American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Like Nietzsche’s pious Protestant readers, Catholic interpreters focused on his assertions about the outmoded nature of Christianity in the modern world. “Is dogma out of date?” asked a Catholic commentator responding to challenges from “fashionable notions of the present day,” which viewed religious creeds and dogmas as “belated survivals” of a premodern world well lost.22 Though not indifferent to the challenges of modernity for Roman Catholicism, they argued that the question of theological relevance itself reflected the destructive tendency in modern thought to view knowledge and values as mutable, variable, and progressive. The problem for Catholics was not that their faith was outsized by modern problems but that moderns were too willing to substitute natural philosophy for supernatural religion, and the winds of speculation for the Rock of Ages. They took delight in Nietzsche’s own insistence that a despiritualized Christianity was too flimsy a foundation for Christian ethics, and thus used Nietzsche to critique liberalizing tendencies in Protestantism to divorce ethics from religion.