietzsche
writes, “The Christians have never practiced the actions Jesus prescribed
them; and the impudent garrulous talk about the ‘justification by faith’ and its
supreme and sole significance is only the consequence of the Church’s lack
of courage and will to profess the works Jesus demanded.”^144 Nietzsche was,
indeed, a critic without parallel.
Dogmatic belief in the central axioms of Christianity (that Christ’s
crucifixion redeemed the world; that salvation was reserved for the hereafter;
that salvation could not be achieved through works) had three mutually
reinforcing consequences: First, devaluation of the significance of earthly
life, as only the hereafter mattered. This also meant that it had become
acceptable to overlook and shirk responsibility for the suffering that existed
in the here-and-now; Second, passive acceptance of the status quo, because
salvation could not be earned in any case through effort in this life (a
consequence that Marx also derided, with his proposition that religion was
the opiate of the masses); and, finally, third, the right of the believer to reject
any real moral burden (outside of the stated belief in salvation through
Christ), because the Son of God had already done all the important work. It
was for such reasons that Dostoevsky, who was a great influence on
Nietzsche, also criticized institutional Christianity (although he arguably
managed it in a more ambiguous but also more sophisticated manner). In his
masterwork, The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky has his atheist superman,
Ivan, tell a little story, “The Grand Inquisitor.”^145 A brief review is in order.
Ivan speaks to his brother Alyosha—whose pursuits as a monastic
novitiate he holds in contempt—of Christ returning to Earth at the time of the
Spanish Inquisition. The returning Savior makes quite a ruckus, as would be